“Dark Nights of the Soul”: Phenomenology and Neurocognition of Spiritual Suffering in Mysticism and Psychosis

Abstract

Phenomenological, clinical, and neurocognitive levels of analysis are combined to understand the cognitive bases of spirituality and spiritual suffering. In particular, the “dark night of the soul” in classical mysticism, with its painful “metapathological” loss of felt meaning is compared with the anhedonias central to the negative symptoms of schizophrenia and schizotypicality. Paul Schilder's early understanding of instabilities in the body image, as our core sense of self, offers a key to both the disorganized hallucinatory syndromes of psychosis and to the relative enhancements of body image/ecological self in spirituality. Expanded versus deleted felt presence/embodiment, as outwardly indexed in measures of physical balance and spatial abilities, becomes the general dimension underlying integrative versus disintegrative transformations of consciousness. “Dark night” suffering can be seen as a semantic satiation leading to a relative deletion of experienced presence in the context of its previous enhancement, a focalized version of the more general anhedonic despair shared by clinical schizotypy and aspects of a larger secularized culture.