Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907)
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature is a book by Harvard University psychologist and philosopher William James. It comprises his edited Gifford Lectures on natural theology, which were delivered at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland between 1901 and 1902. The lectures concerned the psychological study of individual private religious experiences and mysticism, and used a range of examples to identify commonalities in religious experiences across traditions.
Soon after its publication, Varieties entered the Western canon of psychology and philosophy and has remained in print for over a century.
James later developed his philosophy of pragmatism. There are many overlapping ideas in Varieties and his 1907 book Pragmatism.
Historical context
Psychology of religion
In
the 1890s, a "new psychology" emerged in European and American
universities which coincided with the establishment of many new
psychology laboratories and the appointment of faculty in psychology.
New psychology's novelty was encapsulated by its distinction from
philosophy (philosophy of mind in particular) and theology, and its emphasis on the laboratory-based experimental method. As part of this development, the psychology of religion emerged as a new approach to studying religious experience, with the US being the major centre of research in this field.
A few years earlier Edwin Diller Starbuck had written a book entitled Psychology of Religion
which James had written a preface to. James thanks Starbuck in the
preface to his book for having "made over to me his large collection of
manuscript material" before then citing Starbucks work throughout The Varieties. Starbuck recollects that James looked through "several hundred" of his documents.
The Varieties was first presented in 1901-2 as a set of twenty Gifford lectures at the University of Edinburgh. This was a lecture series instituted by Adam Gifford and intended to have a popular and public audience on the subject of natural theology, or scientific approaches to the study of religion.
James had originally planned for the second half of his lectures to be a
philosophical assessment of religion but ill health meant that he could
only write one lecture on the topic, resulting in a work more
descriptive than James had initially anticipated.
Themes
Religious experiences
In the Varieties,
James explicitly excludes from his study both theology and religious
institutions, choosing to limit his study to direct and immediate
religious experiences, which he regarded as the more interesting object
of study.
Churches, theologies, and institutions are important as vehicles for
passing on insights gained by religious experience but, in James's view,
they live second-hand off the original experience of the founder.
A key distinction in James's treatment of religion is between that of
healthy-minded religion and religion of the sick soul; the former is a
religion of life's goodness, while the latter cannot overcome the sense
of evil in the world.
Although James presents this as a value-neutral distinction between
different kinds of religious attitudes, he, in fact, regarded the
sick-souled religious experience as preferable, and his anonymous source
of melancholy experience in lectures VI and VII is, in fact,
autobiographical.
Following these autobiographical sections, James transitions into two
lectures (IX and X) examining religious conversion from a psychological
point-of-view, along with its importance in religious history. James
considered healthy-mindedness to be America's main contribution to
religion, which he saw running from the transcendentalistsRalph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science.
At the extreme, the "healthy-minded" see sickness and evil as an
illusion. James considered belief in the "mind cure" to be reasonable
when compared to medicine as practiced at the beginning of the twentieth century.
James devotes two lectures to mysticism, and in the lectures, he outlines four markers common to mystical experiences. These are:
Ineffability: the experience is incapable of being described, and must be directly experienced to be understood.
Noesis: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned.
Transience: the experience is of limited duration.
Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience.
He believed that religious experiences can have "morbid origins"
in brain pathology and can be irrational, but nevertheless largely
positive. Unlike the bad ideas that people have under the influence of,
say, fevers or drunkenness, after a religious experience the ideas and
insights usually still make sense to the person, and are often valued
for the rest of the person's life.
James had relatively little interest in the legitimacy or
illegitimacy of religious experiences. Further, despite James' examples
being almost exclusively drawn from Christianity,
he did not mean to limit his ideas to any single religion. Religious
experiences are something that people sometimes have, under certain
conditions. In James' description, these experiences are inherently very
complex, often life-altering and largely indescribable and
unquantifiable through traditional means, yet measurable in the profound
changes they have on the individuals that report such experiences.
Pragmatism
Ultimately
James made a pragmatic argument for religion, writing that "the uses of
religion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the
individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in
it". As an example of this he gives the therapeutic effects of prayer.
Although James did not fully articulate his pragmatic philosophy until the publication of Pragmatism in 1907, the approach to religious belief in the Varieties
is influenced by pragmatic philosophy. In his Philosophy and
Conclusions lectures, James concludes that religion is overall
beneficial to humankind, although acknowledges that this does not
establish its truth. While James intended to approach the topic of religious experience from this pragmatist angle, Richard Rorty argues that he ultimately deviated from this methodology in the Varieties.
In his lectures on saintliness, the intention is to discover whether
the saintly virtues are beneficial for human life: if they are, then,
according to pragmatism, that supports their claim to truth. However,
James ends up concluding that the value of the saintly virtues is
dependent on their origin: given that the saintly virtues are only
beneficial if there is an afterlife
for which they can prepare us, their value depends on whether they are
divinely ordained or the result of human psychology. This is no longer a
question of value but of empirical
fact. Hence, Rorty argues that James ends up abandoning his own
pragmatist philosophy due to his ultimate reliance of empirical
evidence.
James remarked on the aesthetic motivation in an individual
choosing a religion and praised religion for its aesthetic value. He
said that individuals "involuntarily intellectualize their religious
experience" and that metaphysical stipulations about the attributes of a
deity "enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious
verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows".
James considers the possibility of "over-beliefs",
beliefs which are not strictly justified by "reason valid universally"
but which might understandably be held by educated people nonetheless.
They are "buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of
which feeling originally supplied the hint". Philosophy may contribute
to shaping these over-beliefs—for example, traditional arguments for the
existence of God, including the cosmological, design, and moral arguments, along with the argument from popular consensus.
Although James did not himself endorse any of these arguments: "The
fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined suggestions of
the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only
corroborate our pre-existent partialities".
He says that individuals in the past had sought such universal proofs,
asking "what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would
offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world
of sensible things?".
James says he has his own over-belief, which he does not intend to
prove, that there is a greater reality not normally accessible by our
normal ways of relating to the world, but which religious experiences
can connect us to.
Reception and legacy
The August 1902 New York Times review of the first edition ends with the following:
Everywhere there is a frolic
welcome to the eccentricities and extravagances of the religious life.
Many will question whether its more sober exhibitions would not have
been more fruitful of results, but the interest and fascination of the
treatment are beyond dispute, and so, too, is the sympathy to which
nothing human is indifferent.
