C. Michael Smith (born August 29, 1950, in Indianapolis, Indiana) is a clinical psychologist and scholar whose medical anthropological and theoretical work has focused on the study of healing systems across cultures. He holds that study of indigenous healing systems can help clarify the strengths and weaknesses of our own modern health care systems.
Biography
C. Michael Smith attended the University of Chicago where he studied with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the cultural psychologist Sudhir Kakar. He took two doctorates from the [Chicago Theological Seminary] in a joint program with the [University of Chicago], under Robert L. Moore. He holds a certificate in Analytical Psychology from the CG Jung Institute of Chicago.
He is director and founder of Crows Nest Center for Shamanic Studies USA, France and Belgium, and has taught at Center Trimurti in Paris and Cogolin, France 2009–2023, and has taught at Institut Resources (PNL) in Bruxelles, Belgium. He taught in the third year analyst training program at the C.G. Jung Institute, Bangalor, India, for the Moscow Society of Jungian Analysts and the Russian Academy of Science (2021), for Instituto Mediterraneo Di Psychologia (Sicily) and lectured for the Italian Institute for Analytical Psychology (CIPA), 2022. His special area of focus has been in bridging indigenous medical systems with depth psychology.In 2018 he gave the Keynote Lectures in Clinical and Humanistc Psychology at Saybrook University. He is author of Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue and Psychotherapy and the Sacred, for which he won acclaim (NAAP Gradiva Nominee Award) in 1996.
Teachings
Smith's work has been an interdisciplinary enterprise in applying the phenomenological-hermeneutic and dialogic method of inquiry, learned while a student of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur at the University of Chicago. This methodology was then combined with medical-anthropological methods of analysis and interpretation of healing systems across cultures, derived from his studies with Sudhir Kakar, also at Chicago.
Finally he combined all this with the scheme of "ritual process and leadership in establishing and maintaining the boundaries of transformative sacred space" created by his doctoral chair, the Jungian analyst and theorist Robert L. Moore, of the Chicago Theological Seminary. Smith credits these three figures with giving his own scholarly and practical work, its orientation and thrust.
Medical Anthropology
Smith has defined medical-anthropology thus: Medical anthropology is a multi-disciplinary field examining the relationship between culture and health care systems, and the way disease is engendered, shaped, managed, diagnosed, and treated within a given society.
From his first publication in 1981, "Theology and the Human Story" [Encounter: Creative Theological Scholarship, Winter 1981, Vol. 42, No.1] Smith has shown increasing interest in the applications of sacred story and myth to the problems of human suffering. In his medical anthropological writing he has extended this interest into identifying all manner of sacred resources within a cultural or religion bond context (myth, symbol, ritual, rites of passage, sacred texts, theological doctrines, sacred architecture, use of mandalas, geometrix, charms, amulets, etc.).
Smith has been especially interested in the clinical applications of his study of health care systems across cultures. He advocates that the study of other cultural health care systems can illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of our own.
Framework for the Sacred
Smith contends that there is an unacknowledged public grieving over the loss of the role of the sacred in modern western psychological and psychiatric practices, claiming that modern people are disappointed when their problems and suffering are not placed in a context of ultimate meaning [Psych & Sacred 21]. In Psychotherapy and the Sacred, he criticized American psychotherapy professions for lack of understanding and skill in working with the spiritual and religious needs of the patient [Psych & Sacred 3–14].