Library of the History of Psychological Theories
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Graham Richards
Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul A Historical Entanglement
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Graham Richards Graham Richards Books 1 Claremont Road Tunbridge Wells, Kent TN1 1SY United Kingdom
[email protected] ISBN 978-1-4419-7172-2â•…â•…â•…â•… e-ISBN 978-1-4419-7173-9 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2010935848 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. 987654321 Printed in the United States of America. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
For two people to whose long-time support I am forever indebted: Mary Midgley and John Radford
If you do not understand the minds of others Never slander others or condemn their views Lest you be misled by self-conceit and egotism. Milarepa. Trans. by Garma C. C. Chang
Preface
I must begin by explaining the origins of this book, since they have a crucial bearing on the form in which it has finally emerged. Shortly after publishing ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology. Towards a Reflexive History in 1997 my friend Rob Iliffe, a now eminent Newtonian scholar at Imperial College London, invited me to contribute a conference paper on the relationship between Psychology and religion to a symposium he was organising for a major history of religion conference. I cobbled something together with which I was fairly smugly satisfied. It quickly dawned on me that the topic was ripe for fresh historical treatment and that, given the crucial issues with which it was concerned, was, in a sense, ‘the Big One’. In Richards (1998) I published a programmatic paper ‘Psychology and Religion: A Suitable Case for Historical Treatment’ in the British Psychological Society’s History & Philosophy of Psychology Section journal. At that point, I assumed the book would involve a relatively straightforward application of the same approach as I had adopted in ‘Race’, Racism and Psychology. I was wrong. Provisional plot-lines kept collapsing, the scale of the research and learning required for such a work kept expanding, and I was ever more acutely aware of the reflexive dimension of the project. To embark on it with one’s 60th year looming, necessarily put one on the spot. I would finally have to clarify my own attitude to religion. And one’s ‘attitude to religion’ is a very profound matter indeed. However, I wanted to maintain as impartial a position as possible for the job in hand, viewing both religion (primarily, of necessity, Christianity) and Psychology as alternative ways of addressing human nature and routes for self-knowledge, subordinating neither to the other. Smugness evaporated. The material itself was nevertheless both fascinating and distracting as I found myself having to detour into James Martineau’s Unitarian theism, Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy, and 1950s–1960s debates between British theologians and ╇
Throughout this work I adopt my usual practice of differentiating between upper-case Psychology/Psychological and lower-case psychology/psychological. The former refer to the discipline, the latter to its subject matter. This avoids ambiguity and clumsy circumlocutions, especially when referring to the relationships between them. I have been plugging this for over 20€years and a few others have now begun to adopt it. It will of course pose problems for any future German translation! ix
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Preface
philosophers in the wake of Wittgenstein. As a result, the end-product includes a few short chapters which are hardly historical at all, while much of my research found no place in it. I also became intensely interested in the Methodist minister Leslie Weatherhead and the role of British religious figures in the origins of the now booming counselling profession as well as in popularising Psychology more generally. This yielded my 2000 paper ‘Psychology and the Churches in Britain 1919–1939: Symptoms of Conversion’. In 2002 I agreed to write the present book for Plenum Press, still optimistic I could forge ahead and produce it within a year or so. Yet it quickly became stalled. The list of chapters kept expanding, a few were completed, many half-written, and the others no more than headings. The problem was partly conceptual or philosophical in that I became progressively more confused as to what kind of topic I was actually dealing with. I also found myself physically less well placed to research the ever growing range of material I felt obliged to tackle. And a viable plot-line remained as elusive as ever. To cut to the chase, in April 2008, at the British Psychological Society’s History & Philosophy of Psychology Section’s Annual Conference I had a sudden moment of clarification listening to Kenneth Gergen. At one point he exhorted us to abandon our confining obsession with sticking to a formal academic style. If our work was to have any real impact, it must be accessible to everyone. I did not interpret this as meaning we should abandon scholarship or rigour, but rather that a more relaxed approach was both more psychologically honest and that we should not get too hung up on trying to produce grand complete accounts, or diverted by completist citation fetishism. This struck a chord, although it was not an entirely new thought to me, and given the cultural resurgence of religion since 1997 (as well as revived interest within Psychology itself) seemed particularly apposite. What I have decided to do then is present a series of essay-like chapters addressing particular episodes or topics which shed light on the relationship between Psychology and religion, without any pretence at being comprehensive or any claims that a coherent chronological historical story can be told (by me at any rate). Some of these are more conventionally academic than others, and no doubt the overall register or tone oscillates somewhat. The upshot is that the work serves more to lay out an agenda of questions than to answer them, and to subvert received assumptions rather than provide neat replacements. I hope this failure to achieve an integrated analysis will be taken charitably as signifying not so much an intellectual inadequacy on the author’s part but rather a more realistic reflection of the patchwork character of its subject matter. The work thus differs from most others which have tackled the topic, usually from the Psychology of Religion angle, in that it is not written from an advocacy position: it is intended neither as a defence nor an attack upon either religion or Psychology, nor is it aimed at either promoting better relations between the two camps or insisting on their severance. In a concluding chapter I have, even so, attempted a provisional drawing together of the threads regarding their historical relationships. I also felt it was only fair to indicate my own current view of religion in the light of what the project has taught me. It is now my 70th year which is, if somewhat distantly, approaching and the wind begins to howl.
Acknowledgments
Numerous people have helped me with this project over the years in a variety of ways. In particular I would like to thank the following: Robert Iliffe (who unwittingly set the ball rolling), Fraser Watts, Hendrika Vande Kemp, Ian Nicholson, Geoff Bunn, Robert Fuller, David Wulff, Jacob Belzen and my patient long-suffering friend Robert Rieber who rashly commissioned the present work. I am also grateful to Hilary Brown, Carol O’Dea and Dan Huckfield for our sometimes heated debates on the nature of religion. These greatly helped me clarify my position, despite the immoveable academic pomposity and verbosity with which I must have often seemed to be maintaining a rigid stance. Maura’s loving support has, as ever, played a major part, as has her encouraging feedback on the final draft. It is also, in the present instance, more than usually necessary to make the routinised statement that I alone am responsible for all the book’s faults as well as the interpretations and views expressed therein.
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Contents
1â•…The Nature of the Problem ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓��� â•… 1 2â•…Mythos and Logos ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓����������������� â•… 9 3â•…Psychology’s Religious Roots ����������������������������������尓����������������������������������� ╇ 13 Education and the Child ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������� ╇ 13 The American Dimension ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������� ╇ 15 Some Early British Religious Psychologists ����������������������������������尓�������������� ╇ 18 James Martineau (1805–1900) ����������������������������������尓�������������������������������� ╇ 19 W. B. Carpenter (1813–1885) ����������������������������������尓��������������������������������� ╇ 20 George J. Romanes (1848–1894) ����������������������������������尓���������������������������� ╇ 21 F. W. H. Myers (1843–1901) ����������������������������������尓����������������������������������� ╇ 22 James Ward (1843–1925) ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���� ╇ 23 A Catholic Detour ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������� ╇ 24 Religious Origins of the Concept of ‘Psychology’����������������������������������尓������ ╇ 27 Conclusions ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓����������������������������� ╇ 29 4â•…Psychology of Religion ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������� ╇ 31 William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience �������������������������������� ╇ 32 Classic Psychology of Religion ����������������������������������尓���������������������������������� ╇ 38 The Demise of Classical Psychology of Religion ����������������������������������尓������� ╇ 45 Conclusion ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������������������ ╇ 48 5â•…A Boundary Problem ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������ ╇ 51 John Macmurray ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓��������������������� ╇ 52 Reinhold Niebuhr ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓�������������������� ╇ 53 Paul Tillich ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������������������ ╇ 56 Martin Buber ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓��������������������������� ╇ 59 The Union Theological Seminary Connection ����������������������������������尓����������� ╇ 62 Conclusion ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������������������ ╇ 63 6â•…The Authenticity of Religious Experience ����������������������������������尓��������������� ╇ 65 xiii
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7╅╇ Religion and Psychotherapy ����������������������������������尓�������������������������������� ╇ ╇ 69 ╇ Boston Emmanuel Movement (1906–1929) ����������������������������������尓����������� ╇╇ 70 ╇ Britain between 1918 and c. 1980 ����������������������������������尓��������������������������� ╇╇ 71 ╇ Hugh Crichton-Miller ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������ â•… 76 ╇ Leslie Weatherhead ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓��������� â•… 78 ╇ William Brown ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������������� â•… 80 ╇ Other Psychological Involvements with Religion ��������������������������������� â•… 83 ╇ The Interwar Period in Britain: A Summary ����������������������������������尓������� â•… 84 ╇ The Post-war Period ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓�������� â•… 85 ╇ The Growth Movement ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������� â•… 89 8╅╇ The Problem of Prayer ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓����� â•… 93 9╅╇Religion and Personality ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓�� ╇ 101 10â•…The Theism Question ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓�������� ╇ 109 11â•…Psychology and Non-Christian Religions ����������������������������������尓������������ ╇ 117 12â•…Religion and Psychological Theory ����������������������������������尓��������������������� ╇ 123 ╇↜Piaget: Salvaging Protestantism by Other Means? ����������������������������������尓� ╇ 124 ╇↜Freud: The Mysterious Nature of Psychoanalysis ����������������������������������尓�� ╇ 126 ╇↜Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967): The Psychology of an Episcopalian ���� ╇ 131 ╇↜Atheism and Anti-religious Psychology ����������������������������������尓����������������� ╇ 138 ╇↜Conclusion ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓�������������������������� ╇ 139 13â•…Conclusions, Hypotheses, Suggestions and a Stab at a Personal ‘Position Statement’ ����������������������������������尓������������������������������ ╇ 141 ╇↜Religious Doctrines Beyond Psychology’s Brief ����������������������������������尓��� ╇ 143 ╇↜Religion and Psychology Essentially Concerned with the Same Issues ���� ╇ 145 ╇↜Religion is an Inferior Alternative to Psychology ����������������������������������尓�� ╇ 147 ╇↜Reconstruing the Relationship ����������������������������������尓�������������������������������� ╇ 149 ╇↜Two Issues for Historians of Psychology ����������������������������������尓��������������� ╇ 152 ╇↜An Attempt at a Final Position ����������������������������������尓�������������������������������� ╇ 153 ╇↜Concluding Remarks ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓���������� ╇ 160 Bibliography ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������������������ ╇ 163 Index ����������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������������������������������������尓������� ╇ 175
Chapter 1
The Nature of the Problem
