part0015

Last night Chuang Chou dreamed he was a butterfly, spirits soaring he was a butterfly [is it that in showing what he was he suited his own fancy?], and did not know about Chou. When all of a sudden he awoke, he was Chou with all his wits about him. He does not know whether he is Chou who dreams he is a butterfly or a butterfly who dreams he is Chou. Between Chou and the butterfly there was necessarily a dividing; just this is what is meant by the transformation of things .

…an anchorite of this kind, who ‘tries to eradicate every trace of sexual interest’ [but only in the popular sense of the word ‘sexual’], does not even necessarily display any pathological allocation of the libido. He may have diverted his sexual interest from human beings entirely, and yet may have sublimated it into a heightened interest in the divine, in nature, or in the animal kingdom, without his libido having undergone an introversion on to his fantasies or a return to his ego .

In one temple celebration, the tang-ki possessed by the monkey god Sun Wukong was sitting on top of the back of a chair peeling a banana, and then he threw the skin into the air. All the time his head was moving quickly from side to side and occasionally he would scratch himself. At one point, he darted from one chair to another. In the crowd, Bob, one of the assistants, stands rigidly with hardly a smile on his face, looking at the performance of the medium. When he spoke, he was very serious.

At another temple celebration, the tang-ki, after a procession around the temple vicinity, returned to the outside of the shrine where the members were going to burn joss paper as a way of sending the Jade Emperor back home. The tang-ki took a large, 8-inch diameter ball with needles inserted on nearly every square inch and holding the chain attached to the ball, almost in a frenzy, commenced throwing the ball over his shoulder, hitting his back repeatedly until blood was drawn. He and some of his assistants had inserted needles in the skin of their forearms earlier on in the day.

On still another occasion, Tong, a tang-ki, explained how when he was giving consultations to people, a vial of perfume appeared in his hands. He also spoke of his car keys disappearing, and a spirit taking his car out for a drive.

A visitor from another country or even Singaporeans unacquainted with tang-ki beliefs and practices could well be excused for thinking that the activities of these tang-kis are a type of madness. The Chinese person who went with me to visit this third tang-ki did indeed think he was at some level ‘mad’. She used not just the word feng [mad in a general sense] but also the words shenjing bing [mentally ill]. In the first scenario, however, it was not the tang-ki but the assistant who has an actual mental illness.

For example, many anorexic women I have worked with describe themselves as having a part of themselves, which they call ‘the illness’, ‘it’ or even ‘Ana’, that takes them over and runs their lives for them, making them refuse to eat and refuse to see that they are thin and in need of food. One woman described how she thought that by touching another person or breathing in cooking fumes she could put on weight.

Another British person, a young man, described his experience in losing weight, almost to the point of dying, as something transcendent, a feeling of nearing some truth. His experience included seeing various objects at the window of his house – a small girl, a soldier and also, one day going down the street, seeing Father Christmas in the lights, even though it was not Christmas time.

Still another person, Lucy, who had a diagnosis of schizophrenia, described how a woman dressed in black would come to her telling her to kill people as would the devil. She also described how two members of a circus troupe would climb and run up the wall and how a girl of about six would come and sit on her bed at night. At one time, the woman in black went away for a while, and when asked where she had gone, Lucy said she had gone away to bake cakes.

Another patient had inserted a metal object under the skin of her leg in an attempt at self-harm. Seeing the blood from the wound and experiencing the pains were satisfying to her.

These people all had various diagnoses of mental illness. Some of their thoughts and experiences seemed similar to the thoughts and experiences of some of the people involved in tang-ki worship.

The question is how does one distinguish the first set of people from the second group given the similar nature of some of their experiences? What makes the experiences of those people described in the first section of the chapter examples of religious experience and the experiences of people described in the second section examples of mental illness?

In a sense, the whole of this book is taken up with the above question and in this chapter the work is taken further by a consideration of mental illness, especially the notion of psychosis and its relationship to the people encountered. Firstly, some psychiatric considerations of the question will be presented, and then vignettes of various people in this research project will be described, two of whom were suffering from a definite psychotic disorder. I also include one Western person, Lucy, from my clinical work in psychoanalysis, as a point of comparison. After this, Lacan’s approach to psychosis will be outlined and discussed in relationship to these vignettes.

As seen in the introduction to this book, there has been a tendency amongst some researchers on religion to see all religious experiences in some sense as pathological. This would be the view of those psychiatrists who published the booklet MYSTICISM: SPIRITUAL QUEST OR PSYCHIC DISORDER (Group for Advancement in Psychiatry 1976). This would also be the tendency of much psychoanalysis, as explained in the introductory chapter.

While in psychiatric textbooks a proviso is often made that one has to take cultural, including religious considerations, into account when diagnosing those who may have a mental illness, as seen in the statement, ‘Delusions are mistaken beliefs which are held with conviction, which are not shared by others of the same cultural or social background and intellect…’ (Goldberg, Benjamin and Creed 1987: 30), it is often still not clear how researchers make a distinction between religious and psychopathological experience or why indeed one factor, that of being part of a sub-cultural belief system, makes a difference to how the experience is classified.

