Routledge Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy: Healing through the Symbolic Process

In Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy: Healing through the Symbolic Process, Robin van Löben Sels uniquely and honestly recounts her personal journey toward a shamanic understanding of psychotherapy. Exploring the disruptive breakthrough of visions and dreams that occurred during her analysis, personal life, and psychoanalytic training, van Löben Sels illustrates how the phenomenology of ancient shamanism is still alive and how it is a paradigm for the emergence and maturation of the psyche in people today. This original book delves into van Löben Sels’s personal experience of the shaman, identifying such eruptions as a contemporary version of the archaic shaman’s initiatory call to vocation. The book is split into two parts. It begins by outlining the shamanic personality in history, recognizing this as an individual that has been called out of a collectively sanctioned identity into a creative life, and the unconscious shaman complex they consequently face, especially in psychotherapeutic relationships. Practical as well as theoretical, the second part outlines the shamanic attributes that underline psychotherapeutic relationships - silence, sound, mask, rhythm, gesture, movement, and respiration - and usefully describes how to use them as asanas for consciousness, or vehicles toward psychological awareness. With clinical examples and personal stories throughout, this book’s unique Jungian perspective addresses contemporary expressions of the shaman complex in our current world. Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy: Healing through the Symbolic Process will be essential reading for Jungian analysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training, as well as for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies. It will be especially helpful and illuminating to those who have experienced an involuntary plunge into the depths and who seek ways to articulate their experience. Review 'In Shamanic Dimensions of Psychotherapy, Robin van Löben Sels artfully weaves together personal narrative and clinical experience, along with threads from art, poetry, literature, analytical psychology, and psychoanalytic theory, to articulate the shamanic elements underpinning the psychotherapy experience. However, this volume is not a dry, academic treatise on shamanism. Throughout the volume, van Löben Sels reveals how the "shamanic complex" functions to facilitate healing in the space created between therapist and patient. In addition to having significant implications for the practicing psychotherapist, her careful and astute articulation of "shamanic attributes" might well serve as a template for the practice of conscious living. Rather than simply explaining shamanism, van Löben Sels utilizes the patterns found in shamanism as a means of amplifying important elements of life and the depth of the therapeutic encounter. Shamanic Dimensions is an important and satisfying contribution to our understanding of shamanistic experience, depth psychology, and the unfolding of life' - Mark Winborn, PhD, NCPsyA, Jungian psychoanalyst, psychologist and author of Interpretation in Jungian Analysis: Art and Technique 'Robin van Löben Sels has the rare gift of being able to capture with words our primary, felt experiences that often have an ineffable quality and, as such, elude verbal description. In this poetic and evocative book, van Löben Sels provides us with anthropological, clinical, and personal descriptions that illustrate, as well as evoke, aspects of the Shaman archetype and its operation in the therapeutic situation especially in the form of the seven shamanic attributes she explores. To pay attention to these attributes is to work mostly at the level of what is non-conscious yet experienced and manifested bodily; it is to be present to the language of sensations and is foundational to moving towards ego consciousness and a growing capacity to name one’s experience - what the author calls a yoga of consc