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Mental disorders and the symbolic function of therapeutic rites in the Réunion Island Hindu environment
1Laboratoire de Psychologie Clinique et de Psychopathologie, Université René Descartes - Paris V, France. yolande.govindama@psycho.univ-paris5.fr
Abstract:
This article describes two therapeutic rituals in the Hindu milieu on Réunion Island--walking on fire and piercing parts of the body in the Feast of Cavedy--to underscore the cultural representation of madness and the symbolic function of these rites in treatment. Madness is considered to be the result of a rupture of genealogy through denial of the founder, and of psychic-somatic unity, which leads the afflicted person to develop a fantasy of immortality. The two therapeutic rituals aim at reestablishing the debt to the founding ancestor by the symbolic reactualization of the original chaos, and at restoring the genealogy through a relationship between the penitent and the officiant, which brings the subject to accept his human condition as a mortal being.
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