Serious historical studies of the relationships between Psychology and Christianity are oddly scarce. Given the topic’s centrality to any understanding of how ideas about ‘human nature’ have altered since the late nineteenth century, and their various Psychological causes, effects and reflections, one might expect it to have received intense attention. Yet it rarely enters the limelight in the copious literatures on ‘modernist modes of subjectivity’, ‘secularisation’ and cultural history, or in the specialist histories of either Psychology or religion. It is worth considering possible reasons for this apparent lacuna before proceeding further: (a) The story seems too obvious and simple to need spelling out. (b) Lack of interest in religion by post-modernist scholars. ╇
Two comprehensive texts do exist: David M. Wulff (1997) Psychology of Religion. Classic and Contemporary and James M. Nelson (2009) Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. The first is an invaluable reference source but it should be stressed that his agenda is to review, as the title states, the sub-discipline ‘The Psychology of Religion’ from the perspective of one committed to that cause. While this inevitably takes him into broader areas, it is thus radically different in aim from the current work which seeks to address the nature of the historical relationship between Psychology and religion as alternative orientations towards construing the human condition. The second appeared too late for me to take into consideration in what follows; while impressively wide-ranging it is again basically a ‘Psychology of Religion’ text, explicitly aimed at promoting dialogue between Psychology and the religious. David Fontana’s Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality (2003) provides an extremely useful overview of the current state of play in ‘Psychology of Religion’, and in itself signifies a revival of interest in this field—and it is not insignificant that it is co-published by the British Psychological Society. Again, however, it is not historical in orientation. Hendrika Vande Kemp has, however, published numerous historical journal papers on specific aspects of the relationship as well as the invaluable Psychology and Theology in Western Thought 1672–1965. A Historical and Annotated Bibliography (1984a), compiled in collaboration with H. Newton Maloney (entries in this are occasionally footnoted subsequently as P&T followed by the entry number). Meissner (1961) is a more extensive bibliography than Vande Kemp’s, but less user-friendly. The difference in content size is primarily due to Meissner’s inclusion of journal papers. Robert C. Fuller (1986) Americans and the Unconscious is somewhat closer to the approach adopted in the present work, but one book does not a genre make and, indeed, in a recent paper (Fuller, 2006) he notes that of 870 articles in the first 158 issues of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (virtually the only journal outlet for history of Psychology until the mid-1980s, and still the most prestigious) a mere 18 (c. 2%) ‘examined religious influences upon the origin and function of the social sciences’ (p.€222). G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_1, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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(c) Marginalisation of the topic within histories of both Psychology and religion because of their received agendas. (d) The issue has been subsumed in the concept of ‘secularisation’. Obviously, these are not entirely distinct, and the first perhaps underlies the rest. The received wisdom is that Psychology’s ascent presented a challenge to mainstream Christianity, replacing religious concepts and images of human nature by ostensibly ‘scientific’ ones, while Psychological techniques for dealing with mental distress such as psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling ousted those used by traditional Christianity. This is part and parcel of the wider process of progressive ‘secularisation’ of western cultures during the twentieth century. Many, thus, ceased to see and understand themselves in religious terms, and came to view their problems as ‘psychological’ rather than ‘spiritual’ in nature. By the end of the twentieth century Psychology had effectively won out over Christianity in the white populations of European cultures (except perhaps in resurgently Catholic Poland and parts of North America), particularly in the main urban centres where this population was concentrated, although a resurgence of religion’s popularity was clearly looming. In non-white and rural (especially U.S. rural) populations Christianity could, admittedly, maintain its cultural power. In Asian immigrant communities Islam, Hinduism and Sikhism were also able to flourish, as did various branches of Judaism in Jewish communities. By and large, however, religion, of whatever kind, had lost its broad appeal and authority. Those in positions of cultural power (from academics to media persons) grew indifferent to religion’s appeal, coming to view religious belief and practice as little more than a personal hobby or quirk. By 2000 this image of affairs had acquired the character of common, implicit, knowledge. One implication then is that studying the details of the Psychology–Christianity relationship would be unlikely to disclose anything of great import, especially as most of those in a position to undertake any such work might be assumed to be in the secular camp. The core feature of this image for our purposes is that it assumes Psychology and the mainstream Christian denominations to be rivals, and, moreover, that Psychology eventually ‘won’. This picture was reinforced by the fact that most scholars who might have been expected to address the issue have, over the last twenty years, identified themselves as belonging to some, rather hazily defined, ‘post-modernist’ movement. In itself this might have proved an advantage for rethinking the topic, were it not off-set by their own almost entirely secular personal ‘psychologies’ or ‘mentalities’. Their focus has indeed been on the ‘psychologisation’ of ‘subjectivity’ during the twentieth century, but this process is treated as ‘figure’ against a ‘ground’ of undifferentiated traditional modes of thinking which passively yield to it. Positive engagements or involvements within the process by the religious camp thus become invisible. They have, in short, failed to be able to bracket ‘Psychology’ and ‘religion’ alike as inter-relating factors in the historical process of psychological change, reserving their attention for the former alone. At heart this perhaps reflects no more than the fact that non-believers are uninterested in religion and are thus reluctant to give it due weight—since to do so would demand that they take it seriously and
The Nature of the Problem
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read religious texts from which they temperamentally recoil (unlike the, to me, unreadable Heidegger!). In some cases there may though be a deeper factor in play: an anxiety that reading and engaging with religious texts and ideas is but the first step on the slippery slope to conversion, and is thus psychologically dangerous. The source of this anxiety lies, one suspects, in childhood exposure to evangelical religion, with its vast store of just such conversion stories. At any rate, direct immersion in religious literature appears to be felt as psychologically risky. (It is not an anxiety which, I must confess, I have been entirely immune to—which may be why I am aware of it.) The ‘secularization’ image and post-modernist aversion are not, however, entirely sufficient to explain the topic’s neglect. In the United States, in particular, non-believers are far from being an overwhelming majority among academics, and religion’s cultural visibility is far higher than in Britain and most of mainland Europe. There are further reasons why the topic has fallen through the historiographic net. Turning first to the history of Psychology, a quick look at its research agendas and priorities suggests that these have inevitably marginalised concern with the Psychology–religion relationship. Until the mid-1970s, historians of Psychology engaged, for the most part, in fairly traditional internalist studies of eminent psychologists, theoretical schools, the major sub-disciplines and methodological developments. This was usually pervaded by broadly progressivist assumptions and guided by a simple plot-line in which scientific Psychology emerges in a somewhat revolutionary fashion in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, first in Germany (and the Austro–Hungarian Empire) and then in France, the United States and Britain. Relationships between Psychology and society at large were left unscrutinised except in specific instances when a particular development (e.g. group testing of intelligence) was patently a direct response to historical circumstances (in that case, the U.S. Army conscription programme of 1917). The reflexive perspective in which Psychology’s role in psychological change becomes a central issue was almost completely unrepresented. Insofar as their orientations were positively celebratory of ‘scientific’ progress, they would have had further cause to be disinclined to attend to religion. After the mid-1970s, reflecting developments in history of science, the need for ‘contextualized’ accounts slowly began to make headway, along with much re-reading of long-neglected primary texts. Responding to Foucault’s work, some anglophone historians of Psychology (like Rose, 1985, 1990) began to attempt similar analyses of the discipline’s roles and meanings in relation to changing modes of subjectivity and sociological issues of power, governance and social management within the ‘modernist’ industrial cultures of Britain and North America. This might easily have brought the Psychology–Christianity relationship into prominence, but the dynamics of the ensuing debates continued to direct attention elsewhere. More urgent themes clearly ╇
This view of traditional histories of Psychology has become widely accepted among academics in the field since the 1980s. A particularly trenchant and influential paper was R. Smith (1988) ‘Does the History of Psychology Have a Subject?’, History of the Human Science Vol.1(2), 147–177.
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required tackling, notably the nature and extent of Psychology’s male-centredness, its dealings with women, and the recovery of non-whites’ (especially African American) and women’s contributions to the discipline. The ways in which the mentally distressed, gays and people with learning difficulties had been conceptualised and treated by Psychology also came to the fore as aspects of a broader project of uncovering both the white-male centredness and the allegedly ideologically conservative interests of earlier Psychology. It has to be said that much of this work (although not Nikolas Rose’s) was, historiographically, relatively unsophisticated and over-partisan. Historians also began to explore social constructionist aspects of methodology and theorising, as well as seeing how far the models which had emerged in history of science (especially Kuhn’s theory of scientific ‘revolutions’) could be applied to Psychology. A very great deal of energy was also devoted to the history of psychoanalysis, this becoming a virtual sub-discipline in its own right. In the background lay some more profound critiques of, on the one hand, the very nature of Psychology as a unified scientifically orthodox project and on the other the ways in which historians had hitherto dealt with its past. From the late 1980s onwards the ‘religion’ issue occasionally bubbles to the surface as a result of these concerns, but it is rarely subjected to systematic examination. It is not then simply lack of interest in the topic or hostility towards religion which are to blame for this oversight but the fact that other questions appeared more pressing, fundamental or interesting. The only qualifications to be entered here are that there have been a handful of scholars, such as Hendrika Vande Kamp (in the U.S.), whose major interest is in psychotherapy and counselling, Jacob Belzen (in Holland), who has focussed on the sub-discipline Psychology of Religion, and David M. Wulff, whose monumental Psychology of Religion. Classic and Contemporary has become a primary reference work (see Footnote€1 above). Both the Psychology of Religion and psychotherapy are but facets, albeit important ones, of the issue with which we are concerned. As far as the history of Christian religion is concerned, the situation is more complex, ‘history of religion’ lacking even the somewhat fuzzy sub-disciplinary status of history of Psychology. Just as history of Psychology has tended to be written by psychologists, history of religion has tended, perhaps even more strongly, to be written by the religious, except when written by the fervently anti-religious in a hostile spirit. Leaving aside the last, we might point to reasons for the topic’s neglect similar to those just mentioned. For social and cultural historians the issues of interest have tended to be social and sociological such as shifting levels of church membership and attendance, changes in levels of cultural authority, political allegiances and the roles of churches and religious societies in social reform movements. There is also a substantial American genre focussing on the history of Creationism. The specific issue of the churches’ responses to Psychology is thus of limited interest, entering only, if at all, in the context of pastoral care. For historians ╇
As one example, in Vivian Green’s very comprehensive A New History of Christianity (1996, rev. 1998), with a Foreword by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Runcie, the word ‘psychology’ appears nowhere in the index or in the extensive section sub-headings to the two chapters on the post-1880 period.
