The following article is published in three installments.
Introduction
Zeynep, a 37-year-old Turkish woman, comes from a secular family background. She has traveled to Bali and India on different occasions to participate in yoga and meditation courses. Her main goal for joining these activities was to heal her childhood traumas and release emotions related to unpleasant memories. During both courses, much to her surprise, the facilitators led the group in a chant of an ‘eastern mantra,’ the zikr[1] of the phrase La ilahe illallah. Zeynep says, “We all stood up, held hands, and started singing La ilahe illallah accompanied by a guitar, while also turning around hand in hand!”.
She explains that in her friend and family circles, public expressions of Islam, such as reciting religious expressions in Arabic, did not exist and were not appreciated. Therefore, hearing the Arabic phrase during the activity stirred mixed feelings in her; on the one hand, she felt ‘at home,’ but on the other, she could not help thinking how ‘that thing’ found her there—in a yoga and meditation course. Zeynep continues to engage in Sufi readings and practice yoga and meditation, which she sees as instruments that heal her ‘inner child’ on the path to reaching her own truth and finding her ‘authentic’ self.[2]
What particularly strikes my curiosity in Zeynep’s narrative is how a practice, previously unimaginable for someone like her—a ‘secular,’ ‘modern,’ and ‘free’ woman, as she describes herself—has become imaginable. What are the underlying conditions through which the zikr or chanting La ilahe illallah, laden with political implications, particularly in the Turkish context, becomes a sensible practice in specific situations for a secular individual? What are the processes by which certain religious and traditional practices get delinked from their particular cultural contexts and find new meanings? Lastly, in what ways are new connections and continuities drawn between past and present or old and new, such as between Sufi rituals and therapeutic methods for trauma processing?
To answer these questions, I will present an analysis of contemporary spiritual practices from the theoretical framework of “religion as mediation.” I argue that healing practices emerge as the primary practices of mediation through which individuals seek to transcend the ordinary and form links between a number of culturally meaningful dichotomies, such as external and internal, visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, constructed and authentic/real. I suggest that the notion of healing acquires its specific meaning through an interplay between religion and psychology, whereby old practices get refashioned within a psychologizing framework and acquire a ‘therapeutic’ label.
Once religious practices are framed as therapeutic, they are rearticulated in scientific terms and rationalized based on their effects on the psychological and physiological functions of the human body. The therapeutic serves as a frame within which individuals reorganize diverse past forms and draw links between them. Hence, the meaning of healing in contemporary spiritual forms extends far beyond a mere elimination of a disease, recovery from sickness, or the transformation of self. It rather refers to a ‘world repairing’ process, occurring at both personal and collective levels, whereby participants of the contemporary spiritual milieu gather the fragments of past forms and recombine them in personalized bricolages through the mediation of the therapeutic. In this way, past and present, old and new, sacred and secular, mystical and rational are recomposed into one coherent, consistent, and continuous whole where the individual can safely dwell.
This study draws primarily on data gathered between 2018 and 2020 during a joint research project funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.[3] The fieldwork spanned five different cities, and 72 interviews were conducted with individuals who either organized or participated in activities that fall outside of institutional or traditional forms of faith. As part of the research team, I took part in various events, workshops, circles, and retreats which involved different combinations of practices, such as yoga, meditation, shamanic and Sufi rituals, tai chi, qigong, homeopathy, storytelling, art therapy, astrology, breath therapy, energy healing, reiki, detox diets, ayurveda, mindfulness technics, regression therapy, feng shui, aromatherapy, family constellation, and numerology.
Some participants were primarily interested in affecting a change in their personal lives and some others, who saw themselves as ‘changemakers’, believed that change at the individual level would also work as a positive transformative force upon the larger community. The existing literature recognizes that the meaning of healing in contemporary spiritual forms is much more than a simple elimination of an illness or a disease. For instance, Meredith McGuire observed that for adherents of very different healing approaches, healing signified a particular type of ‘self-transformation’.[4] Beckford (1984) suggested that new religious and healing movements in North America and Europe cultivate and promote a distinctive relationship between ethics, spirituality, and healing.[5]
The majority of relevant academic works focus on the therapeutic techniques adopted by diverse groups, the different conceptualizations of body, mind, and soul in healing systems, and the ways healing effects and experiences are produced. However, the existing literature has not sufficiently explored the questions of why and how healing has become such a central theme in religious/spiritual discourse.[6] I believe the reason is because despite the recognition that the signification of the notion varies culturally, ‘to be healed’ is somehow assumed to be a major function and a desired state for all religious and spiritual cultures. In my analysis, I intend to problematize this assumption by providing a brief comparison as to the varying significations of healing in different spiritual and religious cultures existing in Turkey. In so doing, I aim to contextualize the central position of healing in contemporary spiritual forms and relate it to the rise of ‘therapy culture’ and the spread of the therapeutic language.
