Cult Med Psychiatry. 1990 Jun; 14(2): 213-36.

The therapist and the source of healing among the Yaka of Zaire.

Devisch R.

Centre for Anthropology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.

The Yaka of southwestern Zaire and the capital, Kinshasa, practise some ten major healing cults with initiatory treatments. These follow the model of rites de passage and lead the patient to resituate him/herself in the group, while partially redramatizing the cosmology and the fundamental values of the society. The body-self is the source and scene of the healing. The therapeutic drama offers a space-time stage upon which metaphoric correspondents of organs, affects, energies and bodily functions are constituted and manipulated. Acting as the patient's maternal uncle, as trapper-hunter, and as demiurge and weaver, the healer aims at fighting the illness by turning it back against itself autodestructively. The initiate is 'reborn' thanks to the emergence of the vital flow, particularly through trance, leading her or him to take up a transformed presence in the world and the group: this is "the weaving of the vital flow."