Shamanic Healing

Shamanic healing occupies a richly contested position within the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ethnographic datum, archetypal metaphor, and therapeutic model. Mircea Eliade’s foundational taxonomy in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951) establishes the canonical framework: the shaman’s chief function is healing, accomplished through soul retrieval, extraction of intrusive objects, and ecstatic journeys to spirit realms—practices documented across Siberia, the Americas, and beyond. His descriptive architecture supplies the comparative vocabulary upon which subsequent depth-psychological appropriations depend. Peter Levine draws on the shamanic insight that trauma is a communal, not merely individual, wound, arguing that Western medicine lags behind shamanistic cultures in recognizing this dimension. Shaun McNiff pursues the most sustained therapeutic transposition, treating the shaman as an archetypal figure whose metaphors—soul loss, rhythmic restoration, the ingestion of illness—illuminate creative arts therapy without requiring literal identification. David Abram introduces a corrective tension, warning that popular ‘shamanic healing techniques’ evacuate the shaman’s primary ecological allegiance, reducing a cosmological vocation to personal insight and cure. The field thus holds a productive dialectic between rigorous ethnographic description, Jungian archetypal reframing, somatic therapeutic application, and ecological critique—making shamanic healing one of the corpus’s most generative and contested boundary concepts.

In the library 28 passages

the essential and strictly personal function of the South American shaman remains healing… since, in his view, the vast majority of illnesses have a spiritual cause—that is, involve either the flight of the soul or a magical object introduced into the body

Eliade establishes shamanic healing as the shaman’s defining personal function across cultures, grounded in a spiritual etiology that requires ecstatic intervention rather than purely material remedy.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The shaman’s chief function is healing, but he also plays an important role in other magico-religious rites

Eliade positions healing as the pre-eminent shamanic function, distinguishing the shaman’s positive curative role from the antisocial activities of the sorcerer.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Shamanistic cultures view illness and trauma as a problem for the entire community, not just for the individual or individuals who manifest the symptoms. Consequently, people in these societies seek healing as much for the good of the whole as for themselves.

Levine invokes shamanic healing to argue that trauma treatment in Western society must recover the communal dimension that shamanistic cultures have always recognized.

Levine, Peter A., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma—The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Shamanistic cultures view illness and trauma as a problem for the entire community, not just for the individual or individuals who manifest the symptoms. Consequently, people in these societies seek healing as much for the good of the whole as for themselves.

Levine argues that the communal orientation of shamanic healing offers a corrective model for contemporary trauma therapy’s over-individualized paradigm.

Levine, Peter A., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma - The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, 1997thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Rhythm and a balanced relationship with nature are principal metaphors for health within the shamanic tradition. I prefer the language of shamanism to abstract psychological concepts. On a daily basis my work is most closely tied to shamanic uses of rhythm and the core idea of moving between worlds in search of the lost soul.

McNiff presents shamanic healing not as a literal practice to be transferred but as a superior metaphorical language for understanding the rhythmic and soul-restorative dimensions of creative arts therapy.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

These communities define illness as a loss of soul. The shaman, acting as an intermediary, travels between worlds to find and return the souls of sick people. I believe the figure of the shaman is appearing today to help us restore soul to the contemporary world through direct and vital contact with the life of the imagination.

McNiff advances an archetypal reading of shamanic healing in which soul loss and soul retrieval become depth-psychological metaphors for the restorative work of imagination in contemporary therapy.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Psychotherapists and some physicians have begun to specialize in ‘shamanic healing techniques.’ ‘Shamanism’ has thus come to connote an alternative form of therapy; the emphasis, among these new practitioners of popular shamanism, is on personal insight and curing. These are noble aims, to be sure, yet they are secondary to, and derivative from, the primary role of the indigenous shaman

Abram critiques the therapeutic appropriation of shamanic healing as a reduction of the shaman’s primary ecological and cosmological function to the narrower aims of personal cure and insight.

Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

In the enactments of the shaman I have found evidence that art and healing are forever united in human experience.

McNiff grounds his lifelong linking of art therapy and shamanism in the claim that shamanic enactment discloses a universal and primordial unity of artistic and healing practice.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Shamanic cultures throughout the world define illness as a loss of soul. I find this definition appealing and very relevant to our contemporary maladies.

McNiff endorses the shamanic definition of illness as soul loss as the most therapeutically generative framework for understanding contemporary psychological suffering.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

riding — as they say — on the sound of his drum, he must sail away, on the wings of trance, to whatever spiritual realm may harbor the soul in question, overwhelm the guardians of that celestial, infernal, or tramontane place, and work swiftly his shamanistic deed of rescue.

Campbell describes soul retrieval as the paradigmatic shamanic healing act, emphasizing the trance-induced cosmological journey as the decisive therapeutic mechanism.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the séances are public, they cause a certain religious tension in the entire community, and, in the absence of other religious ceremonies, shamanic cures constitute the all-important rite.

