Psicologia e espiritualidade: uma fundamentação a partir da antropologia fenomenológica de Edith Stein

Abstract

In order to answer the question about spirit and spirituality as possible objects of Psychology, we return to a rationale for the “concept of spirit” and its possible implications for the relationship between Psychology and Spirituality, based on the phenomenological anthropology of Edith Stein. To this end, we dedicate ourselves to bibliographic research, through which we outline the concepts of "spirit" and "spirituality" in Western thought, based on a historical, philosophical and scientific reconstruction; we describe some of Phenomenology's contributions to our field of research, especially with “Phenomenological Archeology” and “Phenomenology of Religion”; and we describe Steinian thought and anthropology, especially in what constitutes the notions of spirit and spirituality. We detail and discuss the main characteristics that define the “essence” of the concept of spirit, and of the experience of the spiritual in Stein's work. For your specific contributions to our so-called “Psychology of the spirit” and spirituality, we focus on what we share as a “phenomenological anthropology” and a “Christian anthropology” of the Steinian human spirit. We found that the notion of spirit present in the work of Edith Stein is essential for understanding the development of personality or the formation of the human person and is correlated with transcendental consciousness. In addition to this anthropological-ontological dimension, specifically human that makes us an animal different from others, it is possible to recognize in the human spirit, the sphere of transcendence in relation to the other (community), and to the Other, recognized in the Christian phase of Stein's philosophy, as the figure of the divine. In this respect, we recognize a religious anthropology and a religious spirituality, in which God presents himself as the central motive, cause and destiny. Such phenomenological anthropological treatment of the spirit, both in the existential and philosophical dimensions and in the religious dimension, lays the foundations for the understanding of a "way of being" of the spirit and, therefore, of spirituality. Edith Stein developed a phenomenological anthropology, a "psychology with a soul", a "Psychology of the spirit" and thus an authentic "Psychology of Spirituality". Spirit and spirituality are the very anthropological-ontological condition under which we can call ourselves "human". So it is not just a "branch" of psychological research, but the human condition itself without which an authentically human psychology would not be possible. Therefore, the phenomena of spirit and spirituality are not mere objects, whose study is constituted as a “specialty” of Psychology, the opposite is its own condition.