We are all unique characters, all shaped by genes, talents, and maladies, by parents and places, and by original experiences that no one planned. Let's look at the psychology of a universal but less familiar figure, the shaman or medicine person. Shamans are intitiated by their private religious experience while priests are socially initiated into a religious organization.
Shamans are nomadic, and priests build churches, schools, and rectories.
The shaman typically experiences a religious calling through a psychological crisis that leads to visionary, mystical experience. Fundamentally, the shaman is the person destined to bridge different worlds, to cross over and come back with hard won wisdom. John Dunbar raises his head off the surgical table, looks down at his bloody foot, over at the bloody surgical instruments, outside the tent at a soldier with a missing leg. He decides to pull his boot back on and die in battle. We do not know precisely how the Civil War brings Lt. Dunbar to suicide but clearly this is his psychological crisis.