[PDF]William Sargant The Mind Possessed

The Mind Possessed

Dr William Sargant was bom in Highgate, London, in7go7
and educated at Leys School and St John’s College, Cambridge.
Up to 197a he was Physician in Charge of the Department of
Psychological Medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital, London.

He has been Associate Secretary of the World Psychiatric
Association and on the staff of the Maudsley Hospital, London
for many years. He was also Registrar of the Royal Medico-
Psychological Association, Rockefeller Fellow at Harvard
University and Visiting Professor at Duke University. He is the
author of Battle for the Mind , The Unquiet Mind and, with
Eliot Slater, Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry.



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William Sargant

}

The

Mind Possessed

A Physiology of Possession, Mysticism
and Faith Healing


Pan Books London and Sydney


First published in Great Britain 1973 by William

Heinemanh Ltd ' ,

This edition published 1976 by Pan Books Ltd,

Cavaye Place, London swio 9P0

© William Sargant 1973

isbn o 330 24347 o

Printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd

Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser


Contents


t




List of Illustrations 6
Preface 9

Part One

1 The mind under stress 1 3

2 Mesmerism and increased suggestibility 31

3 Hypnosis and possession 48

4 States of possession 61

5 More about possession 77

6 Mystical possession 93

7 Sex and possession 109

8 Drugs, magic and possession 123

Part Two -

g African experiences 139

10 Tribal Sudan 148

11 Expelling spirits 152

12 Experiences in Zambia 161

13 Z ar possession 1 66

14 Casting out devils 171

15 Nigeria and Dahomey 176

16 Macumba in Brazil 182

17 Experiences in Trinidad 190

18 Experiences in Jamaica and Barbados 201

19 Voodoo in Haiti 208

ao Revivals in the United States of America 220
21 General conclusions 234

Bibliography 242
Index 246



List of Illustrations


Possession by Dionysius 500BC


Dancing to trance among the nomadic Samburu tribe in
Kenya

The god Ogoun

The expulsion of a possessing spirit in Zambia
Casting out possessing spirits in Kenya and Zambia by

dru mming

Voodoo possession in Haiti

Possessed by an Indian spirit during Macumba ceremony
in Brazil


Possessed by Joseph the carpenter in Trinidad
Inducing possession by the Holy Ghost, Clay County,
Kentucky

Voodoo possession in Haiti

Possession by the Holy Ghost ; snake handling, North
Carolina


Collapse phase, West Carolina


f



‘And something moved in John’s body, which was
not John. He was invaded, set at nought, possessed.

This power had struck John ... in a moment, wholly,
filling him with an anguish he could never in his life have
imagined, that he surely could not endure, that even '

now he could not believe had ripped him and felled him

in a moment, so that John . . . lay here, now, helpless,
screaming, at the very bottom of darkness.

Then John saw the Lord - for a moment only ; and the
darkness, for a moment only, was filled with a light he
could not bear. Then, in a moment, he was set free .T .
his heart, like a fountain of waters, burst.

Yes, the night had passed, the powers of darkness had

been beaten back. He moved among the saints he

scarcely knew how he moved, for his hands were new,
and his feet were new, and he moved in a new and
Heaven-bright air.’

James Baldwin Go Tell It. on the Mountain
Michael Joseph 1954


Preface


Brought up in a large middle-class Methodist family, it was
still possible, when young, to meet those, including members
of my own family, who had been suddenly and spiritually
changed, as it were in the twinkling of an eye. Their whole
life had been altered and the change was permanent rather
than transitory. Such happenings were thought- to be due
to the intervention of the fioly Ghost.

These alterations of thought and behaviour were forgotten
during my medical and psychiatric training, and my interest
was only re-aroused later on when I started to see what
seemed to me to be basically similar sorts of phenomena in a
non -religious setting with the introduction of the new shock
treatments in psychiatry, and particularly during the inten-
sive use of the emotionally arousing drug abreactive tech-
niques in the Second World War.

