Susto: Loss of Soul Through Terrible Fright

Susto is a disorder you might get in Central or South America, resulting from your soul having left your body as a result of a severe fright. (A more severe form of susto is called espanto, and considered potentially fatal.)

Symptoms of susto include: nervousness, insomnia, despondency, lack of attention to your appearance, listlessness, fear of the event happening again, and stomach upsets. Susto clearly has much in common with PTSD, including the fact that sometimes it doesn't set in until months or years after the event that caused it. See the list of symptoms listed by one curandera, and you will note that many of them correspond to those of PTSD.

But the notion of soul loss captures something essential to the experience of great fear--something that is not captured by the notion of PTSD and the neurological explanations that go with that diagnosis. Great fear (and also great loss) do make you feel as though you had lost some essential part of oneself. The lively, life-filled part: your soul.

Susto is treated by local healers in the US using herbal teas, limpias (cleansing rituals) and barridas (sweeping rituals). During the barrida the client recounts the traumatic event, and then receives a healing usually involving having his or her body swept with a crucifix or some other ritual object such as an egg. Usually a series of barridas is necessary to heal a person from susto.

According to Dr. Dennis O'Neil, at Palomar College, California: "Among the Maya Indians of Southern Mexico and Guatemala, [the] ceremony typically involves a lengthy series of ritual actions in the presence of the patient's friends and relatives. It usually begins with prayers to the Catholic saint of the village. Next, a chicken egg and special herbs are passed over the patient's body to absorb some of the illness. Later, the egg may be left where the soul loss occurred, along with gifts to propitiate the supernatural being who has the patient's soul. The patient is then partly stripped and "shocked" by liquor being sprayed from the curandero's mouth. The patient may then be massaged and finally "sweated" on a bed placed over or near a hot stove. Alternatively, the patient may be covered with many blankets to induce profuse sweating."

A Lacanian Reading of Koro

Koro is the belief that one's penis is retracting fatally into one's body--or that is has been stolen, through witchcraft or spirit medecine. It can be a personal or a social delusion, and it affects men in parts of Asia and Africa.

In 1967 there was a major epidemic of koro in Singapore, which lasted for about ten days of general panic. Emergency rooms filled up with men clutching desperately at themselves in an attempt to stop the syndrome.

In rural parts of China, penises have been traditionally stolen by a spirit in the form of a fox, who wanders the countryside looking for victims. It sounds whimsical, but in some parts of Africa, people have been lynched for stealing someone's penis.

Koro is listed in Appendix I of the DSM-IV-TR. Clearly in the West it corresponds to Panic Disorder, and perhaps to Body Dismorphic Disorder. But what underlies it is more interesting than its classification. In that respect, perhaps a rereading of Freud would be more useful--or perhaps better still Lacan.

Lacan rereads Freud's "penis" as the "Phallus"--not the physical, literal organ, but a metaphor for the power in the world that a man is granted by virtue of being male. Phallus envy makes sense in a way penis envy does not.

In the case of koro, narcissistic injury, symbolised as loss of Phallus (a man's power and status in the world), might be experienced as "my penis is shrinking". Interpreted this way, the disorder becomes less of a curious folktale for and more a deeply comprehensible expression of fear and distress.

Koro From A Taiwanese-American Perspective
This detailed comment was sent to me by Mindy Chang.
In some rural parts of China, there is the belief that fox spirits are responsible for stealing the penises of hapless male victims. The fox spirit is well known in Japanese folklore as a kitsune and in Chinese folklore as hu li jing. Some are good and some are bad. They are often feared because they are powerful and cunning, and if you anger one, you will be punished and cursed. Some of the bad ones appear in the form of beautiful women who seduce young men because they are deficient in yin life force; hence koro.

In some ways, they are similar to the Chinese snake spirits that appear as beautiful young women and seduce men, much like their Western succubae counterparts. The tiger spirit, a.k.a. tiger mother, also is invariably a female spirit that steals young babies to eat; male babies are especially desirable since they are traditionally valued more than girl babies. The snake and tiger spirits are also cunning like their fox spirit sisters.

Either way, these malevolent female spirits represent the unconscious fear Asian men often have of strong Asian women in a predominately patriarchal society. Therefore, it makes sense that a peasant living in rural China might believe these folk tales and be conservative enough to accuse a woman of stealing his penis or masculinity.

