PSYCHOLOGICAL PECULIARITIES OF METAPHORIC COMPREHENSION OF BASIC RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS BY SUBJECTS WITH DIFFERENT LEVELS OF RELIGIOUS ACTIVITY

Abstract

The article provides a theoretical substantiation and a psychological description of the empirical study of the peculiarities of metaphoric comprehension of basic religious concepts (such as «God», «soul», «faith», etc.) by subjects with different levels of religious activity. On one hand, contemporary science has developed a number of theories of metaphor, which in total make it possible to treat metaphorology as a relatively autonomous branch of knowledge, or at least view the metaphoric approach as an essential component of the linguistic turn of cognitive-oriented research. On the other hand, despite the considerable potential of the corresponding approach, it has not been researched in the study of the psychological aspects of Ukrainian’s religious image of the world. Therefore, author’s work becomes one of the first scientific researches in this area.

The results of the theoretical and empirical research help to state the following: firstly, in the context of the psychological analysis, the metaphor and the symbol are two in extricably interrelated aspects (internal and external) of the integrated process of comprehension, including religious concepts, with basic metaphors (for example, the metaphor of «fire» or the metaphor of «water») of one or an other culture corresponding to the archetypal structures of its carrier’s mentality; secondly, the «Pictogram» method can be used as a valid empirical tool for studying the process and results of metaphorization and as a means of explication through the graphic-symbolic expression of complex metaphoric images in theirs emanticintegrity; thirdly, the associative-metaphoric structure of religious image of the world of subjects with different levels of religious activity is characterized by a number of qualitative differences, represented and formalized in our study by comparingrelative frequency of the manifestation of fundamental symbolic categories and their separate components. Among such global categories that manifest themselves in the pictorial reproduction of the results of metaphoric comprehension of most religious concepts we find «heavenly» (astrological) and «earthly» (phytomorphic and zoomorphic) symbols, affectively charged «somatic» images («heart», «smile», etc.), attributes of religious culture («cross», «icon», etc.), as well as abstract (in particular, geometric) symbols. Their combination embodies the subjective complexity of the metaphoric religious image of the world, which, at the same time, becomes extremely abstract and visually concrete, affective-irrational and, at least, partly verbalized-rational.