A July 1963 Time magazine review of an expanded edition published that year ends with quotes about the book from Peirce and Santayana:
He was simply impatient with his
fellow academicians and their endless hairsplitting over matters that
had no relation to life. A vibrant, generous person, he hoped to show
that religious emotions, even those of the deranged, were crucial to
human life. The great virtue of The Varieties, noted pragmatist philosopher Charles Peirce, is its "penetration into the hearts of people." Its great weakness, retorted George Santayana, is its "tendency to disintegrate the idea of truth, to recommend belief without reason and to encourage superstition."
In 1913 Josiah Royce wrote a paper on George Fox
which he described as "a fragmentary contribution to that study of the
"Varieties of Religious Experience" which William James has so
significantly brought to the attention of students of human nature".
Royce described James' book as one which "with all its wealth of
illustration, and in its courageous enterprise, has a certain classic
beauty". He further considered the book to be reflective of "the
manifoldness and of the breadth of the general psychological movement
itself".
In 1986, Nicholas Lash criticised James's Varieties, challenging James's separation of the personal and institutional. Lash argues that religious geniuses such as St. Paul or Jesus,
with whom James was particularly interested, did not have their
religious experiences in isolation but within and influenced by a social
and historical context. Ultimately, Lash argues that this comes from James's failure to overcome Cartesian dualism in his thought: while James believed he had succeeded in surpassing Descartes, he was still tied to a notion of an internal ego, distinct from the body or outside world, which undergoes experiences.
The book was cherished by Ludwig Wittgenstein who wrote to Bertrand Russell that "Whenever I have time now I read James’ Varieties of Religious Exp[erience]. This book does me a lot of good". It was one of the few books he recommended to his friend Maurice O'Connor Drury. The influence of James' book is seen from letters sent to him from his sister Hermione as he was serving at the front during World War 1.
She was concerned about his well-being and wrote to him that "there
will be time for you to be a Jamesian type after the war is over!". Brian McGuinness writes that Wittgenstein aspired to be the 'saintly' type described in the book.
In more recent years the book has continued to be positively reviewed. In 1951 William A. Christian called the book "still one of the best books on the psychological variables in the domain of religion" and in 1995 Stephen H. Webb
remarked that "James is perhaps most read today for his sensitive
descriptions of the bewildering diversity of religious forms".
The book has been described as philosophical, as opposed to
merely psychological. Michael Hodges writes that James's book is
"addressed to a philosophical audience"
and in 1979 Gary T. Alexander wrote that the book is "seldom used in
any substantive manner by current psychologists of religion, who,
although often lauding the work as a creation of genius, tend to view it
as primarily philosophical in nature".
The neuroscience of religion, also known as neurotheology, and as spiritual neuroscience, attempts to explain religious experience and behaviour in neuroscientific terms. It is the study of correlations of neural phenomena with subjective experiences of spirituality and hypotheses to explain these phenomena. This contrasts with the psychology of religion which studies mental, rather than neural states.
"Neurotheology" is a neologism
that describes the scientific study of the neural correlates of
religious or spiritual beliefs, experiences and practices. Other
researchers prefer to use terms like "spiritual neuroscience" or
"neuroscience of religion". Researchers in the field attempt to explain
the neurological basis for religious experiences, such as:
Aldous Huxley used the term neurotheology for the first time in the utopian novel Island. The discipline studies the cognitive neuroscience of religious experience and spirituality. The term is also sometimes used in a less scientific context or a philosophical context. Some of these uses, according to the mainstream scientific community, qualify as pseudoscience. Huxley used it mainly in a philosophical context.
Theoretical work
In
an attempt to focus and clarify what was a growing interest in this
field, in 1994 educator and businessman Laurence O. McKinney published
the first book on the subject, titled "Neurotheology: Virtual Religion
in the 21st Century", written for a popular audience but also promoted
in the theological journal Zygon.
According to McKinney, neurotheology sources the basis of religious
inquiry in relatively recent developmental neurophysiology. According to
McKinney's theory, pre-frontal development, in humans, creates an
illusion of chronological time as a fundamental part of normal adult
cognition past the age of three. The inability of the adult brain to
retrieve earlier images experienced by an infantile brain creates
questions such as "where did I come from" and "where does it all go",
which McKinney suggests led to the creation of various religious
explanations. The experience of death as a peaceful regression into
timelessness as the brain dies won praise from readers as varied as
writer Arthur C. Clarke, eminent theologian Harvey Cox, and the Dalai Lama and sparked a new interest in the field.
What Andrew B. Newberg
and others "discovered is that intensely focused spiritual
contemplation triggers an alteration in the activity of the brain that
leads one to perceive transcendent religious experiences as solid,
tangible reality. In other words, the sensation that Buddhists call oneness with the universe." The orientation
area requires sensory input to do its calculus. "If you block sensory
inputs to this region, as you do during the intense concentration of meditation, you prevent the brain from forming the distinction between self
and not-self," says Newberg. With no information from the senses
arriving, the left orientation area cannot find any boundary between the
self and the world. As a result, the brain seems to have no choice but
"to perceive the self as endless and intimately interwoven with everyone
and everything." "The right orientation area, equally bereft of sensory
data, defaults to a feeling of infinite space. The meditators feel that
they have touched infinity."
The radical Catholic theologian Eugen Drewermann developed a two-volume critique of traditional conceptions of God and the soul and a reinterpretation of religion (Modern Neurology and the Question of God) based on current neuroscientific research.
However, it has also been argued "that neurotheology should be conceived and practiced within a theological framework."
Experimental work
In 1969, British biologist Alister Hardy
founded a Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC) at Oxford after
retiring from his post as Linacre Professor of Zoology. Citing William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he set out to collect first-hand accounts of numinous experiences. He was awarded the Templeton Prize before his death in 1985. His successor David Hay suggested in God's Biologist: A Life of Alister Hardy (2011) that the RERC later dispersed as investigators turned to newer techniques of scientific investigation.
During the 1980s Michael Persinger stimulated the temporal lobes of human subjects with a weak magnetic field using an apparatus that popularly became known as the "God helmet" and reported that many of his subjects claimed to experience a "sensed presence" during stimulation. This work has been criticised, though some researchers have published a replication of one God Helmet experiment.
Granqvist et al. claimed that Persinger's work was not double-blind. Participants were often graduate students who knew what sort of results to expect, and there was the risk that the experimenters' expectations
would be transmitted to subjects by unconscious cues. The participants
were frequently given an idea of the purpose of the study by being asked
to fill in questionnaires designed to test their suggestibility to paranormal experiences before the trials were conducted. Granqvist et al. failed to replicate
Persinger's experiments double-blinded, and concluded that the presence
or absence of the magnetic field had no relationship with any religious
or spiritual experience reported by the participants, but was predicted
entirely by their suggestibility and personality traits. Following the
publication of this study, Persinger et al. dispute this.
