This article is an argument that for women, possession trance constitutes a psychodynamic response to powerlessness by providing them a means for the gratification of wishes ordinarily denied to them. Powerful alters enable them to act out wishes they cannot express directly. Possession serves both as an idiom of distress and of indirect self‐assertion, facilitated by ritualized, culturally structured dissociation.
This paper represents a reanalysis of data from earlier studies supporting the hypothesis that cultural patterning of altered states of consciousness (trance) conforms to a monothetic general evolutionary scale of sociocultural behavior. Global correlations using holocultural methodology show trance type to be positively correlated with four selected evolutionary variables, two related to societal complexity and two related to subsistence economy.
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