The Good, the Dead, and the Other: Chronicles of a Nepali Phantasmicide

Is an experience the private matter of an inner individual self? The phantasmicide committed by Laxmi in Sinja, Nepal, with the assistance of his uncle suggests otherwise. The perception of a wandering spirit in Nepal, like that of a dragon in the Middle Ages, demonstrates how subjective experiences may sometimes acquire independence in the blurred margins where reality merges with imagination. This line of reasoning finds support in the indigenous view of personhood, according to which a person actualizes as a multitude of situational souls emerging in reaction to circumstances—circumstances to which these reactions may also be pinned. Instead of an outward projection of psychological life, the intersubjective life of the spirit coprotagonist of this affair encourages envisaging experiences as partially independent phenomena capable of acting back upon the experiencing self and being acted upon in turn as other free‐standing subjects. Highlighting the mutual inextricability of private interiority and worldly events, the chronicle of this Nepali phantasmicide fosters thus an alternative to psychological transference pointing toward an Intersubjective‐I that avoids constraining self and world within rigid boundaries. [intersubjectivity, experience, transference, situationality, personhood, Nepal]