Gnostic Dilemmas in Western Psychologies of Spirituality1
International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 2003 DOI: 10.24972/ijts.2003.22.1.27 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 3 |
| Key points | Argues that Gnosticism's spiritual metapathologies, as critiqued by Plotinus, resurface in modern naturalistic psychologies of spirituality and in contemporary transpersonal research, posing an inherent dilemma for a science of the spiritual. |
Abstract
Early Gnosticism is identified as a form of Weber’s inner-worldly mysticism that, following the critique of Plotinus, entailed spiritual metapathologies of inflated grandiosity, despair, and/or social withdrawal. These vulnerabilities re-emerge in the naturalistic psychologies of spirituality begun by Emerson, Nietzsche, Jung, and Maslow and more implicitly within contemporary personality and neuropsychological research on numinous/transpersonal experience. An updated version of Gnostic dilemma and its conflicted dualism may be endemic to any would-be science of the spiritual and to much current transpersonal psychology as well.