Finland's earliest exposure to Christianity—roughly a thousand years ago—was to its Eastern Orthodox branch. In the twelfth century, however, Swedish-led Crusades pushed Eastern Orthodoxy back to the eastern part of what is now Finland. In the sixteenth century Swedish influence brought about another change—the country's mass conversion to Lutheranism.1 Karelia, in the east, remained largely Orthodox. During the nineteenth century, after Sweden was forced to cede the territory of Finland to Russia, of which it became a Grand Duchy, the Czars began to encourage Finland's version of the romantic nationalism sweeping Europe. In Finland's quest to become a modern nation like Germany, its cultural elites spread out across the territory in search of a body of folklore that would compare to Germany's. They found in Karelia a mythic fons et origo of “Finnish” culture [8]—despite the clear differences between the two, and particularly religious differences. This attribution of sacredness to Karelia is of foundational importance to the Finnish lament “revival”2 and to “Karelianist” politics ([8-10]) which space does not allow me to describe.

Ketola and Martikainen, in their study of contemporary religious communities in Finland [11], divide these communities into 10 categories, including “Western Esoteric Traditions and the New Age,” whose manifestations would include groups/congregations and magazines [12] that develop themes familiar around the world of contemporary religion/spirituality. For example, a Yoga school in Helsinki is said to emanate “spirituality, well-being, individuality, and sociality” [13]. Junnonaho ([14], pp. 88, 93) has found widespread acceptance of what he calls “New Age ideas” both in surveys of Finns and in New Age institutions in Finland—“metaphysical book shops, groups of psychic and mental development, alternative health centers, and practically all possible groups of so-called alternative religiosity.” A spiritual eclecticism or “mixing of codes” pervades such institutions and their counterparts elsewhere in the world [15].

Having invoked the label “New Age,” it is important to explain why I prefer instead, following Charles Taylor, to speak of ours as the “Age of Authenticity” [16].3 Although some do find a consistent set of core beliefs and practices across the scope of “New Age” phenomena [17,18],4 for others the sheer diversity of spiritualities, practices, beliefs, etc. that are commonly described under the rubric of “New Age” is a sign that the term is problematic [1]. Moreover, at least in my recordings, lamenters never self-identified with the New Age, but did speak movingly of their commitment to authenticity.

What I address in this paper is the surprising connection between a value (authenticity) that receives its fullest treatment, perhaps, in the works of psychologist Carl Rogers [19], but that turns out to be regarded by ÄI-Lamenters as sacred. This can just as well be described as the penetration of religious notions into the psychological sphere, or the penetration of psychological notions into the sphere of religion. Kivivuori argued in the 1990s [20] that a psychological mindset was penetrating all social institutions—in Finland as elsewhere. However, more recent work by Utriainen, Hovi, and Broo [5], underscores the mutual interpenetration of sacred and secular discourses pertaining to healing. “Officially secular spaces, such as hospitals have been in a modern north-European country such as Finland, include ‘pockets’ where religious language (but in a changed form…) or other practices are now increasingly found” ([5], p. 6). Utriainen and her colleagues cite “‘therapy’, ‘holism’ and ‘spirituality’ [as…] some of the key labels by the use of which religious practices and beliefs enter many … formerly secular institutions and places” ([5], p. 8). However, the creation of that kind of hybridity relies equally on invocations of “authenticity” as in this advertisement for a course described as an aito identiteettikurssi intense löytäjälle “authentic-identity course to find yourself” ([20], p. 11), translation by the present author).

Before turning to a thorough description of Finnish lament courses, the next major section paints, with large brush strokes, the Western historical context for the emergence of religious and therapeutic hybrids in Finland. That context is the emergence in the West over the last two-and-a-half centuries of a modern self obsessed tendency, with a very particular sort of “experience” and a very particular kind of “authenticity,” and the more recent partial displacement of organized religions by spiritualities. Note that “authenticity” is commonly used in two very different senses by, for example, folklorists [21] (as well as performers) versus sociologists (e.g. Heelas) and anthropologists (Lindholm [22]) of religion. We will be concerned with authenticity as “faithfulness” not to tradition, but “to the self” [23].

