“It is the art of a warrior to balance the terror of being
a man with the wonder of being a man.”
Don Juan, as quoted by Carlos Casteneda

Just as the blinding heat of the desert sun joined in a steady dance with the dark chill of midnight will eventually reduce any rock to rubble, the inescapable cycle of magic and loss known to us all is surely one of the greatest challenges to the maintenance of a balanced psyche. Only the hardiest sort of person has the psychological elasticity necessary to survive the endless rhythm of expansion into beauty and desire followed by the inevitable tightening into fear or revulsion. Sooner or later, most of us lose our flexibility and freeze into weary postures of cynicism or scrupulously unexamined faith. Very few people so clearly pass through the extremes of what life has to offer as did the Lakota man named Black Elk. In this paper I hope to present a basic biographical summary of Black Elk’s life, a description -- from a Western psychological perspective -- of some of the seemingly psychotic experiences he endured and finally, a brief discussion of the usefulness of this perspective. The visions and events that I will be reviewing took place from approximately 1870 to 1890. They were recorded by John Neihardt in the early 1930’s from his extended conversations with Black Elk. For the purposes of this paper, I will assume the veracity of what was written in Black Elk Speaks (1932). Given the apparent character of the speaker, as well as the deep respect for honesty among the Lakota people, this seems a safe assumption.

“May you live in interesting times.”
An Oft-Quoted Chinese Curse

Like a child conceived in rape, it seems that the character of Black Elk’s life was generated by the violent meeting of two utterly opposed forces. Although he was approaching adolescence before he actually saw a white person, the whites had completely overrun his culture by the time Black Elk entered his late teens. By his mid twenties, he was to find himself in London, adrift in a culture he could never have imagined just ten short years earlier. Unfortunately, space doesn’t permit a recapitulation of the details of his fascinating life here. The principle point I hope to make is that, by virtually any standards, this young man was under almost inconceivable psychological stress. He had witnessed the utter destruction of his culture and the bison herds that anchored the Lakota way of life, the murders of the leaders of his people and then, in the hope of discovering “some secret of the (whites) that would help (his) people somehow,” he joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and traveled to Chicago, New York, London and Paris. This can be compared to one of us being whisked off to Saturn by creatures as brutal as they were alien.

Black Elk’s Subjective Psychological Experience
“Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness,
provided the madness is given us by divine gift.”

Socrates Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the inner reality Black Elk experienced echoes the extremes which characterized the external events of his life. However, while there appears to be a reflection of inner and outer experience, there is also abundant evidence of a predisposition toward extraordinary perceptions. For example, at the age of five, before the period of great drama in his life had commenced, he began hearing voices.

I was out playing alone when I heard them. It was like someone calling me, and I thought it was my mother, but there was nobody there. This happened more than once, and always made me afraid, so that I ran home (Neihardt 1932, p. 15).

Shortly after these initial encounters with voices, Black Elk experienced his first visions (or hallucinations). These came in the form of birds that spoke to him and two men who flew toward him while singing a sacred song:

Behold, a sacred voice is calling you;
All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.
 

Perhaps this is an opportune moment to consider what may have been meant by whatever Lakota word is traditionally translated as “vision” as opposed to our term, “hallucination.” In shamanic cultures such as the Lakota, our familiar sense of distrust of our own perceptions was absent. Because of a more inclusive and subtle sense of what constitutes reality, Black Elk would not have been obsessed with making fine distinctions between what he had really experienced and what he only thought he had experienced. This is not to say that there exists a seamless continuum between the conventionally accepted material reality upon which our own society is founded and the more mythical realms within which most, if not all, tribal people find themselves. Especially when young, as we see in the quotation cited above, unexplained voices or visions could be deeply disturbing, as they were for Black Elk. However, while they could be disturbing, they were rarely, if ever, cause for complete psychological breakdown or reason to be shunned by others -- as is all too often the case when we are faced with “hallucinations” in our own society. Speaking of our own society, Stephen Larsen, a former student of the mythologist, Joseph Campbell, writes:
Rather than being suppressed or subordinated, the primary, mythic type of consciousness is engaged and brought into relationship simultaneously with the mythology and the social system of the group. Mythic meaning and social meaning are thus brought together rather than separated, and the archaic type of thinking is fused with mythic images and social realities. This constitutes orientation into what has been referred to as the ‘mythologically instructed community.’
In such demythologized societies as our own, however, while abstract categorical thinking is nurtured, the primary, mythical type of thinking is neglected. And much like those unfortunate children who, neglected by their parents, are locked away in a darkened room out of sight, the mythic imagination seems to stay ‘autistic,’ remaining in a primitive, self-preoccupied state. Unrelated to, it lacks the capacity to relate intelligently to consciousness. It only emerges when consciousness is taking time off, in fantasy and dreams (Larsen 1976, p.23).