Eliade documents the publicly ritualized and communally constitutive character of shamanic healing séances in North America, underscoring their centrality to collective religious life.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

illness is divided into six categories: (1) visible accidents; (2) breach of a taboo; (3) terror caused by the apparition of monsters; (4) ‘bad blood’; (5) poisoning by another shaman; (6) loss of the soul.

Eliade records the Achomawi diagnostic taxonomy that underlies shamanic healing practice, demonstrating the sophisticated aetiological framework that guides the shaman’s curative séance.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

This cultivation of individual healing styles characterizes both shamans and contemporary psychotherapists.

McNiff identifies the personalized, non-standardized character of shamanic healing as a structural parallel with contemporary psychotherapeutic practice, distinguishing both from priestly institutionalism.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Rather than attempting to tranquilize eruptions of psychological tension by external means, the artist and the shaman go to the heart of the inner storm and enact its furies in a way that benefits the individual and the community.

McNiff contrasts the shamanic and artistic approach to psychological crisis—active, communal enactment—with the suppressive logic of conventional therapeutic intervention.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the chief elements of the shamanic tradition: initiation involving the candidate’s death and resurrection, ecstatic visits to the land of the dead and to the sky, insertion of magical substances in the candidate’s body, revelation of secret doctrines, instruction in shamanic healing

Eliade identifies shamanic healing instruction as one of the constitutive elements transmitted through initiatory secret societies, linking curative competence to cosmological death-and-rebirth experience.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

With the patient’s consent, the shaman decides who the victim shall be. While the latter is asleep the shaman, taking the form of an eagle, descends on him and, tearing out his soul, goes down with it to the realm of the dead and presents it to Erlik

Eliade presents a Buryat case in which shamanic healing of soul loss entails a morally troubling cosmological exchange, complicating idealized portraits of the healer’s beneficent role.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

If the patient’s soul has been carried off by an evil spirit, the shaman himself is obliged to undertake the journey of recovery, which is far more difficult.

Eliade distinguishes grades of shamanic healing difficulty according to the nature of the soul’s captor, with direct underworld confrontation reserved for the most dangerous cases.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Like the shaman, Moreno was an ecstatic, an artist who believed completely in the healing power of emotion, spontaneous action, and creative sensitivity.

McNiff aligns psychodrama’s therapeutic logic with shamanic healing by characterizing Moreno as an ecstatic figure whose method of enactment recapitulates the shaman’s restorative function.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

The process of imagining the shaman as an archetypal figure is based upon a poetic state of mind that opens us to the reality of figures of imagination.

McNiff argues that perceiving the shaman as archetype rather than ethnographic object enables a therapeutically productive, imaginative engagement with healing that transcends cultural literalism.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the discomfort caused by a loss of rhythm can be likened to the shamanic definition of illness as lost soul.

McNiff transposes the shamanic illness concept of soul loss into the experiential register of lost rhythm, offering a somatic-aesthetic bridge between indigenous and contemporary therapeutic frameworks.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

sucking blood appears to be an aberrant form of shamanic healing… This extremely complex rite, based on the sacred value of hot blood, is ‘shamanic’ only secondarily and through coalescence with other rites belonging to different magico-religious complexes.

Eliade cautions against conflating all extraction rites with core shamanic healing, identifying certain blood-sucking practices as secondary accretions from distinct magico-religious complexes.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

It is to this Kingdom of Shadows that the shaman descends to seek the patient’s soul.

Eliade documents the Yukagir underworld descent as the definitive act of shamanic healing for soul loss, embedding the curative journey within a cosmological geography of the dead.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

One must be wounded to become a healer. This is the local image of a universal mythological motif, which is described in Eliade’s book about the initiation of medicine men and shamans.

Von Franz locates the wounded-healer motif at the intersection of Greek mythology and shamanic initiation, drawing on Eliade to establish the universal psychological necessity of the healer’s prior wound.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

I see the shaman as an archetypal figure, a universal aspect of art and healing that helps to deepen and expand the image of the creative arts therapist. Shaman has become a cross-cultural term that gives a common name to indigenous healers throughout the world.

McNiff defines his terminological usage of ‘shaman’ as an archetypal cross-cultural category rather than a specific ethnographic identity, grounding his therapeutic framework in universal rather than local healing traditions.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the cause of many séances is illness, for certain spirits are believed to provoke diseases. To identify the author of the trouble, the shaman incarnates his familiar spirit

Eliade describes the Tungus séance as a diagnostic and curative procedure in which spirit incarnation serves to identify and address the spiritual cause of illness.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

in the present chapter on shamanism, that is to say, we are touching lightly the problem of the mystical experience — which is n

Campbell situates shamanic healing within the broader problem of mystical experience, treating it as a culturally variable vehicle for a transhistorical psychological constant.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the shamaness is on the point of sinking to the ground, unconscious, she raises her arms and begins revolving on herself.

Eliade documents the physical trance comportment of the Araucanian machi during a healing ceremony, illustrating the somatic dimension of ecstatic shamanic healing practice.

Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Related terms