It is important to acknowledge both the deep historic roots of contemporary religious subjectivism as part of the Western “genealogy of the self” [24], and its relative uniqueness to late- or post-modernity. Thus on the one hand, some features of the modern Authentic Self (features that Heelas, for example [25], labels “New Age”) have Augustinian and even classical Greek roots. Yet the emergence in the West of a self that is both source and object of spiritual practice, and the apotheosis of experience and authentic self-expression—started in the seventeenth century and blossomed in the late eighteen century. These flowerings included Pietism in Finland ([26] and [27], pp. 49-50) and elsewhere ([28], p. 302), and Methodist “experience meetings” ([24], p. 887).

What Nikolas Rose calls “the psy disciplines,” i.e., “the psychosciences and disciplines— psychology, psychiatry, and their cognates”—have become crucial to modern technologies of the self, including those reproduced in Finnish lament courses, especially to the extent that they reflect “psy.” “It has become impossible to conceive of personhood, to experience one's own or another's personhood, or to govern oneself or others without psy,” ([29], pp. 2, 34).

At approximately the same time as Methodist meetings emerged, psychiatry was taking shape in Scotland, Germany, and France [30]. The particular French history invoked here illustrates the interweaving of psychiatry and religion. According to Goldstein, pioneering nineteenth century French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) worked and wrote at a time of particular religious fervor, focused for example on healing miracles. Charcot's article on the topic, though intended as a pronouncement of psychiatric authority was, “like so much of the activity of the Salpêtrière school, … a response to religious life in France, in this case the flourishing miracle cult at Lourdes” [31] as cited by [32], p. 381.)

At the time Charcot's article appeared, British psychiatry and its scientific model of the self was also entering into dialogue with popular religious trends like demonology and Pentecostalism. Hayward [3] explores the exchange between these currents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The writings and practices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century spiritualists and Pentecostalists reveal the influence of psychiatry, indeed. However, this was not a simple story of scientific models driving out religious beliefs;

rather, a much more textured process took place in which spiritual practitioners actively incorporated contemporary psychiatric, neurological, and epidemiologic knowledge as part of a general attempt to make sense of their supernatural experiences. The incipient disciplines of psychiatry and biomedicine did not depose religious conceptions of exorcism and possession; instead, psychological and neurological concepts became just one more part of the practical repertoire of techniques upon which demonologists drew in order to achieve their spiritual aims and personal goals. Scientific ideas that might have been formulated to advance the projects of materialism or secularization could always be expropriated by religious practitioners to sustain an antagonistic program of magical or supernatural practice [3], p. 39).

Meanwhile, psychotherapy was largely unknown in the early twentieth-century U.S., but underwent a wild popularization between 1906 and 1910. This historical moment is of interest to us here because it involved an unprecedented collaboration between American psychotherapists and churches. Caplan [33] has shown us that psychotherapy's popularization in the U.S. can be traced, largely, to the “Emmanuel Movement.” Originating in Boston's Emmanuel [Episcopal] Church, the movement entailed an “unprecedented medical-pastoral venture.” “The psychotherapy movement's appeal transcended denominational boundaries: Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Universalists all enlisted in the cause” [33], p. 290). Notably this tentative merger of interests did not involve the sacralization of the self and its authentic expression. These emerged only with New Age per se, later in the century.

These French, British, and American histories can be seen as predecessors of postmodernity, with its unabashed hybrids of the modern and the traditional, and as foreshadowings of those contemporary ideas of “personal growth” therapy and personal spirituality seen in lament and other healing courses in Finland. In our “Age of Authenticity,” “therapies multiply which promise to help you find yourself, realize yourself, release your true self, and so on” [16], p. 475). During the twentieth century, self-control and a high tolerance for role-playing came to be regarded as “self-destructive and fraudulent. Instead, we want to discover and express our essential selves in rapturous church services, in charged therapy sessions … [and] intense personal relationships” [22], p. 65).

We can think of the byways through which what Heelas calls “New Age” thought and practice emerged fully into twentieth-century currents as long roads with origins in the nineteenth century, or as radicalizations of nineteenth-century trends.

