PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL INFLUENCE OF MARIAN ICONS ON THE SPIRITUAL STATE OF A BELIEVER

Abstract

In the article, the author analyzed how icons of the Virgin Mary affect the psyche and spiritual well-being of a person living within the coordinates of the Christian faith. This is truly important, because we exist in a time when society is faced with war, losses, constant anxiety about tomorrow, and it is at such moments that people instinctively reach for something greater than themselves, seek support in the sacred. For Ukrainians, the image of the Virgin Mary is not just a religious symbol, but something much deeper, something that has grown into our culture at the subconscious level, because maternal warmth, a sense of protection, and that love that does not set conditions merge here. In both the Orthodox and Greek Catholic traditions, veneration of the Mother of God has a powerful emotional basis that cannot be explained only by theological categories. To understand this phenomenon, the work combines several research optics – religious studies, cultural anthropology and psychology, and also involves the works of both domestic and foreign authors who have already touched on this issue. The article examines the main iconographic types – Hodigitria, Eleusis, Oranta, Panakhranta, Pokrov – and attempts to understand why each of them resonates differently with the inner state of the believer, why a person cries in front of one icon, and feels calm and confident in front of another. Separately, it is discussed how a person interacts with an icon in different situations – at home, in a temple, in moments of personal crisis – and what happens at the psychological level. Five mechanisms of such influence are identified: visual meditation, when the gaze is focused on the image and thoughts gradually calm down; projection of one's own experiences onto the figure of the Mother of God and identification with her; symbolic communication, i.e. internal dialogue through the image; ritual grounding, which returns a person to the bodily presence here and now; and, finally, the aesthetic experience of the beauty of the icon itself. The topic of the archetype of the Great Mother in the Jungian sense is also touched upon – how it lives in the collective unconscious and how it is activated during prayer before the icon of the Virgin. The practical significance of the work is that it brings together what is known about the healing and spiritual potential of icon veneration in our difficult time, in particular in the conditions of a full-scale war, but at the same time honestly speaks about the limits of such influence, about what an icon cannot replace.