Incommensurability: an obstacle to the integration of psychotherapy and spirituality. the desert fathers as an overcoming epistemological paradigm

In recent years, the body of literature that deals with trying different ways of integrating spirituality into psychotherapeutic practice has grown exponentially. Probably the interest in this topic has arisen with regard to the inclusion in the DSM-IV of the new category "Religious or Spiritual Problem" (Code V62.89). Until then, religious or spiritual issues had been viewed in the clinical practice as symptoms of some mental illnesses like, for example, the delusions with religious content typical of schizophrenics. But with the fourth edition of the aforementioned manual, there began to be an interest in the study of spirituality as it expresses a fundamental aspect of personality. In this vein, various models of integration of spirituality and psychotherapy have been formulated. Our intention is to study the problem of incommensurability as one of the epistemological and methodological problems that supposes a project of this type. We present the writings of the Desert Fathers as an explanatory model that guarantees an epistemologically legitimate integration of spiritual traditions with psychotherapeutic practice. And for that reason, we argue that their writings could constitute a way to overcome the relationship of mutual incommensurability that apparently exists between scientific rationality and spirituality.