This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
The module will develop an understanding of what in ancient, non-Western, and modern European contexts are the historical and conceptual relationships between therapy, spiritual exercise, medical discourse, the search for wisdom or insight, and the critique of cultural life.
How do the different ancient, non-Western and modern or contemporary traditions imagine happiness, enjoyment, or bliss, and what is the imagined relationship between these states and the goal of therapeutic practice? Might something like a general theory of therapeutics, spiritual exercise, or “anthropotechnics” constitute an overarching category that unites what we normally imagine to be distinct areas of philosophy, psychology, religion, and clinical practice?
This comparative module explores how modern psychological and psychoanalytic therapies have more to do with religious traditions of spiritual exercise than tends to be indicated by academic disciplines, acknowledged by professional therapeutic societies, or actively explored in the development of new therapeutic models.
Total contact hours: 20
Essay (5000 words) - 100%
Agamben, G. (2013). The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, Stanford. Stanford University Press;
Berardi, F. (2009). The Soul at Work. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press;
Carrette, J. (2012). Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy, London: Routledge;
Carrette, J. & Richard King, (2004). Selling Spirituality: the Silent Takeover of Religion, London: Routledge;
Foucault, M. (2003). The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, 3rd edition, London: Routledge;
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell;
Jamal, M. (2009). (ed). Islamic Mystical Poetry: Sufi Verse from the Early Mystics to Rumi, London: Penguin;
Martin, R. & John Barresi. (2008). The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity, New York: Columbia University Press;
Mascaro, J. (1965). (ed). The Upanishads, London: Penguin;
Ranganthan, S. (2009). (ed). Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, London: Penguin.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
Students will have demonstrated comparative familiarity with practices and concepts of spirituality and therapy in ancient and contemporary forms from a range of texts;
Students will have described how practices, concepts, and institutions of medicine, philosophical wisdom, cultural critique, and religion are mutually influential in ancient, non-European, and also recent discussions of spirituality and therapy;
Students will have critically assessed recent trends in the inflation of spirituality as a value in relation to its marketing as a form of self-help and business success;
Students will have examined critically the ways modern and contemporary models of therapy and spirituality have repeated, translated, and suppressed aspects of ancient or globally comparative spirituality or 'therapy of the soul';
Students will have used ancient or contemporary texts to develop new comparative models and topics of research relating to recognized traditions of cultivating and shaping inner experience, clinical therapeutic practice, and academic discussions of psychic life
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