Attached Paper

Archives of Trauma: Traumatic Mystical Experience, Therapy, and the Lives of Anomalous Experiencers

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This paper will provide an overview of the lineage of thought, treatment, and community building that anomalous experiencers have engaged with to make meaning of what has happened to them. Drawing from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper reframes the lives of experiencers, and often their most traumatic moments, not as cultural curiosities but as sites of lived meaning and care within the context of psychiatric history and religious experience.