Psycho-Social Reflection on Spirit Possession Interpreting Possession States and Cultural Healing at Balaji

Varied cultural groups have their own ways of understanding and defining natural and human phenomena. This understanding emerges as a culture develops and incorporates certain peculiar features. In the backdrop of a North Indian Hindu Culture, altered states of the mind are understood as spirit possession, which mostly affect women for being attractive to spirits for various reasons. To get relief from it, an entire system of a particular form of worshipping has been developed at various spiritual places like the temple of a celibate God, Balaji, in North India which seems to provide some relief. This paper will present the initial findings of a research work which attempts to understand how trance States in women emerge in the Brahminical patriarchal North Indian culture.lt also aims to examine assumptions about how a person's life and belief system contribute to the appearance of ghosts which in a major part of Indian cultural understanding is seen as an alien soul that has entered the victim's body with devilish intentions. Understanding the idea of culture and mind as inseparable and seeing it from a psychoanalytic point of view, this work attempts to analyze the formation of social reality of these women which constructs their psyche. There must be some sort of psychological comfort or discomfort in possessed states and their expressions that leads such a large population of women thriving that place and engaging in a system of expressions that may be considered 'obscene' or 'abnormal' outside that arena. I would examine the role of society in a person reaching such state and the will to adjust in society being strong enough to make the person not express some of her needs, desires etc for the fear of social alienation while possession states and visiting places like Balaji makes her fall back into mainstream society. Prima facie it seems that some supernatural practices are taking place, however, on close introspection I realized that the ischolar_mains are not in some supernatural processes but in the lived life of the women. This work would critically engage in these ischolar_mains and explore the complexities of lived life that leads to possession states.