Transpersonal Possession

Transpersonal Possession occupies a contested but theoretically significant position within depth psychology, designating those states in which consciousness is seized, directed, or overwhelmed by forces that exceed the boundaries of the personal ego and individual biography. The corpus reveals three distinct registers in which the concept is treated. First, in Jungian and post-Jungian frameworks — represented here by Jung himself and by Schoen — possession by transpersonal forces is understood demonologically as well as psychologically: the individual may be occupied by archetypal constellations, spirits of the dead who do not recognize their own mortality, or what Schoen terms ‘Satanic possession’ as a genuine transpersonal evil distinct from misdiagnosed psychiatric disorder. Second, Neumann situates transpersonal possession structurally, describing how the supremacy of the transpersonal unconscious historically ‘grips’ communities and individuals through archetypal canon, numinous group totalities, and the mana personality — states in which the ego has not yet differentiated itself from transpersonal dominants. Third, Grof extends the concept into psychedelic phenomenology, documenting experiences in which an alien intelligence or force appears to direct the subject’s mind from beyond ordinary ego boundaries. Across these traditions the central tension is diagnostic and evaluative: is the possessed individual encountering a genuinely autonomous transpersonal reality, or projecting archaic intrapsychic contents onto an illusory outer agency? The stakes are clinical, philosophical, and ethical simultaneously.

In the library 17 passages

He goes on to acknowledge a form of transpersonal evil that he sees as Satanic possession, as contrasted with misdiagnosed psychiatric disorders. Peck originally did not believe in the reality of the Devil or evil spirits, but after witnessing two spirit possessions and participating in two exorcisms, he now does believe they are actual and real phenomena.

Schoen, citing Scott Peck, argues that transpersonal possession by Satanic or demonic forces is a genuinely distinct phenomenon irreducible to psychiatric misdiagnosis, a claim grounded in witnessed exorcisms.

Schoen, David E., The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis

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All spirits of the dead who possess the living are convinced that they haven’t died yet. Even a few years ago there was a doctor in California who practiced a strange kind of psychotherapy. These were partly psychotic cases, all of which he thought were possessed.

Jung presents spirit possession as a clinical and phenomenological reality in which a discarnate consciousness inhabits a living person without awareness of its own death, raising the question of how psychotherapy should address such intrusion.

Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014thesis

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I’m seeking images and representations that can carry, describe, and reflect transpersonal aspects of this phenomenon I’m calling Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil.

Schoen distinguishes transpersonal possession as the domain of Archetypal Shadow/Archetypal Evil — a force that seeks to destroy the soul — from lesser shadow phenomena that serve developmental purposes.

Schoen, David E., The War of the Gods in Addiction: C.G. Jung, Alcoholics Anonymous and Archetypal Evil, 2020thesis

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The supremacy of the transpersonal, and hence of the unconscious which, psychically speaking, is the seat of transpersonality, is denigrated and defamed. This form of apotropaic defense-magic invariably attempts to explain away and exorcize anything dangerous with a glib ‘nothing but’

Neumann argues that the modern ego’s secondary personalization — its reduction of transpersonal dominance to personalistic terms — is itself a defense against the genuine power of transpersonal possession, which the unconscious exercises over ego consciousness.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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everywhere the transpersonal canon of values stamps itself upon the community it has gripped. In the same way, time too is caught up in a nexus of feast days with their solemn celebrations — dramas, contests, spring and autumn festivals, sacraments, and rites, in which cosmic life intermingles with the earthly.

Neumann describes how collective transpersonal forces grip and shape entire communities through ritual and sacred time, constituting a cultural form of transpersonal possession.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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The superiority of this group totality over the individual part invests the former with all the marks of an archetype. It is possessed of superior power, has a spiritual character and displays the qualities of leadership, is numinous, and is always the ‘wholly other.’

Neumann shows how the group archetype, as a transpersonal totality, exercises a possessive numinous authority over individual members, an early form of collective transpersonal possession.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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Beyond their own loss of control, some volunteers felt another ‘intelligence’ or ‘force’ directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with ‘beings.’

Strassman’s DMT research documents subjects reporting autonomous intelligences that seize directional control of the mind, phenomenologically paralleling classical accounts of transpersonal possession.

Strassman, Rick, DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor’s Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences, 2001supporting

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some volunteers felt another ‘intelligence’ or ‘force’ directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with ‘beings.’

Duplicating the finding in a second edition of the same research, Strassman confirms that encounter with non-human intelligences producing volitional override is a reproducible feature of high-dose DMT states.

Strassman, Rick, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, 2001supporting

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The myth, being a projection of the transpersonal collective unconscious, depicts transpersonal events

Neumann locates the mythological record as testimony to transpersonal events that possess the collective imagination across cultures, situating possession within the broader logic of the collective unconscious.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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specific clinical symptoms are anchored in dynamic structures of a transpersonal nature and cannot be resolved on the level of psychodynamic or even perinatal experiences. In order to eliminate a specific emotional, psycho-somatic, or interpersonal problem, the patient sometimes has to experience dramatic sequences of a clearly transpersonal nature.

Grof establishes that certain symptoms are held in place by transpersonal dynamic structures — a clinical analogue to possession — requiring transpersonal-level intervention rather than conventional psychodynamic work.

Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy: The Healing Potential of Psychedelic Medicine, 1980supporting

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specific clinical symptoms are anchored in dynamic structures of a transpersonal nature and cannot be resolved on the level of psychodynamic or even perinatal experiences.

Confirming the preceding finding, Grof holds that transpersonal structures function as possessive governing systems that maintain symptom formation beyond the reach of ordinary therapeutic levels.

Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980supporting

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a hierarchy of ‘spiritual-magical’ potencies and planes of power, with the Great Mother at the summit and beside her, as an effective male principle, the animus of the transpersonal male.

Neumann traces an archaic hierarchy of transpersonal powers — the Great Mother and the transpersonal male animus — that possess and regulate the psychic life of the matriarchal group.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting

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The development of consciousness in archetypal stages is a transpersonal fact, a dynamic self-revelation of the psychic structure, which dominates the history of mankind and the individual.

Neumann frames the transpersonal as a structural fact that dominates both collective history and individual development, the precondition for understanding any possessive action of the unconscious.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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the ego falls a victim to a very dangerous inflation — that is to say, to a condition in which consciousness is ‘puffed up’ owing to the influence of an unconscious content.

Neumann’s account of ego inflation — consciousness seized and swollen by an unconscious content — functions as a secular, intrapsychic variant of transpersonal possession by an archetypal force.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949aside

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transpersonal experiences can be defined as ‘experiences involving an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual ego boundaries and beyond the limitations of time and/or space.’

Grof’s canonical definition of transpersonal experience establishes the conceptual boundary within which possession by forces exceeding normal ego limits becomes intelligible as a category.

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975aside

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The second form involves reducing the transpersonal to the prepersonal, when a person believes all things culminate with the ego.

Mathieu’s discussion of the pre/trans fallacy is obliquely relevant, as misidentifying a possessive transpersonal state as mere regression is precisely the diagnostic confusion that surrounds clinical accounts of transpersonal possession.

Mathieu, Ingrid, Recovering Spirituality: Achieving Emotional Sobriety in Your Spiritual Practice, 2011aside

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