One published attempt to create a "haunted room" using environmental
"complex" electromagnetic fields based on Persinger's theoretical and
experimental work did not produce the sensation of a "sensed presence"
and found that reports of unusual experiences were uncorrelated with the
presence or absence of these fields. As in the study by Granqvist et al., reports of unusual experiences were instead predicted by the personality characteristics and suggestibility of participants.
One experiment with a commercial version of the God helmet found no
difference in response to graphic images whether the device was on or
off.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran explored the neural basis of the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE using the galvanic skin response
(GSR), which correlates with emotional arousal, to determine whether
the hyperreligiosity seen in TLE was due to an overall heightened
emotional state or was specific to religious stimuli. Ramachandran
presented two subjects with neutral, sexually arousing and religious
words while measuring GSR. Ramachandran was able to show that patients
with TLE showed enhanced emotional responses to the religious words,
diminished responses to the sexually charged words, and normal responses
to the neutral words. This study was presented as an abstract at a
neuroscience conference and referenced in Ramachandran's book, Phantoms in the Brain, which was not published as a peer-reviewed scientific article.
Research by Mario Beauregard at the University of Montreal, using fMRI on Carmelite
nuns, has purported to show that religious and spiritual experiences
include several brain regions and not a single 'God spot'. As Beauregard
has said, "There is no God spot in the brain. Spiritual experiences are
complex, like intense experiences with other human beings." The neuroimaging was conducted when the nuns were asked to recall
past mystical states, not while actually undergoing them; "subjects
were asked to remember and relive (eyes closed) the most intense
mystical experience ever felt in their lives as a member of the
Carmelite Order."
A 2011 study by researchers at the Duke University Medical Center found hippocampal atrophy is associated with older adults who report life-changing religious experiences, as well as those who are "born-again Protestants, Catholics, and those with no religious affiliation".
A 2016 study using fMRI found "a recognizable feeling central to ... (Mormon)... devotional practice was reproducibly associated with activation in nucleus accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and frontal attentional regions. Nucleus accumbens
activation preceded peak spiritual feelings by 1–3 s and was replicated
in four separate tasks. ... The association of abstract ideas and brain
reward circuitry may interact with frontal attentional and emotive
salience processing, suggesting a mechanism whereby doctrinal concepts
may come to be intrinsically rewarding and motivate behavior in
religious individuals."
Psychopharmacology
Some scientists working in the field hypothesize that the basis of spiritual experience arises in neurological physiology. Speculative suggestions have been made that an increase of N,N-dimethyltryptamine levels in the pineal gland contribute to spiritual experiences. It has also been suggested that stimulation of the temporal lobe by psychoactive ingredients of magic mushrooms mimics religious experiences. This hypothesis has found laboratory validation with respect to psilocybin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology_of_religion Psychology of religion consists of the application of psychological methods and interpretive frameworks to the diverse contents of religious traditions as well as to both religious and irreligious individuals. The various methods and frameworks can be summarized according to the classic distinction between the natural-scientific
and human-scientific approaches. The first cluster amounts to
objective, quantitative, and preferably experimental procedures for
testing hypotheses about causal connections among the objects of one's
study. In contrast, the human-scientific approach accesses the human
world of experience using qualitative, phenomenological,
and interpretive methods. This approach aims to discern meaningful,
rather than causal, connections among the phenomena one seeks to
understand.
Psychologists of religion pursue three major projects:
systematic description, especially of religious contents, attitudes, experiences, and expressions
explanation of the origins of religion, both in the history of the
human race and in individual lives, taking into account a diversity of
influences
mapping out the consequences of religious attitudes and conduct, both for the individual and for society at large.
The psychology
of religion first arose as a self-conscious discipline in the late 19th
century, but all three of these tasks have a history going back many
centuries before that.
Overview
The challenge for the psychology of religion is essentially threefold:
to provide a thoroughgoing description of the objects of
investigation, whether they be shared religious content (e.g., a
tradition's ritual observances) or individual experiences, attitudes, or
conduct;
to account in psychological terms for the rise of such phenomena, whether they be in individual lives or not;
to clarify the outcomes – the fruits, as William James put it – of these phenomena, for individuals, and the larger society. These fruits may be both positive and negative.
The first, descriptive task naturally requires a clarification of one's terms – above all, the word religion. Historians of religion
have long underscored the problematic character of this term. They note
that its usage over the centuries has changed in significant ways,
generally in the direction of reification.
The early psychologists of religion were fully aware of these
difficulties, typically acknowledging that the definitions they chose
were to some degree arbitrary.
With the rise of positivistic trends in psychology over the 20th
century, especially the demand that all phenomena be operationalized by
quantitative procedures, psychologists of religion developed a multitude
of scales, most of them developed for use by Protestant Christians. Factor analysis was also brought into play by both psychologists and sociologists of religion,
to establish a fixed core of dimensions and a corresponding set of
scales. The justification and adequacy of these efforts, especially in
the light of constructivist and other postmodern viewpoints, remains a matter of debate.
In the last several decades, especially among clinical psychologists,
a preference for the terms "spirituality" and "spiritual" has emerged,
along with efforts to distinguish them from "religion" and "religious."
Especially in the United States,
"religion" has for many become associated with sectarian institutions
and their obligatory creeds and rituals, thus giving the word a negative
cast; "spirituality",
in contrast, is positively constructed as deeply individual and
subjective, as a universal capacity to apprehend and accord one's life
with higher realities. In fact, "spirituality" has likewise undergone an evolution in the West, from a time when it was essentially a synonym for religion in its original, subjective meaning.
Today, efforts are ongoing to "operationalize"
these terms, with little regard for their history in their Western
context, and with the apparent realist assumption that underlying them
are fixed qualities identifiable using empirical procedures.
Schnitker and Emmons theorized that the understanding of religion
as a search for meaning makes implications in the three psychological
areas of motivation, cognition and social relationships. The cognitive
aspects relate to God and a sense of purpose, the motivational ones to
the need to control, and the religious search for meaning is also woven
into social communities.
History
Edwin Diller Starbuck
Edwin Diller Starbuck is considered a pioneer of the psychology of religion and his book Psychology of Religion (1899)
has been described as the first book in the genre. This book was
endorsed by William James who collaborated by writing its preface. Starbuck's work would influence James on writing his own book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, with James thanking him in the preface for having "made over to me his large collection of manuscript material". In the book itself James mentions Starbuck's name 46 times and cites him on several different occasions.
