I am writing a chapter for someone’s book on psychopathology through the ages. He asked me to tackle the subject of a supernatural understanding of psychopathology. Now, you’d think that would be a snap; it’s all about how ‘the devil made me do it’. But no. The supernatural can only truly be appreciated in contrast to the natural.The natural is what can be seen in nature. That is, the natural is what we can see and measure in some way. It is what comes to a person “naturally”. If I can touch it, see it, smell, it, taste it, or hear it, then it has meaning for me. If I cannot, if I have to experience it as a thought, then it might be a nice thought, but it has no scientific significance.Naturalism is the philosophy of the naturalist perspective, and it stands behind the human science of psychology. K A Aho, in the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, asserted that human beings are unlike other animals in that they are a “lived-body”, a dialogical way of being that is already engaged and embedded in a web of sociohistorical meanings. That is, we are born embodied into a culture, thrown into it as the philosopher Martin Heidegger has said. Aho claimed that the job of the human sciences is not to explain existence but to understand how we interpret ourselves, how we make meaning out of our experience of being in this world. A background of meanings is always already in place informing the development and direction of a world view. The background that informs the discipline of psychology is naturalism, but the background that informs the discipline of theology is anti-naturalism. Note I did not say supernaturalism.Philosophers regard naturalism to include everything that can be identified by the natural sciences so, naturalism is sometimes known as physicalism or materialism. The naturalist takes for granted various beliefs about the world and how things operate in the world.By contrast, non-naturalism, or anti-naturalism, is everything that goes beyond the physical world, and that has been termed the metaphysical. Thus for instance, phenomenology, which is a philosophy of subjective experience, is of the non-naturalistic perspective. Classic, Husserlian phenomenology is a system designed to escape the natural attitude. A naturalist theory cannot posit the existence of supernatural entities such as spirits or minds, and it cannot adopt a metaphysical stance in which the approach to reality characteristic of the natural sciences is not fundamental.One of the most frightening movies to come out in the early 1970s was ‘The Exorcist’, a tale of demon possession and the terror that attended attempts to force demons out of a demon-possessed person. However, when the film was re-released in 2000 it did not evoke exactly the same reaction; many people laughed at it in places where previously they had recoiled, and the reason suggested by some was because society had, in the interim, lost its sensitivity to the numinous.The numinous is a type of experience. It is that which impacts a person and leaves the impression that one has encountered something wholly other. It is mysterious and unsettling. The numinous feels like a whispered secret from another dimension, another world. Rudolph Otto stated that its mystery denotes, “…that which is hidden and esoteric, that which is beyond conception or understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar…that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny’, and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment…in a peculiar ‘moment’ of consciousness, to wit, the stupor before something ‘wholly other’, whether such an other be named ‘spirit’ or ‘daemon’ or ‘deva’, or be left without any name”.A common way to understand the supernatural is to say it involves what one believes while the natural refers to what one senses. However, if the supernatural is what a person believes, then it would include many things not usually considered to be supernatural. For instance, in categorical intentionality a person holds in his or her mind a construct (such as justice, equity, alterity or altruism). While nobody can see, taste, smell, or measure these things by the senses, people believe they exist. People hold them in their minds as being real, and they do so by way of intentional faith. Thus, phenomenology could be considered a supernatural system (but not many philosophers would agree). Taking this one step further, when we perceive something by the senses, we believe that what we are sensing corresponds to something that is actually there, something encountered in our lived body, and something the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty termed “perceptual faith”. In fact, the naturalism behind the observational process in the scientific method relies on such a belief. However, no one would call the scientific method a supernatural system.More popularly, then, that which is supernatural is attributed to forces beyond scientific understanding, the laws of nature, or the scientific method; it is above (super) nature and does not obey the laws of nature. Spirits of the dead communicate with the living (spiritism), and mediums and shamans are the service providers of choice. The supernatural is the realm of ghosts, spirits, the occult, the paranormal, the gods and angels. It is the realm of sickness and suffering attributed to such beings. Thus, naturalists believe that supernatural explanations for the etiology of psychological disorder refer to a primitive phase in the understanding of mental health.A person could spend a whole book trying to define psychopathology. He or she might please some and anger others. That is because many people do not like a “pathological” understanding of human suffering. So, I will bypass that kind of discussion and jump to something quite commonly used when mental health professionals have to provide a complete diagnosis. It is called the global assessment of functioning and it is a number between one and 100. The GAF scale can be thought of as the sum of two sub-scales. The pain scale is a range of negative numbers. The functioning scale is a range of positive numbers. As pain increases, functioning decreases; as functioning increases, pain decreases. They are inversely correlated with one another, and the number that results from combining them is the GAF.I think this is also a nice way of conceptualising psychopathology. Psychopathology is a mix of pain, or subjective suffering, and functional capacity.So, when someone hears voices of people who are not there, goes into the dumps of deep depression and entertains suicide, or climbs high into a manic episode, is there always a completely naturalistic explanation — one traceable to the brain? Is there an anti-naturalistic one that involves that person’s mind? Are there supernatural spirits tormenting that person? Or could it ever be all three?