The New Age provides a spiritual—and thus radicalized—rendering of the assumptions and values of [nineteenth-century] humanistic expressivism. Humanistic expressivists think in terms of self-development. They … concentrate on what it is to be a person … [and] have faith in what the inner, psychological realm has to offer. Attaching significance to self-exploration and seeking to express all that one can be, their values include “awareness,” “insight,” “empathy,” “creativity,” “autonomy,” “authenticity,” being loving” and seeking “fulfillment” [7], p. 115; emphasis added).

So, despite its historic roots, the massive subjectivization of Western culture—including mass/popular culture, cut off to a large extent from organized religion—only occurred in the twentieth century, as Taylor, Heelas, Lindholm, and others have noted. And it is only with this twentieth-century popularization of new forms of spirituality that religion and its connections with nation-states (see the state religions of Europe, some of which are rapidly losing members) is increasingly being displaced:

[What] Charles Taylor calls “the massive subjective turn of modern culture”—favors those forms of [“subjective-life”] spirituality which resource one's subjectivities and treats them as a fundamental source of significance, and undermines those forms of religion which do not. Experienced as the heart of life and flowing through the unique experiences that comprise personal life, holistic spirituality can appeal to the increasing number of free spirits in the culture—people who exercise their autonomy by trusting their own experience to find ways of “deepening,”5 thereby “elevating,” the quality of their subjective lives, their intimate relationships, their sense of fulfillment and authenticity [34], p. 57, emphasis added).

What Heelas calls “subjective-life spirituality” is not simply individualization by another name. Subjectivism refers to the apotheosis of “forms of spirituality which cater for subjective-life tasks-offering individuals a sense of harmony and serenity, for example” [35], p. 78. However, this “subjectivism” need not be of the Lone Ranger sort.

The direction that subjective-life may take as it extends out beyond its autonomous basis can vary. Our findings suggest that this variation can be thought of in terms of a spectrum between two poles. At one extreme lies what we will call individuated subjectivism and at the other relational subjectivism, with many intermediate positions in between [35], pp. 95-96, emphasis added).

Like “individuated subjectivism,” “relational subjectivism” embraces “self-expression and fulfillment …doing ‘what feels right,’ ‘following your heart,’ [and] ‘being true to yourself,’” but “relational subjectivity is all about ‘the we of me’—developing one's own subjective-life, be/coming oneself, relating to one's life, through one's relationships” ([35], pp. 80, 97).

Relational subjectivism is indeed what we find in Finnish lament courses. ÄI-Lamenters invoke something like the concept of relational subjectivism precisely, if seemingly paradoxically, when explaining the sanctity of lamenting in contemporary groups. But the significance of the “relational subjectivism” model becomes even clearer insofar as it helps explain something mentioned again in the Conclusion—the predominance of women in lament courses.

We have sketched the background of rapidly spreading forms of spirituality, many of which include a healing element, and their Finnish incarnation. It is time now to paint the background of Finnish lament courses in particular, i.e., tracing the history of Karelian lament and adding an ethnographic description of the courses.

One might regard crying with words and melody (lament) as a global tradition, as some teachers regard shamanism. Traditional performances of ritual lament were once extremely widespread [44]. In many societies lamentation served to hasten and safeguard a dead soul's journey to the other world. This and other ritual functions were pervasive in the ancient Near East (see [45], for a description of five millennia of lamenting in Egypt). Crucially for our purposes, a magico-ritual function defined itkuvirret ‘laments’ in Karelia—an area straddling the Finnish-Russian border (see Figure 1, below)8— as well as among Komis, Mordvins, and other Finnic peoples (see Figure 2)—until the 1970′s (personal communication: Eila Stepanova, August 2010) when, some 70 years after the disappearance of wedding laments, funerary laments were becoming moribund [21,46-49].

Laments' performative function—guiding the dead to the afterworld—rendered them sacred for thousands of years, at least in the eyes of women. Their perspective contrasted sharply with the views, for example, of Solon, Plato, and other Greeks who each tried to at least control if not eradicate this women's practice. And from the birth of the Christianity until roughly a century ago, churchly pronouncements against lament became more and more harsh, and the implementation of bans on lament apparently became more violent ([50] and [44]. On the surface it is ironic that an increasing number of Finnish women accept as pyhä, ‘sacred,’ what churches have for 2000 years attempted to eradicate. But it is in fact not ironic at all, since the sacredness of this women's tradition has probably always been a prime motivation for attacks on it, whether from Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or the apparent secularism of recently urbanized populations [44].