In 1957 in Battle for the Mind , 1 I tried to link abreactive
and shock treatments with the physiology of sudden relig-
ious conversion and brain washing. This book has had very
large and continuing sales, and an acceptance which has
encouraged me- to continue this research, alongside my
main work of teaching medical students, and trying to learn
better how to help patients, mostly along the new physical
and mechanistic lines. v ;

I have fortunately been able to travel frequently and in
many parts of the world, studying, photographing and film-
ing examples of 'religious and non-religious possession,
healing and trance. Despite their tremendous importance
— for a man’s whole life can be so easily changed when such
things happen to him — such investigations earned no official


Preface 9

research grants or help. Too often I was straying outside my
own psychiatric territory and into that of other disciplines.
Fortunately, book sales and frequent invitations to lecture
abroad have made it possible to continue this work over
many years.

Battle for the Mind correctly anticipated the recently ever-
increasing interest in matters mystical and how life can be
given — if so desired — a more philosophical and less material-
istic purpose, In my Maudsley Lecture in 1967 on the
Physiology of Faith I also discussed physical aids to the
attainment of spiritual grace and do so again here, including
dancing, drugs and sex which are being so much more used
now for this purpose.

If at the end of this research, I come to the conclusion
that many of the happenings examined and recorded are
man-made, rather than originating from co-existing spiri-
tual worlds, this makes it all the more important that man’s
thoughts are somehow more continually directed towards
good rather than -evil ends; often most effectively, it also
seems, by the mechanistic methods discussed here.

Man himself may well be our most approachable god;
and so man must sooner or later start to behave as a benefi-
cent deity rather than so often as the devil incarnate. With
his increasingly godlike powers, he has, for instance, used
these to kill no less than 60,000,000 of his fellow men in the
last forty years and could now destroy all life on earth. Our
prayers should constantly include ourselves and be about
ourselves and our actions.

In Battle for the Mind and The Unquiet Mind , 2 I was for-
tunate in having Robert Graves to help in the final re-
writing and to provide additional factual information. This
time, Richard Cavendish, formerly editor of Man, Myth
and Magic, has been very helpful in both these same respects.
Dr Alexander Walk has been as knowledgeable and helpful
in his proof corrections and suggestions in this book, as in
previous ones. I have to thank several research secretaries
at'St Thomas’s Hospital for help with the script and also my


former secretary Miss M. English. My wife’s help has been
invaluable in many respects, especially in the collection of
sound, photographic and film recordings under sometimes
strange circumstances.

William Sargant
London 1973


Notes

1 W. Sargant, Battle for the Mind Heinemann 1957

2 W. Sargant, The Unquiet Mind Heinemann 1967




i The mind under stress


The origin of this book dates back to the Second World War
and the treatment of batde neuroses - psychological dis-
orders stemming from horrifying and mentally overwhelm-
ing experiences of war. Soldiers who had broken down, in
combat or afterwards, sometimes became totally pre-
occupied by their memories of what had happened to them.
In other cases, these memories had been repressed into the
subconscious mind but were causing feelings of depression,
fatigue, irritability, irrational fears or nightmares.

Experiments were made with various drugs which enabled
previously ‘normal’ people, suffering from recent batde
neuroses, to relive emotionally, or to ‘abreact’ as it is called,
experiences which had led to breakdown. We would inject a
drug intravenously or give ether on a mask to the patient.
Then we would suggest to him, in his drug-disinhibited
state, that he was back in the situation of terror and stress
which was troubling him. If his best friend’s head had been
blown off into his lap, or he had been trapped in a burning
tank or buried alive by an exploding shell, he was made to
put himself back into the experience and live through it
again. If successful, the effect was to stir up intense nervous
excitement which produced violent outbursts of emotion.

As we increased the crescendo of the patient’s excitement,
he might suddenly collapse arid fall back inert on the
couch. At first we thought this collapse might be caused by
the drug, but it later became clear that it was an emotional
.collapse, brought about hy the excitement aroused during
abreaction. After the patient had come round, he might
burst into tears or shake his head and smile, and then report


14 The mind possessed

■ that all his previous fears and abnormal preoccupations
had suddenly left him, that his mind was functioning more
normally again, that he felt more like his old self, that
memories which had obsessed and terrified him could now
be thought of without fear or anxiety. This could happen
• after weeks or months of illness, and the failure of other
treatments. But it was only a really intense abreactive ex-
perience, followed by a phase of collapse, which was likely
to produce such a dramatic relief of symptoms.

