Introduction

This chapter is an ethnography of a psychosomatic department in a German Hospital (Klinik), where past-life aetiologies are invoked and addressed through art, body work, breathwork, exotic music, trance, and collective psychotherapeutic journeys that meld the past and the present, the living and the dead, East and West. This is played out against a large mountain park (Bergpark) and a Thermalbad (spa) on either side of the Klinik, each of which sport Greek, Roman, and Anglo-Chinese motifs in their architecture and landscape. Together, these function as a formal and para-formal therapeutic resource for patients, who may draw energy through divination techniques from spots in the park, or do aqua gymnastics with their ailing bodies in the Therme. This ensemble is enabled by the therapists, some of whom traverse these several worlds literally and figuratively by interning with Brazilian shamans and Hindu gurus, and fusing them with New Age psychotherapies from California invented by Germans, along with an initial training in Protestant theology.

This psychedelic and “panpsychic world” (Jonas 1982; Goff 2019), paid for by mandatory German health insurance, is the perfect foil to the “movement for global mental health” (MGMH), whose claim to being global is belied by its preoccupation with the Global South. This preoccupation is predicated on the notion of a “treatment gap” because of rudimentary and inadequate mental health facilities and personnel in the Lower and Middle Income Countries (LMICs).