In many Karelian regions, villagers were baptized members of the Russian Orthodox Church. However, priests were unable to visit these villages more than once a year, at which time babies born in the preceding year would be baptized, weddings would be blessed or sacralized, and funerals over which women had largely officiated—particularly by performing laments—would be recapitulated following Orthodox ritual. In such Karelian villages, kansan ortodoksisuus ‘folk Orthodoxy’ predominated. This village religion included the following beliefs (interview with Alexandra Stepanova, April 2009):

“There was some kind of communication between the departed, and the living, those who remained, relatives”

Scholars like Elizabeth Tolbert have described expert lamenters (itkiänaiset, ‘lament women’) as “female shamans.” Some knew spells as well as they knew the lament register. Also, even if itkijänaiset did not make the soul journey along with the dead in funeral laments (as male shamans might in different circumstances), they could certainly be said to enter trance states. Only thus could their sung-wept feelings take on the magical power through which they blessed the dead, brides, etc., as Tolbert makes clear:

To understand the musical procedures used in the lament [including musical masking], the shamanistic elements in the lament must be kept in mind: magico-religious power associated with lamenting as evidenced in the etymological associations of lamenting with sorcery, verbal descriptions of the power of the lament and its necessity for the success of ritual, the dangers of lament performance and soul loss, and shamanistic cosmological conceptions which show up in the form and function of lament [48], p. 54).

The micro level of [traditional Karelian] lament structure consists primarily of the musical consequences of the icons of crying. They signal and validate the presence of spiritual power by their direct index of emotional involvement. The ritual context of the lament suggests overwhelmingly that the micro-tonal and micro-rhythmic variations are essential to the process of creating an effective performance, and are not merely the result of individual catharsis. These micro-parameters are an indication that the lamenter has reached a trance-like state and successfully contacted the other world ([51], p. 90).

The preceding has indicated various reasons that Karelian itkuvirret, ‘laments,’ would be considered pyhä, ‘sacred,’ and why it is that I present even a highly modified version of the lament tradition as a spiritual practice. It is to these modified neolaments that we must now turn.

Karelian lament has had “three lives” [39]. The first stretched from an era temporally undefined except by its characterization as one of “tradition” to roughly 1900, when performances of wedding laments disappeared and funeral laments began to decline. The second life began after World War II, when Karelian women lamented the loss of their homes—a loss shared by several hundred thousand Karelians evacuating their villages in territory newly transferred to the Soviet Union (a form of war reparations demanded of Finland). Throughout the first and second lives of Karelian lament, the itkukieli ‘lament language [i.e., lament register]’ was mandatory for all performances, both ritual and “occasional” or personal/situational laments (personal communication: Eila Stepanova, August 2010). The features of the lament register included free meter, pervasive alliteration, and —most important by far for our purposes—a conventional set of at least 1400 “metaphoric” or “formulaic expressions,” “circumlocutions,” or “substitute names”9 obligatorily used to avoid addressing the dead, or the bride, etc. “directly,” i.e., by kin term [52].

Why this esoteric register of Karelian? As itkijänaiset ‘lament women’ have explained to at least two generations of researchers, the true addressees of their laments—several classes of spirits-understood only this register. Most mortals had a harder time with it. It is possible that itkijänaiset from interrelated Finnic groups that shared overlapping lament traditions—Ingrians and Vepsians, for example—understood each other (personal communication: Eila Stepanova, August 2010), but that Finns, who may never have had a lament tradition of their own,10 would not have understood much at all of old Karelian laments.

