In an article in the French newspaper Le Figaro, journalist Pascal Sank addressed one of the major problems of psychology: defining the concept of the spirit among scientists, clerics, politicians, secularists and even ordinary people.
The author says that the term, originally religious, was erased from the French lexicon after the revolution, but it was proved in its secular form and gradually obscured in the successive French translations of Freud's writings. Even after the analyst Jean Laplanche For the psychologist.
Although Freud often used the term "spirit" in its religious or literary sense, this term was replaced by "psychic apparatus," as Olivier Manoni, who worked on the new translation of Freud, explained. This term is a bad translation of the term, Spirit.
"The concept of the soul can not be reduced to an equation because it is something that lives in us, but it does matter to us, guides us, and gives us meaning," says psychologist Vivian Thebodier.
The spirit of life
"The spirit is that power and this desire that helped her get up again when she was completely collapsed and enabled her to go alone to Kazakhstan to adopt her little girl," said Caroline Coldby, a journalist and television producer.
"The spirit is the force of life," Vivian said. "This is the force that makes us walk in directions we never imagined 20 years ago."
Psychologist Carl J. Young - who knows the nature of the spirit beyond the realm of reason - is constantly seeking meditation and drawing to establish contact with what the unique counselor calls the soul.
"Without a soul, we lose the best part of us," he says. "It's the sensitivity that opposes the physical nature of the body, but it completes it into a whole entity."
Vivienne Thebodier believes that the brain creates the soul, and that it generates thought, including the internal thought that gives us consciousness. Neurologist Antonio Damasio asserts that spiritual experiences - whether religious or non-religious - are mental processes.
Pineal gland
Two studies in neuroscience (one in Taiwan in 2007 and one in Cambridge in 2016) have shown that the pineal gland is the site of interactions when one meditates or prays, so this small endocrine is the center of our spiritual life.
In another article on the same subject, Catherine Ternick says in a provocative interview with Le Figaro about her book, a search for the last spiritual soul of her husband, who died on the same evening in November when he was in the garden.
"The spirit is this mysterious floating object, which is difficult to understand except by the gift of wisdom," she explains. "Our technological world is not conducive to spiritual experiences, because modern life has created a man who lives in a terrible internal split."
At the end of her conversation, she calls upon objects and places "with the eyes of the soul", ie, with eyes "to give these things and places a biological whiff that gives them a real depth, and thus these things have a real poetic and aesthetic beauty."