The paper is structured as follows: First, I review the media perspective in religious studies and explain how I use the therapeutic as a historically specific medium, a product of a scientific endeavor to articulate and manage human processes. Second, I present the meanings that the notion of healing has acquired in various spiritual and religious discourses in Turkey to avoid a generic understanding of the concept and to highlight the distinctive forms it has taken in contemporary spiritualities. Third, I discuss how the therapeutic as a medium interacts with religious mediums and remediates past forms, initiating connections between systems and processes that were previously considered to be discrete and incompatible. Finally, I examine how the initiated connections come to define healing as a ‘world repairing’ act, through which both the individual and the world are constructed as wholes made up of connected parts, rather than disconcerted fragments.
Culture, Mediation, and Therapeutic Media
The line of scholarship that views religion as mediation concentrates on the diverse ways whereby the ‘distance’ between the earthly and the divine or the visible and the invisible are mediated in different religious/spiritual traditions[7]. The focus, in this approach, is placed on the techniques and technologies referred to as ‘medium,’ through which communication with and about ‘the sacred’ becomes possible.[8] Here, a medium is not taken as a fixed genre or a simple vehicle of communication that embeds a particular content. Instead, a medium is seen as a cultural construction endowed with the power to serve a particular purpose, the value of which is also generated and embraced by groups or individuals in a given context.
Examples of a religious medium might involve both material and nonmaterial things, such as certain bodily practices, sensations, performances, words, books, images, prayers, prophecies, music, dance, spirit mediums, priests, healers, prophets, amulets, icons, oils, powders, incenses, liquids, shrines, temples, churches, mosques, audiocassettes, or videos (De Witte 2008: 19). In a similar vein, Quran is also a religious medium, and a variety of practices derived from it, such as reciting verses, producing Islamic calligraphy, or chanting the zikr of the phrase La ilahe illallah, are mediation practices through which the sacred word is channeled on earth in various aural and visual forms. Such practices are endowed with power in mediating the assumed ‘distance’ between the sacred and the profane.[9] Therefore, performing them is considered to incite a process of transformation that will progressively render humans ‘closer’ to the sacred presence.
Mediation is intrinsic to culture; experience is constructed and put into the narrative through the recognized forms of mediation in a particular cultural context. In this paper, the way I use ‘therapeutic’ is also related to a historically specific cultural framework which is termed ‘therapy culture’ to refer to the distinctive influence of psychotherapeutic language in shaping our understanding of what is sensible, possible, communicable, and doable.[10] My use of ‘therapeutic’ should not be confused with the term’s clinical connotations that inform the relationship between a patient and a therapist. Rather, by ‘therapeutic,’ I mean a range of practices and discursive tools that help mediate between a series of dichotomies, such as internal vs. external[11], conscious and unconscious, visible vs. invisible, known vs. unknown, self vs. the other, representation vs. reality, rational vs. irrational, chaos vs. order, discord vs. harmony, and conflict vs. unity.
These tools, which I will refer to as ‘therapeutic media’[12] from now on, involve a variety of concepts, narrative templates, idioms, causal frameworks, vocabularies, explanatory schemas, methods, techniques, procedures, treatments, and modes of intervention through which human beings build their world and make sense of it. Therapeutic media reifies that world and the ‘therapy culture’ by acting as an institutionally authorized medium, that draws links between various oppositions and oversees a sensible exchange between them. Different from religious mediums, therapeutic media does not necessarily claim to mediate between the sacred and profane. On the contrary, its emergence was a result of a search for materialistic explanations for the ‘higher mental powers of humans,’ which were traditionally associated with the realm of the divine.[13]
The history of therapeutic media goes back to the emergence of psychology as a modern scientific discipline in Europe and North America in the second half of the 19th century. Though a multiplicity of approaches within psychology and its cognates existed, the discipline evolved alongside and out of the secularization processes. It sought to find laws, procedures, and techniques with which the ‘hidden’ aspects of human thinking and behavior could be rendered not only visible and intelligible but also manageable.[14] It, therefore, is taken as a ‘technology of self,’ that constructed the contemporary apparatus for ‘being human’.[15] Thus, therapeutic media does not only incorporate tools for ‘world-building’, but it also directs humans in terms of how to inhabit that world.