Although the idea that a metaphoric and thus “indirect” register would appeal to spirits might strike some as surprising, it is in fact noted in the linguistic anthropological literature. The trick is to take the itkukieli (the traditional Karelian lament register) as one of a class, i.e., as an “honorific register,” which is a term intended to include all of the phenomena Silverstein mentions:

Note how all maximally respectful language… mitigates communication. Whether one is talking about speech level phenomena in the classic cases of Japanese, Javanese (Errington 1988), etc., or mother-in-law or similar registers in Aboriginal Australian societies, or speech of-and-to the gods in Yurok (Buckley 1984), all the indexically marked ways of speaking have this attenuated and/or tropic denotational effect, in effect constituting denotation by “hint” and by allusion [53], pp. 349-350).

Revivalist lament courses that started in the late 1990s, and particularly courses taught by ÄI-Lamenters, represent the third life of Karelian lament. In this third life, the Finnish language—not Karelian—dominates; thus one must speak Finnish to participate in ÄI-lament courses. Most of these courses are gatherings of ten or so women as students, together with Pirkko Fihlman and Tuomas Rounakari, the man who almost always co-teaches courses with Fihlman and a successful musician. The two-and-a-half day weekend courses consist of lectures on the Karelian tradition, the “revival,” lament technique, etc.; the playing of archival recordings of old lamenters and a video recording of the very first course (1998); in-class singing and lamenting exercises; homework (polishing the lament that each student performs on Sunday); and, ideally, a debriefing Sunday afternoon as the course ends. Students are middle-class women, i.e., those who can afford both the time and the registration fee. Courses attract people of many professions, but consistently women who practice various forms of therapy—psychodrama, art, and sex therapy, for example—or who have allied professions such as psychiatric nursing. Over the years of offering courses, probably at least 20% of the 700 trainees have had a strong Karelian background. Finally, it is not unusual to have several students who have taken, if not lament classes, other “healing” courses.

According to my interviews, a minority of lament course alumnae “become lamenters.” The path for those who do wish to continue is typically to take more courses. Out of some 750 students who have taken lament courses since the late 1990s, only a dozen or less have later performed in public. It is unclear how many of the 750 continue to lament in private for personal benefit. Somewhat surprisingly, the few who have gone on to perform publicly are neither consistently from the east (Karelia) nor western Finland. Moreover, when those who lack any known Karelian roots and indeed who originate from Pohjanmaa (mentioned above) do become lamenters, the irony of their lives is not lost on them.

What makes the lament courses unique vis-à-vis other healing courses in Finland and elsewhere is the balance struck in lament courses between psychodynamic concepts of therapy or healing and a very particular linguistic-cultural-ritual-musical tradition. ÄI-Lament teachers mention both the sacredness of traditional lamenting and such hybrid phrases such as itkuprossessi, the ‘lament process,’ which evokes the formation of trust and intimacy in the lament group, the preparation of one's own lament, and the catharsis experienced in lamenting before the group.

Pirkko Fihlman's ideas of language, derived from older generations of lamenters, contrast sharply with those of many psychotherapists and assertiveness trainers in affirming the importance of learning a particular linguistic convention to be used in self-expression—namely, minäviesti or “I-language” [54]. I-language is taught or at least advocated in other Finnish settings, including a graduate program in art therapy (as reported by a student whom I interviewed) and Lutheran confirmation classes [55-56].

Why should ÄI-Lament courses devote substantial amounts of time to teaching about Karelian, rather than Finnish, lamenting? According to Nenola [21,57], there had never been a lament tradition in western Finland. This fact accords with a widespread stereotype that tends to be reproduced by Finns and outsiders alike—the stereotype of the “silent” or “emotionally inexpressive Finn” [58-61]. A recent survey I conducted in Finland (n = 200) revealed agreement with the stereotype that “Finns” have difficulty expressing their feelings (Wilce, unpublished data). I was taken aback when a focus group of six university students in Jyväskylä not only indicated agreement with the stereotype, but asserted that the situation has not changed with their generation. The stereotype best fits men, and those living in western Finland, the extreme being the region of Pohjanmaa or Ostrobothnia, with a strong Swedish heritage.

