The Navajo, psychosis, Lacan, and Derrida.(Jacques Lacan)

 
  The effective violence of disseminating writing. An infraction marking 
  the "symbolic." Would every possibility of disorder and 
  disorganization in the symbolic, from the vantage of a certain outside 
  force, would everything that forces the symbolic, derive from the 
  specular (or the "imaginary"), that is, from a "real" determined as 
  the "impossible"? From schizophrenia or psychosis? In this case, what 
  are the conclusions to be drawn? 
  --Jacques Derrida, Positions 
 
  So psychoanalysis "recognizes itself" when it is confronted with those 
  very psychoses which nevertheless (or rather, for that very reason) it 
  has scarcely any means of reaching: as if the psychosis were 
  displaying in a savage illumination, and offering in a mode not too 
  distant but just too close, that towards which analysis must make its 
  laborious way. 
  --Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1) 

Many older cultures had no specific word for the kind of state the term psychosis attempts to describe, but it was a state they were familiar with and to which they bore a more complex relation than does contemporary Western society. Although psychosis was a condition that aroused much concern for the Navajo, or Dine, at least, their response to it was and is closer to the sentiments of Derrida and Foucault than to the outright fear that most of us would express. Psychoanalysis tends to regard psychosis, as it does neurosis and perversion, as essentially incurable, but the classical method of psychoanalytic treatment is not recommended for psychotics, and most psychoanalysts do not work with psychotic patients. Jacques Lacan, whose fascination with psychosis led to his interest in psychoanalysis, worked with psychotics throughout his career but never elaborated any procedure for treating them. He tended to regard psychosis as a descent into the darkest reaches of the imaginary, a state which, he believed, all must exit in order to become functioning subjects, no matter how rebellious or compliant. Even though psychosis in many ways is on or outside the perimeter of the Lacanian theoretical and practical structure, I will suggest that psychosis is the alien and familiar underside that both supports and dismantles psychoanalysis. Psychosis performs a similar dual function in Navajo culture, but the primary difference is that the Navajo, largely through story and ceremony, recognize that the path to psychic health and well-being winds through the forest of insanity, while psychoanalysis, as Foucault asserts and Derrida implies, has yet to acknowledge that. However, toward the end of his career, Lacan did come to realize, I believe largely unconsciously, that psychosis was a place from which health and even enlightenment could arise.

In the later parts of this essay, I will focus on the intersections between psychosis, Navajo ceremony and story, and some of the key concepts and figures of Lacan and then Derrida in order to demonstrate that psychosis is both cure and poison; it occupies a position in the discourses of the Navajo and of Lacan that is akin to Plato's pharmakon and Derrida's differance. The Navajo Evilway ceremony and the Coyote Transformation story, in particular, can teach us how to deal with structural and historical trauma and loss, and Lacan and Derrida can help us appreciate how sophisticated and compelling that lesson is. First, though, I will describe the Navajo and the psychoanalytic methods for dealing with mental illness.

Many Navajo ceremonies are performed to restore health to someone who is mentally ill. They are intricate procedures, organized around chants or "sings" (hataal) conducted by a medicine man or "singer" (hataalii). The ceremonial system, passed on orally from singer to apprentice, is endorsed by and elucidated in a large network of stories which are also transmitted through the generations. Most systems contain two major parts, the general origin story, which includes the emergence from the underworlds, and the origin story of each separate ceremonial. Each general origin story follows the plotline of a journey upward through several layers or worlds (anywhere from two to fourteen stacked on top of each other) below the Earth's surface, upon which order and balance is created. One of these healing ceremonials is "Red Antway," so named because red ants are deemed responsible for most of the ills that are amenable to treatment by the Red Ant Chant. One of the two rituals of the Red Antway, the one I will focus on, is Evilway (hochxoji), also known as Ghostway or Uglyway. Usually lasting five nights, it exorcises diseases--such as severe anxiety, delusions, repetitive nightmares, hallucinations--caused by "ghosts of animals or of other beings that travel in darkness ('witchery of the whirling darkness')" and other unknown sinister influences. (2) To become well, the patient is taken back ceremonially to and through the time of the first illness. Accordingly, the Red Antway relates the series of preemergence events that establish the Chantway and the prototype ceremonial, the first performance of the chant itself. The Red Ant people were initially placed in the underworlds to live in harmony, but they cannot stop quarrelling; their behavior leads to violence and murder, so they are continually moved up to the next layer of earth until they reach the final surface. After Deschini finishes relating the emergence, he continues seamlessly into the Coyote Transformation story wherein Coyote deceives a young hunter and exchanges skins with him, thereby taking the hunter's place with his young wife. Coyote is eventually found out and the hunter is discovered, unable to speak and near death, in the skin of a coyote. The healing ceremony, the Hoop Transformation rite, is then performed, the key presupposition for which is that the patient's illness is caused by a transformation that has left him or her enervated by some unwanted outer form: specifically, the form of an animal, the mangy coyote. (3) Since a "large part of every rite may be the exact imitation of a mythical scene or incident," in the Hoop Transformation rite great care is taken to recapitulate the events of the myth and story. (4)

The medicine man leads the patient--enshrouded by an animal skin or cloth that represents it--who follows the footsteps of the hero through a reconstructed setting into the hogan while the skin is gradually pulled off his body. A sandpainting inside the hogan depicts the Holy People and other characters from the original drama. The primary goal is to identify the patient with the Holy People being invoked: he becomes "one with them by absorption, imitation, transformation, substitution, recapitulation, repetition, commemoration, and concentration." (5) The medicine man's role is vital: through the equipment in his medicine bundle and by means of his own body he transfers the powers represented by the sandpainting to the patient. While apprenticing to become a medicine man he identifies himself with the different heroes who undertook a perilous quest to acquire the power of the chant; through this principle of identification, he "incorporates within himself the entire complex of godly notions and even has the power to make others like himself, that is, like gods." (6) To be cured, the patient must mimic the medicine man and thereby the afflicted hero. For the Navajo, once an event takes place its effects may be repeated at any time in the future, so a primary lesson is that past occurrences, no matter how distant, still affect the present. But because of the medicine man's knowledge and the symbolic repetition of the narrative the negative effects of previous events can be ameliorated through ceremony and ritual.

Key to successful treatment, something we don't see in Western medicine, is the way the patient's mind, body, and senses are fully engaged. The segment of the ceremony inside the hogan begins with repetitive chanting performed by the medicine man and others. The singing and chanting is regularly interrupted either by rest periods or by the medicine man's ceremonial performances, which, according to Martin D. Topper,

 
  may involve the offering of prayer sticks to the Holy People, the 
  purification of the patient in some part of the myth that underlies 
  the ceremony, the entry of masked dancers, the preparation of 
  ceremonial materials such as sand paintings and prayersticks, the 
  taking of herbal medications [including emetics], the washing of the 
  patient, the blessing of the patient while he or she is sitting on a 
  sand painting, the painting of the patient with ashes or clay mixed 
  with animal fat and herbal medicines, the taking of a sweat bath. (7)