The Nature of the Problem
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concerned with religious thought and theology, the dominant interest has been with the major theological figures of the early twentieth century, men like Reinhold and H. Richard Niebuhr, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Hans Küng and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. While acknowledging that developments within theology need to be understood as responses to the emergence of secular ‘modernism’, including Psychology, the Psychology–Christianity relationship per se again remains a peripheral matter, more so for example than that between theology and philosophy. Moreover, the topic’s neglect by historians can lead others in both camps uncritically to accept the stereotypical image of the situation discussed previously. More recently the work of Karen Armstrong has brilliantly tackled more general issues related to the history of monotheistic religion (giving fairer weight to Islam and Judaism), but again Psychology per se is not within her remit. These factors all combine to subsume the history of the Psychology–Christianity relationship under the broader ‘secularisation’ rubric, the ‘secularisation’ cliché, both contributing to and being reinforced by the absence of attention it has received. This is not to deny that ‘secularisation’ has taken place over the last century and a half, and especially over the last century. It is though to suggest that the reality was more complex than can usefully be captured by this simple term, and that in some respects it needs qualification. Part of the present work’s task therefore is to identify and articulate some of these complexities as illuminated by the Psychology–religion relationship. The need for a new approach is also reinforced by Mathew Thomson’s Psychological Subjects (2006), which discloses a far more complicated picture than straightforward top-down ‘psychologisation’. He has disinterred in great detail the agendas of the widespread ‘popular psychology’ and self-improvement groups, movements, magazines and clubs which flourished in Britain prior to World War II, and in so doing showed (among much else) how the ‘abandonment of religion’ picture is at best exaggerated and at worst downright wrong. Again, however, it is not a topic he addresses directly at any length. Given the more prominent religiosity of the George W. Bush U.S. presidency and Tony Blair’s British premiership, plus the global hubbub accompanying the death of Pope John Paul II, and the rise of Christian and Islamic creationism, as well as of religious fundamentalism in general, it is also clear that this image is in any case becoming outdated. A reappraisal of the topic is thus timely, but also problematic. It is timely because religion is currently reassuming a world-wide prominence in social and political affairs unseen for over a century. Since the late eighteenth century international politics, one might note, has primarily revolved around secular and non-religious ideological issues, while in western cultures, whatever the part religion played in personal life, political life had, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, become effectively secularised, religious issues as such playing relatively little role in determining government policies (except over recent decades in the case of the ‘Christian right’ in the U.S.). While these are sweeping generalisations which require numerous qualifications regarding specific times and places, there is surely little doubt that the first decade of the present century is seeing religious factors influencing, and sometimes dominating, contemporary affairs on a scale inconceivable during most of the twentieth, from the continuing political power of
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1 The Nature of the Problem
the fundamentalist Christian right in the United States to that of so-called ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘extremist’ Islam, Zionism and Hinduism elsewhere. Albeit outside the mainstream churches, evangelical Christianity is also domestically thriving in many western cultures, not least in Britain and North America, the sites with which we are primarily dealing here. The revival of Creationism especially in North America is but one important aspect of this. Such a renewed salience of religion is itself surely a psychological phenomenon of major significance. As previously indicated, over the last twenty years it has become routine among social and cultural historians, historians of science and historians of Psychology to talk of the emergence of ‘modernist modes of subjectivity’ (or some such phrase) and view the period from the late nineteenth century onwards as one in which ostensibly ‘scientific’ Psychological modes of understanding human nature and experience effectively ousted, or at any rate outweighed, religious modes. Present circumstances must at least give us pause for thought before further reiterating this formulaic account. If the polarity is ‘materialist’, ‘scientific’ Psychology versus ‘spiritual’ religion, the outcome of the contest is clearly far from decided, and perhaps we should not be thinking in terms of this framework anyway. One conclusion to be drawn from what ensues is indeed, as we will see, that the complexity of the historical relationships between the parties requires that we abandon it. Even so, the task of reappraisal is also, as noted, problematic. Among recent historians of Psychology there has been increasing scepticism (to which the present author has contributed) about the unity of ‘Psychology’ as a scientific discipline. Rather it is seen as an umbrella title for a wide range of different kinds of inquiry related to human (and animal) behaviour and experience, varying in terms of subject matter (brain-functioning to crowd behaviour, memory to vocational guidance), method (from laboratory experiment to field observation, introspection to psychoanalysis), national character (North American, British, German and French Psychologies for example have often differed profoundly) and underlying ideology or philosophical orientation (positivist, pragmatist, Marxist, existentialist, liberal humanist, feminist, and even Nazi Psychologies all being identifiable). This suggests that Psychology cannot be validly cast as a single entity exhibiting one clear-cut relationship (or sequence of relationships) with religion. But is ‘religion’ (or even ‘Christianity’) any more coherent a category? The answer has to be in the negative. Heterogeneous though it be, Psychology is, unambiguously, an academic discipline of a predominantly scientific character, albeit one with numerous wider social dimensions and in which the meaning of the injunction to be ‘scientific’ is perennially controversial. It is not a centre of economic or political power, nor is it a formally constituted social organisation or source of clear prescriptive rules and guidelines for the conduct of life (even if individual psychologists have their own ideas on such matters which may enjoy a wider vogue and have profound cultural impacts, e.g. in relation to child-rearing). Religions, by contrast, have typically been all these things. In offering transcendental frameworks within which all of human life should be conducted and construed, religions engage with it at all levels. Their ‘products’ range from music to war, from resources for individual self-knowledge to architecture, from poetry to forms of political power,
The Nature of the Problem
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and from rituals to mark the key moments of social and individual life to charitable organisations. Psychology engages with religion only at certain points in this spectrum. They are nonetheless points of central importance, for they pertain to the very legitimacy, nature and value of the beliefs on which religions are premised. Principally they relate to religious accounts of human nature, to the significance of ‘religious experience’, to the psychological character and consequences of religious belief and to some of its social psychological aspects. Religion is also, of course, diverse in a more straightforward sense—there is not just one religion but, even within Christianity, a great range of denominations and sects. The attitudes of these towards science in general and Psychology in particular have, as we will be seeing, varied from outright hostility in the case of post-Great War European conservative Protestantism, to positive, if selective, endorsement and even on occasion to something like an alliance. In considering the relationship between Psychology and religion, therefore, we are, more accurately, concerned with the relationships between a set of Psychological sub-disciplines and those religious constituencies which have chosen to take Psychology seriously. Additionally we are also concerned with the roles which psychologists’ own religious beliefs (if any) have played in determining the character of their Psychological work. This last point reminds us that we are not dealing with two mutually exclusive camps, that there is an overlap between them, and that the relationship can be as much an internal psychological/religious issue for individuals as one of debate between them. Before proceeding to the historical material, there is another issue which needs to be raised. It has become clearer to me that there is at least one over-arching framework which may provide the context, if not a plot-line, for the entire issue. This is that both parties are ultimately having to wrestle with the relationship between what Karen Armstrong calls mythos and logos. This topic needs its own brief introduction.
Chapter 2
Mythos and Logos
The distinction between what Karen Armstrong (following earlier scholars) currently refers to as mythos and logos is more familiar in other guises such as ‘art versus science’, ‘spirituality versus worldliness’ and ‘values versus facts’ (Armstrong, 1993). These, however, all lack quite the generality required, referring to facets of the polarity in question rather than the polarity itself. For current purposes the two may be characterised as follows: Mythos refers to those broad frameworks of value and meaning in terms of which we conduct and evaluate our lives and experience the universe as a whole. A mythos is not a body of empirical propositions but a way of being and experiencing. It is what gives life its point. The dominant mythos of a culture is expressed in its arts, literature, values, aspirations and rituals, providing individuals with the resources for interpreting and expressing their emotional lives and relationships with others. It is their articulation of mythos which can provide written texts such as sacred scriptures, poetry, drama and novels with such an enduring appeal, sometimes millennia after their creation. And insofar as they fail to articulate it, they become unread except by a handful of academic specialists. Logos on the other hand refers to our practical and problem-solving understanding of how the world works, our grasps both of physical cause–effect relationships and how to exercise social power over others. Logos is about means not ends. The texts which logos yields are inherently transient in general appeal unless leavened with a yeast of mythos. We care not for the wheat transactions recorded on cuneiform clay tablets, but the Epic of Gilgamesh remains fascinating; the Shakespeare industry prospers as ever, but Tudor works on church administration remain under the dust awaiting a Ph.D. student. And pre-1980 runs of specialist science journals remain unconsulted by students and lecturers alike, while English students can still delightedly rediscover Jane Austen and TV script-writers ransack Charles Dickens yet again. Even the most devout largely ignore the biblical Book of Numbers, yet the Gospel according to St. John remains required reading for anyone with pretensions to being educated, Christian or not.
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This may take the form of visual illustrations which gives them enduring artistic or aesthetic appeal, especially in books on medicine, technology and the life-sciences in general. G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_2, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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2 Mythos and Logos
When politics focuses on matters of economics, social cohesion, public health, controlling crime and defence against external threat it is in the service of logos. But when rulers come to believe a mythos is all they require, that, for example, as instruments of God’s will their success is guaranteed and logos-based practical expertise irrelevant, the consequences are, as Karen Armstrong observes, usually disastrous. The eternal political problem is balancing mythos-rooted values and logos-known practicality. Mythos alone cannot tell you how to solve practical real-world problems. Logos alone cannot guide you on the morality of the solutions it enables you to identify. To get down to brass tacks: Over the last century and a half Christianity has witnessed the steady disproof of the Bible’s empirical logos content as stating literal truths. At the same time Psychology has forever writhed in a cleft stick between its logos-like scientific aspirations and the centrality of mythos to its own subject matter—which is in turn the very thing which is producing it. The cliché that Psychology in general has replaced (or wants to replace) religion is, we will see, quite misleading. What is truer perhaps is that western societies at large have wanted it to do so. As an aspiring natural science, Psychology is in the service of logos, and, insofar as it succeeds in fulfilling this aspiration, can do no such thing. But there is a vicious twist. The staggering success of the natural sciences for a long time held out such promise that only an expertise on human nature that sailed under its banner could hope for cultural credibility (see Mary Midgley’s 1992 Science as Salvation for an insightful review of the general topic of science’s mythos aspirations, although this is not a term she uses). Psychologists themselves could only flourish if they were able to offer ‘scientific’ accounts of mental distress, techniques of education and child-rearing, as well as demarcations between the normal and abnormal, the healthy and pathological, in all areas of human behaviour and character. Many strove to promote ‘holism’ or appreciation of individual uniqueness to counter the analytical and reductionist approaches of their more hard-headedly scientifically orthodox colleagues. But the more these tactics were employed the more they shifted into the territory of mythos, Psychoanalysis perhaps being the paradigm example. It is worth recalling at this point that late nineteenth century science had produced its own science-rooted mythos. It did this by converting the Darwinian and Spencerian evolutionary images into a creation myth of a more conventional kind. The Christian ‘Fall’ was replaced by an evolutionary ‘Rise’, and white ruling-class Europeans were the highest and finest achievement of evolution itself. This evolutionary mythos, when allowed to guide practical affairs, had consequences no less disastrous than those which ensue when a religious mythos occupies the policymaking saddle; eugenics, degenerationism and scientific racism being cast as direct applications of scientific knowledge. Even the usual ethical evaluations of compassion (good) and ruthless competition (bad) were at times stood on their heads by exponents of the evolutionary mythos. By the 1920s most psychologists had rejected this kind of use of evolutionary theory, but the inevitability of Psychology being infused with mythos elements and connotations has remained inescapable. It is, in fact, in providing these with a comforting ‘scientific’ ratification, that Psychology’s task is popularly understood to lie.
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Mythos is, to reiterate, not about generating empirically testable propositions. It is about generating stories, images and symbols which can provide our emotions and life-experiences with meaning, value and structure. Logos is about identifying the causal principles by which the world operates and generating methods for controlling these. This includes, in the case of the social world, the formulation of laws and regulations which ensure that society runs smoothly and consistently with the values which it ultimately derives from mythos. But the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ rarely, prior to the mid-twentieth century, seriously inhibited Christian societies from including capital punishment in the Statute Book (let alone going to war). What we are in effect exploring in this work therefore are some of the vicissitudes in how both Psychology and mainstream Christianity have managed this tension. When Psychology fails to pay mythos its due it always risks becoming dehumanisingly reductionistic and severing itself from one of its principle sources. Conversely, when Christianity fails to pay logos its due it always risks becoming absurd. I am not, I should stress, arguing here that the mythos/logos distinction is synonymous with that between religion and science. All that is being indicated is that these are the territories, so to speak, which they respectively inhabit. But Psychology exists at the point where they encounter each other and demand integration, for the continent of which they are territories is a single one; the psyche itself. One might say that Psychology is a cultural expression of the psyche’s efforts at finding and articulating such an integration. It has not, alas, done very well so far. A first move in rectifying the received image of inherent opposition between the two parties is to examine the historical roles of religion in the origins of modern Psychology.
Chapter 3
Psychology’s Religious Roots
During the period from around 1870 to 1900 Psychology acquired something resembling its current form as a purportedly scientific, institutionally based discipline. This is generally depicted as resulting primarily from (a) the extension, especially in Germany, of physiological experimental techniques to basic ‘psychophysical’ phenomena such as reaction-time and sensory discrimination, and (b) the rise of evolutionary theory after 1859, which provided an integrating theoretical framework for a variety of hitherto disparate proto-Psychological disciplines and fields of study such as animal behaviour, education, mental philosophy and criminology. Both of these represented further advances of ‘materialist’ science and the latter was especially widely construed as essentially in conflict with mainstream Christian doctrines. How did the religious respond to first the prospect, and then the reality, of a ‘science of the mind’? Surely this amounted to a scientific invasion of the core territory of the religious domain—indeed perhaps its only territory now that its authority over the physical universe had been ceded to science? In fact, head-on clashes were rare and in some important respects many of the religious were supportive of the new discipline. Why so? In what follows we will explore this unexpected lack of confrontation and show that, when the religious factor is taken into account, the standard picture of Psychology’s origins requires some adjustment.