Pirkko Fihlman (interview, 2003) has described lament as a tool to help modern people, by which she means modern Finns. According to her ÄI-Lament co-teacher Tuomas Rounakari, one can look at the lament revival as offering to western Finns elements of eastern culture (that of eastern Finns but particularly Karelians, most of whom now live in Russia, not Finland). In lament courses, Fihlman or Rounakari will occasionally draw explicit contrasts between the Karelian cultural tradition they are teaching and western Finnish culture. For example, Rounakari has said more than once that in Karelia people say, “Cry that thing until it's ready/ until the end,” while the western Finnish tendency is to tell someone who is upset or crying, “You'll manage, you'll manage—so don't collapse there beside me” (said during the 2009 Annual Meeting of ÄI-Lamenters.).

We return to such representations of Finns in the Conclusion, in discussing the stakes for lament courses. Meanwhile, in section 2 below, I present an analysis of lamenters' discourse, and especially their echoing of other discourses.

Whatever it might owe to classical Greek and biblical discourse (e.g. Romans 7:22, II Corinthians 4:16), we see a very marked movement in the last several centuries of western discourse toward an embrace of “internalization” and “the trope of interiority” (“compelling metaphors of the spatial distinctions of inner and outer” that enable the imagination of “the internal fixity of the self and… of gender identity [62], p. 171) with the acceleration traceable to the rise and spread of Protestant theologies of the person [63]. Throughout the nineteenth century psy-disciplines played their role, but we can attribute the increasing dominance of the interior model of the self to psychoanalysis in particular (see Wachtel's [64] critical account of this history).

The trope of interiority plays a major role in ÄI-Lament courses. It is not necessarily the case that interiority or internalization per se are valued above exteriority and externalization. In fact, the conviction on the part of ÄI-Lament teachers that the point of lamenting is catharsis, or the authentic expression of what is inside, does not at all threaten the notion of the self's residence in an inner castle of some sort. It is the inner self whose voice or “contents” must be expressed, and that conviction is key to understanding Finnish manifestations of expressivist subjective-spirituality. In the 2009 annual meeting of the ÄI-Lamenters, Paavo Kärkkäinen (a life coach with much experience lamenting, and one of the panelists in the annual meeting's featured discussion) described lamenting as both a promising means of purging oneself of very deep feelings, and a practice that must avoid the pitfalls of hörheltäminen, ‘psychobabble.’ In response to Kärkkäinen, a female Lutheran priest in the audience said that true lamenting “is not verbiage/rhetoric but inner feeling.”11

Pirkko Fihlman of ÄI-Lamenters sometimes depicts “inner feelings” as the object of healing via Hoitava Itku, ‘Healing Lament,’ courses). She said, for example, “And this old Karelian lament tradition is that by which we healed those sisäisiä tunteita, ‘inner feelings.’” Fihlman stresses the link between the Karelian lament tradition and ÄI-classes, asserting that traditional lamentation was about healing inner feelings and that Fihlman's practice is but the latest link in that tradition.

To be the latest link in a tradition does not mean pure replication. ÄI-Lamenters are innovators and not just replicators. They encourage deep self-expression, not literal faithfulness to traditional forms. From Pirkko Fihlman's perspective, despite making little use of the traditional metaphor corpus, what ÄI-Lamenters teach is the itkukieli—simply modernized. In fact she says that only the itkukieli is capable of reaching and healing “the deep feelings” about which her students compose their laments. Quite often, Fihlman and her co-teacher Tuomas Rounakari use the phrase kuvakieli ‘picture [pictorial] language’ for (their version of) the itkukieli. “The picture-language speaks syvemmin ‘more deeply’ [than everyday Finnish],” said Fihlman during an interview.

In asking Fihlman and others about the semiotic register appropriate to lament, I sometimes broke the register into its component pieces, inquiring about the relative importance of one facet or another in making the register as special as it was/is, and the process of healing. Just speaking one's feelings— the very thing encouraged in courses oriented toward “I-language” in Finland or elsewhere—is for Fihlman inadequate. “The feeling,” says Fihlman, “goes deeper with the [addition of the] melody.” This statement accurately reflects her central semiotic ideology [66], p. 17)—that the combination of feeling with weeping, melody, and words “heals” at a deep level. “Pure crying doesn‘t touch that syvintä tunnetta, ‘deepest feeling,’” said Fihlman in a February 2009 lament course.

