“Spirituality” in Psychology: a Philosophical and Methodological Analysis

The article problematizes the use of the concept of “spirituality” in psychological discourse, which loses its nuclear cultural meaning here while meeting the requirements of science. The author shows that this loss occurs in a necessary way and is connected with the epistemological foundations of modern science, namely, with the understanding (“model”) of “truth”. Consequently, a constructive prerequisite for the natural inclusion of “spirituality” in any discursive system may be a different model of truth in comparison with science. M. Foucault reveals three historical types of discursive practices where “spirituality” (unlike scientific discourse) was not a foreign concept: there ‘truth’ was defined as directly related to the sociocultural production of human subjectivity. Such discourses always implied anthropopraxis, where the condition for the attainment of truth was the “transformation” of its very subject — here ‘truth’ was semantically closely intertwined with the ethical category of “the good”.