Yearning for God: Trance as a Culturally Specific Practice and Its Implications for Understanding Dissociative Disorders

Abstract

ABSTRCT This paper suggests a tentative hypothesis to explain the apparent paucity of dissociative disorder patients between the 1920s and the 1970s: that the trance phenomenon that is now so characteristic in patients who struggle with childhood trauma may be a manner of handling emotional distress specific to certain periods in American history. The paper argues that trance is learnable; that there are specific periods in American history in which trance is encouraged in religious experience and that we are now in one such period; that in such periods, trance becomes incorporated into a complex behavioral practice in religious settings in which the boundary between the perceptually real and unreal may be blurred; and that the prevalence of this practice in religious settings may influence the symptom expression of those who struggle with the aftermath of trauma.