Possession is a claimed state in which a person's body, mind, or behaviour is said to have been taken over by an external spirit, demon, deity, or other entity, typically against their will.[1] Reports of possession appear across a wide range of cultures and religious traditions worldwide, and the ritual response to claimed possession — see Exorcism for the full account of practices, traditions, and specific cases — is one of the most consistently documented religious practices across human history.[2]
Cross-cultural patterns
A survey cited in the medical literature on possession found reports drawn from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, with women outnumbering men reporting the experience by nearly two to one, and average onset around age twenty-five.[3] The identity attributed to the possessing entity varies significantly by cultural and religious context: in the survey, roughly 43% of cases involved a claimed possession by a god, deity, angel or holy spirit, 29% by a dead relative, 18% by an evil spirit or demon, and the remainder by animals or the devil specifically.[3] This pattern is a significant reason possession is generally treated across religious traditions and academic disciplines alike as a cross-cultural phenomenon with locally-specific theological interpretation, rather than a single fixed belief.
Different traditions frame the nature of the possessing entity very differently. In mainstream Christian and Islamic theology, the possessing entity is typically understood as an external, independently-existing demon or jinn. Jewish dybbuk tradition, by contrast, holds the possessing entity to be a specific category of human soul — one that failed to complete its own spiritual repair — rather than a demon at all; see Exorcism § Judaism for the fuller account of this distinction.
Medical and psychiatric perspective
Mainstream psychiatry does not recognise possession as a standalone clinical diagnosis. The DSM-5 and its text revision (DSM-5-TR) instead address claimed possession under the criteria for Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), describing "possession-form" presentations in which it appears, to the person experiencing it, as though a spirit, supernatural being, or outside person has taken control of their mental processes or actions.[1] This framing treats possession less as a diagnosis in itself than as a culturally-shaped explanation — an etiology rather than a disorder — for an underlying presentation that may otherwise resemble dissociative disorder, psychotic illness, or, in at least one well-documented case, a neurological condition such as temporal lobe epilepsy.[4]
The relationship between formal religion and psychiatry on this question is not uniformly adversarial. Some Catholic exorcists work directly alongside psychiatrists as part of the Church's required pre-exorcism evaluation process; Dr. Richard Gallagher, a psychiatrist who has evaluated possession claims on behalf of the Catholic Church for decades, has stated publicly that the great majority of cases referred to him turn out to involve conventional psychiatric or medical conditions rather than any inexplicable phenomenon.[5] Some clinicians have separately explored exorcism-influenced ritual as a potential adjunct within psychotherapy for DID specifically, though this remains a minority and contested position within the field, distinct from endorsing possession as a literal phenomenon.[6]
Historical cases sometimes retrospectively diagnosed in psychiatric terms include Christoph Haizmann, a 17th-century Austrian painter whose claimed possession and exorcism was the subject of a detailed 1922 case study by Sigmund Freud.[7]
Notable documented cases
The best-documented modern possession claims are covered in full under Exorcism, including the 1949 case of Roland Doe (Ronald Hunkeler), which inspired The Exorcist, and the 1976 death of Anneliese Michel following an extended series of exorcism rites, later attributed by physicians to temporal lobe epilepsy and severe psychiatric illness.
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "See no evil, hear no evil? The role of psychiatry in exorcism."Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine.
- ↑ "There's a global shortage of exorcists."Quartz.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Spirit possession in Jewish folklore: the dybbuk."Hektoen International.
- ↑ "Facing Our Demons: Psychiatric Perspectives on Exorcism."Hilltop Review.
- ↑ "As exorcism demand continues to rise, Vatican to hold training."The National Desk.
- ↑ "A Phenomenological Model of Therapeutic Exorcism for Dissociative Identity Disorder."Sage Journals.
- ↑ "Demon Possession, Theology, and Mental Health."Mental Health, Religion & Culture.