• In their description of non-verbal hallucinations (Symptom 60), Wing et al. describe a person hearing noises such as music, tapping and central heating noises as a symptom [almost exactly as Henry describes his experience - see below] (Wing et al. 1974: 163).

• Wing et al. also, when discussing ‘dissociative hallucinations’ (Symptom 64), talk of a person holding a conversation with a presence such as a person, ghost, spirit or god as a symptom despite the membership of the person in a sub-cultural group that sanctions such experiences (1974: 165). They talk here of a sub-cultural group sanctioning hallucinatory experience, not recognizing that such a group probably calls such experiences visions and that the very word ‘hallucination’ presupposes certain ontological assumptions. Many people I met had this visionary experience.

• When talking about ‘delusions of control’ (Symptom 71), where a person might experience someone else’s words as coming out as their own words or experience (themselves being possessed), the authors do allow for the fact that a person might be describing a ‘socially shared experience’. They would classify the experience in another category, that of a subcultural influenced delusion’, although they still call this a symptom (Symptom 83) (1974: 173). They give an example here of a Taoist priestess believing that she is controlled by a god when in a trance as being a ‘subcultural influenced delusion’ (Wing et al. 1974: 168).

• The authors also have a separate category of ‘religious delusions’ (Symptom 78), which includes those who have a religious identification and an explanation in religious terms of other abnormal experiences, although if the person belongs to a religious group who have these beliefs, they relegate such symptoms to being ‘subcultural influenced delusions’ (1974: 171).

While I am aware that these authors do not use all the above categories of symptoms in the Catego Computer Programme used with the Present State Examination to systematize classification and diagnosis, they do consider them as symptoms.

The authors of the ICD-10 CLASSIFICATION OF MENTAL AND BEHAVIOURAL DISORDERS , when considering delusions in schizophrenia and, soon after, when mentioning delusions of control, influence and passivity, go on to consider:

…persistent delusions of other kinds that are culturally inappropriate and completely impossible, such as religious or political identity, or supernatural powers and abilities e.g. being able to control the weather, or being in communication with aliens from another world .

These authors’ example of thinking that one can control the weather is interesting as the tang-ki Anna does hold that she can sometimes control the weather. However, the authors do not consider who decides what is culturally inappropriate or on what basis, how agents of social change can affect behaviour and, also, who considers what is impossible in reference to logical and empirical possibility? Cook points out that the authors, after pointing out that such ideas as mentioned above should not be taken as delusions if culturally appropriate, immediately give an example of delusional thought as, ‘…natural or supernatural forces…at work to influence the inflicted person in ways that are often bizarre’ (World Health Organization. 1992) (Cited in Cook 2004: 155). He also points out that no guidance is given as to how to distinguish the bizarre from the normal (Cook 2004: 155).

A more recent attempt to come to grips with the difference between religious experience and psychotic experience is the work of Jackson and Fulford (1997). In their work, they conclude that one cannot distinguish between psychotic religious experience and pathological psychotic experience in terms of the use of i) traditional aspects of form and content ii) the relationship of symptoms to other symptoms or iii) by reference to descriptive criteria of mental illness [such as the Present State Examination]. Jackson and Fulford think that the only way to distinguish the two is to look at symptoms as being embedded in the, ‘…structure of each individual’s values and beliefs’ (Jackson and Fulford 1997: 18). By doing this, they believe one can see whether they are ‘action enhancing’ or ‘action destroying’, this being the main discriminatory factor that serves as a basis as to whether the symptoms are pathological or not. Littlewood (1997) wonders whether there is a need to try to distinguish the phenomena Jackson and Fulford (1997) are trying to distinguish, given that the categories ‘religious experience’ and ‘psychopathology’ are not some type of natural category existing separate from the social world but are cultural ascriptions.

In accounting for the difference between religious and psychiatric phenomena, Jackson and Fulford postulate two main categories: spiritual psychotic experiences and pathological psychotic experiences (Jackson and Fulford 1997: 2). Spiritual psychotic experience to them is benign, adaptive and action enhancing, while pathological experience is malign, non-adaptive and action destroying (1997: 13). They then say that a spiritual psychotic phenomenon is not the province of medicine (1997: 2). While this may be true, it is only true because in general people experiencing benign psychotic phenomena, whether spiritual experiences or not, would not need the attention of a psychiatrist. Jackson and Fulford (1977) see the difference between the two categories as not being decided on empirical grounds but on a question of the value and beliefs of the person experiencing the phenomenon. While their account of the difference between aspects of religious phenomena and mental illness is a better account than previous more positivist accounts, it still does not do justice to the nature of religious experience and its difference from psychopathology.

One could go further and say that while it is true that one cannot just on the basis of empirical observations always differentiate between psychotic and religious phenomena, there is still a difference and a difference that can be discerned at the level of structure of the psyche rather than at the level of symptoms. It is true, though, that values and beliefs need to be taken into consideration in making a judgement about the difference in any specific case, but not only do values and beliefs need to be taken into account but the nature of the social/cultural environment that a person is embedded in also needs to be taken into account.

