When Spirits Become Therapists: Ethnopsychology and Hypnotherapy in Brazil

The present work seeks to demonstrate through a case study that hypnotherapy, under ethnopsychological inspiration, can combine spiritual manifestations in a person’s therapeutic process. This work highlights, on the one hand, the influence of spiritual beings as part of a larger collective machinery that must be acknowledged in their own references as a working condition. This text proposes a way of understanding the meaning of these beings from the ecology of their machinery, in order to oppose a reductionist and colonialist perspective that translates them into distant categories from their universes, such as imagination, hallucination, brain damage, or defense mechanism. On the other hand, a rereading of hypnotherapy is proposed through its principles of acceptance and utilization, emphasizing the importance of modes of the relationship as therapeutic resources. Using some concepts from semiotics, focus is set on the construction of the relationship between the protagonists in the hypnotic relationship and on their condition as signs of collective universes. Next, there is emphasis on the construction of certain roles, such as prophet-witness, master-disciple, and doctor-patient, and the ways these can be fundamental to establishing a therapeutic contract with a person and accessing their world. The article is concluded by confirming that acceptance must encompass individual and collective knowledges and that the use of hypnotherapy, far from a mechanical and repetitive process, should contemplate the person in holistic terms.