For the purpose of investigating the attititudes and emotional responses of the rural residents toward the folk treatments, and evlauating its effects in the part of psychotherapeutic aspects of shamanism in Korea, this survey was conducted by the authors with direct interview method on 104 medical and psychiatric patients and their families who had invited shamans for performing shamanistic rituals for treatments, residing in Dangjin-Gun, Choongchungnam-Do (province), during the 2 weeks period, from August 5th to 18 th, 1974.
The findings and results obtained from the survey are summerized as follows:
1) As for the perceived results of folk treatments, 38.4% of cases were improved, 52.9% unchanged, and 8.7% worsened and females seemed to be get more subjective improvement than males which did not necessarily mean the objective medical healing.
2) About the rate of expectations of the magical healing power of shamanism before the rituals, 43.2% felt positive, and particulary in female subjects.
3) During the rituals, direct feeling responses of participants were various on individual basis and nearly half of them were in negative or depressive feeling. The result of the treatment was closely correlated with the rate of expectations of magical power and the intensity of participant´s feeling responses.
4) Nearly all of the rituals of shamanistic treatments was motivated and mainteined (leaded) by females.
5) No significant differences are found in the attitude toward the folklore treatments of various groups divided with the age distribution, economical status, and educational background. But the Catholics and Protestants seemed to be more negative or less positively responded for the folk treatments.
6) Among supernatural concepts of disease, 53. 0% of cases were classified as the spirit intrusion, 26. 9% as the breach of taboo, 8. 5% as the object intrusion, and the soul loss and disease sorcery had not been reported.
In addition, the discussions were held on the classification of diseases from which these subjects had sufferred, contents and methods of treatment rituals, and other modalities of treatments utilized after folk treatment.
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