It would be easy in anthropological studies to avoid addressing the criticism of the psychiatric understanding of psychopathology discussed above by just not using psychiatric nosology and concentrating on the world view of the people being investigated, seeing psychiatric categories of psychopathology and religious experience as just two incommensurable epistemological universes. However, to do this would be to miss out on the value of a comparative approach using notions of psychopathology in a critical way, something Good suggests is missing from anthropological studies (Good 1992: 181, 196). Also, in this present study, the people themselves, to various degrees, inhabit both the world of psychiatry and ‘mental health’ as well as the world of ‘traditional’ healing. To leave out one area at the expense of the other would not do justice to the complexity of their world.

Bob, mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter as the tang-ki’s attendant, is a man in his early forties who is a manager of three people in a small stationary office within a government department. Before this job, he had been a tradesperson. He found work stressful and challenging, particularly as he had on occasions to go into the Woodbridge psychiatric hospital as an in-patient. Bob had been in the hospital for two weeks when I first met him. He told me he had suffered from depression since he was fifteen years old and that he was also diagnosed as being schizophrenic. He said he heard voices and suffered from delusions, although he did not say what these were, and he also said that he was an alcoholic. Bob said he became possessed by spirits and needed the help of the tang-ki at the shrine to help get him out of this state.

Some of the temple members were quite critical of the mental health service that Bob was receiving. After visiting Bob in the hospital, one shrine member commented that all modern medicine does is to make zombies out of people like Bob. When this person visited Bob, he said Bob was just lying on a bed, hardly able to move or communicate because of the medication he had been given. This person, university-educated to MA level, could not see that the use of medication was helping Bob, given, he said, that the problem Bob suffered from was a spiritual problem; one of being possessed. He said that the psychiatrist treating Bob was British-educated and part of a colonial system that looks down on people’s traditional ways of healing.

Bob is a well-accepted member of the shrine. People know he is a psychiatric patient but do not allude to it, for they see his main problem as being possessed.

Soo Mei is a woman in her forties married to a Eurasian man Daniel. Soo Mei is now Catholic like her husband. I met both Soo Mei and her husband and also met Fernando, the writer of a book on Soo Mei (Fernando 2004). Soo Mei had become ill a few years after leaving school at sixteen. She found it difficult to deal with her job and the politics of the workplace and became depressed and suicidal. She was taken to a tang-ki a few times to see if he could cure her, but this was a bad experience. After an initial session, where the medium gave her a fu [talisman] that she had to burn and then drink the ashes mixed with water, the tang-ki conducted another ritual where Soo Mei had to lie in a box and the medium then killed a rooster and poured its blood over her. She said that she was terrified and had nightmares for some time after this event. Soon after this event, Soo Mei was admitted into a psychiatric hospital for two weeks and given ECT treatment as well as medication.

Soo Mei had further breakdowns in the course of her life. Usually, during these breakdowns, she becomes argumentative, aggressive and hears voices. At one time, during the SARS outbreak in 2003, Soo Mei had been insistent that the house was going to collapse and that a war was taking place, as the voices had told her that this was going to happen.

At another time, fairly recently, when going for a walk, Soo Mei fell over and felt that something had pushed her. There were some burnt joss sticks and offerings of food for the spirits in the place where she had fallen. Her husband noticed many things going wrong after this incident. Chinese people had told him that she could have stepped on something dirty [anzhang] and so offended the spirits.

Soo Mei started to become more agitated at this time. Her husband asked her psychiatrist whether stepping on something dirty could have affected her, but the doctor replied, ‘No, no, no, it’s not possible; it is just a coincidence’, and he admitted her to hospital, where she stayed for a month.

Soo Mei and her husband say that when she is ill she is not helped by being involved in religious activity; in fact, she said, it exacerbated her illness. When she is well she prays a lot and goes to a Catholic Church.

Henry, a man in his fifties, owns a small shop. His father had been a medium. On first meeting Henry at a temple celebration, he very soon started talking fairly animatedly about negative, sombre aspects of the world: environmental pollution, wars, parents who kill children, children who kill parents and a general lack of filial piety. He thinks his main vice is gambling and also thinks that he has a short temper. As I got to know Henry, he started to recount a time when he was very depressed and even suicidal and had no interest in anything, even in women. At that time he had gone to a tang-ki and soon after this had an experience, where he heard the chanting of monks and a bell being struck. A similar experience happened several times over the next month. On the first occasion, Henry opened the windows to see whether he could locate the source of the sounds, but the sounds were not coming from outside. The sounds produced a feeling of peace in him and from that time on he started to recover. I later discovered that just before he became depressed his father had died.

