Abstract
As should be well known, virtually all the founding fathers of psychology contributed something to the subdiscipline presently called psychology of religion. However, in spite of its lengthy history, this psychology of religion is a problematic enterprise and many of its basic questions – e.g., What kind of scholarship, if any, is it? What is its place in academia? What it is about? – still await answers. To some observers, research on religion is a field of applied psychology (Strien 1990): what is known from other branches of psychology can be used to analyze religion. Others, however, strongly opposed to this view, argue that psychology of religion belongs to theoretical psychology (Ouwerkerk 1986; Vergote 1983/1997). To them, religiosity is a test of the scope of more general psychological theories: Are these psychologies able to deal with religiosity? Can they take account of the special relationship the person is involved in, for instance, when praying, when speaking words into a void, addressing “someone” from whom no answer is expected, yet claiming that this moment fills life with meaning? As with other significant psychological research focusing on a specific domain (e.g., art, literature, sport, war and peace), there is no clear institutional unity among people involved in psychology of religion: they are found in departments of philosophy, psychiatry, anthropology, religious studies and in the various specialized departments of psychology.
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Notes
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Another recent discussion on the object of psychology of religion originated in the USA (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Wuthnow 1998, 2001; Zinnbauer et al. 1997). The issue was (and is) whether spirituality should be or become regarded as the object, or whether it should at least be including in the definition of the object of the discipline (Pargament 1999; Stifoss-Hanssen 1999). In division 36 of the American Psychological Association, the division for the ‘psychology of religion,’ a proposal was even made to change the name of the division to ‘psychology of religion and spirituality’. That proposal was not accepted. Some years later, however, the supporters of the proposal started with APA a new journal entitled Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (since 2009). This primarily American discussion will be joined in chapter 6.
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Usually, here as with Allport’s theory of the personality, this viewpoint is the result of (implicit) theological a priori’s – viewing the human being as God’s creature and the relatedness with God as belonging inherently to human nature, only to be repressed at considerable (also psycho-social) costs – going back to Augustine’s famous neo-Platonian adage “Fecisti nos ad Te...”: “Thou [God] hath created us to Thee and our heart is restless in us until it rests in Thee” (Confessiones, Book I, 1, 3).
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A classic functional definition of religion is the one by Yinger: “a system of beliefs and practices by means of which a group of people struggle with the ultimate problems of human life” (1970, p. 7); a well-known defender of the opposed view is Peter Berger, who states: “substantive definitions of religion generally include only such meanings and meaning-complexes as refer to transcendent entities in the conventional sense – God, gods, supernatural beings and worlds, or such metaempirical entities as, say, the ma’at of the ancient Egyptians or the Hindu law of karma” (1974, pp. 127–128).
- 6.
To be clear: I do not assert that every psychologist of religion has the “defense of religion” as her or his program, or starts from religious assumptions as dealt with in this essay. Evidently, there are people publishing on, e.g. mental health and/or psychotherapy, who strive to stay strictly within a psychological framework and who make no suggestions on a religious level to patients (cf., e.g., Rizzuto 1996; Strean 1994). Yet, in many related publications it is evident that at least one of the goals is to counterbalance (vulgarized psychological) views of religion as being neurotic, a hazard to mental health, etc. One should also note, however, that very often patients themselves try to draw the therapist into some kind of religious discussion, i.e. they want “more” than “just” psychotherapy (cf. Kehoe and Gutheil 1993). The same trends could be witnessed within other fields in psychology of religion.
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It should be pointed out that the very term “religion” is impregnated with Christian meaning, as it was created within Christianity in order to reflect on its own status and history. Today, it is increasingly realized that even the employment of the term may impair understanding of other “religions” (Feil 1986).
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There is more to religiosity than being “reinforced behavior” (Skinner 1953), sometimes it may be a way to “human excellence” (James 1902/1982) or to “wholeness” (Jung 1938/1969), but at other times it proves to be “infantile wish fulfillment” (Freud 1913/1964, 1927/1961) or at best a “coping device” (Pargament 1990) – all these and other notions may reveal at least as much about their authors as about the religion they claim to study.
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Belzen, J.A. (2010). The Way Out of Contemporary Debates on the Object of the Discipline. In: Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_4
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