William James
American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) is regarded by most psychologists of religion as the founder of the field. He served as president of the American Psychological Association, and wrote one of the first psychology textbooks. In the psychology of religion, James' influence endures. His Varieties of Religious Experience is considered to be the classic work in the field, and references to James' ideas are common at professional conferences.
James distinguished between institutional religion
and personal religion. Institutional religion refers to the religious
group or organization and plays an important part in a society's
culture. Personal religion, in which the individual has mystical experience, can be experienced regardless of the culture. James was most interested in understanding personal religious experience.
In studying personal religious experiences, James made a distinction between healthy-minded and sick-souled
religiousness. Individuals predisposed to healthy-mindedness tend to
ignore the evil in the world and focus on the positive and the good.
James used examples of Walt Whitman and the "mind-cure" religious movement to illustrate healthy-mindedness in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
In contrast, individuals predisposed to having a sick-souled religion
are unable to ignore evil and suffering and need a unifying experience,
religious or otherwise, to reconcile good and evil. James included
quotations from Leo Tolstoy and John Bunyan to illustrate the sick soul.
William James' hypothesis of pragmatism
stems from the efficacy of religion. If an individual believes in and
performs religious activities, and those actions happen to work, then
that practice appears the proper choice for the individual. However, if
the processes of religion have little efficacy, then there is no
rationality for continuing the practice.
James also believed that the different religious experiences could bring benefits and positive outcomes to society. In Varieties of Religious Experience, he says:
"We
must judge the tree by its fruit. The best fruits of the religious
experience are the best things history has to offer. The highest flights
of charity, devotion, trust, patience, and bravery to which the wings
of human nature have spread themselves, have all been flown for
religious ideals.”
― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
Other early theorists
G.W.F. Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770–1831) described all systems of religion, philosophy, and social
science as expressions of the basic urge of consciousness to learn about
itself and its surroundings, and record its findings and hypotheses.
Thus, religion is only a form of that search for knowledge, within which
humans record various experiences and reflections. Others, compiling
and categorizing these writings in various ways, form the consolidated
worldview as articulated by that religion, philosophy, social science,
etc. His work The Phenomenology of Spirit
was a study of how various types of writing and thinking draw from and
re-combine with the individual and group experiences of various places
and times, influencing the current forms of knowledge and worldviews
that are operative in a population. This activity is the functioning of
an incomplete group mind, where each is accessing the recorded wisdom of
others. His works often include detailed descriptions of the
psychological motivations involved in thought and behavior, e.g., the
struggle of a community or nation to know itself and thus correctly
govern itself. In Hegel's system, Religion is one of the major
repositories of wisdom to be used in these struggles, representing a
huge body of recollections from humanity's past in various stages of its
development.
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) gave explanations of the genesis of religion in his various writings. In Totem and Taboo, he applied the idea of the Oedipus complex
(involving unresolved sexual feelings of, for example, a son toward his
mother and hostility toward his father) and postulated its emergence in
the primordial stage of human development.
In Moses and Monotheism, Freud reconstructed biblical history by his general theory. His ideas were also developed in The Future of an Illusion. When Freud spoke of religion as an illusion, he maintained that it "is a fantasy structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to maturity."
Freud views the idea of God as being a version of the father image, and religious belief as at bottom infantile and neurotic. Authoritarian religion, Freud believed, is dysfunctional and alienates man from himself.
The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung
(1875–1961) adopted a very different posture, one that was more
sympathetic to religion and more concerned with a positive appreciation
of religious symbolism.
Jung considered the question of the metaphysical existence of God to be
unanswerable by the psychologist and adopted a kind of agnosticism.
Jung postulated, in addition to the personal unconscious (roughly adopting Freud's concept), the collective unconscious, which is the repository of human experience and which contains "archetypes"
(i.e. basic images that are universal in that they recur regardless of
culture). The irruption of these images from the unconscious into the
realm of consciousness he viewed as the basis of religious experience and often of artistic creativity. Some of Jung's writings have been devoted to elucidating some of the archetypal symbols, and include his work in comparative mythology.
Alfred Adler
Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler (1870–1937), who parted ways with Freud, emphasized the role of goals and motivation in his Individual Psychology.
One of Adler's most famous ideas is that we try to compensate for
inferiorities that we perceive in ourselves. A lack of power often lies
at the root of feelings of inferiority. One way that religion enters
into this picture is through our beliefs in God, which are
characteristic of our tendency to strive for perfection and superiority.
For example, in many religions, God is considered to be perfect and
omnipotent, and commands people likewise to be perfect. If we, too,
achieve perfection, we become one with God. By identifying with God in
this way, we compensate for our imperfections and feelings of
inferiority.
Our ideas about God
are important indicators of how we view the world. According to Adler,
these ideas have changed over time, as our vision of the world – and our
place in it – has changed. Consider this example that Adler offers: the
traditional belief that people were placed deliberately on earth as
God's ultimate creation is being replaced with the idea that people have
evolved by natural selection.
This coincides with a view of God not as a real being, but as an
abstract representation of nature's forces. In this way, our view of God
has changed from one that was concrete and specific to one that is more
general. From Adler's vantage point, this is a relatively ineffective
perception of God because it is so general that it fails to convey a
strong sense of direction and purpose.
An important thing for Adler is that God (or the idea of God)
motivates people to act and that those actions do have real consequences
for ourselves and others. Our view of God is important because it
embodies our goals and directs our social interactions.
Compared to science, another social movement, religion
is more efficient because it motivates people more effectively.
According to Adler, only when science begins to capture the same
religious fervor, and promotes the welfare of all segments of society,
will the two be more equal in peoples' eyes.
Gordon Allport
In his 1950 book The Individual and His Religion, Gordon Allport (1897–1967) illustrates how people may use religion in different ways. He makes a distinction between Mature religion and
Immature religion. Mature religious sentiment is how Allport
characterized the person whose approach to religion is dynamic,
open-minded, and able to maintain links between inconsistencies. In
contrast, immature religion is self-serving and generally represents the negative stereotypes that people have about religion.
More recently, this distinction has been encapsulated in the
terms "intrinsic religion", referring to a genuine, heartfelt devout faith, and "extrinsic religion", referring to a more utilitarian use of religion as a means to an end, such as church attendance to gain social status. These dimensions of religion were measured on the Religious Orientation Scale of Allport and Ross. The third form of religious orientation has been described by Daniel Batson. This refers to treatment of religion as an open-ended search.
