IJSP Number 4, 2022

53 a lot of discussions and controversies, both in psychology as well as in philosophy. In the end it seems an operation of displacement of everything subtle and non- material in order to replace it by observable, measurable, quantifiable and testable items. The overall goal being the same as that of the fathers of this science of the soul – psychology - who wanted to extract and to separate psychology from its traditional philosophical origins. What this ‘final cut’ succeeded to do was the elimination of the metaphysical aspect or the human soul, the old problem of its immortality and its relation to the divine. The programmatic goal was to finally get rid of the transcendence (of the soul) in order to emphasize, once again, the immanence of the concrete world. As such, psyc hology was on the ‘solid’ ground level of observable facts that are ready for the senses to be perceived and for the brain to interpret. Once there is only the brain to be studied, there remains no more room for the soul question or the spirit problem. As a consequence, the mind is reduced to an emergent epiphenomenon of complex brain activity, and the brain itself is viewed as no more and no less than a hyper-complex computer. It seems that every approach to the human soul has to avoid, one way or the other, the main issue, namely the soul problem; otherwise, it seems, that no psycho- logy can aspire to be a psychology – as a fully-fledged and well-established science. Every time this problematic issue of the soul appears in a field of psychology it has to be phagocytosed as an unwelcomed intruder or a bizarre and strange alien which has no right of existence in the appraised field of serious and objective ‘Science’. As such, psychology has to manage the study of the psyche without a soul and, more recently, of the brain without a mind; what counts are only observable and accountable behaviours and brain waves one can see on EEG or that can be visualized by tomographic computer imagery. On the other hand, there were, from the very beginning, voices that emphasized the study of the soul problem, voices that even pretended to discuss the spiritual level of existence inherent to every human. Such a voice was that of the founder of scientific psychology, Gustave Fechner, who established a formula to calculate the relation between sensory perception and inner, mental sensations. To name just a few on the same line of thought, who actually believed that there is more to the brain than just computations in a computer, we may name S. Freud, C.G. Jung, A. Maslow, S. Groff, V. Frankl, or O. Rank. We realize that the psychic and spiritual aspects of human beings were not ignored or forgotten since 1860 but studied by the most brilliant minds in the field. Still, it seems that a noetic level of existence gets always more or less marginalized by the official line of thought as if it were a strange virus you have to get rid of by a strong and up to date antidote. And, bringing forward the psychological-behavioural and cognitive aspects, encountered and emphasized in therapy and supervision as they are officially conceived and publicly accepted, we have an implicit cover-up operation that conceals and evacuates the real spiritual or noetic issues. It is maybe interesting to observe here that it was only in the late twentieth century that the second cybernetics, or the second systemic theories, recognized the new and unexpected idea that reality itself and human realities are co-constructed by both parties of a conversation or every interhuman exchange or transaction. The constructivist movement in systemic family therapy sets a great emphasize on the