Tong, the tang-ki mentioned in the third paragraph of this chapter, is from Melaka in Malaysia. He is a man in his fifties, a retired civil servant with two children, who both went to university, one of whom gained first class honours in accountancy. Tong and his wife want to find work for themselves and want to go overseas, perhaps to England. They have two houses one of which serves as a shrine. Tong also goes to Singapore every three months to give consultations. He believes that on one occasion a spirit took the keys of his car and took the car for a drive. He also believes that on several occasions a vial of perfume appeared in his hands when he was giving consultations.

When Anna was about six to eight years of age, she experienced hearing people talk in the house, although other people could not hear this talking. She also experienced seeing various gods. Sometimes late at night, Anna would see the monkey god doing somersaults or she would see the first and second master of hell, Toa Ji A Pei. At that time, she had retreated quite a lot from normal life and had missed some schooling. Her parents became very concerned for her, as she would often shout and cry for no apparent reason. This behaviour went on for some years.

Anna later felt called to be a medium and thought that she was in some ways special, that she had had a heavenly life before this one and that she had come down to earth because of some transgression. Anna believes she can be taken to heaven or hell for a visit. I gather this was mainly by way of dreams.

Anna was very sure of her ability to heal people and to help them. Once, when having dinner in a restaurant, she said to the proprietor she could help his business to become more successful. Anna said that she could sense the presence of spirits around her and sometimes could predict disasters. She said that she had a dream about a coming disaster, six months before the 11th September 2001, and also a few days before the tsunami in 2004. She believed she could stop the rain and gave three examples.

On one occasion, when the relationship between the people at Anna’s shrine and I was a little strained, Anna had tried to introduce me to two other shrines. We went to one shrine, but the medium was not present. On a night we were going to go to another temple, the tang-ki was also not present. Anna was fearful that because of these unlucky events, on the next day when she held the monthly festival [koujun, H. ko-kun] where joss paper has to be burnt outside the shrine, it might rain, implying that I could bring bad luck to the shrine.

Anna told me that in ancient times mediums could remove their intestines while they were carrying out a ritual and then replace them afterwards. She also stopped meditating when a Taoist priest told her that her face could go green if she carried on meditating.

Tony, a man in his forties, is English educated. He is the person who took me to visit the large American health company [page 131 ]. I met Tony one evening after he had been to see a tang-ki. He had come over to where I was standing outside the shrine and started talking to me. Tony’s speech was a very fast monologue, and he jumped from one topic to another without much warning. Like Anna, he could speak to me for two to three hours at a time, but, unlike Anna, he was difficult to understand.

There were recurrent, rather strange themes in Tony’s speech that he would often come back to such as the importance of folic acid in psychiatry and the nature of bi-polar illness. I was asked if I could look out for certain medical books, namely psychiatric textbooks, despite the fact that his wife was a nurse. He said he never mentioned his interest in medicine to her.

On several occasions, once at 1.30 in the morning, he telephoned to inform me of the details of the same books that he had told me about the previous day. On one occasion, I was asked whether I thought it was all right for a person to take revenge on other people. Another day, he described how a group of people had attacked him and how, despite having knowledge of martial arts, he had not defended himself. Tony also explained to me how a certain medicine could kill a person, and he went through the details.

While Tony had been to consult with the tang-ki at the shrine where I met him on several occasions previously, he had not quite fitted in and seemed to slightly irritate others, especially in that he seemed to the members to have a nonchalant approach to obtaining work, although, in fact, he was trying very hard to find work. The other men in the temple had also found his conversation unclear. Another woman who came to the shrine was slightly scared of him, perhaps because he had asked to borrow some money from her. At the beginning of our meetings, Tony would usually immediately start talking about one of his interests, disregarding where we were standing – at one time almost immediately where he had got off the bus in a busy bus station.

Tony was rather a strange person but pleasant, and I spent four or five afternoons with him. When I first met him, I was particularly struck by the resemblance in the way he spoke to the speech of someone with hypomania, although I was never sure whether he had such a diagnosis.

Lucy is a twenty-four-year-old New Zealand woman I saw for psychotherapy. Her grandfather on her father’s side was Scottish and Catholic, although her parents were not religious. Her father was a drug addict and alcoholic. Lucy had been in a psychiatric hospital for over nine months. She had an abortion about a year before going into hospital and soon after that started to feel sad. In the same year, she took an overdose and tried to cut her wrists.

Experiences of seeing people that others could not see started to plague Lucy. She engaged in conversations with these people. One person was a woman in dark monk-like clothing, another two were circus acrobats and another, a young girl. She said that she heard the voice of the devil. On one occasion, the woman and the devil told her she was stupid and told her to kill other people. At one time, Lucy mentioned that the woman had disappeared and when I asked where she had gone, Lucy said that she had gone to bake cakes.

Lucy had a provisional diagnosis of psychotic depression and schizophrenia. At times, psychiatrists thought she had a dissociative disorder caused perhaps by post-traumatic stress disorder following the abortion. I saw Lucy in psychotherapy for eight months after she was discharged from the hospital.