More specifically, it has been seen by Batson as comprising a
willingness to view religious doubts positively, acceptance that
religious orientation can change and existential complexity, the belief
that one's religious beliefs should be shaped from personal crises that
one has experienced in one's life. Batson refers to extrinsic, intrinsic
and quests respectively as religion-as-means, religion-as-end, and
religion-as-quest, and measures these constructs on the Religious Life
Inventory.
Erik H. Erikson
Erik Erikson (1902–1994) is best known for his theory of psychological development, which has its roots in the psychoanalytic importance of identity in personality. His biographies of Gandhi and Martin Luther reveal Erikson's positive view of religion. He considered religions to be important influences in successful personality development because they are the primary way that cultures promote the virtues associated with each stage of life. Religious rituals
facilitate this development. Erikson's theory has not benefited from
systematic empirical study, but it remains an influential and
well-regarded theory in the psychological study of religion.
Erich Fromm
The American scholar Erich Fromm (1900–1980) modified the Freudian theory and produced a more complex account of the functions of religion. In his book Psychoanalysis and Religion he responded to Freud's theories by explaining that part of the modification is viewing the Oedipus complex
as based not so much on sexuality as on a "much more profound desire",
namely, the childish desire to remain attached to protecting figures.
The right religion, in Fromm's estimation, can, in principle, foster an
individual's highest potentialities, but religion in practice tends to
relapse into being neurotic.
According to Fromm, humans need a stable frame of reference.
Religion fills this need. In effect, humans crave answers to questions
that no other source of knowledge has an answer to, which only religion
may seem to answer. However, a sense of free will must be given for
religion to appear healthy. An authoritarian notion of religion appears
detrimental.
Rudolf Otto
Rudolf Otto (1869–1937) was a German Protestant theologian and scholar of comparative religion. Otto's most famous work, The Idea of the Holy (published first in 1917 as Das Heilige), defines the concept of the holy as that which is numinous.
Otto explained the numinous as a "non-rational, non-sensory experience
or feeling whose primary and immediate object is outside the self." It
is a mystery (Latin: mysterium tremendum) that is both fascinating (fascinans)
and terrifying at the same time; A mystery that causes trembling and
fascination, attempting to explain that inexpressible and perhaps
supernatural emotional reaction of wonder drawing us to seemingly ordinary and/or religious experiences of grace.
This sense of emotional wonder appears evident at the root of all
religious experiences. Through this emotional wonder, we suspend our
rational mind for non-rational possibilities.
The Idea of the Holy also set out a paradigm
for the study of religion that focuses on the need to realize the
religious as a non-reducible, original category in its own right. This
paradigm was under much attack between approximately 1950 and 1990 but
has made a strong comeback since then.
Modern thinkers
Autobiographal
accounts of 20th-century psychology of religion as a field have been
supplied by numerous modern psychologists of religion, primarily based
in Europe, but also by several US-based psychologists such as Ralph W. Hood and Donald Capps.
Allen Bergin
Allen Bergin
is noted for his 1980 paper "Psychotherapy and Religious Values", which
is known as a landmark in scholarly acceptance that religious values
do, in practice, influence psychotherapy.He received the Distinguished Professional Contributions to Knowledge
award from the American Psychological Association in 1989 and was cited
as challenging "psychological orthodoxy to emphasize the importance of
values and religion in therapy."
Robert A. Emmons
Robert A. Emmons offered a theory of "spiritual strivings" in his 1999 book, The Psychology of Ultimate Concerns.
With support from empirical studies, Emmons argued that spiritual
strivings foster personality integration because they exist at a higher
level of the personality.
Ralph W. Hood Jr.
Ralph W. Hood Jr. is a professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
He is a former editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of
Religion and a former co-editor of the Archive for the Psychology of
Religion and The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.
He is Past President of Division 36 of the American Psychological
Association and a recipient of its William James Award. He has published
several hundred articles and book chapters on the psychology of
religion and has authored, co-authored, or edited thirteen volumes, all
dealing with the psychology of religion.
Kenneth Pargament
Kenneth Pargament is noted for his book Psychology of Religion and Coping (1997),
as well as for a 2007 book on religion and psychotherapy, and a
sustained research program on religious coping. He is professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, US), and
has published more than 100 papers on the subject of religion and spirituality in psychology. Pargament led the design of a questionnaire called the "RCOPE" to measure Religious Coping strategies. Pargament has distinguished between three types of styles for coping with stress:
Collaborative, in which people co-operate with God to deal with stressful events;
Deferring, in which people leave everything to God; and
Self-directed, in which people do not rely on God and try
exclusively to solve problems by their own efforts. He also describes
four major stances toward religion that have been adopted by
psychotherapists in their work with clients, which he calls the
religiously rejectionist, exclusivist, constructivist, and pluralist stances.
James Hillman
James Hillman, at the end of his book Re-Visioning Psychology,
reverses James' position of viewing religion through psychology, urging
instead that we view psychology as a variety of religious experience.
He concludes: "Psychology as religion implies imagining all
psychological events as effects of Gods in the soul."
Julian Jaynes, primarily in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind,
proposed that religion (and some other psychological phenomena such as
hypnosis and schizophrenia) is a remnant of a relatively recent time in
human development, prior to the advent of consciousness. Jaynes
hypothesized that hallucinated verbal commands helped non-conscious
early man to perform tasks promoting human survival. Starting about
10,000 BCE, selective pressures favored the hallucinated verbal commands
for social control, and they came to be perceived as an external,
rather than internal, voice commanding the person to take some action.
These were hence often explained as originating from invisible gods,
spirits, and ancestors.
Hypotheses on the role of religion
There are three primary hypotheses on the role of religion in the modern world.
Secularization
The first hypothesis, secularization, holds that science and technology will take the place of religion.
Secularization supports the separation of religion from politics,
ethics, and psychology. Taking this position even further, Taylor
explains that secularization denies transcendence, divinity, and
rationality in religious beliefs.
Religious transformation
Challenges to the secularization hypothesis led to significant revisions, resulting in the religious transformation hypothesis.
This perspective holds that general trends towards individualism and
social disintegration will produce changes in religion, making religious
practice more individualized and spiritually focused. This in turn is expected to produce more spiritual seeking, although not exclusive to religious institutions. Eclecticism, which draws from multiple religious/spiritual systems and New Age movements are also predicted to result.
Cultural divide
In
response to the religious transformation hypothesis, Ronald Inglehart
piloted the renewal of the secularization hypothesis. His argument
hinges on the premise that religion develops to fill the human need for
security. Therefore, the development of social and economic security in
Europe explains its corresponding secularization due to a lack of need
for religion.
