Introduzione. Della medicalizzazione della vita e del rituale

Today the processes of objectivation and reification reach all fields of social life. The institutions of trance notwithstanding their strong social, political, religious and existential values seem to have difficulties to whithstand this continuous and widespread interpretation and the reduction to sanitary institutions, that is, to compensative forms of modern medical therapy. This implies nevertheless the possibility of deep reflection on the concept of “therapy” and on the relation between therapy and the construction of a world of relations between social actors and also between social actors and the social and cosmological construct. The analysis of the modified states of consciousness, or more appropriately of the alternative states of consciousness, allows thus the particular analysis of “taking care of the Other”, this “taking care of the Other” being realized in the conditions of an alternative state of consciousness.