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Anthropologist Josep Maria Fericgla: “Love is not a feeling or an emotion. That is an infantile way of understanding it”

From Clarín · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

Interview Named sources Context piece
  • Anthropologist and writer Josep Maria Fericgla says a transformative experience at 15 led him to study expansive states of consciousness.
  • He argues that love is not merely a feeling but a behavior grounded in recognizing another person, and he presents intuition as a direct route to reality.
  • Fericgla describes leaving psychology before completing his degree and turning to anthropology after finding that it better suited his interest in ecstatic experiences.

A spontaneous experience at 15 changed the direction of Josep Maria Fericgla’s life. After what he describes as “two days of absolute peace and awakened lucidity,” the Catalan-born anthropologist and writer decided to devote himself to understanding expansive states of consciousness.

Fericgla recalls meditating with a group of friends when he entered what he calls a spontaneous ecstatic state. He says he emerged from a condition of deep peace, calm and full awareness determined to study such experiences and discover whether they could be sought or induced at will.

Love is not a feeling or an emotion. That is an infantile way of understanding it.

· Josep Maria FericglaThe anthropologist challenged the idea that love should be understood primarily as an emotion.

His path to anthropology was indirect. He first studied music, which he kept pursuing for pleasure, and then psychology. But he says psychology took him far from his central existential interest. He left the course in his fifth year, with two subjects still unfinished, after becoming frustrated with what he describes as its treatment of people and its limitations in understanding ecstatic experiences.

I decided that I would dedicate my life to that: getting to know these states better, studying them and, if there was some way to seek and induce them at will, finding it.

· Josep Maria FericglaHe described the decision that followed his spontaneous ecstatic experience at age 15.

He had encountered anthropology the previous year as an elective within psychology. That perspective, he says, allowed him to explore experiences that psychology did not understand and instead tended to label as pathological. He later earned a degree in history and a doctorate in social and cultural anthropology from the University of Barcelona.

Fericgla, founder of the Josep M. Fericgla Foundation and author of 29 books, has received several awards and international recognitions. His work and reflections address love, intuition, initiation rites and the human search for transcendence. He argues that love should be understood not as an emotion, but as conduct based on recognizing the other person, while intuition offers a direct way of accessing reality.

Psychology is a farce. I mean, it is useless.

· Josep Maria FericglaFericgla explained why he abandoned his psychology studies before completing them.
About this summary

Originally published by Clarín in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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