However, religion continues in the third world where social and
economic insecurity is rampant. The overall effect is expected to be a
growing cultural disparity.
The idea that religiosity
arises from the human need for security has also been furthered by
studies examining religious beliefs as a compensatory mechanism of
control. These studies are motivated by the idea that people are
invested in maintaining beliefs in order and structure to prevent
beliefs in chaos and randomness.
In the experimental setting, researchers have also tested
compensatory control in regard to individuals' perceptions of external
systems, such as religion or government. For example, Kay and colleagues
found that in a laboratory setting, individuals are more likely to
endorse broad external systems (e.g., religion or sociopolitical
systems) that impose order and control on their lives when they are
induced with lowered levels of personal control. In this study,
researchers suggest that when a person's personal control is lessened,
their motivation to believe in order is threatened, resulting in
compensation of this threat through adherence to other external sources
of control.
Psychometric approaches to religion
Since the 1960s psychologists of religion have used the methodology of psychometrics to assess ways in which a person may be religious. An example is the Religious Orientation Scale of Allport and Ross, which measures how respondents stand on intrinsic and extrinsic religion as described by Allport.
More recent questionnaires include the Age-Universal I-E Scale of Gorsuch and Venable, the Religious Life Inventory of Batson, Schoenrade and Ventis, and the Spiritual Experiences Index-Revised of Genia.
The first provides an age-independent measure of Allport and Ross's two
religious orientations. The second measures three forms of religious
orientation: religion as means (intrinsic), religion as end (extrinsic),
and religion as quest. The third assesses spiritual maturity using two
factors: Spiritual Support and Spiritual Openness.
Some questionnaires, such as the Religious Orientation Scale,
relate to different religious orientations, such as intrinsic and
extrinsic religiousness, referring to different motivations for
religious allegiance. A rather different approach, taken, for example,
by Glock and Stark (1965), has been to list different dimensions of
religion rather than different religious orientations, which relates to
how an individual may manifest different forms of being religious.
Glock and Stark's typology described five dimensions of religion – the
doctrinal, the intellectual, the ethical-consequential, the ritual, and
the experiential.
In later works, these authors subdivided the ritual dimension into
devotional and public ritual, and also clarified that their distinction
of religion along multiple dimensions was not identical to
distinguishing religious orientations. Although some psychologists of
religion have found it helpful to take a multidimensional approach to
religion for the purpose of psychometric scale design, there has been,
as Wulff explains, considerable controversy about whether religion
should really be seen as multidimensional.
Questionnaires to assess religious experience
What
we call religious experiences can differ greatly. Some reports exist of
supernatural happenings that it would be difficult to explain from a
rational, scientific point of view. On the other hand, there also exist
the sort of testimonies that simply seem to convey a feeling of peace or
oneness – something which most of us, religious or not, may possibly
relate to. In categorizing religious experiences it is perhaps helpful
to look at them as explicable through one of two theories: the
objectivist thesis or the subjectivist thesis.
An objectivist would argue that the religious experience is a
proof of God's existence. However, others have criticised the
reliability of religious experiences. The English philosopher Thomas
Hobbes asked how it was possible to tell the difference between talking
to God in a dream, and dreaming about talking to God.
The Subjectivist view argues that it is not necessary to think of
religious experiences as evidence for the existence of an actual being
whom we call God. From this point of view, the important thing is the
experience itself and the effect that it has on the individual.
Many have looked at stage models, like those of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, to explain how children develop ideas about God and religion in general.
The book-length study contains six stages of faith development proposed by James Fowler:
No.
Fowler
Age
Piaget
0
Undifferentiated Faith
0–2 years
Sensoric-motorical
1
Intuitive- Projective
2–7 years
Pre-operational
2
Mythic- Literal
7–12 years
Concrete operational
3
Synthetic- Conventional
12+ years
Formal-operational
4
Individual-Reflective
21+ years
5
Conjunctive
35+ years
6
Universalizing
45+
Stage 0 – "Primal or Undifferentiated" faith (birth to two
years), is characterized by an early learning of the safety of their
environment (i.e. warm, safe and secure vs. hurt, neglect and abuse). If
consistent nurture is experienced, one will develop a sense of trust
and safety about the universe and the divine. Conversely, negative
experiences will cause one to develop distrust about the universe and
the divine. Transition to the next stage begins with integration of
thought and language which facilitates the use of symbols in speech and
play.
Stage 1 – "Intuitive-Projective" faith (ages of three to seven), is characterized by the psyche's unprotected exposure to the Unconscious, and marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns. Religion is learned mainly through experiences, stories, images, and the people that one comes in contact with.
Stage 2 – "Mythic-Literal" faith (mostly in school children), is characterized by a strong belief in the justice and reciprocity of the universe, and their deities are almost always anthropomorphic. During this time metaphors and symbolic language are often misunderstood and are taken literally.
Stage 3 – "Synthetic-Conventional" faith (arising in adolescence; aged 12 to adulthood), is characterized by conformity
to authority and the religious development of a personal identity. Any
conflicts with one's beliefs are ignored at this stage due to the fear
of threat from inconsistencies.
Stage 4 – "Individuative-Reflective" faith (usually mid-twenties to late thirties), is a stage of angst and struggle. The individual takes personal responsibility for his or her beliefs and feelings.
As one is able to reflect on one's own beliefs, there is an openness to
a new complexity of faith, but this also increases the awareness of
conflicts in one's belief.
Stage 5 – "Conjunctive" faith (mid-life crisis), acknowledges paradox and transcendence
relating reality behind the symbols of inherited systems. The
individual resolves conflicts from previous stages by a complex
understanding of a multidimensional, interdependent "truth" that cannot
be explained by any particular statement.
Stage 6 – "Universalizing" faith: The individual would treat any
person with compassion as he or she views people as from a universal
community, and should be treated with universal principles of love and
justice.
Fowler's model has inspired a considerable body of empirical research
into faith development, although little of such research was ever
conducted by Fowler himself. Gary Leak's Faith Development Scale (FDS)
has been subject to factor analysis by Leak.
Other hypotheses
Other theorists in developmental psychology have suggested that religiosity comes naturally to young children.
Specifically, children may have a natural-born conception of mind-body
dualism, which lends itself to beliefs that the mind may live on after
the body dies. In addition, children have a tendency to see agency and
human design where there is not, and prefer a creationist explanation of
the world even when raised by parents who do not.
