Faith, Meaning, and Anomalous Healing. A Phenomenological-Relational Interpretative Framework
Faith, Meaning, and Anomalous Healing. A Phenomenological-Relational Interpretative Framework

Author(s): João Miguel Alves Ferreira
Subject(s): Philosophy, Psychology, Neuropsychology, Personality Psychology, Behaviorism, Phenomenology
Published by: Presa Universitara Clujeana
Keywords: faith; healing; phenomenology; anomalistic psychology; placebo; contemplative neuroscience; meaning response; relationality; generalized entanglement; spirituality;
Summary/Abstract: Reports of healing associated with faith, contemplative practice, prayer, ritual, and interpersonal intention persist across cultures and continue to challenge purely reductionist interpretations. Responses to such phenomena are often polarised between dismissal as artefact and affirmation as proof of supernatural or contested causal interpretation. This monograph proposes a phenomenological-relational interpretive framework for anomalous healing reports. Faith is conceptualised not as magical belief, but as a lived configuration characterised by intentional alignment, existential surrender, affective trust, and perceived embeddedness within a wider field of meaning. Such states may influence healing through interacting pathways including expectancy, psychoneuroimmunology, autonomic regulation, behavioural transformation, relational support, and altered self-processing. The work further examines whether concepts derived from Weak Quantum Theory and generalised entanglement may be used cautiously as heuristic vocabularies for contextuality and relational non-separability in complex human systems, rather than as established physical mechanisms. Drawing on neuroscience, contemplative science, anomalistic psychology, phenomenology, and medical humanities, the monograph argues that anomalous healing reports deserve neither credulous acceptance nor reflexive dismissal, but disciplined interdisciplinary interpretation. The framework remains provisional, empirically revisable, and open to multiple ontological readings.

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