Witchcraft practices: Between social realities, religious beliefs, and psychic issues
Alexopoulos de Girard, Christina
Witchcraft practices: Between social realities, religious beliefs, and psychic issues - 2025.
27
This text examines witchcraft practices, between social realities, religious beliefs, and psychic issues, focusing on the specific case of aheckul in the Kabyle context and in the clinic of exile. After an epistemological reflection on the interest and originality of psychoanalytic anthropology for thinking about cases where the psychic, the religious, and the cultural are intimately linked, we focus on a study of witchcraft in the Kabyle context. We study the relationship to the feminine and to castration anxiety, in a society marked by relations of domination that determine very precise positions in the social hierarchy for each gender. The case of Na-Taous evokes both the established social order and attempts to reverse it through witchcraft. Finally, we look at the defensive aspects of witchcraft evoked by a patient of Kabyle origin seen in France, struggling with the delirious conviction that his maternal grandmother had a sorcerous hold over both his deceased father and himself, in order to see how traditional schemas can be invoked as indigenous theories and as infantile sexual theories, in an attempt to delimit anxiety in its most archaic forms. The case of Massi, who tries to kill the "evil one" within him by almost killing himself, provides an insight into the attributive externalization effected by belief in witchcraft, and its failure to protect the subject from self-destructive acts carried out with the conviction of attacking the evil inside him. Therapeutic work enables us to envisage the transformation of hallucination and delirium into an ability to tame the feeling of strangeness, to imagine a partial separation from an invasive and persecuting other, and to recognize a part of oneself in what is perceived as exogenous and fearéd.
Witchcraft practices: Between social realities, religious beliefs, and psychic issues - 2025.
27
This text examines witchcraft practices, between social realities, religious beliefs, and psychic issues, focusing on the specific case of aheckul in the Kabyle context and in the clinic of exile. After an epistemological reflection on the interest and originality of psychoanalytic anthropology for thinking about cases where the psychic, the religious, and the cultural are intimately linked, we focus on a study of witchcraft in the Kabyle context. We study the relationship to the feminine and to castration anxiety, in a society marked by relations of domination that determine very precise positions in the social hierarchy for each gender. The case of Na-Taous evokes both the established social order and attempts to reverse it through witchcraft. Finally, we look at the defensive aspects of witchcraft evoked by a patient of Kabyle origin seen in France, struggling with the delirious conviction that his maternal grandmother had a sorcerous hold over both his deceased father and himself, in order to see how traditional schemas can be invoked as indigenous theories and as infantile sexual theories, in an attempt to delimit anxiety in its most archaic forms. The case of Massi, who tries to kill the "evil one" within him by almost killing himself, provides an insight into the attributive externalization effected by belief in witchcraft, and its failure to protect the subject from self-destructive acts carried out with the conviction of attacking the evil inside him. Therapeutic work enables us to envisage the transformation of hallucination and delirium into an ability to tame the feeling of strangeness, to imagine a partial separation from an invasive and persecuting other, and to recognize a part of oneself in what is perceived as exogenous and fearéd.
Réseaux sociaux