The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

The Primordial Mind draws on the author's clinical experience as a psychoanalyst to construct an interdisciplinary model for understanding primordial mental activity in relation to thought in everyday life.Providing a critical review of theorists such as Freud, Jung, Klein, Bion and Piaget this book offers a detailed discussion of topics including:dreaming and creativity shamanism the relationship between mental processes in spiritual cultures the psychoses and language.This book challenges existing models of primordial mind and the inherent limitations of theories derived from western thought, such as those which dismiss members of spiritual cultures as immature or primitive and which understand shamanism in relation to schizophrenia. As such this book will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts as well as those with a psychological interest in spiritual cultures.