Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self

by Sandra Ingerman

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New York, NY: HarperOne/ HarperCollins 1991.

This is an important book for anyone who works with people who have severe emotional wounds. Sandra Ingerman trained in shamanic healing with Michael Harner, and is now a very respected shamanic teacher herself.

In this easy to read book you will find explanations of shamanic cosmologies and approaches to healing, particularly focused on reuniting people with shattered personalities who have literally lost fragments of themselves. While this may sound like a metaphoric description of psychological fragmentation, in the world of bioenergetic anatomy and healing it is a literal description of aspects of a person that may become fragmented and lost – not just to conscious awareness, but actually dislocated energetically from the person and existing in remote energetic/spiritual realms.

Ingerman details methods for locating and reuniting these fragments with their owners. Case descriptions provide more concrete and understandable details of how the fragmentations occur and how they can be repaired.

For instance:

Carol, a participant in a shamanic workshop, went on her own shamanic journey. A teacher in one of the shamanic realms directed her attention to a childhood trauma that had left her with serious problems. Carol immediately recalled being raped by her father at age three.

Ingerman journeyed into shamanic realms, and with the help of her power animal observed the trauma occurring when Carol was three years old.

As I watched, I saw something for which I was totally unprepared. As the rape was taking place, I saw Carol's soul, her essence, separate from her body and leave. As I watched her departing soul, I was that it had gone into a place known in shamanism as the void – a place of pitch darkness, silence, lifelessness.  (p. 42)

Ingerman traveled into the void, calling out to Carol's soul. Connecting with her, Ingerman found her willing to return with her to rejoin Carol. She said, 'Yes' and Ingerman felt her holding onto her back.

When we returned to ordinary reality, I blew the three-year-old soul into Carol's heart and the top of her head, as shamans have traditionally done. "Welcome home," I said to the part that had been lost in the void. (p. 42-43)

A few weeks after our session, Carol called me. She reported she felt as if she were present in her body for the first time in her adult life. Whereas she always had felt disconnected from herself before, she now experienced life directly and intenself. Colors appeared more vibrant. Plants seemed as alive as animals. No longer did she experience life as a movie she was merely observing. (p. 44)

Some may view these reports of personality fragmentations and healings as metaphoric imagery that facilitate a person's reuniting psychological splits which occurred under traumatic circumstances. If this is so, it is still a remarkable contribution to healing such splits. Under more conventional psychotherapeutic approaches, repairing split personalities may take many months and years of therapy. Shamanic healings often occur in a single session.

Others may understand these reports as descriptions of energetic and spiritual realities that are outside conventional, Western cosmological frameworks. My personal preference is for these explanations – which Ingerman details very clearly in this excellent book.

Review by Daniel J. Benor, MD
IJHC Editor in Chief

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