Issues of spirituality in psychology and psychotherapy

Abstract

Psychology was born from philosophy as the “science of the soul”, and was treated and practised as such by the ancient Greeks. Over time, especially after it was reborn in the 19th century as modern psychology with its origins in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory, it evolved into a strictly empirical science, distanced from metaphysics and detached from what is spiritual and hence immeasurable and methodologically problematic. Subsequent psychotherapeutic approaches have gone through phases from a reductionist understanding of man (psychoanalysis, behaviourism) to viewing him in a broader, also noetic perspective (existential analysis, logotherapy). There is a certain opposition here in the anthropological assumptions that shape psychology. We still use the prevailing materialistic anthropology, consistently limiting human functioning to its bio-psycho-social dimension; rationalizing all manifestations of human behaviour incomprehensible to reason (excluding the spiritual factor in its interpretation). However, we have realistic psychology and anthropological personalism, which recognizes the manifestations of man’s spiritual life. The constantly developing branch of psychology, which is the psychology of religion and spirituality, shows that the element of ratio is present in the centre of interest for modern psychologists, bringing further research on the connections between human religiosity and spirituality and his functioning in various areas. The practical dimension of psychology, i.e. psychotherapy, is based on assumptions that adepts of particular therapeutic modalities accept “on faith”, because they have no empirical confirmation. The growing popularity of using strategies and techniques derived from various spiritualities in psychotherapy shows how strongly the element fides is embedded in it. To sum up: fields such as psychology and psychotherapy, regardless of what they declare, have always been based on the elements of both fides and ratio, and today they still balance between spirituality and science.