The Bible itself makes a distinction between disease and possession Mark Thus, Christian theology should recognize the difference. At least six factors differentiate schizophrenia from demonic possession as described in the Bible. These factors can be helpful when trying to determine if an individual is possessed or has an NBD. Attraction to vs. Aversion to Religion.
Demons want nothing to do with Christ. Conversely, people with NBD are often devoutly religious. Irrational Speech vs. Rational Speech. In New Testament accounts involving demons, the demons spoke in a rational manner. Untreated people with schizophrenia will often speak in nonsense and jump rapidly between unrelated topics. Ordinary Learning vs. Supernatural Knowledge Demons in the New Testament would speak through people to convey knowledge that otherwise could not have been known to the possessed individuals.
Those with NBD have no such ability to know facts which they have not acquired by normal learning. Time Traveler for possessed The first known use of possessed was in See more words from the same year.
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Bolton and Banner express some of these distinctions as applied to action and various mental faculties:. Perception of reality can be veridical or mistaken, or in an extreme, hallucinatory. Beliefs may be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable, based on good evidence or otherwise. Emotions may be understandable reactions to events, for example, anger is an understandable response to being hurt, or not understandable, being angry for no reason; and so on.
The will may fail to control action. Action may be reasonable or otherwise, depending on whether it follows from beliefs and desires, or on whether those beliefs and desires are themselves reasonable.
Behaviour may be random, without any relation to the achievement of goals, without method, and in this sense may fail to be real action The observer relativity and hence the wide range of possible evaluations and interpretations at each of these faculties is evident. Different observers may see in a child's tantrum an attempt to coerce the parents to provide yet another toy or in that same behaviour merely that the child is 'tired.
Observer relativity also has a cultural dimension. An example, further discussed below, is the tendency in some societies to see certain emotions— say unhappiness in a marriage—as having nothing to do with the personalities involved or other relational issues, but rather as states imposed by an interfering spirit.
Many readers are likely to understand interpersonal emotions as having to do with the person and the relationship. The idea I want to pursue in what follows is that spirit possession—or as I shall call it henceforth the spirit stance —occupies a peculiar position: it is an intentional strategy in the sense that it aims at predicting and explaining behaviour by ascribing to an agent the spirit beliefs and desires, but it is only deployed once the mental states and activity of the subject the person are deemed to have failed normative distinctions of the sort just outlined.
It thus subverts the person's agency, while simultaneously maintaining a peculiar form of intentionality where otherwise one might expect a drop to the physical stance. Whether it achieves this and the manner by which it does will be subsequently discussed. First I will describe some of the situations in which the spirit stance is adopted and the normative distinctions that occasion this.
These examples will serve to illuminate the way in which the spirit stance cuts across the ascriptions of what may be described as a disenchanted folk psychology. For both the healer and the possessed person, a question arises as to why the spirit had targeted that person in particular. In the Dakhla oasis of Egypt, where I had conducted research, three answers are available. The first is bad luck, such as in the case of the farmer cited above who inadvertently stepped upon a jinni's habitat.
The third, and most common, is sorcery se'hr : here a person who would like to see another disadvantaged visits a sorcerer who is able to direct a jinni at the victim. The jinni is instructed to wreak havoc usually in a specified domain—physical health, behavioural, psychological—with the final purpose of imposing various sorts of social failures e. Whatever the means by which person and spirit are brought in proximity, the understanding is that a person is made more vulnerable to possession if he or she fails to secure protection through prayer and other forms of worship.
The spirit stance is adopted to explain a wide range of behaviours and is certainly not limited to 'illness. In each of these cases, un-understandability, unreasonableness, inappropriateness, etc. In order to draw out the implications of the spirit stance it is helpful to have a view on what to contrast it with. I will take the contrast to lie in a disenchanted folk psychology, the kind, for example, where interpersonal conflict is usually explained by consideration of the personalities involved and, say, their temperaments.
It is also one in which 'madness' tends to be seen as a consequence of dysfunctional physical or psychological mechanisms. Given this, and in light of the preceding examples, it can be seen that the spirit stance cuts across ascriptions of such a folk-psychology: it extends into areas that would normally—though by no means exclusively—be described from the intentional stance marital discord, other social and interpersonal problems , as well as into areas that would normally be described from the physical stance 'madness,' mental disorder.