It is not only problems to be healed but also the power to heal that is located in the depths. In the same 2009 course, Tuomas Rounakari said, “And somehow, while crying, of course, one goes like into a deep trance.”12 This description of lament as trance-experience may come particularly easily to Rounakari's mind, given that he engages in shamanistic rituals, and knows very well both from ethnographic work in Siberia and from his own experience just what shamanic trance consists of (and see my discussion of the trance-like experience of traditional Karelian itkijänaiset, lament-women, above.). When other ÄI-Lamenters, or others who offer healing courses in Finland, refer to “going deeper,” they are reflecting a form of discourse that is in widespread use in what Heelas and his colleagues call “subjective-life” (or “inner-life”) spirituality. It is crucial, however, to recognize special features of “relational subjectivism” (introduced earlier):

And unlike individuated (let alone life-as) modes of subjective-life, relational subjectivism is associated with the tendency to go deeper: one finds out more about oneself by discussing one's anger with a close friend or by dealing with jealousy with a lover, for example [35], p. 97).

The two tropes discussed thus far—tropes of interiority and depth—overlap, though only partially. To call a feeling deep may denote its intensity; referring to an “inner feeling” rarely if ever directly denotes intensity. And those two overlap with tropes of authenticity.

ÄI-Lamenter's way of blending therapeutic jargon and the discourse of cultural revivalism has again and again taken me aback. I have also repeatedly been surprised at ÄI leaders' insistence not only that lamenting with supportive others is sacred, but that the sacredness is about the shared emotion, the deep connection between people that it produces, as might stories in a therapy group. However, in this Age of Authenticity, the sacralization of transparent emotional “sharing” is not uncommon. Carrie Kemp, writing about “Journey of Reconciliation with Inactive Catholics,” asserts that “a church without members who speak from their sacred authenticity will have no soul” ([67] emphasis added). From the perspective of “subjective-life spirituality” and in particular its relational face, “sacred authenticity” (see also [68], pp. 40-41) is something we as humans at least potentially possess. Authentic self-expression requires courage, even daring. Mustering the courage to engage in deep emotional sharing of the kind that defines lament courses is also celebrated in the contemporary American intentional community pseudonymized as “the Aurora Commons.” In their article entitled “Performing Authentic Selfhood in an Intentional Community,” Holden and Schrock describe “courageous performances, especially those concerned with overcoming fear, were often ritualized to heighten the perceived sacredness of authenticity” [69], p. 210; emphasis added).

As concrete images of the courage required by authentic self-performance ÄI-Lamenters sometimes use the metaphor of daring to be naked or even without skin. We find the same metaphor on self-identified “New Age” websites [70].13 During debriefing at the end of a March 2009 lament course, one student said appreciatively, “Here [in the course], when you are quite naked with your feelings, you are not that beautiful or that clever.” We could paraphrase thus: Here we strip off our defenses, our attempts to project invulnerability, and embrace radical openness. This becoming naked is part of what Pirkko Fihlman and Tuomas Rounakari see as the sacredness of lament. In a 2010 interview, Rounakari said, “In lament there is that kind of state of spiritual nakedness that IS holy.”

Fihlman also uses the metaphor of a threshold one dares to cross, that threshold sometimes being a watery surface below which one dares to dive.

In a conversation with two foreigners who had both participated in lament courses (my wife and myself), Fihlman said (in English), “What we have shared, it's holy for us.” We hear the same theme in this exchange between Fihlman and a former student (Aino Pusa) who is now a very active, often public lamenter:

Fihlman: Laments are not like things in every other sort of place but they are areas where the deepest feelings a person had are touched. And then lament should always start with that kind of—I start my laments with a prayer.

Pusa: Like I said in the beginning, it's such a sacred thing.

For Pusa, it seems clear that not only a preceding prayer, but the process by which the deepest feelings of performer (and audience) are touched, makes lament “a sacred thing.”

We have seen thus far that, as a reflection of relational-subjectivism, neolamenting is both therapeutic and sacred. But if lamenting is some sort of therapy, what sort is it? If we encounter an abundance of psychotherapeutic terms in lament courses, as we do, what school of psychotherapy do they reflect?