It is possible to go through all the above vignettes noting various symptoms from Wing et al. (1974) list of symptoms for all the people mentioned, although only two of the Chinese people and the one New Zealand person had a firm diagnosis of a mental illness.

It is clear that both Bob and Soo Mei suffer from a psychotic schizophrenic illness; both hear voices and both suffer from delusions that are far from benign. Neither of them disagrees with this diagnosis. However, with Soo Mei, there is more of a clear-cut division between religious spiritual phenomena and mental illness than there is in the case of Bob.

At the beginning of Soo Mei’s ‘illness’, when she was experiencing what psychiatrist would call auditory hallucinations, Soo Mei’s family thought this might have been caused by spirits and they took her to see a tang-ki. They soon gave up this way of categorizing Soo Mei’s problems and gradually accepted the idea that she had a psychiatric illness. Seemingly, when Soo Mei has these experiences, she sometimes wonders whether she is possessed, but when she is not experiencing them she thinks of them as symptoms of a psychiatric illness and labels the experiences as hallucinations and delusions. Soo Mei and her family wondered, when she fell over, whether this could have been caused by her stepping on an offering for the spirits set up on the footpath, although they accepted the psychiatrist’s explanation; the explanation in Singapore’s mental health that fits the current hegemonic explanation of the nature of this type of experience.

However, the situation is very different in the case of Bob, who accepts that he has a mental illness but also accepts the temple’s account of there being a weakness in his character that allows him to be disturbed by malign spirits. This is more or less the understanding of his mother and also of the people at the shrine. Bob’s account of his troubles seems to fit the model Littlewood (1997) proposes that whether experience is described as spiritual or as mental illness is a matter of social ascription. Here the same phenomenon is seen by some, including Bob, as a psychotic phenomenon and an indication of mental illness to be treated by psychiatry with hospitalization and medication. However, in the context of his religious beliefs, they are also seen by Bob and the members of the shrine as spiritual experiences to be treated by seeing a tang-ki. Even though in one situation his experiences can be seen as religious, they are by no means benign experiences.

Tong’s experience was not troublesome to him or his family, although his family did not believe it. Under Wing et al. analysis (1974), this experience might have been labelled as a sub-cultural delusion, while under Jackson and Fulford’s (1997) description it might be labelled a benign, religious, psychotic phenomenon. To Tong, it was a religious experience.

Could Anna’s early experiences of visions and voices when young be examples of hallucinations, both auditory and visual? Would they be seen by psychiatry as psychotic phenomena? Could her later belief that she was somehow someone special sent down from heaven to help save the world be considered as a type of delusion of grandiose ability, along with beliefs such as stopping the rain and having premonitions about the future? While these experiences might again be classified by Wing et al. (1974) as ‘subcultural delusions’ and by Jackson and Fulford (1997) as ‘religious psychotic experiences’, such a conclusion is not an adequate account of what these religious experiences are or how they differ from psychotic experiences.

Henry’s experience of hearing bells and monks chanting, if not classified as being part of a category of a sub-cultural belief, could be seen as auditory hallucinations; the sounds of monks chanting and a noise being, perhaps, phenomena produced as a reaction to the loss of his father during a period of depression. To some extent, empirically, they could be seen as similar to the experience of Lucy and be regarded as a reaction to a loss. But here I would classify Henry’s experience as spiritual while I would classify Lucy’s experience as psychotic.

In the case of Lucy, no one says that her experiences are religious occurrences. Lucy herself experiences the voices and hallucinations as real events and not something that can be labelled as pathological. The psychiatric system interprets these, in the main, as psychotic symptoms, and sees Lucy as having a clear case of mental illness, although psychiatrists are not quite sure whether the diagnosis is psychotic depression or schizophrenia.

I believe that the above discussion, involving the diagnostic nosology of Wing et al. (1974) and Jackson and Fulford’s (1997) idea of investigating the values and beliefs of people to whom one can apply such symptoms, takes one only part-way in answering the question of what distinguishes spiritual from psychotic phenomena.

We now turn to Lacanian thought, which can take us further into our investigation of our subject matter.

Lacan postulates three fundamental structures of the human psyche, that of psychosis, neurosis and perversion. While symptoms are important for gaining some orientation towards a person’s way of being in the world, there is no necessary connection for Lacan between symptoms and structures. A person can have a neurotic structure but have psychotic symptoms as in a hysterical psychosis, for example; or a person can have a psychotic structure but no observable psychotic symptoms and may even have neurotic symptoms.

For Lacan, the difference between a psychotic structure and a neurotic structure is that in a psychotic structure a person lacks a fundamental signifier that binds together the three registers of human experience, that of the symbolic, imaginary and real. He calls this binding signifier the Name-of-the-Father because it is usually located in a male whose role is to separate the child from the mother and promote its entry into language and the cultural world. Without the presence of this signifier, the three registers fall apart and the psychotic person finds himself living in the real and imaginary dimensions of human experience more than in the shared symbolic world of other people. Here, language does not mediate the world as much as it does for the ordinary neurotic person. A person is thus more open to experiences such as hallucinations and delusions. In this state, the signifiers of a person’s speech are no longer in much contact with the signified, and they can take on a life of their own, so to speak.

