Analyse phénoménologique du mouvement du soi des professionnels de l’intervention en soins spirituels du Québec : éléments d’une clinique entre herméneutique et spiritualités, la Sophiatrie

The phenomenological analysis of the movement of the Self was carried out with seventeen subjects, speakers in spiritual care (ISS), having journeyed towards a profession opened to spirituality and opening to their spirituality. Our research approach is based on phenomenology and is anchored in a constructivist paradigm. We sought to understand the formalization of a new profession which gives access to a form of spiritual and secular psychology put into practice by means of non-confessional spiritual care. This particular practice of spiritual care within secular health institutions made us question the epistemological sources of self hermeneutics which goes through both the impact of the history of secularity, which recognizes the cultural and religious rupture. This research provided a better understanding of the spiritual journey of the ISS and an understanding of the nature of secular spiritual care that engages the personal spirituality of the ISS. It had also made it possible to propose a model of accompaniment which is located at the interface of spiritual care and psychotherapy. The movement of the Self is first expressed in the knowledge of one's own wounds, of one's humanity and in a relationship to oneself from the point of view of cultural, religious, social and / or institutional normativity. Then, the subject seeks to come to a new relationship with himself that he builds while moving in the direction of an autonomy to conquer - self-government - which describes a form of spiritual maturity opened to other people’s spirituality. Finally, the achievement of this maturity is made by a poetic creation of the Self which is the acceptance of the Self that allows the ISS to deploy its spirituality in the heart of a secular space at the service of the spiritual need of patients. The content analysis of the movement of the Self has made it possible to define four evolutionary stages through which the deployment of a spiritual psychology specific to spiritual subjects is accomplished: (1) figuration as a spiritual thought that is sought in causal movement; (2) the configuration which refers to the spiritual thought engaged in the construction of a sense of itself, of a story of its own and of a spirituality to live; (3) refiguration as a thinking that criticizes and questions itself (this is recursion according to Morin 2006); (4) the transfiguration which is the moment when the thought is validated, occurs and starts again in a retrocausal movement. 6 This last and fourth stage of the movement of the Self allows to reveal a form of wisdom which approach is centered on the discovery, the construction and the expression of the Self. Indeed, the spiritual subject can discover himself and take himself as the object of consciousness with an universal scope, in other words, that he projects himself adequately in the common space, between his spirituality and the dominant secular thought . This in-between is what characterizes wisdom - Sophia in Greek - insofar as the subject is able to find a meeting point between his individual history and the common history. This wisdom makes him find himself at the right time, at the right place (this is the kairos) and helps him to build his own story subjected to the vagaries of existence. Then, his human and spiritual experience are expressing his desire for the indeterminate chained to causality. The results regarding the spiritual and secular psychology gave rise to a distinction between religious belief and religious spirituality. In the first case, the subject finds himself in a form of self-culture (Foucault, 1979) which aims at the only authentic relationship with the self; in the second one, it places the subject in a situation to surpass oneself (Hadot, 1993) which positions him in a continuous quest for meaning. In short, this movement of the Self appears to be subjected to a specific organization of thought where the quest for meaning is accomplished in a recurrence which abolishes it without respite (there is no meaning) while affirming it without stopping (the meaning is the meaning itself). This movement of thought is in fact a movement of the self which is lost in the formation of an inductive and deductive self-knowledge and which describes the idea that "the sense of meaning is a meaning that has no meaning". However, it makes it possible to reach a meeting point between the self and the other, between the interior and the exterior, between the inside and the outside; it also allows to judge the judgments, criticize the criticism and overcome prejudices about oneself or the world. Finally, Sophia (Self-recognition) is the anchor point of the whole movement of the Self, making the object of our clinic essentially focused on the principle of recursion (Selfcriticism).

Keyphrases: subjectivation, Spiritual care, Wisdom, Individuation, Self-knowledge, Phenomenology