Education and the Child One obvious reason for non-confrontation lies in the social context. Both in Europe and the United States newly urbanised industrial societies, with rapidly growing populations, were seeing the problems of managing education, crime and mental illness rising to unprecedented levels, anxieties over these often being exacerbated ╇
This is an oversimplification—in some respects this extension was part and parcel of the development of experimental methodology itself, pioneering experimental Psychology did not simply apply pre-existing techniques. G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_3, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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by the eugenic concerns, derived from evolutionary theory, which became so widespread during this period. These were naturally fields in which religious interests and involvement were frequently very prominent, especially with respect to the child and education, as well as psychological distress. In illustration of this, it is instructive briefly to indicate the presence of religious interests in the field of education and child studies in Britain. Although British scientific study of the child is generally dated to Darwin’s famous monograph, it only began acquiring a major cultural presence in the 1890s with the founding of two organisations which subsequently merged. In 1894, with support from James Sully (professor of Psychology at University College, London) who became its first president, the British Child Study Association (BCSA) was founded, its London branch being the most active. Two years later a Childhood Society (CS) followed, originating in a Committee on the Mental and Physical Condition of Children which had begun work in 1888 and in 1895 published its Report on the Scientific Study of the Mental and Physical Conditions of Childhood (Warner, 1895) claiming to have studied 50 thousand children between 1888 and 1891, and a further 50 thousand from 1892 to 1894. In both of these we find representatives of the Christian churches playing a leading part. In the case of the BCSA (London branch) a particularly prominent figure was the Methodist minister, the Reverend John Scott Lidgett. Turberfield (2003) notes that Lidgett has been described as ‘the greatest Methodist since John Wesley’. His involvement with the BCSA stemmed directly from his prominent role in the Bermondsey Settlement, in London’s East End, a religious project aimed at helping children in the poorest area of London, which also had connections with Oxford Anglican Evangelicals. One notes that a certain ‘Sister Grace’ from the settlement offered a talk on ‘The educational uses of play’ in June 1897, possibly related to the work of the spin-off ‘Guild of Childhood’ established to teach under-10s folk songs and dances. Other ministers identifiable as active members include Rev. T. W. Sharpe, also active in the CS, Senior Chief Inspector in the Education Department at this time (who gave a talk on ‘Social and moral aspects of elementary education schools’ in 1899), Rev. J. C. Bevan (occasionally Chair of meetings) and Rev. W. J. Adams (who became president in 1902). As well as Sharpe the CS founding committee included Rev. George Bell (headmaster of Marlborough College), Rev. J. C. Welldon (headmaster of Harrow) and the Catholic Cardinal Vaughan (Archbishop of Westminster). The religious beliefs or sympathies of other members of these societies cannot be so easily ascertained, but inferences might be made. Even Sully himself had begun training as a nonconformist minister ╇
Pick (1989, rep. 1996) remains the best introduction to eugenics and the associated Europe-wide ‘degeneration’ panic. ╇ Charles Darwin (1877) ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant’, Mind Vol.€2, 285–294. ╇ For a recent overview of Sully’s career including his involvements with child study and education see Lyobov G. Gurjeva (2001) ‘James Sully and Scientific Psychology, 1870–1910’ in G. C. Bunn, A. S. Lovie and G. D. Richards (eds.) Psychology in Britain. Historical Essays and Personal Reflections. ╇ British Psychological Society. History of Psychology Centre Archive 003/03/03.
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in his early years. Reginald Langdon Down, who succeeded Sully as president of the BCSA, was the son of the better known medical pioneer in what we now call ‘learning difficulties’, John L. H. Langdon Down, discoverer of Down’s syndrome, a man renowned for his piety (although Reginald later became prominent in the Eugenics Society). As this indicates, religion was central to the cultural ambience in which British Psychology was first attempting to market its expertise beyond academia. A good case could be made that education and child-rearing provided the single most important route by which it initially achieved this. Crime, ‘idiocy’ and mental distress were additional concerns to which it was believed the new discipline could contribute, and again religious figures were ubiquitous in the official and philanthropic bodies variously responsible for managing, monitoring, providing resources and overseeing treatment. Any list of witnesses before Royal Commissions and Parliamentary Committees on such matters from this period will contain a significant sprinkling of religious ministers and representatives of religious charities. It would be interesting to speculate how far this religious constituency acted as a brake on the ‘scientific’ eugenicist and degenerationist lobby, but this is beyond my concern here. If Psychology was to create a place for itself in the world at large, it had carefully to negotiate its relationship with the religious interests. Conversely, to the extent that it succeeded, the religious would in turn endorse the value of Psychological perspectives on such matters. Although this is a British example, the same analysis would apply, perhaps with even greater force, to the United States and much of mainland Europe. Educational Psychology itself was substantially an earlier European creation in which religion had played a major role, being central for pious pioneers such as both the German Protestant Friedrich Froebel and the Italian Antonio Rosmini Serbati (a Catholic priest). Whatever is true of other topics, concern with the child and education should be viewed not only as something which Psychology could use for its self-promotion, but as a very significant factor driving the actual emergence of the discipline. It was in the literature related to this, both secular and religious, that proto-Psychological ideas had been being promulgated ever since the late eighteenth century and arguably as far back as the sixteenth. Insofar as these were religious in character, they therefore played a role in Psychology’s origins. In the United States the predominance of religiously founded universities and colleges gave this a further positive twist. To understand this we need to look more generally at North American Psychology’s origins.
The American Dimension In the United States Psychology was preceded by university and college based courses in what is usually referred to as ‘Mental and Moral Philosophy’ (MMP henceforth), taught to all students, frequently by the institution’s president. This
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was rooted in the Scottish realist or ‘common sense’ tradition founded in the previous century by Thomas Reid and elaborated further by Dugald Stewart, which sought to avoid both the reductionist, materialist tendencies of David Hume’s associationist empiricism and the giddying abstractions of German rationalism. As the philosophical core of the broader ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, the concerns of this school and its associates also ventured into Psychological topics such as education, social psychology and detailed classification of the various human mental ‘faculties’. Moreover MMP’s advocates were, like this tradition’s founders, centrally concerned with promoting and sustaining religious belief, generally of a Protestant, especially Presbyterian, variety. During the first seven decades of the nineteenth century a succession of American thinkers, from Thomas Upham to Noah Porter and James McCosh (an emigré Scot), created, in MMP, what was essentially an indigenous American philosophical school. From the start this school’s concerns were, like those of their Scottish predecessors, as much practical as metaphysical, and infused with a moral agenda. This was, initially, a matter of great urgency as pro-atheist and pro-French Revolution student riots had swept through a number of college campuses in the years around 1800. These philosophers strongly believed that a valid Psychology would ratify the rationality and authenticity of ‘normal’ religious belief. After about 1860 the term ‘philosophy’ was often being replaced by ‘science’ in naming this discipline, and its leading figures kept a close watch on events in European Psychology. The presence of MMP in American institutions of higher education had the dual effects of providing Psychology with both a pre-existing academic niche and an intellectual starting point. Most of the American pioneer psychologists had been taught by exponents of MMP, and in several cases were their protégés. They also tended to be religious believers themselves, or at least remained sympathetic. Until the 1980s historians of Psychology routinely scorned MMP as a sterile quasi-scholastic heritage from which Psychology rebelliously broke. Since then closer scrutiny of the historical record and the long neglected MMP texts themselves have shown that, however radical in some senses the break with MMP was, there were deeper levels of continuity regarding the ‘moral agenda’ and far less opposition from MMP’s leading lights than this image implies. Porter, McCosh and John Bascom, in particular, were well up to speed with contemporary European Psychology and accepted much of it, despite their misgivings about prevailing evolutionary doctrines. While Herbert Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ version of evolution was enthusiastically received by America’s millionaire capitalists, Noah Porter banned his Principles of Sociology from undergraduate ╇
See G. Richards (1992) Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas 1600–1850, Chap.€5. ╇ Porter was the strongest opponent of evolution, McCosh came to accept it while holding it to be compatible with a version of ‘design’ as God’s way of doing things, Bascom argued that it was oversimplistic in its ‘additive’ character, failing to appreciate how far evolutionary innovations as it were ‘fed back’ (as we might now say) to affect previous ones—which perhaps hardly counts as opposition to the notion as such at all.
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courses at Yale. But he kept well abreast of the German experimental tradition of Wundt, while McCosh even replicated some of Francis Galton’s studies on imagery. In short then, American Psychology can be viewed in many respects as the product of an encounter between the religious MMP tradition and new European experimental research methodologies. One important doctrine in the MMP tradition was the ‘natural’ character of religious belief, strongly advocated by Noah Porter and his psychologist protégé George Trumball Ladd. This provided a central mediating theme between the new Psychology as being advocated by G. Stanley Hall (who had also founded a Child Study Society) and wider social concerns, for it could link the Psychological understanding of the child directly to education and child-development, and the need to create the optimum environments, both at home and in the school, for healthy moral development, which would naturally bring religious belief in its train. Papers on the teaching of religion appeared in Hall’s journal The Pedagogical Seminary and the topic was dealt with in his mighty two-volume Adolescence (1904). In the United States, even more than in Britain, these were fields in which the religious were especially prominent, although the engagement between these interests and Psychology becomes more evident after 1900. Religious dominance of institutions of higher education also ensured a higher level of religious input into the emerging academic Psychology than had occurred in Britain, where its pioneers had (Alexander Bain excepted) predominantly worked outside the academy, or, like Sully, entered it only belatedly in their careers. One should finally note the high number of U.S. psychologists entering their professional lives before 1910 who were variously ordained ministers, sons of ordained ministers, had had religious training or were otherwise closely involved with religious organisations and issues. These include G. T. Ladd (Congregationalist minister and protégé of Noah Porter), James McKeen Cattell (son of a Presbyterian minister), William James (whose Swedenborgian father and New England Transcendentalist background involved him with religion from childhood), G. S. Hall (who had trained at Union Theological Seminary), J. M. Baldwin (initially a protégé of James McCosh), Carl E. Seashore (pioneer in the psychology of music; earned his way through his first college as organist and choir master of a Swedish Lutheran Church and then, in 1895, earned the first Yale Ph.D. in Psychology under G. T. Ladd) and H. H. Goddard (son of a Quaker missionary mother and reared in a Quaker community). There is a deeper aspect to the conviction, among Mental and Moral Philosophers and American pioneer psychologists, that Psychology promised to confirm the legitimacy of Protestant Christianity. Both in the United States and mainland Europe the later nineteenth century had seen growing support for a ‘liberal Protestantism’ in which, theologically, ‘immanentism’ was favoured over ‘transcendentalism’ and the emphasis increasingly placed on the believer’s individual experience (thus the ‘authenticity’ of religious experience became a crucial topic). Reconciliation with ╇ See Fuller (1986, 2006) for more in-depth discussions of the religious factors underlying U.S. Psychology’s origins.
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science using the ‘facts’ versus ‘values’ distinction was also a much favoured line among the religious at this time; therefore, it was not simply, as was sometimes later the case, a tactic used by psychologists to avoid evaluating religious beliefs. This topic is handily reviewed in Vidal (1988) and will be discussed further in Chaps.€4 and 12 (in relation to Piaget). In sum, we can safely say that Psychology’s roots are to be found at least partly in (a) a growing concern with education and child-rearing, traditionally topics in which religious interests were deeply involved both theoretically and practically, and (b) in the inherently religious American MMP tradition which bequeathed its moral agenda to the new discipline as it emerged from the late 1880s onwards.
Some Early British Religious Psychologists In Britain the role of religion in academic Psychology’s founding phase is less clearcut. Its canonically central figures, Francis Galton, Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer, were all non-believers, verging on hostility, while at Cambridge University religious opposition stymied James Ward’s first efforts at establishing an academic presence for Psychology. Oxford was similarly resistant, which left, in England, only the recently created University of London, which, under the Unitarian W. B. Carpenter’s long Registrarship, was more sympathetic and eventually appointed James Sully as the first British professor of Psychology in 1892. English universities did not, in any case, teach courses analogous in content or aim to MMP. In Scotland things were somewhat different, with the indigenous Reidian school of philosophy well entrenched; however, this had not undergone the kinds of further ‘psychologising’ transformation it had in the United States MMP tradition, and with Sir William Hamilton’s death (1856) and McCosh’s 1868 emigration it had effectively shot its creative bolt by the end of the 1860s. Here, Alexander Bain, a religious sceptic, did manage to obtain a Chair at Aberdeen, beating McCosh for the job (hence McCosh’s emigration). While Galton had published two statistical studies of the efficacy of prayer, these verged on the satirical, famously finding that royalty, for whose longevity the entire nation prayed on a weekly basis, had in fact slightly shorter life expectancies than average, while insurance company calculations and other data showed that ships carrying missionaries—whose embarkation was typically accompanied by fervent prayers for their safety—were as likely to sink or founder as any other (Galton, 1872, rep. 1951). (He did, though, dutifully note in a po-faced fashion that perhaps without the prayers royalty’s shortfall from average life expectancy might have been even greater.) Galton, Bain and Spencer were not, however, the whole story. Five figures in particular might be mentioned who were involved in Psychology’s British emergence and at the same time concerned with religious issues. Since these are less clearly historically visible than the American MMP school they need more extensive discussion.
