Kalweit, Holger

   German ethnologist and psychologist who has studied shamanism in Hawaii, the North American Southwest, Mexico, and Tibet. Kalweit is the author of several books in German, as well as the founder of two psychotherapeutic methods, darkness therapy and nature psychotherapy, which draw on shamanic practices. In the now-classic Dreamtime and Inner Space: The World of the Shaman (1988), Kalweit presents accounts of shamans worldwide and compares these with psychological research into altered states of consciousness, proposing that shamans are “astronauts of inner space.” More recently, Shamans, Healers and Medicine Men (2000), as with other volumes by psychotherapists, presents yet another grand survey of shamans worldwide as healers and focuses on personal relationships, arguing that shamanic healing is “not merely the alleviation of symptoms but entails a transformation of one’s relationship to life.”