Our method of treatment, supposedly new, was in fact of
time-honoured antiquity. Alcohol had earlier been used to
bring about states of sudden and violent abreactive emo-
tional release, and hypnosis had been used extensively in the
First World War, and was still sometimes employed in the
Second, to induce a patient to relive traumatic battle ex-
periences. But more significantly, as this book will show,
our method of treatment was markedly similar to techniques
which men have employed for thousands of years all over
the world in "their dealings with the abnormal : not only in
terms of mental illness, but in relation to ‘supernormal 5 pr
‘supernatural’ agencies — gods, spirits and demons . 1 -

We found that traumatic events had to be relived in the
present tense. It was of little value if the patient merely des-
cribed what had/ happened to him in a dull recital of events
in the past tense and without renewed emotion. We tried to
put him mentally right-back into the horrifying situation, to
make him live through it afresh, feeling, remembering and
describing the whole experience in words. It was this verb-
alizing and emotional re-creation of a . harrowing past
experience which both Freud and Breuer, one of Freud’s
early co-workers, had insisted was the essential curative
agent of the abreactive process. For it enabled repressed
and highly • traumatic memories to flood back into the
patient’s normal stream of consciousness, instead of being
isolated and shut off from it, perhaps even totally forgotten,
but still existing in the patient’s subconscious mind and
' causing disabling symptoms.


The mind under stress 15


Towards the end of the war we started to use more
powerfully excitatory types of drug, such as ether and
methedrine (an amphetamine), instead of the more sedative
intravenous barbiturates, such as pentothal or sodium
amytal. We now began to find that it was not always the
reliving of specific traumatic incidents in the past that pro-
duced the most beneficial effects, but the release by one
means or another of states of really intense emotional excite-
ment, anger or fear. These states might be created around
incidents which were comparatively trivial and unimpor-
tant. We even found on occasion that the release of great
anger or fear could be more effectively produced around
incidents which were entirely imaginary and had never
happened to the patient at all, and such abreactions of
imaginary events could have remarkably beneficial effects.
In fact, in dealing with people whose^minds had only just
recently broken down under stresses and strains, it might
only be necessary to produce a state of severe emotional
excitement centred about almost anything, to break up a
recently implanted abnormal pattern of behaviour; and
this would help to return the nervous system to its more
normal functioning. Though many soldiers still remained
‘scarred’ and sensitized in a variety of ways because of their
sudden breakdown . 2

. We found that the two emotions which it was most help-
ful to arouse, to break up recently implanted abnormal pat-
terns of behaviour and thought, were feelings of great anger
and aggression, or of intense fear and anxiety. The release
of feelings of depression did not bring any real benefit, and
laughter was not a sufficiently powerful emotion for the
purpose. Laughter is more useful in preventing a person
from beco'ming too emotionally involved, angry and fearful
in the first place, and helps to avoid breakdown rather than
to relieve it later on.

When we could not provoke an overwhelming release of
emotion around terrifying incidents in the patient’s past,
we might still rouse him to intense fear, or anger by getting


1 6 The mind possessed

him to release all the repressed emotions he felt about some
authority figure, a bullying sergeant-major perhaps, who
had disciplined and terrorized him during the months before
his breakdown. For a sergeant-major and the repressive
discipline he imposed might have just as traumatic and dis-
ruptive effects on the nervous stability of some soldiers in
the long run as the • sudden acute stresses of a highly un-
pleasant battle experience. •

We found that if a patient had always been chronically
neurotic and unstable, long before the events leading up to
his breakdown, our treatment usually had little lasting effect.
Furthermore, if the patient was deeply depressed or melan-
cholic, rather than anxious and hysterical, it was generally
impossible to make him release intense anger or fear during
the abreaction, and so no improvement resulted. It seemed
that in this type of case the brain was too inhibited, in its
deeply depressed state, to be able to release enough emotion
to break up the depressive condition. Similarly, schizo-
phrenics often became much more chaotic in their minds
when too intense a release of emotion was encouraged in
them. In fact, we soon gave up trying to treat seriously men-
tally ill patients by abreactive methods, which were far more
.useful in treating recent neurotic illnesses in previously
normal people.

However, it is significant that since the introduction of
electrical shock therapy and insulin-coma therapy, even
deeply depressed and schizophrenic patients, with previous-
ly stable and conscientious personalities, can be helped by
what is basically the same method. Electrical shock therapy
creates states of intense brain excitement, leading on to the
same phase of temporary inhibition and collapse which we
induced through drugs. The same thing could happen when ■
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