The ‘psychological’ and the ‘spiritual’: an evolutional relationship within an ontological framework. A brief comment on Jung's ‘Self’

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of phenomenological perspectives in most modern scientific fields addressing religion and spirituality, including psychology of religion, ontological inquiries retain an important position in certain fields, such as modern sociology (e.g., Weber, Giddens' concept of ‘ontological security’). Ontological and phenomenological approaches, alongside certain principles that function as interpretative tools in the social sciences (e.g., reductionism, teleology, supervenience), can be synthesised to construct a pluralistic methodology for understanding anew the dynamics between the ‘psychological’ and the ‘spiritual’. This paper attempts to articulate an ‘evolutional’ approach to the spiritual as an ‘emergent’ property arising from multiple factors beyond the psychological and the metaphysical (such as social and cultural constructs). This holistic understanding of the spiritual will be then applied to Jung's notion of the ‘Self’ to understand further its spiritual and/or ontological potential.