How divination is like psychotherapy: a thread on healing, culture, and colonialism.

(This thread jump off from my previous thread on how colonialist academic psychology denigrates astrology and divination as ‘magical thinking.’) 1/37 https://twitter.com/500livesasafox/status/1259461245113192449

Divination in pop culture tends to be viewed as a kind of failed science or hobby, yet ancient links exist between divination and healing. Greek diviners were said to have cured plagues, and were seen as practical healers and religious purifiers in addition to seers. 2/37

Ethnographers have extensively documented how medical/religious figures in non-European cultures employ divination in healing contexts and counseling practices, for instance among the Yolmo in Nepal, the Weyewa of Indonesia, the Nyole culture of Uganda, etc. 3/37

In Lucumi religion, cowrie shell divination is used in healing rituals to identify disease etiologies, as well as to provide prescriptions, which could include prayers, cleansings, sacrifices, etc., or just as easily referral to another diviner or physician. 4/37

Judy Pugh studied astrological counseling in modern India, where person-centered dialogue involved prediction/diagnosis and prescription. She concluded, that a “broad scope of therapeutic skills [are] lodged in the divinatory profession in contemporary India.” 5/37

My own research showed that Tarot divination frequently involved querents in crisis who sought guidance, support, or help with thorny life issues. Seeking and providing validation was a key theme, and Tarot was recommended as an adjunct or alternative to psychotherapy. 6/37

Turning to the psychotherapy literature, we can examine how divination and psychotherapy converge. The “common factors” model of psychotherapy describes ingredients to psychological treatments that span theoretical orientations, such as empathy and client expectations. 7/37

Research generally supports that factors common to all approaches account for most of the improvement that patients receive from psychotherapy. In fact, it’s kind of an open secret that few treatments can demonstrate the empirical efficacy of their “specific ingredients.” 8/37

In my dissertation research, querents expected readers to address their concern, readers endeavored to establish empathic bonds with querents, divination was a collaborative service with a shared aim, & validation & attention from the reader was a key theme. Common factors. 9/37

Over and above this, a more explicit and tight correspondence between divination and psychotherapy can be established. In their seminal work “Persuasion and Healing,” Frank & Frank described four *essential* factors common to all forms of psychotherapy. 10/37

First, psychotherapy involves “an emotionally charged, confiding relationship with a helping person.” Tarot readings, at least, necessarily involve the reader as a helping figure, and typically involve some ongoing dialogue about the querent’s concerns. 11/37

One aspect of divination in my study that is poorly attested in the academic literature overall was also the potential for readings to be highly affectively charged or even uncanny, and for lasting emotional reverberations to stay with querents long after the event. 12/37

On the flip side, readers typically noted how dialogue with querents about their concerns or about the reading was central to the process, and some readers underscored how Tarot reading was an emotionally taxing endeavor that for that reason merits compensation. 13/37

Second, psychotherapy involves “a healing setting.” Although divination may, in contrast to psychotherapy, occur in much more casual and less hermetically contained settings than the traditional psychotherapist’s office, divination achieves this function symbolically. 14/37

Phenomenologically, one of the diviner’s roles involves establishing a context for divination with the aim of creating a bounded, hollow space to enclose the emerging determinacy and revelation of the divination. This can involve ritual, performance, or collaborative play. 15/37

Third, psychotherapy involves “a rationale, conceptual scheme, or myth that provides a plausible explanation for the patient’s symptoms and prescribes a ritual or procedure for resolving them.” Note the language. We’ll return to that later. 16/37

Setting aside that skeptical folks may reject the conceptual scheme offered by the diviner, divination proceeds on the basis of a belief, supposition, or assertion that the divinatory object—Tarot cards, birth chart, etc.—can be meaningfully interpreted to provide insight. 17/37

Although divination does not always result in or even aim toward resolving the querent’s concerns, it does aim to provide insight into and clarification of those concerns, which the querent is then entrusted to apply to their own life. 18/37

