dark night of the soul

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a phrase originating in the mystical poem Noche Oscura del Alma by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross, describing a period of profound spiritual desolation, loss of faith, and the felt absence of the divine that the mystic understood as a necessary stage of purification preceding union with God; in contemporary usage the phrase has been secularised to describe any period of intense psychological darkness, existential crisis, and the collapse of meaning that can precede significant personal transformation; unlike depression, which is a clinical condition, the dark night of the soul in popular usage suggests a passage through which identity and belief systems are stripped away, often against one's will, ultimately opening into a deeper and more integrated sense of self; it has been adopted in psychotherapy, particularly transpersonal and depth psychological traditions, as a framework for understanding spiritual emergency