Wilson Van Dusen (1923 to 2005), a clinical psychologist at Mendocino State Hospital in California, talked with the voices his patients heard and found that they behaved like distinct beings, mostly a destructive ‘lower order’ and a rarer, helpful ‘higher order’. Struck by how closely this matched the eighteenth-century visionary Emanuel Swedenborg’s accounts of spirits, he wrote The Presence of Other Worlds (1974) on Swedenborg’s journeys into the spiritual worlds. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his willingness to take seriously that some of what people meet inwardly may be real beings, and places such beings in the middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer.
Who was Wilson Van Dusen? #
A psychologist of inner experience. He was born and raised in San Francisco, studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and took a PhD in phenomenological psychology at the University of Ottawa in 1952. From 1953 to 1968 he worked at Mendocino State Hospital in northern California, which often held up to three thousand patients, as clinical psychologist, chief psychologist and acting chief of research. He became known there for treating patients with schizophrenia without medication. He contributed to Carl Rogers’s Person to Person (1967), wrote The Natural Depth in Man (1971), and later helped create the humanistic psychology programme at Sonoma State University.1 See Who was Carl Rogers, and why does he matter to Therapeutic Shamanism?
What did he find in his patients’ voices? #
That they acted like other people. Van Dusen took what he called a phenomenological approach, treating the hallucinations as real to the patient. He asked patients to repeat, word for word, what their voices said, and then questioned the voices directly through the patient, recording long dialogues; he even gave the voices a Rorschach test separately from the patient. After about twenty patients, he found, little more was learnt.2
The voices fell into two kinds. The lower order, by far the more common, were hostile and persistent. They mocked, threatened and tormented, often over past guilt, had a small vocabulary, no identity or memories of their own, were consistently against religion, and seemed to Van Dusen to show “a persistent will to destroy”. Some tried to take over parts of the body, such as an ear or an eye. The higher order were much rarer, perhaps a fifth of such experiences or fewer. They were helpful, symbolic and religious, tended to speak less in words, widened the patient’s values, and were “respectful of his freedom”. He likened the lower order to Freud’s id and the higher to Jung’s archetypes.3 See Who was Carl Jung?
What is The Presence of Other Worlds? #
His book on Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 to 1772), the Swedish scientist who in later life wrote at length about his journeys into the spiritual worlds. Van Dusen had found that Swedenborg’s accounts matched what his patients described almost point for point, with spirits that invade the memory, deceive and lie, and try to possess the body, and angelic presences that influence without overriding a person’s freedom. He concluded that Swedenborg and the patients were describing the same thing, and suggested that the unconscious and the world of spirits might be one and the same, whilst granting that this remains a matter of opinion or faith.4
The Presence of Other Worlds, published in 1974, follows Swedenborg’s journey into his own mind and into the worlds he described, and holds that his experiences still offer insight into psychological and spiritual growth. It became the best-selling book on Swedenborg of the twentieth century.5 His criteria for telling the two orders apart have lived on in other work; the IFS therapist Robert Falconer, for example, includes a summary of Van Dusen’s findings among his tools for telling a genuine guide from an unwanted presence.6 See Who is Robert Falconer, and what is The Others Within Us about?
How does his work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
In taking the voices seriously. The default in psychotherapy is usually to see spirits as disowned and unintegrated parts of self; the default among shamans is usually to see them as real. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that sometimes the spirits are real and sometimes they are not, and that what matters is not to carry a default position that distorts what is actually there.7 Van Dusen, by listening to what everyone else silenced, let the voices show what they were.
It also places such beings in a map. Spirit possession is a middle-world problem, and no Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer or Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Spirit will ever possess anyone against their will.8 Compared with the wise, loving and transcendent beings of the Upper and Lower Worlds, middle-world beings are far more limited, and some are not to be trusted, which is why Therapeutic Shamanism is careful about which beings it works with and journeys to the Lower-World and Upper-World for guidance.9 The word ‘lower’ carries no such meaning in Therapeutic Shamanism’s own map, where the Lower-World is a place of healing and Soul, not of the destructive voices Van Dusen called lower. See What is the middle-world? and How do I distinguish guidance from projection and middle-world bleed-through?