Many diviners do endeavor to provide explicit prescriptions or recommended actions to querents. One of the Tarot readers in my study, for example, noted that he would often give querents “really specific advice, and sometimes be terrified that they would follow it”! 19/37

It is intriguing to note that Frank & Frank explicit remark on the “imagination-catching” aspect of therapeutic rituals. Tarot’s evocative imagery, astrology’s archetypal language, and the general air of magic around these practices inherently evoke imaginative engagement. 20/37

Fourth, psychotherapy involves “a ritual or procedure that requires the active participation of both patient and therapist and is believed by both to be the means of restoring the patient’s health.” 21/37

Diviners constitutively approach divination with the intention of illuminating a question with the belief that it will be helpful to the querent. Tarot readers in my research typically approached readings with an altruistic agenda and aimed to provide benefit or healing. 22/37

One reader conceptualized herself as a “psychological healer,” and another aimed to free querents from “the shackles that are hindering their enjoyment of life. Yet another aimed to enliven querents spiritually by connecting them to wellsprings of traditional wisdom. 23/37

While querents do not always believe divination will be helpful, and may approach readings casually or with skepticism, the same is true of psychotherapy. In fact, the modal number of sessions attended by new psychotherapy sessions is *one*! 24/37

Now, divination usually involves a single session, whereas psychotherapy is typically ongoing, but this difference is merely apparent: single session and walk-in psychotherapy has become recognized as a mainstream approach within the psychotherapy research literature. 25/37

I concluded in my research that Tarot divination shares structure and aims common to virtually every form of psychotherapy, and that the central factor separating Tarot divination from psychotherapy consists in its lack of cultural prestige. On that note… 26/37

Divination could be framed as a folk medicine practice: defined by (1) possessing unofficial, marginalized status with respect to culturally dominant institutions & allopathic practices; and (2) transmission outside standardized print sources, usually via oral tradition. 27/37

Alternatively, divination could be seen as a “quasi-therapy,” a practice within a “permissive, supportive social environment” that emphasize personal growth and encourage “personal and interpersonal re-integration and experimentation.” 28/37

“Quasi-therapy” and “folk medicine” are academic terms that merit interrogation. The specialized language used to delineate non-professional, unofficial, culturally marginalized practices underscore how academic thought is invested in supporting colonial power structures. 29/37

Descriptions define and confine: divination’s plate is set at the kid’s table when we stratify practices by how they are regarded in dominance hierarchies rather than grounding our understanding in the psychological meanings, functions, and effects of the practices. 30/37

Psychiatry has a grand tradition of separating out “culture-bound syndromes” from … syndromes. The not very well concealed message is that *we Westerners* know what disorder and healing are, and other cultures have limited, parochial systems of knowledge. 31/37

The segregation of “real therapy” from practices that are inherently Other—that are culturally different, marginalized, or unprofessional—is not a scientific distinction, but a political one. It is colonialism in action, baked into the academic discourse on healing. 32/37

As the mainstream psychological literature tells it, astrology, Tarot, and divination are quaint, benighted practices, hobbies at best, and errors or scams at worst. I dug into this in depth in a previous thread on magical thinking. 33/37 https://twitter.com/500livesasafox/status/1259461245113192449

Viewed within the full breadth of historical and cultural scope, however, contemporary divination carries forward a tradition of insight and healing that bears remarkable similarity, when viewed impartially, to culturally sanctioned practices like psychotherapy. 34/37

Frank & Frank had it right: psychotherapy is itself a practice involving ritual, myth, and imagination, just like divination. And let’s be honest: all healing practices are culture-bound. How could they not be, except in a colonialist framework? 35/37

Let’s turn it all on its head: in my view, it’s not that divination should cozy up to psychotherapy to gain institutional prestige. Rather, we need to dismantle the institutions and colonized ways of thinking that generate these hierarchies. 36/37

So let’s not say divination is like psychotherapy, but rather that divination and psychotherapy each represent specific crystallizations of a single archetype—the sacred encounter between healer and patient, sage and seeker, helper and helped. /thread