Divine trauma: Schizophrenia and unresolved realities in South India

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between schizophrenia, divine encounters, and therapeutics based on ethnographic research in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Contributing to a long history of single‐subject ethnographies in psychological anthropology, this article narrates the events leading up to the diagnosis and the emerging life worlds post‐diagnosis of an interlocutor I call Dhruv. I depart from symbolic constructions of the divine to an affective divine, a kind of force that enters and alters embodied existence. Following scholars who call for theories that move beyond Western metropolitan epistemologies, I draw upon the Bhagavad Gita, a poetic scripture from the Hindu tradition, as a form of psychological theory to contend how an encounter with the divine might be too much to bear, even traumatic. In doing so, the article offers an alternative entry point to the commonly held assumption of the therapeutic efficacy of divine encounters and religious sites in India.