I’ve cited this passage for some rather contradictory reasons. In it, I think Mr. Larsen nicely summarizes one of the major differences in perspective between these two types of societies in relation to non-ordinary experiences or perceptions. However, I see two points at which Mr. Larsen’s analysis benefits from some rethinking. The first point may well be seen as nit-picking but strikes me as valid nonetheless. Our culture is presented as “demythologized.” I think it is vital to keep in mind that no society that has ever existed has been demythologized -- and that missing this point perpetuates the unexamined assumption that our own perceptive schemata is neutral. We live in a society as embedded in myth as any other. Our mythological edifice is built upon such concepts as linear time, material ambition, the value of currency, the supremacy of youth over age, the usefulness of prisons and executions, the big bang theory of the origins of the universe, and the vagaries of sub-atomic physics, to name a few of the more obvious. Each of these paradigms is demonstrably illusory (or at least unproved), yet accepted as consensus reality. As is generally the case, those charged with developing and maintaining this socially accepted mythological structure are most vehement in silencing any questions which call into question the validity of the structure itself. One need look no further than the nature of a legal system that punishes the victimless crimes of drug use and prostitution for validation of this point. In all but the most forward-thinking institutions, doubt concerning any of the foundation-beliefs of our society is cause enough for dismissal. While these may be obvious points, I suspect they are important ones precisely because of the fact that the self-assured air of many scientists rests upon the conviction that we, as scientists (or aspiring clinicians, in my case) are a demythologized people functioning in a demythologized context -- that of academia. To them, science is not seen as yet another mythical structure, it is seen as that which surrounds and contains all other, previous ways of thinking. This ego/ethno-centric vision of the universe is prevalent in virtually all known societies. It would seem we all consider ourselves to be The People and everyone else to be variations on the theme. The myths we believe in, we call fact, science, or reality. Those of us with the opportunity to incorporate a more global, detribalized awareness, and hopefully some resultant insight into our world-view are obligated to do so. By failing to assume this humility, we render meaningless the vast history of sacrifice which has brought us to this historical moment, so full of despair and opportunity.
My other reaction to Larsen concerns his contention that, because our mythic imagination is ignored, “it only emerges when consciousness is taking time off, in fantasy and dreams.” Would that it were so cooperative! In fact, it emerges in myriad ways in all of us, and in ways both destructive and misunderstood. Mental hospitals, prisons, special education classes, urban sidewalks are all populated be people in whom this mythic imagination continues to emerge at inappropriate times and in inappropriate ways, while galleries, libraries and concert halls are testament to its more controlled, albeit equally irrepressible emergence in others.
For the materialist understanding of what Black Elk was experiencing, we turn to Farthing, who offers a perspective:

Hallucinations are particularly vivid mental images that are believed to be real. For example, in an ASC you might have a vivid image of a deceased relative, and believe that the person is really there in front of you. Dreams are hallucinations during sleep, but hallucinations can also occur in other states, such as psychedelic drug states or following hypnotic suggestions. An interesting intermediate case between hallucination and illusion occurs when meaningless stimuli are grossly misperceived with the aid of imagination. For example, under conditions of need or anxiety you might hear voices in the wind, imposing structure on a more-or-less random mixture of sounds (Farthing 1992, p. 209).

Farthing, and most other contemporary psychologists would probably interpret the disembodied voices, talking birds and singing figures Black Elk recounts as being examples of the last phenomenon cited above: an imposition of structure on a random mixture of sounds. My purpose is not to dispute this interpretation based upon a factual analysis of what actually happened. Rather, I am interested in examining the ways in which these different interpretations of the presenting issues of the client (Black Elk) may affect the outcome of his treatment, and in offering a brief examination of some of the particular strengths and weaknesses of these utterly opposed world-views in terms of the psychological advantages they confer upon their adherents. But first, we must continue with the summary of Black Elk’s experiences.

The vision that Black Elk recalled throughout his life as the “great vision” was preceded by severe physical symptoms. One day, for no apparent reason, both legs began to hurt. By the next morning, the boy was unable to walk at all and his arms, legs and face were all badly swollen. While suffering from this condition, he had an extended vision that included conversations with some of the Gods of his people, being granted the power to heal others, communication with animals and even astral travel. He was unconscious and appeared to be near death for twelve days.
Although this was the most important vision of his life, this was hardly the only one. Black Elk continued to hear disembodied voices as well as the intelligible voices of various animals throughout his life, usually in the midst of an otherwise normal day. He, and his people, believed that he was able to heal the sick with his spiritual power. He also was convinced that the weather often responded to his entreaties (Neihardt 1932, p. 231).

