Psychiatric approach to religious-mystical experience: a paradigm shift (philosophical conceptualization)

Abstract

Relevance. As the psychopathology of religious experience developed in the second half of the 20th – early 21st century, a noticeable trend was the transition to a paradigm that orients psychiatric science toward a differentiated approach to religious-mystical experience. The change of paradigms requires the implementation of philosophical reflection through the prism of interdisciplinary interaction.The purpose is to reveal the prerequisites and first results of the paradigm shift in psychiatric science in the field of studying religious-mystical experience.Objectives: to explicate the disciplinary matrix of the psychiatric approach to the study of the phenomenon of religious mysticism; to demonstrate the limits of reductionism in the psychotopathological approach to religiousmystical experience; to explore the directions of integration of psychiatry of religious-mystical experience into the interdisciplinary space and the implementation of new approaches as prerequisites for paradigmatic changes in its discourse.Methodology. When considering the approaches of representatives of psychiatric science regarding the nature and essence of religious and mystical, a comparative analysis was used. The study of the diversity of psychiatric approaches to religious and mystical experience was carried out based on the application of the principle of systematicity. The principle of historicism was used to identify the logic of the development of the psychiatric approach to mystical experiences in the space of interdisciplinary dialogue and interaction.Results. The main directions of development of the approach of domestic and foreign psychiatric science to religious and mystical experiences are systematized. The position is substantiated that, unlike the psychology of religion, the psychiatric approach, from the very beginning of its emergence in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, adhered to the implementation of a scientific program aimed at studying these experiences as pathological phenomena (religious psychoses). Over time, there was a rejection of the complete reduction of religious and mystical experiences to madness.Conclusions. As a result of paradigm shifts in psychiatric science, a new research program emerged that examined the array of religious-mystical experience through the prism of “normal – pathological.” Thanks to paradigm shifts, certain layers of religious-mystical experience began to be viewed as an integral part of spiritual culture and a component of mental health.