Researchers have also investigated attachment system dynamics as a
predictor of the religious conversion experience throughout childhood
and adolescence. One hypothesis is the correspondence hypothesis,
which posits that individuals with secure parental attachment are more
likely to experience a gradual conversion experience. Under the
correspondence hypothesis, internal working models of a person's
attachment figure is thought to perpetuate his or her perception of God
as a secure base. Another hypothesis relating attachment style to the
conversion experience is the compensation hypothesis,
which states that individuals with insecure attachments are more likely
to have a sudden conversion experience as they compensate for their
insecure attachment relationship by seeking a relationship with God.
Researchers have tested these hypotheses using longitudinal studies and
individuals' self narratives of their conversion experience. For
example, one study investigating attachment styles and adolescent
conversions at Young Life religious summer camps resulted in evidence
supporting the correspondence hypothesis through analysis of personal
narratives and a prospective longitudinal follow-up of Young Life
campers, with mixed results for the compensation hypothesis.
Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just as the cardiac, pulmonary, urinary, and immune systems, cognition has a functional structure with a genetic basis, and therefore appeared through natural selection.
Like other organs and tissues, this functional structure should be
universally shared among humans and should solve important problems of
survival and reproduction. Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand
cognitive processes by understanding the survival and reproductive
functions they might serve, and with this lens, apply the same concept
to religion.
Pascal Boyer
is one of the leading figures in the cognitive psychology of religion, a
new field of inquiry that is less than fifteen years old, which
accounts for the psychological processes that underlie religious thought
and practice. In his book Religion Explained, Boyer shows that there is no simple explanation for religious consciousness.
Boyer is mainly concerned with explaining the various psychological
processes involved in the acquisition and transmission of ideas
concerning the gods. Boyer builds on the ideas of cognitive
anthropologists Dan Sperber and Scott Atran,
who first argued that religious cognition represents a by-product of
various evolutionary adaptations, including folk psychology, and
purposeful violations of innate expectations about how the world is
constructed (for example, bodiless beings with thoughts and emotions)
that make religious cognitions striking and memorable.
Religious persons acquire religious ideas and practices through social exposure. The child of a ZenBuddhist will not become an evangelical Christian or a Zulu
warrior without the relevant cultural experience. While mere exposure
does not cause a particular religious outlook (a person may have been
raised a Roman Catholic
but leave the church), nevertheless some exposure seems required – this
person will never invent Roman Catholicism out of thin air. Boyer says cognitive science
can help us to understand the psychological mechanisms that account for
these manifest correlations and in so doing enable us to better
understand the nature of religious belief and practice.
Boyer moves outside the leading currents in mainstream cognitive psychology
and suggests that we can use evolutionary biology to unravel the
relevant mental architecture. Our brains are, after all, biological
objects, and the best naturalistic account of their development in
nature is Darwin's theory of evolution.
To the extent that mental architecture exhibits intricate processes and
structures, it is plausible to think that this is the result of
evolutionary processes working over vast periods of time. Like all
biological systems, the mind is optimised to promote survival and
reproduction in the evolutionary environment. On this view all
specialised cognitive functions broadly serve those reproductive ends.
For Steven Pinker the universal propensity toward religious belief is a genuine scientific puzzle. He thinks that adaptationist
explanations for religion do not meet the criteria for adaptations. An
alternative explanation is that religious psychology is a by-product of
many parts of the mind that originally evolved for other purposes.
Religion and prayer
Religious practice often manifests itself in some form of prayer.
Recent studies have focused specifically on the effects of prayer on
health. Measures of prayer and the above measures of spirituality
evaluate different characteristics and should not be considered
synonymous.
Prayer is fairly prevalent in the United States. About 55% of Americans report praying daily.
However, the practice of prayer is more prevalent and practiced more
consistently among Americans who perform other religious practices. There are four primary types of prayer in the West. Poloma and Pendleton,
utilized factor analysis to delineate these four types of prayer:
meditative (more spiritual, silent thinking), ritualistic (reciting),
petitionary (making requests to God), and colloquial (general conversing
with God). Further scientific study of prayer using factor analysis has
revealed three dimensions of prayer.
Ladd and Spilka's first factor was awareness of self, inward reaching.
Their second and third factors were upward reaching (toward God) and
outward reaching (toward others). This study appears to support the
contemporary model of prayer as connection (whether to the self, higher
being, or others).
Dein and Littlewood (2008) suggest that an individual's prayer
life can be viewed on a spectrum ranging from immature to mature. A
progression on the scale is characterized by a change in the perspective
of the purpose of prayer. Rather than using prayer as a means of
changing the reality of a situation, a more mature individual will use
prayer to request assistance in coping with immutable problems and draw
closer to God or others. This change in perspective has been shown to be
associated with an individual's passage through adolescence.
Prayer appears to have health implications. Empirical studies
suggest that mindfully reading and reciting the Psalms (from scripture)
can help a person calm down and focus. Prayer is also positively correlated with happiness and religious satisfaction.
A study conducted by Francis, Robbins, Lewis, and Barnes investigated
the relationship between self-reported prayer frequency and measures of
psychoticism and neuroticism according to the abbreviated form of the
Revised Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQR-A). The study included a
sample size of 2306 students attending Protestant and Catholic schools
in the highly religious culture of Northern Ireland. The data shows a
negative correlation between prayer frequency and psychoticism. The data
also shows that, in Catholic students, frequent prayer has a positive
correlation to neuroticism scores.
Ladd and McIntosh suggest that prayer-related behaviors, such as bowing
the head and clasping the hands together in an almost fetal position,
are suggestive of "social touch" actions. Prayer in this manner may
prepare an individual to carry out positive pro-social behavior after
praying, due to factors such as increased blood flow to the head and
nasal breathing. Overall, slight health benefits have been found fairly consistently across studies.
Three main pathways to explain this trend have been offered:
placebo effect, focus and attitude adjustment, and activation of healing
processes.
These offerings have been expanded by Breslin and Lewis (2008) who have
constructed a five pathway model between prayer and health with the
following mediators: physiological, psychological, placebo, social
support, and spiritual. The spiritual mediator is a departure from the
rest in that its potential for empirical investigation is not currently
feasible. Although the conceptualizations of chi, the universal mind,
divine intervention, and the like breach the boundaries of scientific
observation, they are included in this model as possible links between
prayer and health so as to not unnecessarily exclude the supernatural
from the broader conversation of psychology and religion.
Religion and ritual
Another significant form of religious practice is ritual.
