Soul Retrieval

Soul-loss explanations in anthropological records

Anthropologists have recorded ideas that illness can follow the departure or loss of a soul in many regions. A museum text summarizing Siberian healing says that among eight named peoples, including the Evenks, Yakuts and Nenets, healing was the main function of shamans in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and that returning a soul stolen by evil spirits was central to treatment. The same text reports that the Kets understood prolonged illness as soul departure.

Case studies from other regions describe related ideas. Wikan analyzed kesambet, an illness attributed to fright or soul loss in North Bali, and compared it with susto. Desjarlais described soul loss among the Yolmo Sherpa of Helambu, Nepal, and Greenway described fright sickness among Quechua speakers in a rural southern Peruvian community. These accounts differ in cosmology and treatment.

Susto and Hmong soul loss

In Latin America, the DSM-5 describes susto as a cultural explanation of distress in which a terrifying event causes the soul to leave the body. A 2023 review of 18 articles reports that healers use rituals calling the lost soul, prayers, cleansing ceremonies and medicinal plants. An interpretive study in a rural town in central Mexico concluded that susto helps residents interpret difficult circumstances such as poverty and a patriarchal social order.

A study of 924 contact forms completed by 36 shamans in a Hmong American community in California found that shamans frequently attributed physical, emotional and psychological complaints to soul loss or bad spirits. In a 2026 interview study, eight of 12 Hmong shamans in the United States and Thailand attributed depression to soul loss or spiritual imbalance.

Eliade, Harner and neo-shamanic soul retrieval

Mircea Eliade characterized shamanism as archaic techniques of ecstasy, and a 2025 study notes that scholars often treat the soul as the core of a shamanic worldview. The same authors argue that soul-centered theories leave an explanatory gap and do not account for body-centered practice among contemporary shamans in northeast China. The sources reviewed do not give a fuller account of critiques of Eliade.

The anthropologist Michael Harner studied the Conibo of the Peruvian Amazon in 1959 to 1961 for the American Museum of Natural History, according to an obituary. His 1980 book The Way of the Shaman presented core shamanism. The obituary dates the founding of the Center for Shamanic Studies to 1979 and its renaming as the Foundation for Shamanic Studies to 1987, while the Foundation's own history places the Center's founding in the early 1980s and Harner's initial Upper Amazon training in 1961 and 1964.

A catalog record dates Sandra Ingerman's book Soul Retrieval to 1991. A scoping review lists soul retrieval among the techniques of neo-shamanism, the contemporary Western adaptation of shamanic practice, and defines it as treatment for a loss of spiritual energy thought to be vital to well-being.

Soul loss, susto and related terms

Soul loss is an explanatory category used by practitioners and communities, not a medical diagnosis. Susto, kesambet and Quechua fright sickness are local terms with different symptom lists and causes. The 2023 susto review observes that psychiatry, anthropology and ethnology define susto inconsistently, and that most articles omit severity, duration and diagnostic criteria. The review suggests susto may be both a perceived cause of mental disorders and an idiom of distress, and calls for research to clarify which.

Wikan's title asks whether the Balinese illness is a culture-bound syndrome, and her analysis places it in comparison with susto. The sources reviewed do not settle which of these terms describe the same experience across regions.

Shamanism, core shamanism and soul retrieval

Shamanism is itself a contested scholarly category. A scoping review calls it a transcultural, heterogeneous worldview concerned with human interaction with the spirit world. It describes core shamanism as Harner's framework of common elements stripped of cultural specifics, and neo-shamanism as the contemporary Western adaptation that includes soul retrieval. Soul retrieval therefore names both traditional ritual returns of a lost soul and a modern workshop-taught method, and the two should not be assumed to be the same.

Dissociation is a separate, clinical term. One review defines it as a disruption of usually integrated functions of consciousness, perception, memory, identity and affect. None of the sources reviewed shows that soul loss in any tradition corresponds to dissociation, and this page treats the two as different vocabularies.

Traditional soul-calling and retrieval rituals

The sources describe ritual rather than a single procedure. In the susto literature, healers call the lost soul, pray, involve the family and hold cleansing ceremonies. Among the Yolmo, an analysis of shamanic ritual suggests that themes of fragmentation and deficiency in illness are answered by restoring a sense of harmony and completion. In one Quechua community, treatment involved reaffirming ethnic identity and reintegrating the patient into the family.

A study of modern shamans in northeast China describes soul retrieval as proceeding through soul loss, evocation and return, and interprets it as a body technique in which the shaman temporarily shares a body state with the patient. The authors report no fieldwork dates or case counts, so the account is illustrative.