We can say that in both areas the spirit stance subverts the agency of the person but in the latter mental disorder it preserves another form of intentionality, where otherwise there may have been a drop to a physical stance explanation of the person's behaviour and mental states.
The spirit stance is a variant of the intentional stance in that it explains the inappropriate or un-understandable behaviour of a human-agent by positing a non-corporeal entity now seen as the agent of this behaviour. To demonstrate how it works, consider behaviours that may attract a social judgement of 'madness'; a few have been listed in table 1. These will vary from one socio-cultural context to another. Now recall that spirits are represented as agents with beliefs, desires, and dispositions, capable of setting goals and acting on them.
What does it mean to say that the person is behaving in this way because he or she is possessed by a spirit? The first sense in which this can be understood is executive possession; that is, the behaviour witnessed is literally the spirit's. As indicated at the beginning of this paper, displacement of the host's agency need not be accompanied by a trance state—an altered state of consciousness.
Thus the behaviour is understood as intentional by virtue of the spirit's agency. Most generally, it would be said that it is in the nature of a spirit to seek deserted places and isolation, to be pre-occupied with fire, to be restless. The second sense in which behaviour is ascribed to a spirit is pathogenic possession.
Here, the spirit is 'making' the person behave in those bizarre ways. While behaviour in this case is not, strictly speaking, the spirit's, it remains describable in an intentional idiom in those cases where sorcery is involved.
Sorcery is a common reason why spirits become involved with human hosts. As practiced in Dakhla, sorcery typically involves three agents: the seeker the person who wants the harm arranged ; the sorcerer; and the spirit that will do the work. The purpose is to make the person behave in a 'mad' manner and thus to harm that person socially. The victim's behaviour is therefore goal-directed but the beliefs and desires that direct the behaviour, and the goals that are being served, have been established elsewhere in the nexus of relations that constitute sorcery.
In terms of prediction of behaviour, this requires that the applied theory e. What pattern does the spirit stance aim to track? Here we return to issues raised earlier when discussing approaches to spirit possession. If there are such things as spirits, then the spirit stance tracks the intentionality of spirit-persons in the same way that the intentional stance tracks the intentionality of human persons: assumptions are made concerning the beliefs and desires the agent ought to have and, being rational, that the agent will act to further its goals.
Here, procurement of individualised knowledge pertaining to the dispositions and intentions of spirit-persons as outlined earlier will facilitate the prediction of behaviour. On the other hand if spirits do not exist, and the only source of agency is the person, then it is not clear how individualised knowledge of the spirit—now seen merely as a fiction of the person's mind arising during a trance episode or direct communication—can play any role in the prediction of behaviour.
It would not matter what the 'spirit's' dispositions are as there is only one actor here: the person. And this actually does occur; consider these examples from the Dakhla oasis: a Muslim man possessed by a Christian spirit stops attending the mosque, begins reading the Bible and praying to Jesus; a woman possessed by a capricious, mischievous spirit behaves in such a manner where this is out of character for her. Pressel makes a similar point, here pertaining to the Brazilian Umbanda religion: "After learning to play the role of each spirit, the novice may extend that personality trait into his own everyday behaviour" She cites the case of an "extremely impatient woman" she knew who "had learned to be calm from her preta velha spirit [spirits of old African slaves known for being peaceful, compassionate, patient, and wise]" ibid.
Thus, even if we reject spirits as possible agentic entities, there is still room for the spirit stance to allow for the prediction of a person's behaviour. This will depend on the extent to which the personality of the individualised 'spirit' is integrated by the person who supposedly is possessed by that spirit. The proposal for a spirit stance raises some objections and requires further clarification.
One objection concerns its presumed uniqueness. It could be argued that the spirit stance is really nothing but the intentional stance, only that the agent is distinguished from the person whose behaviour is being described. Alternatively, it could be pointed out that the spirit stance is really a physical stance as in many cases the person's behaviour is described through non-intentional processes spirits enter the person and affect bodily organs.