Some Early British Religious Psychologists
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James Martineau (1805–1900) One was the now better-remembered Harriet Martineau’s elder brother James Martineau, a radical Unitarian theologian and moral philosopher (in the general sense of one concerned with ethics). While cold-shouldered by Bain and his associates in the founding of Mind (1876), Martineau remained a prominent figure in late Victorian intellectual life (his major publications appearing after this date) and was central in the creation of the Metaphysical Club, ensuring that Huxley and Tyndall were invited to join. For us the key points to note here are that his work was fundamentally aimed at demonstrating that religious belief was centrally psychological in character, deriving its ultimate authority from personal experience, and that a philosophical analysis of the concept of ‘cause’ vindicated a theistic view of the universe in which he moved far beyond the traditional version of the ‘argument from design’. Most interestingly, he put forward an account of human psychological evolution which did not, like most of those of his contemporaries, involve postulating any mysterious qualitative jump from animal nature to human nature. At the risk of imbalance, I think his views on this need rescuing from obscurity and deserve a summary here. As the range of the ‘psychological view’, the scope of consciousness, became progressively extended in the course of evolution, eventually in humans the relations of the family, the village, the clan, the State, and at last the genus humanum, become included within the circle of cognisance, corresponding affections wake into life and enrich the personality with motive energies unfelt and unappreciated before; and as each prefers its claim upon us for a proportionate loyalty, the ratios of our moral life become organised, and, notwithstanding its growing complexity, it attains a more perfect order. And this process so implicates together the agent and his fellows, that we can scarce divide the causal factors into individual and social, inner and outer: bodily, no doubt, he stands there by himself, while his family are separately grouped round him; but spiritually he is not himself without them, and the major part of his individuality is relative to them, as theirs is relative to him. He has no self that is not reflected in them, and of which they are not reflections; and this reveals itself by a kind of moral amputation, if death should snatch them away, and put his selfdom to the test of loneliness. It is the same with the larger groups which enclose him in their sympathetic embrace. (Martineau, 1885, Vol.€II., p.€373, italics in original)
This, we should remind ourselves, was published five years before William James’ chapter on the self in The Principles of Psychology in which this social diffusion of the self was treated at length. The evolutionary momentum of this process, however, eventually takes us beyond ‘mere adaptation, however exact, to existing conditions’ (ibid, p.€375) and leads on to ‘the open-eyed march to a pre-conceived and nobler future; and wins a “survival of the fittest,” not by opportune accommodation to present data, but by ╇ See Francis Neary (2001) ‘A Question of “Peculiar Importance”: George Croom Robertson, Mind and the Changing Relationship Between British Psychology and Philosophy’, in G. C. Bunn, A. S. Lovie and G. D. Richards (eds.) Psychology in Britain. Historical Essays and Personal Reflections.
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startling creation of unforeseen quæsita. It melts down the old conditions in its fires, and remoulds them with its better art, and then lives into them with purposed and ideal fitness.’ (ibid, pp.€375–376). Martineau is thus able to co-opt the evolutionary image to his religious purpose, claiming that what evolution has yielded (but not by any mysterious non-evolutionary leaping of the animal–human gap) is a new situation in which humanity has come to be capable, psychologically, of envisaging or intuiting a higher moral purpose or principle transcending the specific demands of the present, and the broader the range of consciousness becomes, or is extended by our own efforts, the clearer the nature of that purpose or principle becomes, and the more reliable the guidance of our conscience. More fundamentally, Martineau’s theism centred on the place of mind in nature, thus placing the Psychological question of the nature of mind itself at the core of his concerns. Had he been based in the United States Martineau would, one can plausibly speculate, have figured among the major exponents of MMP. As it was, he has apparently disappeared from the view of all but a handful of historians of theology, despite the high calibre of his thought and his considerable literary merits.
W. B. Carpenter (1813–1885) A close friend of Martineau’s was his fellow Unitarian, already mentioned, the more well known William B. Carpenter, author of the major proto-Psychological work Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), physiologist, microscopist and Registrar of University College London from 1856 to 1879. Throughout his life Carpenter was devout in his religious practise, even composing some hymn tunes, and, while acknowledging Darwin’s greatness, felt unable to accept that natural selection could do more than create varieties within species. He thus espoused, like Martineau, though perhaps in a more literal sense, a version of the ‘argument from design’ as necessary to account for ‘that general consistency of the advance along definite lines of progress which is manifested in the history of evolution’ (Carpenter, 1888, p.€463, italics in original) and endorsed a pithy question of Martineau’s ‘If it takes mind to construe the world, how can it take the negation of mind to constitute it?’ which encapsulated their shared theism.10 How this affected his Psychology as such is less clear, though it obviously provided the background for his opposition to Huxley’s automatism and, implicitly, his 1873 essay ‘The Psychology of Belief’, which ends on a quite traditionally pious note about the ‘philosopher’s’ (which includes the scientist’s) ‘best fulfilling his duty to the Great Giver of his own powers of thought, and to the Divine Author of that Nature in which he deems it his highest privilege to be able to read some of the thoughts of God.’ (ibid, p.€238). In Principles of Mental Physiology he firmly restates his religious position in the final chapter, again extensively quoting Martineau. Both Martineau and Carpenter, 10╇
W. B. Carpenter (1888) Nature and Man, Essays Scientific and Philosophical.
Some Early British Religious Psychologists
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believers from childhood, were ardent and life-long in their religious observance. Principles of Mental Physiology remained a mainstay of British academic Psychology teaching (mostly to medical students) throughout the rest of the century, a 7th edition appearing in 1896.
George J. Romanes (1848–1894) Romanes provides an interesting contrast. He is remembered as one of Darwin’s most enthusiastic and talented followers, being viewed at the time as his intellectual heir. His most ambitious work was his two-part study of psychological evolution, Mental Evolution in Animals (1885) and Mental Evolution in Man (1888), the fullest late Victorian exposition of the evolutionary Psychological viewpoint. But he also shared the general concern with the issue of religious belief, and in 1878 published, under the pseudonym ‘Physicus’, A Candid Examination of Theism in which he presented a rigorous argument against the rationality of any belief in the need to postulate a divine ‘mental’ agency operating in nature, as well against the possibility of forming any coherent idea of God’s nature. This had been preceded by a far less sceptical Cambridge Burney Prize essay Christian Prayer Considered in Relation to the Belief that the Almighty Governs the World by General Laws (1874), an exercise in demonstrating the compatibility of Christian belief in the efficacy of prayer with scientific belief in natural laws by arguing for the limited sphere of scientific enquiry. The Candid Examination with its ‘melancholy conclusions’, as his friend Charles Gore describes them, proved to be only the beginning of Romanes’ struggles with the religion question, for, partly due to the influence of his devout wife Ethel Romanes, he became increasingly conscious of the genuine power of religious belief. Himself dominated, as he admits, by the ‘intellect’, he appears to have found himself compelled, by the very exercise of that faculty, to acknowledge its limitations, and driven to try and find a route beyond his initial scepticism. A major shift is apparent in his 1885 Mind and Motion in which he moves to a position of ‘pure agnosticism’ as the necessary ‘language of science’, and his posthumously published Monism11. One should note in these works the interpretation he now gives to his underlying evolutionary orientation. The present apparently antireligious implications of science are, he argues, but a temporary consequence of its as yet rudimentary level of understanding, and will evaporate in time to further the evolution of religion itself. His spiritual wrestlings intensified during the remainder of his short life. The literary outcome of these appeared a year after his death as Thoughts on Religion, edited by Gore, which contained first a somewhat earlier essay ‘The Influence of Science upon Religion’, in which his original opposition to natural religion is given full vent, and the arguments about causality and the inconceivability of God as a ‘mental’ being by analogy with ourselves fully elaborated, but following this come the incomplete notes for a planned ‘Candid Examination of 11╇
Reprinted in Mind and Motion and Monism (Romanes, 1896).
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Religion’. In these the tone has dramatically changed. ‘Pure agnosticism’ now becomes a warrant for suspending judgment against as well as for religious belief. As far as Christianity is concerned the intense studies of the New Testament over the previous decades have, he judges, vindicated their authenticity, as contrasted with the situation in the 1850s. At the centre of his argument, however, lies his growing conviction that ‘the question of all questions’ is ‘is or is not mechanical causation “the outward and visible form of an inward and spiritual grace”?’—and that the answer is in the affirmative. The ‘Candid Examination of Religion’ may almost be read as a chronicle of Romanes’ final religious journey as he first justifies ‘faith’ in general and then ‘Christian faith’ in particular, finding himself now able intellectually to shed one objection after another as the implications of this are explored. It is actually quite a remarkable and in some ways moving document, as Romanes, now seriously ill, works his way towards making the ‘experiment of faith’ which he intellectually feels his ‘pure agnosticism’ now demands of him. It is, necessarily, in places fragmentary and less rigorously argued than his other works, but his fierce intellectual super-ego remains unrelenting. Its last passages were written very shortly before his death, and leave us perhaps in some suspense. Only a few days before he died did he finally try ‘the experiment’ his doubts had hitherto inhibited him from making, and it turned out not really to be an experiment at all but rather a final lifting of the doubts after attending a communion service, saying only ‘I have come to see that faith is intellectually justifiable. It is Christianity or nothing.’, though still awaiting the ‘real inward assurance’ that he sought.12 Did Romanes’ religious writings have any impact on Psychology itself? This is indeed hard to discern in any concrete fashion, but two observations do seem justified. Firstly, that Romanes, while never having a ‘religious experience’ as such, centres his religious quest on an argument about causality which is ultimately psychological in nature, and which he viewed as supported by contemporary ‘mental science’; secondly, that his case signifies how, by the late 1880s and 1890s, the antireligious, strong materialist, winds of the 1860s–1870s had greatly abated in British academic circles. And these were the very decades in which British Psychology in its modern form became established.
F. W. H. Myers (1843–1901) A further figure of some relevance is F. W. H. Myers, who felt the contemporary crisis of belief most acutely.13 His case necessarily brings into the picture another 12╇ See E. Romanes (ed.) (1898), The Life and Letters of George John Romanes, pp.€379–381, for her account of his final days. It has to be said that among his scientific contemporaries this virtual ‘death-bed’ conversion was viewed with some scepticism as due to his deteriorated intellectual vigour and wifely pressure, but the ‘Candid Examination of Religion’ itself refutes this in my judgment. E. Romanes herself dismisses the suggestions in her Preface to the 1898 edition, though that might be expected. 13╇ See the title essay in F. W. H. Myers (1893a) Science and the Future Life and Other Essays, for a full statement of this.