An example of a person with a psychotic structure would be Lucy with her experience of various people others do not see and her conversations with these people. We could say neither her father as representative of an organizing signifier [the Name-of-the-Father] nor the abortion came into her consciousness as representations, so they returned from outside as hallucinations rather than as repressed phenomena, as might happen in a person with a neurotic structure. Lucy before her experience had no belief in the devil as an entity. Nor did she have much sense of guilt and what there was did not seem connected with the abortion.

For Henry, however, we see a presence of guilt subsequent to losing his father. He is quite preoccupied with the ideal of filial piety and elaborated this theme at great length. The experience of bells and monks came after a deep depression and a visit to a tang-ki. In Henry’s situation, then, the bells and chanting of monks can be called a religious experience coming from the real but also mediated by his membership in a cultural group. His religious experience can be seen to go alongside what could be called a depression, a neurotic one where conflicts with his father are repressed and return as morbid ruminations. There is no reason why one should not look at the experience of Henry as being both a religious experience and a depressive illness, subsequent to losing his father. It seems the depression and general low mood with suicidal feelings motivated him to go to see the tang-ki in the first place.

At the beginning of this project, one of my initial hypotheses was that the Lacanian concept of the Name-of-the-Father, as part of an Oedipal dynamic of unconscious functioning, would be at the centre of this work, as it was in a paper I wrote on male initiation rituals in New Guinea (Bull 1996/97). However, this was not the case and I concluded that this concept was not the main mechanism underlying the healing of the shrines. The first hint that something else seemed to be occurring was when reading Stafford’s (1995) suggestion that the tang-ki lies on the side of the woman rather than the man. This all became clearer when encountering the story of the deities Guanyin and Nezha, who go against traditional Oedipal dynamics; and yet the myths are still able to serve as a charter for tang-kis and do assist people to get their bearings in the social world.

Lacan came increasingly in his later work to question the Oedipal account of entering into the symbolic world as being the only way of becoming a subject. It was particularly in his thinking on James Joyce, explicated in Lacan’s SEMINAR TWENTY-THREE of 1975/76, that another way of becoming a subject and entering the symbolic world, rather than having to go through Oedipal dynamics, started to show itself. This other way was arrived at through Lacan’s thinking on the nature of psychotic symptoms. While Lacan’s thinking on this topic is not well known, I suggest it can be of use to one in understanding cultural, religious phenomena and, in particular, the relationship of tang-ki worship to psychopathology, in a way the works of Jackson and Fulford (1997) cannot.

While some psychoanalytical commentators have looked at Bernini’s statue, The Ecstacy of Saint Teresa of Avila, as being about a repressed or sublimated sexuality, Lacan is certain that the view that tries to reduce this experience of mysticism to just being about repressed sexuality is wrong (1998: 77). He says in his 1972/73 seminar that it is about an expression of an ineffable experience located in the real that mystics [one can add ecstatics’] experience and bear witness to (1998: 77). This ecstasy is referred to as an experience of jouissance that is similar to the experience of the psychotic person but that unlike the psychotic person’s experience it is not disintegrative, and it puts the receiver of the experience on to the side of what he calls ex-sistence. Here ex-sistence for Lacan is something ineffable coming from the outside beyond the symbolic but that can also be taken up to some extent by the symbolic order. One sees such an example of this putting the receiver on the side of ex-sistence in the tang-ki possession ritual.

Fink relates the concept of ex-sistence to Heidegger’s understanding of existence and also to the Greek word ‘ecstasy’ (1995: 122). Benvenuto, a Lacanian psychoanalyst enlarges on this idea and talks of needing to follow a particular path on the way to this state. She says that:

In both cases, mystical and psychotic, we have an experience of enjoyment of God and the necessity to …find a communicable coherence for an experience which cannot be integrated into ordinary knowledge. But whereas the mystic welcomes this experience, the psychotic is forced into a submission to it [what psychiatrists call psychotic passivity]. The one accepts losing his/her own subjectivity because it remains guaranteed, inscribed in a framework, the religious one, which justifies and allows its accomplishment. The other has not subjectivized it…

When looking at tang-ki worship, particularly its trance state and the entering into the trance, one can see a similar experience of ecstasy to the mystic. One can say this ecstasy is not about a repression of sexuality nor an example of psychopathology but an encounter with a deity, or what Lacan might call an encounter with jouissance, similar but not the same as psychotic experience. This experience of ecstasy can help keep pathology at bay.

In tang-ki worship, one sees a space where a way of life is created by the tang-ki and their followers that the anthropologist Nickerson, in an interesting article, calls an ‘autonomous’ space operating outside of the dominant order (2001: 188-189; 212). He thinks that because of this autonomy tang-ki practices do not affect the world and that they actually perpetuate the dominant order by ignoring the world (2001: 212). This space could be called a liminal space or even, to use Foucault’s term, a heterotopic space, as the word ‘autonomous’ suggests this space is cut off completely from the outside world, whereas it has been shown in this work that tang-ki worship is very much connected with the outside world. It is connected by way of being about both the production of subjectivity and identity as well as being about the subversion of dominant discourses.

