Isoda
Ah, yes, autogenic neutralization, thought Isoda. For years he had observed the process in the treatment of schizophrenics and other patients experiencing dissociative disorders and depersonalizaton, including the 'Dopplegänger' phenomenon: sudden inability to recognize oneself, for instance, feeling that one is looking at oneself from outside, the state often being terminated by a tap on the body by another person. This was the experiential aspect of what, in Romantic poetry, was often treated as a mere fanciful image: the double, the spirit, the other-I accompanying a person in identical form, the Agonippe fountain of the Muses. He had come to specialize in this kind of case because of its relevance to his research interest. During abreactions, he had noticed the presentation of much archetypal material. This brought him back to thinking about the structure of the collective unconscious. Many of these patients had had traumatic experiences in childhood: near death, suicide of a playmate, the witnessing of some horror during the final days of the war. Others had no such history. But in every case the thematic content of the abreactions involved the living out symbolically of archetypal scenarios.The settings of these abreactive sequences were often pagodas or temples. Images from, and references to, the Shinto faith were prevalent. Uji-gami, or the tutelary god that looks after a small community, often appeared. The guild kami, the family kami, the local kami: the lesser gods. In his background reading, he had run across an interesting book written in 1894 by an American named Percival Lowell: OCCULT JAPAN OR THE WAY OF THE GODS: AN ESOTERIC STUDY OF JAPANESE PERSONALITY AND POSSESSION. The man was an occultist who had traveled through Japan looking for cases of kami-oroshi: the act of possession. He sought out the sects of the Shinto church practicing the possession cult: Shinshiu and Mitake; he discovered that only through possession can shinki, the god-spirit, be made to circulate for specific ends. Among many observations, he made this particularly interesting one: "For while simple Shinto regards the dead as spiritually living, philosophic Buddhism regards the living as spiritually dead." The phenomenology presented by abreacting patients in many ways seemed to concur with this.