Modern core-shamanic and clinical formats

Core shamanism is described as using drumming at 4 to 7 hertz to induce an altered state. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies, a training body founded by Harner, describes basic workshops, advanced courses and three-year programs, reaching about 5,000 people a year through 203 courses; this is the organization's own report. The sources reviewed do not describe the steps of a modern soul retrieval session.

In a feasibility case series for veterans with PTSD, the semi-structured protocol combined rapport building, power animal retrieval, extraction, spirit release, curse unraveling, soul retrieval, forgiveness and cord cutting, aspect maturing and divination. The protocol shows soul retrieval used as one component among several.

What traditions and practitioners describe

Within the traditions described, soul loss is offered as an explanation for prolonged illness, fright, depression-like states and misfortune, and ritual return of the soul is the corresponding remedy. Hmong shamans interviewed in 2026 linked depression to soul loss or spiritual imbalance and described coping through family time, gardening and receiving healing from other shamans. Hmong shamans in California attributed an array of complaints to soul loss or bad spirits.

The scoping review describes soul retrieval in neo-shamanism as aimed at a loss of spiritual energy vital to well-being. Such descriptions are the stated aims of practitioners and are not findings of studies.

Social and cultural functions reported

Researchers also describe what these rituals do socially. The California study reported that Hmong shamans' rituals affirmed and strengthened connections to family, culture and community, and the Quechua study described reintegration of the patient into the family. The Mexican study framed susto as a belief system that gives people a way to interpret difficult everyday circumstances. These are observations of meaning and context, not measurements of symptom change.

Studies of soul-loss illness

The susto literature is largely descriptive. The 2023 review found three symptom patterns that overlap with depression, post-traumatic stress and somatic disorder, and concluded that the concept may serve as an idiom of distress as well as a perceived cause of other disorders. It notes that most articles omit severity, duration and diagnostic criteria, which limits comparison. None of the ethnographic studies reviewed here measured whether ritual soul return changes symptoms.

Studies of shamanic healing

A 2025 scoping review searched PubMed, CINAHL and Scopus and included 16 of 124 results: one clinical trial reported in three publications, two case series and ten case reports. Soul retrieval appears in the trial of shamanic healing for jaw pain in women and in a case series of neo-shamanic workshop participants. The authors cite small samples, no control groups and heterogeneous reports, yet conclude shamanic healing has potential benefits and a relatively low risk of harm.

The jaw pain study was a phase 1 feasibility study in which 23 women attended five sessions with one of four practitioners. Pain scores fell by the end of treatment, and a follow-up report found no change over nine months. Without a reported untreated comparison group, the results cannot separate any effect of the sessions from other influences, and the sessions were not soul retrieval alone.

Gaps and the limits of inference

The veterans case series enrolled six participants and judged its multi-component protocol feasible and acceptable, calling for future research on efficacy. A systematic review of trials of traditional healers for depression and anxiety found 16 trials with 1,132 participants and reported greater symptom improvement than controls, but described the evidence as limited by low study quality and a lack of long-term data. That review does not examine soul retrieval, and no controlled trial of modern soul retrieval as a stand-alone method was found in the PubMed searches run for this page (soul retrieval, soul loss, shamanic healing).

Care boundaries and delayed treatment

The scoping review reported delayed conventional treatment in six case reports of shamanic healing, along with incidents involving ingested objects and inserted needles, even as its authors concluded the overall risk of harm was relatively low. Because the underlying evidence consists of small uncontrolled reports, the sources reviewed cannot establish how often such harms occur. Soul retrieval is not a substitute for medical or mental health assessment, and symptoms of depression, trauma or physical illness warrant conventional evaluation.

A case report from Australia describes a hospital that agreed to a soul calling ceremony in an operating theater for a Hmong woman, and the authors suggest that informed, culturally sensitive care is possible. This describes accommodation of belief within medical care rather than evidence about the ritual's effect.

Trauma, dissociation and memory

Dissociation ranges from transient reactions to trauma through to a disabling disorder, and a review warns that misdiagnosis is a concern. The sources reviewed do not examine whether soul retrieval alters dissociative symptoms for better or worse, and the susto review notes that distress described as soul loss can coincide with depression or post-traumatic stress that may need clinical care.

Reviews of psychotherapy describe a risk of false memory formation when practitioners try to recover unremembered trauma, with therapists' beliefs in repression linked to suggestive techniques. These reviews concern psychotherapy and do not study soul retrieval, so they indicate a general caution about suggestion rather than a documented risk of this practice.

Training and oversight

The only training information reviewed is the Foundation for Shamanic Studies' description of its own courses, which is not independent verification. No professional register or code of ethics for soul retrieval practitioners was found in the sources reviewed, so a reader cannot assume a shared standard of training, supervision or complaints handling.