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Transcultural Psychiatry
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Mental Disorders and the Symbolic Function of Therapeutic Rites in the Réunion Island Hindu Environment

Yolande Govindama

Université René Descartes - Paris V

This article describes two therapeutic rituals in the Hindu milieu on Réunion Island - walking on fire and piercing parts of the body in the Feast of Cavedy - to underscore the cultural representation of madness and the symbolic function of these rites in treatment. Madness is considered to be the result of a rupture of genealogy through denial of the founder, and of psychic-somatic unity, which leads the afflicted person to develop a fantasy of immortality. The two therapeutic rituals aim at reestablishing the debt to the founding ancestor by the symbolic reactualization of the original chaos, and at restoring the genealogy through a relationship between the penitent and the officiant, which brings the subject to accept his human condition as a mortal being.

Key Words: healing • Hinduism • psychoanalysis • Réunion Island • therapeutic ritual symbolic function

Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 43, No. 3, 488-511 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1363461506066990
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