My argument in this paper has been that the spirit stance is a variant of the intentional stance. Hence, in response to the first objection, I agree that it is an intentional stance but not that it is thereby indistinguishable from it. The crucial point here is that the spirit stance is adopted only once the intentional stance is abandoned. The spirit stance includes the recognition that mental states and behaviour have failed certain normative distinctions—the reason the intentional stance is abandoned—yet continues to describe both in an intentional idiom.
In response to the second objection—that the spirit stance is a physical stance—I agree that intrusion by spirits sounds a lot like, say, infection by viruses. And the latter is a common physical stance account for tiredness, moodiness, etc. However, as I have endeavoured to elucidate throughout this paper, spirits are represented as persons whose nature can be known and who are capable of intentional behaviour. That is why it is possible in some cases to explain as well as predict behaviour by positing such entities, irrespective of whether spirits are independent agents or cultural-psychological fictions.
Earlier I noted that the spirit stance subverts the person's agency by abandoning the intentional stance, yet preserves another form of intentionality mediated by the spirit-person. This thesis requires further remark. The subversion of agency need not be a conscious decision on behalf of the observer though it certainly can be; there is a thin-line separating the inability from the unwillingness to see intentionality in the behaviour of others.
The examples listed in table 1 —in particular those applying to relationships—might seem to a modern sensibility as blatant attempts to subvert action and mental states of their inter personal meanings in favour of an externally imposed efficient cause. For example, blaming marital discord on spirit influence and sorcery subverts the couple's moods of the usual interpersonal referents such as personality 'clashes'; the problem is not in the relationship.
Now, some may find it problematic that a society disapproves of adulation towards one's wife and homosexual urges—the other examples in table 1 —to the extent that they can only be understood as externally imposed states. And we are all aware of pejorative references to 'hormones' when someone wishes to cast doubt on the rationality and intentionality of another's behaviour.
The difference is not in kind, rather, it is in the values and the behaviours that attract non-intentional explanation.
Abandonment of the intentional stance is common in everyday life, even if the reasons and normative distinctions that occasion this vary relative to cultural contexts and observers.
Turning to the second part of the thesis: that the spirit stance preserves a form of intentionality where otherwise one might expect a drop to the physical stance. This applies to inappropriate and un-understandable behaviour, as is commonly attributed to 'madness' or 'mental disorder.
As discussed in the previous section, it is common to both enchanted and disenchanted varieties of folk psychologies not to see method in the madness.
In the former the person is 'possessed,' in the latter he is 'ill' due to a dysfunctional physical or psychological mechanism. Physical stance explanations of 'madness' are also present in societies where the institution of spirit possession is established.
In this respect, the difference between such societies and disenchanted ones is that spirit possession preserves some intentionality where elsewhere the predominant option would be a physical explanation.
Note that the issue here concerns the resources of an everyday folk psychology, and not of a theoretically driven account that may render behaviour understandable. Consideration of the connections between spirit possession, personhood, and intentionality afforded a novel perspective on spirit possession and a developed understanding of the intentional stance.
Understanding spirit possession and intentionality in this light suggests the following insight: Centuries before the modern disciplines of psychoanalysis, phenomenological-psychopathology and the philosophy of mental health came on stage and tried to address the prejudices of folk psychology by restoring meaning to 'madness,' the social institution of spirit possession had been preserving the intentionality of socially inappropriate and un-understandable behaviour.
By contra-posing a world of human-persons to that of spirit-persons and by allowing the latter the capacity to affect, or be the agent of, human behaviour, social deviance is not seen, at least initially, as 'mental disorder. And this allows, in some cases, for the explanation and prediction of behaviour. The exposition and analysis offered in this paper raise a question of importance with which I shall conclude: Is the spirit stance and hence some intentionality preferable to the physical stance and therefore no intentionality in terms of the social explanation of apparently meaningless behaviour in contexts where these are the predominant options?
It is perhaps in understanding the issues relevant to thinking about this question, that some insight can be achieved into the value we place on meaning as such, and whether preserving meaning is a sufficient reason for us to relax our conceptions of agency and personhood. Bering, J. Article Google Scholar. Bloom, P. New York: Basic Books. Google Scholar. Boddy, J. Bolton, D. Mind, Meaning and Mental Disorder.
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Fotiou, E.
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