Possible Diagnosis of Black Elk’s Condition
“Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the
best that is in you.”
Nietzsche
According to a contemporary undergraduate Abnormal Psychology text, “Psychosis is a condition in which individuals lose contact with reality” (Comer 1992, p. 491). Here again we find the assumption of a clearly definable, universally agreed-upon, consensus reality. Questions of differing cultural realities are generally relegated to other fields (principally Anthropology), or to other realms less central to the practice of Clinical Psychology (like Deborah Tannen’s studies of miscommunication between men and women, for example). Heretofore, there appears to be lacking in the field of Psychology an admission that there is not, in fact, an objective reality to which we can refer our clients, and upon which we can calibrate our various tools and diagnostic tests. A quick glance at the quotation which begins this paragraph can give us some idea of why conventional Psychologists appear to be the last to have heard this news. Physicists have functioned without recourse to this haven of objective tranquillity since Einstein demonstrated beyond doubt that it was precisely this errant assumption that had trapped physics and cosmology since Newton. He showed, to general dismay, that without taking into consideration the relative position and velocity of both viewer and that which is viewed, there can be no predictive accuracy in this universe. Medicine has long been vexed by the “Mind-Body Problem,” as it tends to be called. It is a problem, not because this mysterious relationship between emotional and physical states often impacts negatively on patients, but because there is as yet no reliable method of predicting or measuring its influence. In other words, it is a “problem” because it interferes with the design of medical research within the confines of the present Western biological paradigm. Placebo response is seen as a source of inconvenient statistical noise, rather than a subject for intensive research itself. Much like governmental thinking on illegal drug use, the conventional medical community seems unwilling to accept the potential authenticity of phenomena that call into question some of the cornerstones of materialistic, allopathic medicine, thereby forfeiting unknown beneficial effects.
I would argue that Psychology is in much the same position. As I have attempted to show in earlier papers, ours is a field apparently dedicated to attention to microscopic detail while many of the most pressing issues facing our clients are large-scale, socio-cultural issues. Psychologist James Hillman gets to this point in his aptly named book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse:

Psychiatry is retrenching. Fear in the practitioner’s office. They want to believe that the new illnesses arising, allegedly, from the world -- chemicals, electromagnetic fields, high-tension lines, noise pollution, food additives, radioactivity, rare metals, trace elements, and aluminum -- are really projections onto psuedocauses by depressed people. First people get depressed, and then they delusionally think their symptoms are coming from the world. Psychiatry prefers to believe that the new diagnosis called “environmental illness” or “multiple chemical sensitivity” is a cop out from the real problem: the patient is simply depressed. The headaches and nausea, the fatigue and lack of libido, the occasional dizziness and circulatory disorders start inside the patient. This is the old idea of self-caused (endogenic) depression. It’s you, not the world, that is making you sick, so treatment begins with you, not the world...
... the principle causes of stress are not what we thought they were. We used to believe, and studies “showed,” that stress came from inside the patient’s psychic field of personal relations: death of a loved one, moving to a new town... But now new studies “show” stress arises largely from “the irritations of daily life,” which I take to mean again the aesthetic disorders of the environment, such as racism, noise, crowding, traffic, air quality, crime fears, police cars, violence fears... At last therapy is going to have to go out the door with the client, maybe even make home visits, or at least walk down the street (Hillman & Ventura 1992, p. 81).

If this rethinking of psychology ever occurs, it will not come easily. A field so terrified of losing what little scientific credibility it has been able to accrue will not easily admit that much of its potential relevance is inescapably political in nature. Again we come to the realization that much of our current position is due to convenience more than to factual analysis. In fact, one could argue, as Szasz (1974), Laing (1967), Hillman (1992), and others have, that Psychology is often little more than a means by which the powerful control the victims of, and the challengers to their authority. Professionally speaking, where does one find himself if he concludes that a client is in distress precisely because he or she is living in an insanely cruel economic and political system? What apolitical advice can one offer? And perhaps more importantly, is alleviating and thereby neutralizing this discontent in the long-term interest of either the client or the society itself? Is this not, in fact, precisely the sort of discontent from which the positive forces of improvement might spring?

