Hosting the Dead: A Reflection on Ghosts, Ghouls, and Therapeutic Containment

Halloween approaches, and with it the invitation to sit with what lingers. In psychotherapy, we are asked to host the unburied: losses that have no grave, traumas that speak in symptoms, ancestral echoes that arrive unannounced. Samuel Kimbles (2021) calls these “suffering ghosts”, unacknowledged cultural and familial histories that demand psychic reckoning. The task is not to banish them but to transform suffering into kinship. This requires a mind that is both porous and bounded, curious yet capable of discernment.

The danger is real: haunting can slide into possession. When the therapist becomes a passive mirror of distress, the consulting room risks turning into a mausoleum. Raw affect floods the space; nothing is metabolised. Yet the opposite error is equally grave, forcing premature closure, exorcising the ghost before it has spoken. Between these poles lies the art of symbolic hospitality: holding grief long enough for meaning to emerge, tolerating rupture without collapse.

A Syrian folktale, “The Woodcutter’s Wealthy Sister”, offers a cautionary image. A poor woodcutter meets a glamorous woman claiming to be his lost sister. She invites him, and also his abused wife, and their children to her palace. The wife senses deception: the “sister” is a ghulah, a female ghoul who lures families to devour them. Through cunning, the wife escapes with her children, leaving the woodcutter to his fate.

In Arabic folklore, ghulahs inhabit liminal spaces, cemeteries, ruined houses, and feed on what is unburied. They often appear as kin: a wealthy aunt, a kindly crone. The tales split feminine power into two faces: the seductive devourer and the discerning protector. This is not mere misogyny; it is a cultural warning about projection and gullibility. Men who ignore female warnings perish; women who fail to warn become complicit.

Translated to the consulting room, the tale loses none of its bite. The therapist can become the ghulah, absorbing pain without return, or the wife who pierces illusion. But the duality is not gendered in practice. Any clinician, regardless of identity, risks collapsing into one role or the other. The corrective is not to choose sides but to integrate: empathy as the doorway, symbolisation as the threshold.

Containment Is Not Enough; Digestion Is Required

Bion’s container-contained model remains a foundational metaphor in analytic thinking. The client projects beta elements, unthinkable fragments of experience, into the therapist. The therapist must perform alpha-function: reverie, metaphor, linkage. Without this, they risk becoming a toxic receptacle. Pain is absorbed, but nothing is transformed.

Supervisory discourse and clinical observation suggest that high empathic attunement, when not accompanied by symbolic processing, can lead to burnout and therapeutic impasse. The therapist feels everything, but nothing moves. Structured symbolisation, whether through interpretation, narrative reconstruction or cognitive reappraisal, offers a way through. It metabolises what would otherwise stagnate.

The mistake is to set empathy against thinking. They are not rivals. Validation is not affirmation. It does not mean agreement, approval or indulgence. It means recognising what is, without rushing to reshape it. Validation is not the enemy of depth. It is its precondition. In DBT, validation precedes behavioural change. In EMDR, attunement precedes reprocessing. In analytic work, the holding environment precedes interpretation. Sequence matters more than ingredient.

Folklore as Diagnostic, Not Dogma

The ghulah tale is culturally specific, yet its structure is universal: a false host offers unlimited nurture; a discerning voice issues a warning; survival depends on heeding the warning. We can map this onto any therapeutic dyad without essentialising gender. The “false host” is the clinician who mistakes endless containment for cure. The “discerning voice” is the capacity, inside the client, the therapist, or the supervisory matrix, to name when the work has stalled.

Folklore is heuristic, not a prescription. It alerts us to archetypal risks, seduction by the promise of painless repair, and blindness to iatrogenic harm, but it cannot dictate technique. A CBT therapist who teaches defusion is performing the same piercing function as the wife in the tale. An ACT clinician who invites playful distance from anxiety is hosting the ghost without letting it feast.

Group Work: Where the Ghoul Multiplies

In groups, the risk is amplified. Unlinked pain circulates like a contagion. Yalom (2020) describes “cohesion without confrontation” as the death knell of process. When the group becomes a universal pain-container, members compete to feed the ghoul. The antidote is not containment alone, but the deliberate cultivation of symbolic diversity: metaphor, here-and-now interpretation, and analytic difference. Diversity of thought interrupts psychic homogeneity, offering friction where fusion once reigned. A single well-timed intervention, “I wonder if the silence we’re all holding is the same silence ”, can shift the matrix from mausoleum to crucible. But it is the plurality of interpretive frames (the capacity to host contradiction without collapse) that metabolises pain into meaning. In this way, the group becomes not a single mouth feeding a single ghost, but a polyphonic kitchen where grief is cooked, not consumed.

Conclusion: Companions, Not Exorcists

Psychology need not exorcise its ghosts. It must learn to digest them. Empathy opens the door; symbolisation cooks the meal. The therapist who can tolerate the heat of the kitchen: rupture, misstep, uncertainty, offers true hospitality. The dead are fed, the living are nourished, and the ghoul is kept at bay.

The woodcutter’s wife does not kill the ghulah; she simply refuses to be dinner. That is the model: discernment without destruction, containment with return. In this way, we honour Kimbles’ suffering ghosts and transform them into ancestors who walk beside us, present, but no longer possessive.

So, as Halloween settles into the bones of the year, linger with these questions: who in the room is being lured, who is issuing the warning, and who is choosing not to hear?