TRANCE

According to Gilbert Rouget (1980), a trance is a "temporary state of altered consciousness that obeys a cultural model." In the Middle Ages this term was applied to the agonies of death and the Passion of Christ. The word trance appeared in connection with the fakirs in a supplement to the first edition of the book Neurhypnologie by James Braid, the British doctor who popularized hypnotism. It was also used at the end of the nineteenth century to refer to the state of depersonalized mediums embodying the spirits of other people. From the perspective of physicians and psychologists of that era, exotic, spiritualistic, or Catholic trances could be explained in terms of provoked somnambulism, hypnosis, hysteria, or neurosis, notions that seemed to give a scientific explanation for these phenomena. Sigmund Freud associated himself with this tradition to some degree when he entitled one of his articles "A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis" (1923).

This perspective was reversed when ethnologists such as Alfred Métraux, Michel Leiris, or Roger Bastide began to use this term, which in their view was less ethnocentric, less psychologizing, or less psychiatric in tone than the words hypnosis or hysteria. Trance became the general term for experiences, rites, and beliefs relating to possession, shamanism, ecstasy, or divination observed in other cultures. From then on, magnetic somnambulism, hypnosis, and even psychoanalysis were seen as coming out of an Occidental trance culture. Thus, in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949/1969), Claude Lévi-Strauss described psychoanalysis as a "modern form of shamanism."

While the question of a psychology or a psychoanalysis of the trance continues to be raised, it has been given away, in many contemporary studies, to that of the relationship between the individual and the cultural realms.

Jacqueline Carroy

See also: Animal magnetism; Benign/malignant regression; Hypnosis; Jouissance (Lacan); Relaxation principle and neocatharsis.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1923d [1922]). A seventeenth-century demonological neurosis. SE, 19: 67-105.

Lapassade, Georges. (1990). La Transe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1969). The elementary structures of kinship (James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, Trans.) Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published 1949)

Michaux, Didier (Ed.). (1995). La transe et l 'hypnose. Paris: Imago.

Rouget, Gilbert. (1980). La musique et la transe. Paris: Gallimard.