Abstract
In Western societies, “new spiritualities” are a response to the supposed needs of the idealized figure of a liberal subject. In other words, they offer methods and ethics for seeking well-being, discovering our true inner self, and achieving self-realization. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Portugal in various contexts of alternative spiritual therapies, this paper highlights a recurrent contradiction in conceptions of what a subject is. On the one hand, we find a neoliberal conception that emphasizes the formation of true subjectivity as a return to an “authentic and original self”. On the other hand, there is the pragmatic phenomenology of experiencing the vacuity of the self, the uncertainty of the subject, the anxiety of not being oneself and of being “acted upon” by an alterity. I suggest that there is a tension between these two conceptions, both within the new spiritualities (which are nurtured by a conception of the idealized subject as a self) and also within the contemporary social sciences (based on the epistemological concept of Ego), which have tended to be theoretically reluctant to consider the possibility of a loss of the self and of a subject “acted upon” by an alterity, both in thought and in action.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, “subject” is used in the philosophical sense of the word. More conceptual insights are developed in the first section on “theoretical settings”.
- 2.
This research is based on fieldwork conducted in Portugal in 2019 and supported in 2019 by an SMI grant from the INSHS-CNRS, France.
- 3.
For a comparative view of evangelical Christians and the Holy Spirit and charismatic gifts, see Coleman 2004.
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Pons, C. (2022). How Can a Subject Be More Than Himself? Spiritual Subjectivities and Well-Being in Portuguese Spiritism and the New Spiritualities. In: Mossière, G. (eds) New Spiritualities and the Cultures of Well-being. Religion, Spirituality and Health: A Social Scientific Approach, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06263-6_2
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