Foucault’s idea of a heterotopic space is about a space where both language and the usual ordering of things are disrupted (Foucault 1970: xvii-xviii). In this liminal/heterotopic space, one can say there is an encounter with the real, with a jouissance that the entry into the symbolic world and submission to the signifiers of the master have, up to now, precluded.

Nickerson applies the term ‘poetics of possession’ to tang-ki possession phenomena. He points to the connection of poetry and possession in the Greek understanding of poetic composition as being a possession by the Muse (2001: 195). He points to Kristeva’s characterizing of the language of this possession poetics as bordering on psychosis and also its similarity to an infant’s enjoyment in echolalia. He also quotes Kristeva as to its subversive element:

Nickerson sees the similarity of Kristeva’s Lacanian view to that of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) view of the ‘schizo’ as someone who resists using words composed of articulated phonetic units, utters gasps and talks of a divine energy. This description can be shown to characterize tang-ki possession phenomena (2001: 196). Nickerson, however, in making this comparison does not see the Lacanian position on psychosis as being different from Deleuze and Guatarri’s view. But Lacan does not valorise psychosis as Deleuze and Guatarri do and though he sees psychosis as being similar to mystical experiences, Lacan sees mystical experiences as different; as being both subversive and able to hold the person together in a way that does not happen for a person experiencing psychotic phenomena.

In the 1970s, Lacan turned his interest to literature, to James Joyce in particular and to a type of psychoanalytical poetics, which had always been present in his writings, but to which he now gave more emphasis. There was a movement in his thought from an emphasis on the imaginary and the symbolic registers of human existence to that of the real and to the associated concept of ‘jouissance’.

Now, while Lacan’s aphorism –the unconscious is structured like a language- is often understood as meaning the unconscious is composed of a particular language e.g. English, Moncayo suggests that this language of the unconscious is what Lacan in SEMINAR TWENTY calls lalangue (1998a: 395,405). Moncayo suggests that this lalangue is emancipatory rather than restrictive and that it is symbolic rather than logical or syntactical. Evans speaks of it as being, ‘… the primary chaotic substrate of polysemy out of which language is constructed’ (1996: 97). He associates it with jouissance. I suggest that this description also pertains to the language of the tang-ki.

Lacan saw James Joyce, like Joyce’s daughter, as having a psychotic structure, but that unlike his daughter Joyce was able to keep psychosis at bay or stabilized through his literary production or creations. These productions are referred to as Joyce’s ‘sinthome’ [an old way of writing the word ‘symptôme’], playing on the words symptom, saint homme – a good man and seeing the sinthome as more of a locus of jouissance and as a particular way a person structures their jouissance and keeps themselves together, rather than as a linguistic entity to be deciphered and interpreted, as Lacan had seen the symptom previously. There is a start here to thinking of psychoanalysis as not being about the removal of a symptom but about the working through of it, the identification with it and the making of a Sinthome that is able to work in a person’s psychical structure to produce something. Aflalo says:

The use of the signifier for enjoyment makes the subject a poem. The renewed practice of a psychoanalysis has to be akin to the poetical work, to undo the living poem that the subject is and counteract the identificatory fading which petrifies the subject under the Master-signifier…The interpretative equivocation must make the non-sense of the Master signifier, which ciphers the enjoyment, surge forth .

…so fantastically musically apt at creating a flux of tongues, a dance, a ‘condensation’ of tongues…’, [which involve], ‘…scibbledygook, puns, playing on words, irony, joy…’ [and he adds] ‘Joyce has not been the only one to call on the Witz and its friends Parody, Humour, Equivocation, Grotesquerie etc’ .

I would agree and would maintain that this is exactly what the tang-kis do in their rituals and their lives, creating a poem and myth of themselves as they dis-identify from the master signifiers that have been imposed on them and cause difficulties. The tang-kis’ beliefs and practices, therefore, can be seen as ‘sinthomes’ in the Lacanian sense and not something that a positivist psychiatric or psychological methodology can pick up on, which, more often than not, mistakes the sinthome for the symptom.

In tang-ki worship, it is the talisman [fu] that can be taken as exemplifying, par excellence, the notion of the sinthome. When a person consults with a tang-ki, he or she is usually given a fu, which the person keeps in their wallet or purse or takes home, burns, then mixes the ash with water and drinks it. While the fu often has words of the shrine written on it, it is the writing of the deity made through the tang-ki, usually with a brush and vermillion ink and the stamp of the seal that gives the fu its importance. The writing itself cannot be read and can be seen to be in Lacan’s terms a little bit of nonsense but important nonsense that Lacan would see as being at the base of the signifier and the sinthome. I believe that the fu acts in a similar way as a sinthome for the person consulting the tang-ki and that it gives the person an enigmatic signifier that allows the person to elaborate their own narrative of their illness in such a way that they can get on with their life. ii

I had always wondered whether Tony had a mental illness but did not realize until near the end of the research that it did not matter whether he had an illness or not. The shrine members were not interested in this, and even if they did see a person who consulted with them as having an illness, such as depression or hysteria, this was not what they were treating. Tony went to the shrine because of the incredible worry he had over not having a job. The tang-ki advised him not to worry and also to be more grounded in what he was doing rather than being all over the place.