Some Early British Religious Psychologists
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feature of the climate in which British Psychology was forged, the contemporary fascination with spiritualism and psychic research. It was in this context that Myers’ most important Psychological work was undertaken: his formulation of the notion of the existence of a ‘subliminal self’ (in which connection he was the first English writer to cite Freud)14 and the two-volume Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903). If not religion in the orthodox sense, belief in the validity of the phenomena which collectively came to be called ‘psychic’ clearly provided a route by which the limitations of materialism could be empirically challenged and the existence of a ‘spiritual’ realm or dimension authenticated. Myers’ interests in this field, triggered by a conversation with Henry Sidgwick in 1869, led first to his membership of Edward Cox’s Psychological Society of Great Britain (1872–1879),15 during which period he conducted some investigations into ‘possession’ phenomena. While not dominated by the spiritualism issue alone, this society’s members were clearly fascinated by such phenomena as sleep, hypnotism, graphology and clairvoyance which, according to Cox, were manifestations of a ‘psychic force’16. After the society was dissolved with the death of its founder, several, including Myers, established the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 to undertake scientific inquiry into spiritualism, séance phenomena, ‘telepathy’ (Myers’ coining) and the like. (In the United States a sister society was also created, G. S. Hall being a leading member, and it is widely claimed that Hall somehow used its funds to found the American Psychological Association.) As secretary of the 1892 2nd International Congress of Psychology in London and participant in the 1900 4th congress in Paris, Myers was in close touch with British Psychological circles during the 1880s and 1890s and highly regarded by William James, the French psychologist Charles Richet and other contemporaries in the discipline. Both methodologically and theoretically psychic research fed into the climate of ideas within which Psychology was being constituted, but must also be seen as one aspect of late Victorian religious concern.
James Ward (1843–1925) Finally one must mention James Ward, as canonical a pioneer British psychologist as any, primarily by virtue of his article on Psychology for the 1885 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, but his later Psychological Principles (1918) should 14╇ F. W. H. Myers (1893b) ‘The subliminal consciousness’, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research Vol.€9, 14–15. 15╇ See G. D. Richards (2001) ‘Edward Cox, the Psychological Society of Great Britain (1875– 1879) and the Meanings of an Institutional Failure’ in G. C. Bunn, A. D. Lovie and G. D. Richards (eds.) Psychology in Britain. Historical Essays and Personal Reflections Leicester & London: B.P.S. Books & Science Museum, pp.€33–53, for a fuller account of this episode and Cox’s own rather complex position. 16╇ Cox is the first to use the term ‘psychic’ in its current sense, although intends it only to refer to a ‘mental’ force analogous to ‘heat’ or ‘gravity’, but ‘psychic phenomena’ are outward manifestations of its presence and operation.
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also be noted, even though post-dating Psychology’s founding phase. Ward had actually been trained, and briefly served, as a Congregationalist minister before abandoning involvement in institutional religion. Nevertheless, he remained personally devout and never drifted into agnosticism. In his 1896–1898 Gifford Lectures, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Ward arrives at a position he calls ‘spiritual monism’, having, to his satisfaction, refuted agnosticism and the materialist, dualist, parallelist and ‘agnostic’ or ‘neutralist’ positions on the mind–body relationship. His final religious position might again be described, like Martineau’s and Carpenter’s, as theistic in that he feels he has demonstrated the necessary existence of a principle of ‘universal reason’. This underlay his Psychological views, which rejected the British associationist position in favour of a view similar to that of Leibnitz (whom he cites with approval in the Gifford Lectures) of the mind as a unitary active source of ‘acts’ and personhood. As Hearnshaw summarises his final 1918 position, ‘There is always a self or subject of experience, which can never be explained in terms of experience, but is itself the explanation of the unity and continuity of experience’ (Hearnshaw, 1964, p.€138). Although out of tune with the character of Psychology as it subsequently developed, Ward’s Psychology considerably influenced William McDougall’s ‘purposive’ theory and has affinities with later European phenomenological Psychologies such as Edmund Husserl’s. These five figures show that late nineteenth century British Psychological thought was not developed entirely in isolation from religion, and that the thinkers themselves included those with serious religious, if not doctrinaire, commitments. The influence of their religious positions on British Psychology is less overt than in the case of the United States, but again sheds light on the lack of confrontation between the two camps.
A Catholic Detour In 1954 McGraw-Hill, a major Psychology publisher, issued a particularly significant 300-page work by Henryk Misiak and Virginia M. Staudt entitled Catholics in Psychology. A Historical Survey, with a Foreword by E. G. Boring no less. Misiak (1911–1992), a Polish-born Catholic priest and pre-war Nazi concentration camp escapee was based at the Jesuit Fordham University in New York, where his coauthor (1916–1997), who later tended to use the name Virginia Staudt Sexton, was a colleague and long-time collaborator. They jointly authored numerous other works on history of Psychology, its philosophical traditions, and international Psychology. What is initially curious, however, is that though published over half a century ago Catholics in Psychology has made no visible impact on History of Psychology. Yet a reason soon suggests itself once we examine the angle from which the text is written. This is that it is scrupulously placatory in tone, adopting a number of U.S. Psychology’s standard mid-twentieth century party lines, thereby carefully mitigating any rethinking of the historical story which the material threatens to entail. It is basically a public relations exercise to reassure psychologists that they have nothing
A Catholic Detour
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to fear from Catholics and Catholics that Psychology contains nothing to threaten their faith. The lynch-pin of this argument is the bald assertion that philosophical and empirical Psychology are in effect quite different realms, and that scientific Psychology need have no interest at all in philosophy. This is of course to invoke the older rational versus empirical Psychology distinction commonplace in Catholic Scholasticism since Thomas Aquinas and much eighteenth century German philosophy, such as Christian Wolff’s. What Misiak and Staudt seem to be saying is that a psychologist’s religious beliefs are actually irrelevant to their ‘scientific’ work as psychologists. In identifying Catholic psychologists, all they are apparently engaged in therefore is a sort of morale-boosting exercise for fellow Catholic psychologists and seeking acknowledgement of their long and undisturbing presence in the discipline. Good American Psychology has not been a Presbyterian monopoly. And Catholics need not worry because scientific Psychology has nothing to do with the soul. This is most frustrating because it is actually an excellent and scholarly survey of quite how much presence Catholicism has had within Psychology and, reading between the lines, it is patently obvious that it is psychologically impossible for psychologists to hermetically compartmentalise their religious and Psychological beliefs, theories and agendas in the way Misiak and Staudt want to claim. There is, however, a lengthy and complex back-story to this. The relationship between the Catholic Church and Catholic Psychology had always been tense and it was not only the psychologists who Misiak and Staudt needed to placate. One key event for Catholic Psychology was Pope Leo XII’s 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris which affirmed Thomist Scholasticism as the official philosophical position of the church and urged its regeneration. This would also help overcome the marginalisation of Catholics in the natural sciences, since these had a clear place in the scholastic scheme of things, at the same time as countering misguided materialism. This ruling remained in force until the end of the Second Vatican Council (1965). Between these two dates Neoscholasticism provided the framework for Catholic Psychology, in effect a ‘school’. Nevertheless, anti-modernist sentiments remained strong within the Catholic hierarchy and, indeed, intensified, culminating in Pope Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis ‘On the Doctrine of the Modernists’, before being further reinforced by the 1918 Code of Canon Law issued by Pope Benedict XV. These are vehement in opposing modernism including many tendencies within contemporary Psychology. Thus Neoscholastic Catholic psychologists could find themselves under fire from both flanks. The key figure from the founding phase is undoubtedly the Belgian Catholic priest, later cardinal, Desiré F. Mercier (1851–1926), whose portrait is Misiak and Staudt’s frontispiece and who discuss his work fairly extensively. Inspired by the 1879 encyclical he established an ‘Institute of Philosophy’ and the first Psychological laboratory in the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium (in 1891, before Sully’s in 1897, the first in Britain), then published two highly successful Psychology textbooks in which the Psychological and religious strands are neatly balanced: Psychologie (1892) and Les Origines de la Psychologie Contemporaine (1897), the first of which continued to be updated, with an 11th edition as late as 1923. A 3rd
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edition of the latter appeared in 1925. In 1905 Albert Michotte, later one of the most eminent early twentieth century European psychologists, both studied and began teaching at Louvain under Mercier and his associate Armand Thiéry.17 Mercier’s passionate commitment to rejuvenating Scholasticism, which had, ever since Descartes been falling ever further adrift of mainstream European philosophical developments, involved, among much else, focussing on Scholasticism’s highly sophisticated and complex model of human psychology. Mercier saw that a ‘scientific’ (if not ‘modernist’) Psychology could be built on this basis, containing as it did a rationale for differentiating purely ‘rational’ enquiry from empirical, secular enquiry. The latter remained, of course, framed within the overarching analysis, but there was nothing to exclude research on the detailed workings of the numerous psychological faculties which this had yielded. And if the rational analysis was correct, empirical Psychological research would, if successful, only reinforce its credibility. Psychology would then serve as one wing of a ‘Neoscholasticism’, connecting it to the now unstoppable juggernaut of ‘science’. This was quite smart, since clearly Scholasticism had very little to offer the physical sciences. Ironically, though, this move subsequently facilitated the emergence of the position adopted by Misiak and Staudt, which cast Catholic psychologists’ empirical research as being no different in kind from anybody else’s. But to take just one example of how Catholic theology affected early, non-theological, Psychological theorising one might cite Franz Brentano’s ‘Act Psychology’, which was written ‘from an empirical standpoint’ (Brentano, 1874). While published shortly after his apostasy from the church (in which he had been a priest), it was clearly influenced by the prominent role Thomism ascribes to ‘intention’ in religious life and experience.18 But both Misiak and Staudt and Boring (1950) only construe the significance of his ‘Act Psychology’ as representing an alternative concept of, and ensuing tradition or strand within Psychology, to Wundt’s. Neither make explicit the theological connection or background. In this way his Psychology can be assimilated into the history of early mainstream Psychology without disturbing the kind of separation between religion and empirical science which they each, for their different reasons, wish to maintain. Synchronously with Mercier’s project at Louvain, 1891 also saw the first establishment of a Psychology laboratory at a U.S. Catholic university (the Catholic University, Washington DC) by an American, Edward A. Place who had earlier spent some time at Louvain. So Presbyterians and Congregationalists were not the only denominations involved in founding U.S. Psychology. Misiak and Staudt (1954) then trace a succession of Catholic psychologists, mostly ordained priests, working through the first two decades of the twentieth century. These include 17╇
On Mercier’s life see Gade (1934), which is however a rather hagiographic text. Franz Brentano (1874, rep. 1924) Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt. See G. W. Allport’s comments on this in The Individual and his Religion (1950), pp.€140–145. E. G. Boring (1950, 2nd ed.) A History of Experimental Psychology covers him primarily through pp.€356–361 and casts him as a forerunner of McDougall’s Hormic Psychology. Misiak and Staudt’s coverage is pp.€23–29. 18╇
Religious Origins of the Concept of ‘Psychology’
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Joseph Fröbes (1866–1947), a German Jesuit who initiated Psychology teaching in 1904 at Ignatius College, Valkenburg (in Holland), preparing ‘a crude edition of the Experimentelle Psychologie’ in 1905, which in 1915 appeared in a two-volume edition and Johannes Lindworsky (1875–1939), another German Jesuit and student of Fröbes, who taught at the Universities of Cologne and Prague, publishing five books between 1919 and 1936, all but the first being translated into English. Even in England a Jesuit, Michael Maher, based at Stonyhurst, published a textbook, Psychology: Empirical and Rational in 1890, which stayed in print until 1918. What this tells us is that Catholicism contained within its academic ranks, especially the Jesuits, a significant number who were eager to engage with German and French Psychology during the last decades of the nineteenth century, despite the church’s fundamental anti-modernism. And in Thomism they had their own intellectual resource for averting confrontation. This is not to claim that Catholic Psychology has displayed a unitary character, especially since 1965. The Spanish psychologist F. M. Palmés, for example, a Catholic priest, was author of a textbook Psicologia (1928) which remained a standard, official teaching text throughout most of Franco’s rule, which Palmés supported. This contrasts with more recent ‘liberationist’ approaches by figures such as I. Martín-Baró, an El Salvador based Jesuit murdered in 1989 by the U.S.-backed military regime, and author of Writings for a Liberation Psychology (1994).19 Despite its Thomist underpinnings, Catholic Psychology has not therefore been entirely homogenous. Mercier’s Belgian version, Palmés Spanish one and its East European expressions in Poland and Hungary for example all taking distinctive forms, a trend which continued in Martín-Baró’s ‘liberation Psychology’. What is clear from this is that the view that Catholic psychologists’ Psychological work has no connection with their religious position is illusory. The contrasting positions of Palmés and Martín-Baró for example related directly to their different conceptions of what being a devout Catholic entails.