Religious rituals encompass a wide array of practices, but can be
defined as the performance of similar actions and vocal expressions
based on prescribed tradition and cultural norms.
Scheff suggests that ritual provides catharsis, emotional purging, through distancing.
This emotional distancing enables an individual to experience feelings
with an amount of separation, and thus with less intensity. However, the
conception of religious ritual as an interactive process has since
matured and become more scientifically established. From this view,
ritual offers a means to catharsis through behaviors that foster
connection with others, allowing for emotional expression. This focus on connection contrasts to the separation that seems to underlie Scheff's view.
Additional research suggests a social component of ritual. For
instance, findings suggest that ritual performance indicates group
commitment and prevents the uncommitted from gaining membership
benefits. Ritual may aid in emphasizing moral values that serve as group norms and regulate societies. It may also strengthen commitment to moral convictions and the likelihood of upholding these social expectations. Thus, performance of rituals may foster social-group stability.
Robert Sapolsky sees a similarity between the rituals accompanying obsessive–compulsive disorder
and religious rituals. According to him, religious ritual reduces the
tension and anxiety associated with the disorder and provides relief
resulting from practicing in a social community.
There is considerable literature on the relationship between religion
and health. More than 3000 empirical studies have examined
relationships between religion and health, including more than 1200 in
the 20th century, and more than 2000 additional studies between 2000 and 2009.
Psychologists consider that religion may benefit both physical
and mental health in various ways, including encouraging healthy
lifestyles, providing social support networks and encouraging an
optimistic outlook on life; prayer and meditation may also benefit
physiological functioning. Nevertheless, religion is not a unique source of health and well-being, and there are benefits to nonreligiosity as well.
Haber, Jacob and Spangler have considered how different dimensions of
religiosity may relate to health benefits in different ways.
Some studies have examined whether there is a "religious
personality." Research on the five factor model of personality suggests
that people who identify as religious are more likely to be agreeable
and conscientious.
Similarly, people who identify as spiritual are more likely to be
extrovert and open, although this varies based on the type of
spirituality endorsed. For example, people endorsing fundamentalist religious beliefs are more likely to measure low on the Openness factor.
Religion and prejudice
To
investigate the salience of religious beliefs in establishing group
identity, researchers have also conducted studies looking at religion
and prejudice. Some studies have shown that greater religious attitudes
may be significant predictors of negative attitudes towards racial or
social outgroups.These effects are often conceptualized under the framework of
intergroup bias, where religious individuals favor members of their
ingroup (ingroup favoritism) and exhibit disfavor towards members of
their outgroup (outgroup derogation). Evidence supporting religious
intergroup bias has been supported in multiple religious groups,
including non-Christian groups (after all, religion is not only related
to Christianity, but others like Islamism, Buddhism, Paganism, and
more), and is thought to reflect the role of group dynamics in religious
identification. Many studies regarding religion and prejudice implement
religious priming both in the laboratory and in naturalistic settings
with evidence supporting the perpetuation of ingroup favoritism and
outgroup derogation in individuals who are high in religiosity.
Recently, reparative or conversion therapy,
a religiously motivated process intended to change an individual's
sexuality, has been the subject of scrutiny and has been condemned by
some governments, LGBT charities, and therapy/counselling professional
bodies.
The American psychologist James H. Leuba (1868–1946), in A Psychological Study of Religion,
accounts for mystical experience psychologically and physiologically,
pointing to analogies with certain drug-induced experiences. Leuba
argued forcibly for a naturalistic treatment of religion, which he
considered to be necessary if religious psychology were to be looked at
scientifically. Shamans all over the world and in different cultures
have traditionally used drugs, especially psychedelics, for their religious experiences. In these communities the absorption of drugs
leads to dreams (visions) through sensory distortion. The psychedelic
experience is often compared to non-ordinary forms of consciousness such
as those experienced in meditation, and mystical experiences. Ego dissolution is often described as a key feature of the psychedelic experience.
William James was also interested in mystical experiences from a drug-induced perspective, leading him to make some experiments with nitrous oxide
and even peyote. He concludes that while the revelations of the mystic
hold true, they hold true only for the mystic; for others they are
certainly ideas to be considered, but hold no claim to truth without
personal experience of such.
The research went further and also focused on social models of psychopathology, analyzing new religious movements and charismatic cult leaders such as David Koresh, leader of the Branch Davidians, and Marshall Applewhite, founder of the Heaven's Gate cult.
The researchers concluded that "If David Koresh and Marshall Applewhite
are appreciated as having psychotic-spectrum beliefs, then the premise
becomes untenable that the diagnosis of psychosis must rigidly rely upon
an inability to maintain a social group. A subset of individuals with
psychotic symptoms appears able to form intense social bonds and
communities despite having an extremely distorted view of reality. The
existence of a better socially functioning subset of individuals with
psychotic-type symptoms is corroborated by research indicating that
psychotic-like experiences, including both bizarre and non-bizarre
delusion-like beliefs, are frequently found in the general population.
This supports the idea that psychotic symptoms likely lie on a
continuum."
Religion and psychotherapy
Clients'
religious beliefs are increasingly being considered in psychotherapy
with the goal of improving service and effectiveness of treatment.
A resulting development was theistic psychotherapy. Conceptually, it
consists of theological principles, a theistic view of personality, and a
theistic view of psychotherapy.
Following an explicit minimizing strategy, therapists attempt to
minimize conflict by acknowledging their religious views while being
respectful of client's religious views.
This is argued to up the potential for therapists to directly utilize
religious practices and principles in therapy, such as prayer,
forgiveness, and grace. In contrast to such an approach, psychoanalyst Robin S. Brown
argues for the extent to which our spiritual commitments remain
unconscious. Drawing from the work of Jung, Brown suggests that "our
biases can only be suspended in the extent to which they are no longer
our biases".
Pastoral psychology
One application of the psychology of religion is in pastoral psychology, the use of psychological findings to improve the pastoral care provided by pastors and other clergy, especially in how they support ordinary members of their congregations. Pastoral psychology is also concerned with improving the practice of chaplains in healthcare and in the military. One major concern of pastoral psychology is to improve the practice of pastoral counseling. Pastoral psychology is a topic of interest for professional journals such as the Journal of Psychology and Christianity and the Journal of Psychology and Theology. In 1984, Thomas Oden severely criticized mid-20th-century pastoral care
and the pastoral psychology that guided it as having entirely abandoned
its classical/traditional sources, and having become overwhelmingly
dominated by modern psychological influences from Freud, Rogers, and others. More recently, others have described pastoral psychology as a field that experiences a tension between psychology and theology.
