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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Psychology is a valuable resource for spirituality when researchers incorporate mutually critical correlations in their use of this discipline. It can be used to identify pathological elements in religious practice, uncover unconscious motivation, provide developmental schemas, and describe responses to meditative experiences. Researchers in spirituality will most likely draw on different schools of psychology in relationship to the particular phenomenon under investigation. Their critical perspective will uncover the presuppositions of psychologies that are either hostile to religion or neglect relationship to transcendence within their theories. Researchers in spirituality will want to retain a religious vocabulary and theological perspective.
1 The study of spirituality is, of course, not limited to the Christian tradition. For the purposes of simplifying my argument, I am focusing on the relationship between various schools of psychology and the study of the religious experience of western Christians.
2 Examples of scholars who in their work in spirituality have drawn on psychological theories in the service of understanding a particular aspect of spirituality in this critical way are notably Sebastian Moore, Joann Wolski Conn, Walter Conn, John McDargh and others. See Moore, Sebastian, Let This Mind Be in You (New York: Seabury, 1985)Google Scholar and, more recently, Jesus the Liberator of Desire (New York: Crossroad, 1989);Google ScholarConn, Joann Wolski, ed., Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development (New York: Paulist, 1986)Google Scholar and Spirituality and Personal Maturity (New York: Paulist, 1989);Google ScholarConn, Walter E., Christian Conversion (New York: Paulist, 1986);Google Scholar and McDargh, John, Psychoanalytic Object Relations Theory and the Study of Religion: On Faith and the Imaging of God (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1983)Google Scholar and “The Life of the Self in Christian Spirituality and Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” Horizons 11/2 (Fall 1984): 344–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Tavard, George, “Apostolic Life and Church Reform,” in Raitt, Jill, ed., Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 3 and 10.Google Scholar
4 Farina, John, “The Study of ‘Spirituality’ in North America: Some Problems and Opportunities” (unpublished paper read at the Catholic Theological Society of America, San Francisco, 1985), 10.Google Scholar
5 Any other spirituality rooted in a religious tradition such as Buddhism or Sufism makes the same assumptions. However, new age spiritualities which are often eclectic and divorced from a religion would not hold these assumptions. Thus their practitioners often engage in meditational practice without the character formation, content of faith, or ethical norms provided by a faith community.
6 Ong, Walter, Orality and Literacy: Technofogizing the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Toolan, David, Facing West from California's Shores (New York: Crossroad, 1987).Google Scholar
7 This reading of Jung, of course, requires a more nuanced argument about a point hotly debated by scholars than these brief reflections allow. See the following authors for discussion on this point: Heisig, James, Imago Dei: A Study of Jung's Psychology of Religion (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1979);Google ScholarClift, Wallace, Jung and Christianity: The Challenge of Reconciliation (New York: Crossroad, 1982);Google ScholarHomans, Peter, Jung in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979);Google ScholarBuber, Martin, Eclipse of God (New York: Harper, 1957), 133–37;Google Scholar and May, Gerald, Will and Spirit (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 293.Google Scholar
8 William James admirably investigated religious experience in such a way as to make it a reputable object of investigation for psychological study. Yet he is limited by his own empirical methods from the sort of claims a theology of religious experience can make.
9 Gerald May makes a similar assertion although he is a psychiatrist. “As a group, the behavioral sciences are inveterately stuck in seeing everything from a humanistic standpoint. Everything is mind or the effect of interactions among minds and environments. Therefore if psychology is going to have anything to say about spirituality, it must reduce spirituality to a mental phenomenon…. The problem with mind-centered psychology is that it cannot get beyond itself. Union … must be reduced to a kind of recollection of fragments within oneself …. God, then, has to be a Jungian archetype at best, a Freudian symbolic invention at worst” (293).