Religious Origins of the Concept of ‘Psychology’ A final, less immediately obvious, but ultimately more profound, aspect of religion’s early relationship with Psychology demands attention. The term ‘psychology’ originated in the sixteenth century in the context of theology, ‘psychologia’ referring to one of the three strands of ‘pneumatology’ identified in scholastic metaphysics, the others being theologia naturalis (natural theology) and angelographia/demonologia (the study of non-human spirits; see Vande Kemp, 1980; 1982a, 1982b, 1986 for some very useful coverage of this). During its sometimes tortuous subsequent career the distinction, made by Christian Wolff, between ‘rational’ and ‘empirical’ Psychology established itself during the eighteenth century. From then 19╇ For Martín-Baró see T. Teo (2005) The Critique of Psychology. From Kant to Post-Colonial Theory, pp.€178–180.
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on the ‘rational Psychology’ tradition continued, retaining a religious connotation, ‘Rational, philosophical psychologies generally had room for God, as they were part of a more general speculative framework with a heritage rooted in Thomistic philosophy’ (Vande Kemp, 1986, p.€98). The term ‘psychology’ was used by Kierkegaard in the titles of three of his works in the 1840s, and a school of ‘biblical Psychology’ emerged almost coevally with the German experimental scientific Psychology to which the modern discipline traditionally traces its historical origins (although F. Delitzsch quotes the Renaissance anatomist and theologian Caspar Bartholinus as first laying its foundations). In English translation the best known work in this genre was F. Delitzsch’s A System of Biblical Psychology (1855), although George Bush’s The Soul; or An Inquiry into Scriptural Psychology, as Developed by the Use of the Terms, Soul, Spirit, Life, etc, Viewed in its Bearings on the Doctrine of the Resurrection, a scholarly linguistic work published in New York in 1845, ought also to be classified here. This was much concerned with the nature of the soul, as revealed in the Bible, and its relation to the ‘spirit’. Delitzsch sees the soul as the external form of the spirit, with ‘the most internal nature of Man’ being his ego, distinct from either and also from the body (Delitzsch, 1855, p.€179). It did not though remain entirely distinct from the scientific strand and this tripartite image can easily be mapped onto secular analytic terms. As we have just seen, Catholic philosophers, particularly in their deployment of the empirical versus rational distinction, facilitated a participation in the former project, while framing the entire exercise in the context of the latter. The distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘empirical’ Psychology remained commonplace in the titles and content divisions of Catholic texts such as those of Lindworsky (1931, 1932) and Brennan (1941). ‘Rational’ in this context essentially meant neo-Thomist. While all this awaits a thorough historical examination (particularly biblical Psychology), it suggests very strongly that for many Christians the prospect of Psychology would not have been novel, and that many Christian or theist thinkers felt that their religion already contained some level of expertise on the issue which could be brought to bear to complement the new, apparently ‘soul-less’ empirical scientific Psychology. This contrasted with the situation it confronted vis-à-vis the physical sciences, for there were no long established and intellectually sophisticated biblical physics or scriptural geology or rational biology traditions comparable to Thomistic and subsequent rational and biblical Psychologies. It is clearly difficult to reconcile all this with Misiak and Staudt’s claim that there is no Catholic Psychology as such. On the contrary, the highly elaborated Thomistic model of the mind presents a quite specific theoretical position with empirical ramifications. For example, it adopts a ‘faculty’ model which would, in relation to personality research, tend to promote type rather than trait approaches, and also has implications for the ‘nature versus nurture’ question. The latter cannot be explored here but the notion of ‘original sin’ is an obvious point to mention (if not exclusive to Thomism). During the founding phase, the religious could then cast their potential contribution not as opposing the new Psychology in a confrontational fashion but as supportive, while critically policing the legitimate boundaries of its ‘empirical’ enquiries.
Conclusions
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Conclusions To summarise then, the first phase of the religion–-Psychology relationship during the latter nineteenth century, while occurring during a period when, in both Britain and North America, the religious felt themselves under intellectual and spiritual attack, was not in fact generally marked by outright conflict (although a few skirmishes occurred over specific issues). For the religious there were pre-existing Psychologies in the forms of MMP, scholastic (or Thomist) Psychology and biblical Psychology from which it could meet the new discipline on a surer footing than it had when encountering the physical sciences. Equally importantly the thrust of some theological thinking, such as Martineau’s, was to place the psychology of religious experience at the centre of the question of the authority of religious belief, and this could be coupled with sophisticated arguments for theism and design which went beyond the classic but now discredited Paleyite version, and were publicly endorsed by scientists such as Carpenter and Romanes, as well as some in the MMP tradition, like McCosh. More specifically, as noted above, there was a widespread expectation among the religious that Psychology had the potential for scientifically endorsing the authenticity of religious experience (see Chap.€6). Even among those disinclined towards orthodox religious belief, psychic research sustained a conviction that scientific vindication of the existence of the ‘spiritual’ realm was in the offing. Meanwhile more practical issues, particularly those related to education and child-rearing, which social change was rendering ever more salient, brought a convergence between professional religious interests and those of Psychology, providing the latter with both a market and an ethical agenda. This is not to claim that either camp was homogenous. Many of the religious certainly found the prospect of a scientific Psychology unsettling and sought to circumscribe its ambitions by doctrinal fiat or philosophical sophistry, while the Psychology camp included its share of adamant anti-religious materialists, and eugenicists who viewed Christian philanthropy as a misplaced intervention in natural selection, likely to harm the quality of the human ‘stock’. It might, I noted earlier, actually be possible that the religious strand in late nineteenth century Psychology had the positive effect of acting as a partial brake on the eugenic and degenerationist excesses into which many of the latter were being lured. What I have tried to do in this chapter is to indicate how the notion of two rival camps, Psychology versus religion, is radically misleading even for the founding phase of the modern discipline prior to about 1910. In fact their relationships during this phase are both numerous and tangled. Taking these fully into account obviously implies that we need to adjust our current image of Psychology’s roots resting straightforwardly in the combination of, to put it crudely, Wundt plus Darwin. The long established, religiously infused, literature on the child and education, the pre-existence within religious thought of Thomist scholastic Psychology and biblical Psychology, the prominence in the U.S. academia of Protestant ‘Mental and Moral Philosophy’, the strategies required if Psychology was to find a professional ‘scientific’ role in relation to social problems, the often religious backgrounds of
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even its more secular pioneers themselves, and the character of contemporary liberal Protestantism—all these combined to render outright confrontation impossible.20 They also, however, guaranteed that the Psychology which then emerged would be diverse in character in several dimensions. Theoretical and methodological consensus would elude it, geographical diversity would prove endemic in a way which did not occur in the physical sciences, and the topics it studied would remain fragmented into multiple sub-disciplines. And certain major axes of division (such as ‘nature versus nurture’ and holism versus reductionism) would remain unresolved. Although this situation has not been exclusively due to the religious factor, it may in part be read as a surface manifestation of the tensions which were repressed during the founding phase. These relate most of all to Psychology’s core values and goals. If, to grossly oversimplify, we can (pastiching K.-J. Habermas perhaps) classify these as technocratic materialism, humanistic and ‘spiritual’, the seeds of division are surely illuminated by a reappraisal of the discipline’s late nineteenth century origins which accords religion its due weight. We are thus back to the mythos and logos tension. Some of the religious (especially the Catholics) are in effect striving to cast the new Psychology as a logos type project which can leave their mythos intact while others, such as the Protestant Americans in the MMP tradition, are seeking to casting it as an inherently mythosguided project. For their part some of the anti-religious evolutionists are trying to cast Psychology as a wing of a new scientifically endorsed evolutionary mythos. Meanwhile the public at large is beginning to yearn for a more scientifically ratified mythos than traditional religion could provide to shed light on the sources of psychological or behavioural distress, pathology or deviance—and Psychology is starting to appear as if it can supply this. It is from this psychologically intense interweaving of mythos type needs with the immense appeal and promise of logos-driven science that, by about 1910, Psychology in more or less its current form emerges.
20╇ One could easily pursue the linkage back to the seventeenth century and beyond in religious works on the ‘passions’ and even, as Goodey (2001) has shown, the complex inter-relationships between psychological categories such as idiocy and intelligence on the one hand and religious or quasi-religious ones such as grace and honour on the other.
Chapter 4
Psychology of Religion
Psychology’s most explicitly direct involvement with religion has obviously been the sub-discipline Psychology of Religion. While enjoying an early flourishing in North America and mainland Europe, this went into a serious decline during the 1920s and by 1930 appeared to have run into the ground in anglophone Psychology, despite occasional fitful revivals for the rest of the century. Although C. G. Jung’s explicit endorsement of the psychological centrality of religion to human well-being had widespread cultural impact from the mid-1930s onwards, this bore little direct relationship to the older Psychology of Religion genre (however profoundly William James’s views influenced Jung personally). After 1950 psychologists began paying increasing attention to the social psychological and personality aspects of religious belief. Michael Argyle and his associate B. Beit-Hallami were major figures in sustaining this concern. This too only partially resembled older Psychology of Religion. Although the possibility of a revival was being raised in the late 1970s (e.g. G. Scobie, 1977, who also acknowledged its change in character), only in the 1990s did anglophone Psychology of Religion begin to enjoy more than a modest revival—it is, however, debateable how far this is a genuine revival or a distinct but homonymous development. The chapter thus concentrates on the pre-1930 period, with only slight reference to some to subsequent developments down to 1950, the date of G. W. Allport’s The Individual and his Religion. The focus will be primarily on the United States, where Psychology of Religion was most successful, but some British texts and the European encounter between religion and psychoanalysis (as exemplified in some of Ernest Jones’ essays and the work of the Swiss pastor Oscar Pfister) will also be included, the latter’s work having been translated into English during this period. An examination of the original Psychology of Religion genre supports and expands on the thesis of the previous chapter. Although traceable as far back as the eighteenth century, notably Jonathan Edwards’ A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections (1746), modern Psychology of Religion’s American origins really lie quite clearly in Edwin Starbuck’s early ╇
See Shamdasani (1995). This encounter was omitted from Jung (1963), thereby imbalancing the image of Jung’s early intellectual influences more in the Freud direction than was entirely warranted. G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_4, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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papers, subsequent book of that title published in 1899, and in G. Stanley Hall’s previously mentioned investigations of child psychology from the 1880s onwards. To these we should add an early work of James Leuba, a less typical figure to be discussed in due course. It is though another text which inevitably commands our initial attention, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), based on his 1901–1902 Gifford Lectures, delivered at Edinburgh University. This text marks both an arrival and a departure—the arrival being a clear formulation of a Psychological orientation towards religion, the departure being that formulation’s break with previous approaches. James, in this text, effectively establishes the tone, if not the methodology, which most American Psychology of religion will adopt over the ensuing three decades. It is essential therefore to examine its character in more detail.