Two weeks after attending the shrine, Tony obtained employment that was more permanent than what he had been doing. Although Tony was not fully embedded in any tang-ki shrine, he was partially involved in a couple of shrines, and his involvement did help him to negotiate various areas of life: On the one hand, he found himself unemployed and stressed with few links to his family or friends and having only a tenuous involvement with the large American company; selling health care products with little success. He also had an unusual interest in mental health issues. He did not fit into the world of market capitalism and a highly stressful life where he had to eke out a living. On the other hand, he had an optimistic vision about gaining a job. He also had some criticisms about some of those involved in the American company that had a heavy handed way of selling products. He criticised the lawyers in this company as being out for themselves.

Tony’s involvement with the shrines gave him, I believe, some tools to create a new story about himself. In the shrines, he became a member of another world where the values of the outside world did not necessarily apply. He was not a failure here. Exposure to the stories of the deities, who themselves did not always take outside values to heart and were opposed to them, allowed him to question these values and his place within them, and he was able to join in the playfulness of the shrine. While he was not able to stay in this ‘heterotopic’ world all the time, it gave him sufficient resources to find some pride, to save face and to live in the other world with the support of a new story about himself. The enjoyment Tony had in talking about himself and the creation of his story was very noticeable as he spoke to me. The fu he received, and carries on himself, can be seen as something that motivates him to go on and elaborate his story.

Christopher, however, in contrast to Tony, did not have the flexibility to be able to engage in the stories of the shrines and play with them. There was no engagement with the stories of the mental health establishment nor of the psychological culture that he was invited to join. His symptom, therefore, remained a symptom. The talisman given to him by Anna was just a piece of paper and the burnt ashes he had to put into his bed just an irritant. There was no promotion of signifiers or a narrative around his symptom that could provide a setting in which the symptom could be embedded in a structure of meaning. There was no jouissance of the sinthome, just the pain or jouissance of the symptom. It was peculiarly like, to use Freud’s term in describing the effects of a psychical trauma in hysteria, a ‘foreign body’ had lodged itself within him, ‘…which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work…(1893-1895: 6). This foreign body was unable to be turned into either an object, like the ‘Ana’ of some girls and women with anorexia that give them some distance from the symptom, or into a gui [ghost spirit] or anzhang [something dirty] that those at the shrines sometimes experienced as possessing them.

Wei, when young, became separated from the culture of the everyday world. He did not have much of a narrative about this period of time; there was not much to say. Wei talks of shenjing bing [a mental illness] being present at that time. However, he then became involved in the word of tang-ki worship and could now talk about that time in detail. It seems to be that through his involvement in tang-ki worship Wei was able to create something for himself that managed to pull him back into society. His narrative links in many ways with the story of Nezha, who possesses him. He is able to play with this and other myths and interweave them it into the stories of his own life. In one sense, he can be said to have made a myth or a poem of himself. We see him engaged in the construction industry as a strong man. When possessed, we sometimes see him sucking a dummy or playing with marbles. At the end of the Redhill shrine celebrations, we see Wei with a small dagger inserted through his skin throwing a large ball with nails on a piece of rope over his back. Unlike the various people mentioned at the beginning of the chapter who did similar things but had the label mental illness, no mental illness can be detected in him.

I do not believe that such acts of self-mortification are acts of masochistic behaviour, like the woman in hospital inserting an object into her leg, although this behaviour itself may be perceived as a travesty of such ritual insertions as happens at Redhill. Rather, these behaviours of Wei can be seen as further elaborations of the sinthome and the game in which he is involved and can be seen to exemplify a peculiar type of jouissance. It would seem this involvement or project is something that keeps him sane, so to speak, in what is sometimes an insane world.

At the end of Aldous Huxley’s (1998) novel BRAVE NEW WORLD , one sees a hermit-like man, ‘the savage’, who refuses to live in the world dominated by ‘the controller’ and by the belief in ‘Fordism’. He can be seen to be lashing himself in order, I would say, to make his world less unreal. Perhaps, one can see Wei as engaging in a similar project when he conducts these lashings of himself. In his case, they are more ritualized and have a component in them of helping to save the world [jiu shi]. We can see them as being part of another version of the foundation story of Redhill, of the boy saving the people from the swordfish and the spilling of his blood. Now, of course, the hill has disappeared as have the cemeteries, but still, we see Wei bearing witness through the shedding of his blood to the power of the ‘other’ exemplified in the fu and the need for some transformation both of the world and of one’s self. That is his story.