According to traditional Chinese medicine, a man’s life force resides in his seed, which is expelled through his penis. This belief is not unlike the passage in the Bible where God chides Onan for spilling his seed upon the ground. One may also recall the passage in Amy Tan’s book “The Joy Luck Club” where the woman who cannot get pregnant is confined to her bed so that her husband’s seed will impregnate her and his yin will not go to waste.

There are some Chinese people who still partake of traditional Chinese remedies that are particularly exotic, such as dried tiger penis. Although officially use of ingredients from exotic animals is illegal, there is a thriving black market trade, thanks to demand, that is met by poachers. The idea is that if a man eats a tiger penis, he will take on the strength and virility of the male tiger; essentially, the tiger’s yin.

When treating koro, it might be beneficial to use traditional Chinese remedies (other than the illegal dried tiger penis). Whether the remedies actually work or the effects are psychosomatic, it matters not so long as the patient believes he will get well because he believes in the remedy.

Dinner? Or Pot-Luck. High Versus Low Context Cultures

Anthropologist Edward T Hall codified cultures as either high-context or low-context. His distinction captures an otherwise indefinable set of nuances that can mysteriously rub you the wrong way if you spend substantial time in culture at the other side of the polarity from your own.

In high-context cultures, relationships are vital, and the meaning of much of what is going on is held in the context, rather than being explicitly said. Think of the Japanese tea ceremony, or about doing business in the Middle East, where you drink endless cups of tea and talk together about everything but business for hours, before you get to what a person from a low-context culture would think of as 'the point'. These cultures tend to be emotional and intuitive, valuing long term relationships and trust.

In low-context cultures, little is implicit. My favourite example is the way, when laughing at a joke, Americans will also say, "That's funny," as though laughing didn't already signal that the joke was funny. In low-context cultures, relationships tend to be shorter in duration, life tends to be action and task-oriented, and 'the rules' tend to be codified and made explicit.

Hall's distinction helps me to understand why I--a person from a high-context culture--miss French dinner parties, which go on for hours over carefully prepared food and carefully selected wine. Inviting people for dinner in America doesn't fill the gap of what I miss--for a start because here people tend to expect to eat and then do something: "dinner and a movie." Likewise, I abhor the pot-luck, because for me the careful, loving, planned preparation of the dinner makes it an aesthetic offering from me to my invitees--it's not just food to share.

But it's not just that. It's that here, a dinner invitation doesn't mean what it means to me. So I've found that though people may come to eat if asked, they don't necessarily invite me back, because (for them) my dinner party was not situated within an unfolding and implicitly understood network of back and forth invitations that create and maintain the basic fabric of social relationships. They're not being rude. It's just that we're operating in a different paradigm.

In a high-context culture, inviting someone to dinner is a bid for relationship. Accepting a dinner invitation is a response indicating openness to relationship. It implicates you. It may even imply a certain indebtedness, relationally. These cultures draw a clear distinction between public and private life, so inviting someone into your home implies trust and closeness. The different elements of behaviour--bringing a gift, preparing the food, praising the food, conversing appropriately and lengthily, spending the time--all evoke feelings of connection and belonging.

So what I miss is not the dinner party itself. The dinner party itself is empty. What counts is the depth beneath it, the meaning behind it, the implicit within it--the very aspects almost impossible to describe to a person from a low-context culture. If you're reading this and really don't get what I'm on about, or think it's ridiculous, you're probably from a low-context culture!

Neither type of culture is better than the other. People from a low-context culture can be intensely frustrated by high-context cultures, in which everything happens as a result of who you know, and in which everything takes seemingly endless amounts of time. Everyone is always late. You have to have connections to get anything done. Everything's based on gifts--or are they bribes? These cultures often seem charming and quaint from the outside, but within them you're an outsider, and as such you can feel mystified by the unwritten rules, subtly excluded, and stymied by the lack of clarity.

Edward Hall's distinction explains why the misunderstandings between America and the cultures of the Middle East are endless. The Middle East is seen as full of feuds and nepotism--aka they value long term relationships and are fiercely loyal, with an intense sense of honour. The US is seen as a false friend--aka they feel free to change their allegiances and renew their strategies according to the situation as it unfolds. No interpretation is more correct than the other, but they are very, very different.

Understanding the basis for the differing interpretation at least helps us to avoid getting caught up in our emotional reactions to what feels culturally 'wrong' based on our own norm.