ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on perceptual questions; philosophical questions; and political questions. The therapies are organized around a putative ‘sixth sense’ – intuition – that is believed to be accessed via clairvoyance or some other form of sensitivity. The chapter deals with some definitions and descriptions of spiritual healing and medical clairvoyance. It considers the ethics and gender politics of marginalized knowledge practices, via a discussion of, in turn: information relay; sensory perception; the understanding of intuition at the core of these practices, and its relation to reason; and the question of gendered knowledge. The chapter also deals with a consideration of how the relationship between the systems has been modelled, and the gendered politics of ‘complementarity’. In addition to diagnostic information, clients will often be interested in the question of causation. The New Age concept of intuition clearly owes a debt to Romanticism, which pinned its faith on imagination as the divine capacity that transcends rational knowing.
