What did Edith Fiore write about the unquiet dead?

What was Edith Fiore’s training and work? #

A traditionally trained clinician. She took her PhD in psychology at the University of Miami and practised in California for more than thirty years, first in general clinical practice and, from 1975, as a hypnotherapist, until she retired in 1997. She lectured widely, trained more than two thousand professionals in her techniques, and wrote three books on her hypnotherapy work.¹ The first of them, You Have Been Here Before (1978), looked at past lives as they emerged under hypnosis.

What does The Unquiet Dead say? #

That some of what troubles the living is the presence in them of the dead. Over years of work, Fiore came to realise that in some cases her patients’ problems were caused by the souls of dead people. When she accepted this, and began to negotiate with those souls and persuade them to leave, her patients got better.² The book is full of case histories, and covers how to recognise spirit possession in oneself and others, how to protect oneself, how to clear a home of spirits that have not moved on, and how she went about a depossessionDe-possession. The healing for a full entity takeover: persuading or compelling the possessing entity out, then disposing of it, and always addressing the underlying soul-loss and Power-loss that let it in. More about this.³

Paul Francis first came across the phrase ‘the unquiet dead’ in her book, and found it rational and lucid, free of any religious or New Age beliefs, and full of professional case examples. To many people, the idea sounds like nonsense.⁴ See Who are the unquiet dead, and are ghosts real?

How did Fiore help the dead to leave? #

By dialogue and persuasion, which were her principal tools.⁵ Therapeutic Shamanism agrees that this often works. Not all spirits are malevolent, and many of the unquiet dead can be reasoned with and persuaded to leave. In shamanism the only reason to converse with the dead at all is to help them on their way, whether to persuade them to leave the body of a living person, or to reassure them and tell them what to expect as they are escorted to the land of the dead. The dead are never taken on as guides or teachers, and they are not kept around, because even with no harmful intent, the energy of the dead is simply not good for the living to be around.⁶ See What is psychopomping? and What is possession, and what is de-possession?

This is why shamanism and mediumship, though both accept that the dead are present, work with them so differently. Mediumship seeks to converse with the dead, and sometimes to be voluntarily possessed by them; shamanism aims only to make sure the dead move on and leave the living alone. See What is the difference between a shaman, a priest, a medium and a medicine person?

Why does Therapeutic Shamanism take her findings seriously? #

Because shamans have always known what she found, and because her road to it is a familiar one. Psychopomping, dealing with the unquiet dead, is one of the essential roles of a shaman in any tribal culture. Hunter-gatherer peoples saw the dead as dangerous to the living and made very sure that they departed. As cultures fell into Taker ways, that understanding was lost, people began to hold on to their dead, the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this filled them with fear of the afterlife so that the dead became reluctant to move on, and the soul-loss and Power-loss of domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this left the living wide open to possession.⁷ See What is the Land of the Dead?

Paul’s own road ran through psychotherapy too. As someone who is both a psychotherapist and a shamanic practitioner, he spent years moving back and forth between the shaman’s default, that spirits are real, and the psychotherapist’s, that they are disowned parts of self. He concluded that sometimes the shamans are right and sometimes the psychotherapists are, and that what matters most is not to carry a default position that distorts what is actually there. His reluctance about the unquiet dead was never about whether they exist, but about facing the sheer scale of the issue.⁸

None of this means anyone has to deal with the dead. Knowing about something and being the person who deals with it are different things, and those who do work with the unquiet dead need a grounded, calm, matter-of-fact approach, with no fascination with their stories; in short, no ‘woo-woo’.⁹

Do other psychologists accept spirit possession? #

Many do not, and explain what emerges under hypnosis in other ways. The psychologist Nicholas Spanos, for example, studied hypnotic past-life regression, a method Fiore also used, and concluded that the ‘past lives’ people described were enactments shaped by their own expectations and by what the hypnotist suggested.¹⁰ Fiore came to the idea only after many years as a traditionally trained psychologist, and her patients got better once she began to negotiate with the souls she met.¹¹ Therapeutic Shamanism holds both possibilities open, since sometimes what is met is a real being, and sometimes it is not.