Changing Meaning of Healing
Most scholars recognize the central role of healing in contemporary spiritual practices. However, there has been insufficient exploration into the specific meanings this complex notion has acquired within contemporary spiritual forms. I believe that the elevated status of healing in contemporary societies often obscures its potential negative connotations or its peripheral position within various religious and spiritual cultures. The excerpt from Hervieu-Léger’s work, wherein she describes healing as one of the three primary themes of new spiritualities, aptly illustrates my point:
The first thematic focus, and undoubtedly the most central, is that of the representations and expectations relating to health and healing. It will rightly be pointed out that the centrality of the theme of healing in contemporary forms of faith does not present any originality [emphasis added]. Protection against disease concerns the mortality of humans, which is already a central object of all known forms of magic. The return to health constitutes, in all human societies [emphasis added]one of the main purposes of ritual mobilization and supernatural powers. No religion fails to address, though in varying forms, the fundamental human urge to escape suffering and illness (Translation from French is mine).[16]
In the above passage, an unquestioned relationship is assumed between healing and spirituality, and healing is framed, in a way, as the ultimate function of religion/spirituality. I consider Régis Dericquebourg’s book, Croire et Guérir (To Believe and to Heal), particularly important in this respect, because he adopts a historical perspective and refrains from assigning a fixed position to healing in religious discourse. Dericquebourg’s main argument is that while healing was only peripherical within the matrix of other theological notions, it constitutes the central pillar of practices and doctrines for religions founded through the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.[17] Moreover, although terms like ‘healing,’ ‘health,’ ‘illness,’ and ‘suffering’ have been fundamental in shaping human cultures, they do not carry fixed meanings or clear positive/negative connotations. Instead, they work as metaphors for understanding how a social reality is constructed in a specific context.
Consequently, I believe that examining the various meanings of healing, while giving due attention to the authorized forms of mediation within the broader cultural context, can offer a more nuanced understanding of the concept. Below, I present a brief outline of spiritism and the signification of healing within the spiritist culture, yet another non-institutionalized form, which emerged and rose in popularity in the 1940s, alongside the secularization policies promoted and imposed by the Turkish Republic. The comparative framework will help to contextualize the therapeutic turn in contemporary spiritualities by allowing to trace the (dis)continuities between these two forms. The particular meaning of healing in these two distinct non-institutional forms is informed by the different positions they have taken vis- à-vis science, in particular, psychology and religion.
My focus, therefore, will be primarily on two things; first, the selectivity at work in how spiritism and more contemporary spiritual forms appropriated certain psychological concepts, and second, their attitude towards Sufi traditions, which have heavily influenced both the institutionalized form of Islam and heterodox religious forms practiced throughout the country.
Duygu Sendag is Assistant Professor at Uskudar University in Turkey. Sendag has a PhD in Civilization Studies from Ibn Haldun University in Istanbul.
[1] Zikr literally means ‘remembering.’ In Sufi culture, it is the practice of repeating the same Quranic expressions over and over as a way of remembering God. La ilahe illallah literally means ‘There is no God but God.’
[2] Pseudonyms are used for all interlocutors throughout the article.
[3] This research project was funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Project number 215K300).
[4] Meredith B. McGuire, Ritual Healing in Suburban America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988).
[5] James A. Beckford, “Holistic Imagery and Ethics in New Religious and Healing Movements,” Social Compass, 31(2-3) (1984), pp. 259-272.
[6] I use religion only with reference to the institutionalized forms of belief. My usage of spirituality, however, comprises both institutionalized and non-institutionalized forms.
[7] Hent de Vries, “Media Res: Global Religion, Public Spheres, and the Task of Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3–43; Birgit Meyer, “Religious Remediations: Pentecostal Views in Ghanaian Video-Movies,” Postscripts 1, no 2/3 (2005), pp. 155-181; David Morgan, “Introduction: Religion, media, culture: the shape of the field,” in Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture, ed.David Morgan (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 1-19.
[8] Jeremy Stolow, “Religion and/as Media,” Theory, Culture and Society 22/4 (2005), p. 125.
[9] Joel Robbins, “Keeping God’s distance: sacrifice, possession and the problem of religious mediation,” American Ethnologist 44/3 (2017), p. 464.
[10] Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of faith after Freud (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper Torchbooks, 1968); Eva Illouz, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions and the Culture of Self-Help (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008); Nikolas Rose, Inventing our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).
[11] It is also possible to formulate the distinction between internal and external through more psychological terminology: the ‘demands of the unconscious’ vs. the ‘imperatives of the superego.’
[12] Throughout the article, I use both ‘medium’ and ‘media.’ Though I do not see a difference in meaning, I keep both terms to differentiate between old and new mediums. Therefore, when I mention religious forms, I use ‘medium’ and for therapeutic ones, I use ‘media.’
[13] Wade E Pickren and Alexandra Rutherford, A history of modern psychology in context (New Jersey: Wiley, 2010): 8.
[14] Rose, Inventing our Selves, p. 11.
[15] Ibid., p. 2.
[16] Danièle Hervieu-Léger, “Bricolage vaut-il dissémination? Quelques réflexions sur l’opérationnalité sociologique d’une métaphore problématique,” Social Compass 52/3 (2005): 301.
[17] Dericquebourg defines a new category called ‘Healing Religions’ (Religions de Guérison) based on his analysis of the following four religions: Scientology, Christian Science, Antoinism, and Invitation of Life. See Régis Dericquebourg, Croire et guérir – Quatre religions de guérison (Paris: Dervy, 2001): 12.