Turning back to the case of Black Elk, we see what appears to be textbook psychotic behavior. He describes his state of mind as follows: “I could not get along with people now, and I would take my horse and go far out from camp alone and compare everything on the earth and in the sky with my vision. Crows would see me and shout to each other as though they were making fun of me: ‘Behold him! Behold him!’ (Neihardt 1932, p. 191). Stephen Larsen writes that, “Surely this… resembles an obsession, coming from deep within, or as we might think in our own cultural terms, the onset of a psychotic episode” (Larsen 1976, p. 110).
Black Elk Speaks is virtually overflowing with anecdotal evidence in support of a diagnosis of any one of several psychotic conditions. Black Elk experienced repeated florid hallucinations throughout his life. In addition to the great vision mentioned above, during an illness in France, he had the sensation of flying across the earth. At the end of his flight, he hovered above his mother, who was living on the reservation thousands of miles away. Years later, Black Elk felt that his perceptions during that out-of-body flight were confirmed (Neihardt 1932, p. 194). In addition to these hallucinations and visions, Black Elk had delusions of reference in that he felt that changes in weather were messages being sent directly to him. He also exhibited classic delusions of grandeur in that he believed he was personally given the power to heal and destroy – given this power by the Gods themselves during his great vision. As mentioned above, Black Elk believed he had the ability to change the weather, as well as interpret its meaning, as we see in this passage: “I knew better than ever now that I really had power, for I had prayed for help from the Grandfathers and they had heard me and sent the thunder beings to hide us and watch over us…” (Neihardt 1932, p. 133).
Taken together, these perceptions could also be seen as constituting religious delusion. I think there is little question that, were Black Elk or anyone with similar experiences to fall into the hands of a classically trained Western mental health worker, he would certainly be diagnosed as psychotic, probably schizophrenic (undifferentiated type, due to the overabundance of unclassifiable symptoms).

Truth vs. Utility
“It is as if Freud supplied to us the sick half of psychology and we must now fill it out with the healthy half.”
Abraham Maslow

Anthropologist Erika Bourguignon surveyed 488 societies. Of that number, 437 (90%) have at least one institutionalized culturally patterned form of altering states. 251 (52%) have spirit possession. [Mertz, Lisa. The Spirits Say They Aren't Crazy; Trance and Healing in Cultural Context -- Summer '94, vol. 17 Issue 1, p. 29 -- ReVision]. In previous papers I’ve cited other studies which suggest the same thing: that ours is a society nearly unique in its aversion to, and ignorance of, altered states of consciousness. Given that much of what any therapist will be facing can be placed under the heading of Unwillingly Altered States of Consciousness (various forms of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, dreams, schizophrenia, even sexual dysfunction…), this cultural aversion should be of vital importance to us as clinicians or researchers. This unique absence in our training as healers may render us unable to offer the sort of knowledge and guidance many of our clients will be seeking.
Freud, who hoped to bring the respectable, monochromal light of objective science to the study of the mind, believed that “schizophrenic people… regress to the earliest point in their development, a point before the formation of the ego and before their recognition of the external world as existing outside of and apart from them (Comer 1992, p. 511). What seems clear is that western, Judeo-Christian societies in particular, are nearly unique in their conviction that we are somehow above and apart from the world in which we live. This delusion of grandeur, and the senseless rampage that follows from it, are certainly more bizarre and self-destructive than anything we will encounter in the behavior of Black Elk. We choose to ignore the wisdom to be found in shamanism – which is a discipline founded upon the beneficial use of altered states of consciousness for healing purposes – at our own, and our clients peril. As Dr. Larsen describes our conundrum, “We have no symbolic vocabulary, no grounded mythological tradition to make our own experiences comprehensible to us. We have, in fact, no senior shamans to help ensure that our dismemberment be followed by a rebirth (Larsen 1976, p. 81).
Not only does this fearfully limited point of view endanger the psychological health of each of us personally, it renders the classically trained psychologist virtually impotent in the face of many types of mental illness. Roger Walsh, a psychiatrist and professor at U.C. Irvine, has written that,
…devoid of the personal experience of altered states of consciousness, yet quite familiar with the altered states of the diagnostic manual, the incredible sagas of shamans must indeed seem psychotic to an interpreter who only considers experiences in an ordinary state of consciousness to be valid, mentally healthy phenomena (Walsh 1990, p. 73).
 

Shamanism, which boasts a record of more than 10,000 years of helping people integrate their internal and external lives, is an excellent place to begin searching for the “healthy half of psychology.”