10 See, e.g., Carroll, Michael P., Catholic Cults and Devotions: A Psychological Inquiry (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989)Google Scholar or Bell, Rudolph, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).Google Scholar
11 Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast/Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).Google Scholar
12 See Bynum; also see Kroll, Jerome and Bachrach, Bernard, “Medieval Visions and Contemporary Hallucinations,” Psychological Medicine 12 (1982): 709–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
13 “Any theologian who has interpretations of two distinct phenomena (tradition and situation) must somehow correlate those interpretations: whether through claims for identity, radical nonidentity, similarities, continuities or analogies” (Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination [New York: Crossroad, 1981], 88Google Scholar, n. 44.
14 Mounteer, Carl A., “Guilt, Martyrdom and Monasticism,” Journal of Psychohistory 9 (Fall 1981): 145.Google ScholarPubMed
15 See Ramsey's, Boniface brief survey of the literature in “Martyrdom and Monasticism” in Beginning to Read the Fathers (New York: Paulist, 1985), 122–48.Google Scholar Notably The Martyrdom of Polycarp and Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom exemplify this refinement in the community's theology of martyrdom.
16 Carroll's recent book, Catholic Cults and Devotions, is a good example ot a caretul psychoanalytic analysis of the unconscious appeal of a broad range of Roman Catholic popular devotions. Carroll is the first to acknowledge that his analysis is one limited explanation of these practices. Once one is alert to unconscious forces at work within these devotions, there remain many complementary features which are not explained at all by this analysis.
17 See Joann Wolski Conn, Spirituality and Personal Maturity for an example of this type of correlation and critique.
18 See McDargh, “The Life of the Self in Christian Spirituality and Contemporary Psychoanalysis.” McDargh makes the point that spiritual practices designed to lessen ego controls may not be particularly helpful to the borderline personality or those with other forms of narcissistic disturbances.
19 Naranjo, Claudia and Ornstein, Robert, On the Psychology of Meditation (New York: Viking, 1971);Google ScholarShan, Lawrence Le, How to Meditate (New York: Bantam, 1974);Google ScholarDiekman, Arthur, “Bimodal Consciousness and the Mystic Experience” in Lee, Philip R., et al., Symposium on Consciousness (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976);Google Scholar“Deautomization and the Mystic Experience,” Psychiatry 29 (1966): 324–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Grof, Stanislov, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (New York: Dutton, 1977)Google Scholar and Masters, Robert E. and Houston, Jean, Varieties of Psychedelic Experience (New York: Delta, 1966).Google Scholar Recently, Grof's schema of Perinatal Matrices has been applied to Teresa of Avila's mystical development in attempting to refute previous categorizations of hysteria; see Bache, Christopher M., “A Reappraisal of Teresa of Avila's Supposed Hysteria,” Journal of Religion and Health 24 (Winter 1985): 300–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Kroll and Bachrach, “Medieval Visions.”
22 The temptation that follows this understanding of process is a tendency among some to assume one can deracinate “spiritual disciplines from the communal context, ritual practices, metaphysical foundations, and ethical guidance which were their originating ground and living matrix” (McDargh, , “Life of the Self,” 348Google Scholar). See Engler, John H., “Vicissitudes of the Self According to Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: A Spectrum Model of Object Relations Development,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Culture 6/1 (Spring 1983), 29–72Google Scholar, who resists this decontextualizing of meditation in the Buddhist tradition from its living matrix.
23 Sutich, Anthony, Journal for Transpersonal Psychology 1 (1969): 13.Google Scholar
24 Perls, Frederick S., Gestalt Therapy Now (New York: Harper, 1971).Google Scholar
25 Assagioli, Roberto, Psychosynthesis (New York: Penguin, 1965).Google Scholar
26 Wilber, Ken, No Boundary (Boulder, CO: Shambala, 1981).Google Scholar
27 “… a Community is a group of people who are socially interdependent, who participate together in discussion and decision making, and who share certain practices that both define the community and are nurtured by it. Such a community is not quickly formed. It almost always has a history and so is also a community of memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of its past” (Bellah, Robert, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], 333Google Scholar).