Spirituality: Explicit and implicit. Hindrances to the scientific status of research on spirituality?

Although spirituality is a popular subject of research in many fields of science about man today, there still are problems with defining it. Their causes, at least in psychology, though unfounded, include distortions reflecting the scientist’s personal bias: apologetic on the one hand and anti-fideist on the other. Bias of the first type often stems from the beliefs, held by the author of a given concept, that go beyond the paradigm of science. This refers to two concepts recognizing the existence of the spiritual dimension of the human being as substantially different from the psychological dimension: V. E. Frankl’s logotheory, being a concept of the spiritual dimension as the source of the need for meaning, and D. Helminiak’s concept, according to which spirituality is the realization of the principle of authentic transcendence of the self. Such concepts are referred to as explicit. However, there are also explicit concepts of spirituality acceptable in academic psychology; the described example is the concept of spirituality developed by J. Averill. Bias of the second type dominated Western psychology for a long time. It may be the cause for the term “spirituality” not being used by the authors of the concepts whose distinctive features appear in this article. These are the implicit concepts of spirituality. Their three examples are: Terror Management Theory (developed by T. Pyszczyński, J. Greenberg, and S. Solomon), the Meaning Maintenance Model (authored mainly by T. Proulx and S. Heine), and Józef Kozielecki’s transgressive concept of man. They include similar elements, but the transgressive concept appears to be the most useful. The conclusion contains proposals of research using the ideas of meaning, coping with absurdity, and the form of transgression as ones that lead to spiritual transformation.