A Marriage of the Sun and the Moon
“The hero’s task… involves recognizing (his cultural) limits and distortions, their illusory and arbitrary nature, and hence escaping from them and from (his) limited tribal world view. The is the process of ‘detribalization’ by which a person matures from a tribal to a more universal perspective.”
Joseph Campbell
In an essay called The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon, Dr. Andrew Weil proposed these two heavenly bodies as symbolic anchors for a new way of looking at health, illness and the flow of energy through the mind and body. The sun represents the constant, masculine, essentially western scientific perspective while the moon assumes the more mystical, feminine, non-western qualities. This sort of balanced partnership between these two elements of the paradigm that he envisions for the future of medicine is essential to the development of psychology as well. In attempting to assist, or at least come closer to understanding, people who are trapped in what they believe to be other realities, we are helpless if we have no personal experience of any reality beyond that provided by the typical education. When dealing with the sorts of alternate visions of reality offered by Black Elk and many contemporary “psychotics” the typical therapist, notwithstanding his or her years of training, is analogous to a lifeguard who is afraid of the water – who has never, in fact, been in over his head.
Not getting wet, in this sense, should no longer be an option for a would-be therapist. Drug therapy may keep a client floating by suppressing the symptoms of his or her psychosis, but it clearly cannot often solve the problem and enable him to live a productive life. Dr. Walsh points out that the sort of psychosis experienced by Black Elk and so many others may in fact be an inescapable reality across cultural and historical lines:

Shamanic initiatory crisis may reflect a deep psychological process, not limited to particular cultures or times. This process seems capable of exploding from the depths of the psyche in contemporary Westerners surrounded by cars and computers as well as in ancient shamans in teepees and igloos. Clearly, some deep, perhaps archetypal, pattern is being played out here (Walsh 1990, p. 94).
 

Jung hypothesized that, in a secular culture such as our own, the religious archetype is still active but remains primitive – because uncultivated – and unconscious… The religious archetype may be, in fact, most dangerous when not bound to outer religious forms. It may emerge in a monomania, in a fanatical intensity of personal style, in an obsession, a fetishism, or in those peculiarly distorted, fragmented religious seizures we often find in delusional schizophrenia (as quoted in Larsen 1976, p.132).
So-called, primitive cultures, on the other hand, avoid this danger by providing a context for both acceptance and cure for these sorts of disorders. In such a culture, a person who hears disembodied voices and/or experiences bizarre visions would not be seen as a danger, but as a potential asset to the community. His unusual experiences are seen as
proof that (he) is destined to be a shaman… the ‘newly inspired’ is understood by the tribe to be undergoing a difficult but potentially valuable developmental process. If handled appropriately this process is expected to resolve in ways that will benefit the whole tribe and provide them with new access to spiritual realms and powers (Walsh 1990, p. 41).
By turning our inquiries away from the insights offered by tens of thousands of years of accumulated experience in shamanic cultures, we not only render ourselves incapable of helping someone experiencing symptoms like those described by Black Elk, we also sentence ourselves to continue living in what is quite obviously an ailing, self-mutilating society.
Western psychiatry has a long history of viewing mystics as madmen, saints as psychotics, and sages as schizophrenics. And this in spite of the fact that the great saints and sages may represent the heights of human development and have had the greatest impact on human history (Walsh 1990, p. 75).
Black Elk managed to live a full and deeply meaningful life despite the cataclysmic historical moment into which he was born. He was a man of phenomenal psychological endurance who would nonetheless have been diagnosed as being very sick by the vast majority of present-day mental health specialists. In Memories, Dreams and Reflections, Jung writes that only the wounded doctor can truly heal. If we are to be of any value to those who seek our help, we must first acknowledge and attempt to treat our own wounds, both personal and cultural.

References
Castenada, Carlos (1968). The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. New York: Pocket Books.
Comer, Ronald (1992). Abnormal Psychology. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co.
DeKorne, Jim (1994). Psychedelic Shamanism. Port Townsend, WA: Loompanics Unlimited.
Farthing, William G. (1992). The Psychology of Consciousness. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Simon & Schuster Company.
Hillman, James and Ventura, Michael (1992). We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. San Francisco: Harper’s.
Laing, R. D. (1967). The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon.
Larsen, Stephen (1988). The Shaman’s Doorway; Opening Imagination to Power and Myth. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.
Neihardt, John G. (1932). Black Elk Speaks; Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. New York: Pocket Books.
Szasz, Thomas S. (1974). The Myth of Mental Illness; Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper and Row.
Walsh, Roger N. (1990). The Spirit of Shamanism. Los Angeles: Jeremy Tarcher.
Weil, Andrew (1980). The Marriage of the Sun and Moon; A Quest for Unity in Consciousness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.