The Loss of the Self—Spiritual Abuse of Adults in the Context of the Catholic Church
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interest in spiritual abuse is a fairly recent phenomenon in research. Originally, it received attention only in the context of child sexual abuse perpetrated by the clergy in the Catholic Church before it was recognized as a specific form of abuse in its own right. In line with Paul Ricœur, I agree that a narrative best describes a person’s identity. I, therefore, give space to the voices of three women who were spiritually abused as adults in France in the context of new religious communities that originated after the Second Vatican Council: Sophie Ducrey, Anne Mardon and Marie-Laure Janssens. The social constructionist method allows the uniqueness of each of their narratives to be recognized, while also accounting for shared experiences such as the dynamics of control, desocialization and intrusion into the private spheres of life. Spiritual abuse, which is at the hinge point between the moral and spiritual and the psychological realms, is perpetrated by a spiritual leader who has power over women. The abuse serves to fulfill the psychological or sexual needs of the leader. Abuse of the conscience, theology and spirituality are the spiritual means used, alongside the psychological ones, to cause the women to become dependent. In the process, their desire for God and the affective needs that some may have are abused. The consequences are many, but the loss of self, of which faith is the core, summarizes it well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".