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As Jung\u2019s anthropological studies expanded and his international travel exposed him to new cultures and ideas, he was taken by the concept of \u2018loss of soul.\u2019\xa0

A collapse of energy, a strange sudden alteration of personality, or episodes of blinding rage could signify a loss of soul from a shamanic perspective. The soul carries the animating and regulating forces as well as memory. In most traditions, it was expected to fly away upon death, much like the Egyptian Ba, depicted as a bird with a human head. Because the soul had an independent life, it might flee suddenly, leaving a listless body behind. The shaman\u2019s task was to retrieve and escort the wandering soul into the body again.

In Michael Harner\u2019s book The Way of the Shaman, he cataloged various ancient practices and distilled a small set of universal techniques. Soul retrieval involves tying a red string on the patient\u2019s wrist and, with the help of one\u2019s spiritual power animal, traveling to the inner worlds, identifying the lost soul by the red string also on its wrist, bringing it back to the waking world and blow it into the patient\u2019s body. Loss of soul in this contemporary system is often associated with trauma, and the imagery is congruent with modern conceptualizations of dissociation.

Jung linked shamanic descriptions with the work of psychiatrist Janet and called \u201cabaissement du niveau mental.\u201d Jung described this as \u201ca slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might be compared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather. The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listlessness, moroseness, and depression. One no longer has any wish or courage to face the tasks of the day. One feels like lead because no part of one\u2019s body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy.\u201d

In modern psychiatry, several clinical descriptions might be assigned to such despair and collapse, but those may not capture the psychospiritual depth of \u2018loss of soul.\u2019 For Jung, the soul carries creativity and grants meaning; it links us to the divine and represents all we could be if wholeness were possible. Whatever the cause, to be abandoned by one\u2019s soul is devastating, and to be reunited, the greatest gift.

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