William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience To begin by briefly setting it in context. No historian of Psychology, of whatever camp, would deny that William James’ Principles of Psychology of 1890 is a text of monumental importance. There is also as near a consensus among them as historians ever achieve that this importance lies in its transparently honest ambivalence, and indeed ambiguity. It appears as both a culminating synthesis of preceding Psychological thought and a comprehensive harbinger of what was to follow. But it included no significant discussion of religion. Following its publication James turned increasingly to philosophy, more specifically to formulating a version of ‘pragmatism’ which was nevertheless rooted in his Psychological position. James was not, though, indifferent to religion, quite the contrary. He both engaged in spiritualist research and delivered a cunning lecture on the possibility of immortality to an audience of divines. The legacy of his father’s Swedenborgian beliefs ran deep in James’ own psyche, rendering it impossible for him to dismiss religious experience and belief in any summary materialist fashion. Both psychologically and Psychologically the entire topic remained ‘unfinished business’ for him. The invitation to give the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh was thus, despite his apprehensions and self-doubts, unrefuseable. Its outcome, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), appropriately holds a similar position in regard to Psychology’s relationship to religion as The Principles does to Psychology in general. Though ever popular, it has been less fully explored by historians of Psychology, other than those directly interested in Psychology of Religion. ╇ J. Leuba (1896) Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena: The Religious Motive, Conversion, Facts, and Doctrines. ╇ On the Gifford Lectures in general see L. Witham (2005) The Measure of God. Our CenturyLong Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion. The Story of the Gifford Lectures. Chapter 4 of this discusses the background and religious context of James’ lectures in some detail. ╇ James On Immortality (1908), but the lectures themselves were delivered in 1897–1898.
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The aspect of the work most pertinent to our present concern lies more in James’ overall orientation and assumptions regarding the nature of Psychology’s relevance to religious questions than in the details of his analyses and categorisations of religious experience. Of most importance is his claim that, whatever their other features and functions, religions do ultimately originate in ‘religious experiences’, usually those of their founders (be this Christ, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha or Mormonism’s Joseph Smith). Psychology’s role then becomes that of evaluating, both generally and in relation to individual cases, the ‘authenticity’ of such experiences. In this he is also, one should note, directly addressing the religious hopes for Psychology discussed in Chap.€3. The work is nonetheless intensely, if not always obviously, personal in character, in effect being the major episode in James’ own struggle to find a religious position—which he outlines in the final chapter and Postscript, a ‘belief that beyond each man and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideals’. It should be stressed that throughout The Varieties, and especially in the sections just alluded to, James deploys his ‘pragmatic’ philosophy to maximum effect. This enables him to anticipate Jung’s later argument that direct subjective experiences of an encounter with a transpersonal ‘power’ are uncontestably more assuredly real than our sensemediated knowledge of the external world. This would perhaps be surprising did we not now know that Jung’s meeting with James, at which the topic was discussed, was a crucial event in his own thinking on the topic (see Footnote€1) This closely echoes Martineau’s argument in fact. In making the ‘authenticity’ case James deploys two kinds of argument, one philosophical, the other more Psychological. Philosophically he brings to bear his pragmatist doctrine that where decisive scientific evidence is lacking on a matter, we are entitled to believe the alternative which is most profoundly meaningful and useful to us. He stresses that this is not a trivial matter of frivolously ‘believing what we want to believe’, that the choice has to be made consistently with our knowledge and ethical principles. On these grounds, and given that the consequences of religious belief for believers are generally positive and psychologically enriching (as he feels he has demonstrated), we have no grounds for rejecting the authenticity of religious experience, indeed in the absence of decisive evidence, the accusation of irrationality can be equally levelled at either option. More psychologically, however, he argues that those reporting religious experience claim to have had a direct and unmediated encounter with another, transpersonal, power. He then, as just noted, raises the question of why this kind of experience should be considered less credible than our experiences of the external world which are actually mediated via our fallible sensory systems. He therefore averts psychological reductionism (or ‘psychologism’) by arguing that psychological phenomena are in a sense more real, or at least less dubitable, than the external world. He also, early on, raises another, related, psychological point which he considers of profound weight, which is that even if we do not have religious experiences ourselves, the testimony of those that ╇
James only cites Martineau once in The Varieties—an in extenso quote from a sermon in the early Endeavours After the Christian Life.
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do nonetheless seems to speak to something within us. (I consider the authenticity of religious experience issue a little further in the next chapter.) He also makes an interesting distinction between ‘once born’ and ‘twice born’ believers. The former are those who have never experienced major religious doubts or crises throughout their lives, staying securely comfortable in the beliefs into which they were born. The latter are those whose belief has been determined by a dramatic discovery or crisis of belief which has either led them into religion for the first time or radically altered the nature of their previous religious beliefs and understanding. And yet James is not unaware of the ‘constructionist’ dimensions of the issue, spelling out in several places how doctrinal and cultural convention may determine the content of specific religious experiences. The Varieties, taken as a whole, is a brilliant exercise in even-handedness. Frequently, just as we think his empathy is taking him into unambiguous endorsement of a case, he withdraws from the brink and dons his professional Psychological hat. For all its sophistication, however, The Varieties of Religious Experience is a work written within a context in which the religious mentality remains dominant, albeit less securely so than once it had been, and which its author cannot quite manage to transcend. And while for the religious it may have appeared to offer a lifeline, for religion’s opponents James’ Psychological observations would have seemed to provide a basis for going further than its author was, for personal psychological reasons, prepared to go, particularly in explaining religious experiences as a product of the sub-conscious or ‘autosuggestion’. We will return shortly to the content of The Varieties, for the moment, as much perhaps for my own benefit as the reader’s, I want to spell out how my orientation differs from James’. One immediate and fundamental divergence relates to James’ aforementioned assumption that religions are rooted in individual ‘religious experience’. By contrast, an assumption underlying the present work is that while the psychological events categorised as ‘religious’ may in some sense be universal as a primary mode of mythos thinking, their construal as religious requires the prior existence of a clearly articulated religious belief system, or at the very least a linguistic category equivalent to ‘religion’. It is the availability of this category, or belief system, which provides the experiencer with the resources on which to draw in rendering the experience meaningful and reportable. In saying such events are universal, I do not mean, of course, that everyone experiences them, but that they are experienced by a certain percentage of all populations, or seem to be recognisably reported in virtually all cultures we know of. Our present-centredness perhaps misleads us into labelling as ‘religions’ the belief systems of non-literate, pre-industrial and ancestral cultures for whom our religious versus secular dichotomy is, or would have been, meaningless. James may be correct insofar as such experiences were a component of the total ‘reality’ for which the belief systems of such cultures—now misleadingly labelled as ‘religions’—had to take account, but not in ascribing to them a self-evident character as ‘religious’ in any sense in which we now understand the term. What this leaves open is the degree to which the character of the experiences themselves is itself moulded and determined by the particular religious beliefs of
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the experiencer, and the degree to which they share a common, ‘raw’, unmediated character. A similar question with regard to the role of available conceptual categories may however be raised regarding all subjective experience. A second aspect of our divergence concerns James’ explicit focus on ‘religious experience’ per se, while leaving aside religion’s other social, economic and political aspects. This, I believe, was to unduly limit Psychology’s legitimate role with regard to the ‘religion’ question, and hence constrained early Psychology of Religion’s agenda. The cultural presence of a powerful ‘religion’ has psychological consequences far beyond the interpretation of religious experiences themselves, and religions serve numerous other psychological (as well as non-psychological) functions. Underlying these two differences is one pertaining partly to our respective personal ‘psychologies’, but perhaps more fundamentally to the historical contexts in which we are living and working. (Indeed, it might be noted that the current work was initiated almost exactly a century after The Varieties by someone born almost exactly a century after its author, so the points in our biographical trajectories at which they were written more or less coincide.) For James the central personal task was, as previously stated, to arrive at a personal position regarding religious belief consistent with his philosophy and Psychology, for the present author it is, as suggested in the Preface, to arrive at a personal position regarding the respective authorities (if any) of both traditional religions and Psychology, and to do this by locating the latter at the troublesome frontier between the complementary, but now apparently opposed, mythos and logos functions of the psyche. In other words, I am writing in a ‘post-modernist’ (for want of a better expression) phase in which both religion and Psychology appear to be bracketed as alternative modes of addressing the nature of one’s fundamental being, and in which neither any longer appears to be entirely up to the task. Our situations nonetheless share certain things in common, the most obvious being that they are transitional; James was writing on the cusp of the transition between religion and Psychology as the dominant authorities on ‘human nature’, the present work is being written on the cusp of a transition between a period in which it was still possible, and possibly necessary, to arrive at a core identification with one or the other, and a period in which neither can really suffice unless one is prepared merely to retreat to an enclosed ancestral position (in the case of religion) or to accept a thoroughgoing atheist vision of Science with a big S as a quasi-religion in itself (which is itself beginning to seem a little ancestral). As far as content is concerned, the The Varieties has to be read in the context of James’ religious philosophy as a whole, particularly as presented in The Will to Believe (1897), the brief Human Immortality (1908, but lectures delivered in 1897–1898) and Pragmatism (1907). Two relatively recent works have attempted to elucidate this: Vanden Burgt (1981) and Ramsey (1993), while an earlier monograph was Bixler (1926), Alexander (1979) is also useful for its exploration of the links between James’ Psychology and his position in The Varieties. Only The Varieties, however, can be considered as a strictly Psychological text, even if infused by its author’s underlying philosophical position.
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How does James see the role of Psychology in relation to religion? The answer is, as so often with James, not unambiguous. Simply, and most obviously, he views Psychology as having the twin roles of empirically surveying, and evaluating the authenticity of, ‘religious experience’. Secondly, however, James wishes to use Psychology to avert a premature ‘materialist’ foreclosure of the religion question as contrary to ‘science’—this indeed being the conclusion to which the ‘empirical’ survey of the nature of religious experience leads in the course of the text. Nevertheless, James performs a clever balancing act throughout and presents his conclusion as a disinterested adjudication on the basis of the empirical evidence. In The Varieties religion is considered as, ultimately, a psychological rather than philosophical issue, and he is nowhere more dismissive than in his discussion of traditional theology and religious philosophy, which seek to argue on purely rational grounds for the existence of God and the nature of God’s personality. Such exercises are quite fruitless and never persuaded anyone who was not already a believer on the basis of their own deeper psychological (if not explicitly religious) experience. In this way, The Varieties serves as a canonical exposition of what we might call a ‘buffer’ view of Psychology as a discipline interposed between religion and the physical sciences, a position which became a central feature in early Psychology of Religion. This verges on acknowledging, but does not quite confront, the discipline’s essentially frontier position between mythos and logos. A second aspect of the work of central interest is its psychological, in the subject matter sense, significance. Regarding this several observations may be made. Firstly, the warmth and acclaim with which the work was received by James’ contemporaries, and the respect which it is subsequently accorded, imply that it was felt to be articulating a widely shared mentalité or mode of subjectivity. This brings home to us the extent of the psychological gulf which separates our worlds. When James was writing, the ‘religion question’ remained of paramount psychological importance—one’s views on it being in some respects the central psychological fact about oneself. This was true even of an atheist or sceptic—it signified a person’s fundamental relationship to life and the cosmos. Religion remained the major institutional vehicle for the mythos function, even if its monopoly was being nibbled at on the margins. Within North American Psychology this was especially so, since its practitioners were, as we have seen, steeped within the usually Protestant traditions of U.S. mental and moral philosophy. Although delivered in Edinburgh, James is, in the Gifford lectures which comprise the work, attempting to sustain, from a non-denominational position, an image of Psychology as in a moral alliance with religion. His final position is not, as already noted, that different from Martineau’s in seeking to root religion in the profoundly psychological, rejecting the idea that it was logically impossible to have a direct, purely subjective encounter with an objectively existing transpersonal ‘other’. The British audience would not, then, have been entirely unfamiliar with the kind of line he was taking. But the very nature of James’ case judiciously leaves the issue open, in principle, to radical rethinking in the future. This is because (a) he himself has no definable denominational allegiance and (b), more seriously in the long-term, he is abandoning religious philosophy in favour of Psychological understanding of the nature of
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the unconscious and sub-conscious, a topic then coming to the fore as the profoundest issue facing Psychology. Secondly, in accepting that, for all its cultural and temporal variability in form, religious experience is some kind of psychological universal, he reveals the limits of what is thinkable within that mode of subjectivity. Again, as previously observed, whatever is universal about these kinds of experience, it cannot be taken for granted that it is their ‘religiousness’. The category ‘religion’ (or some near equivalent) already has to be in place and available, along with a set of received religious doctrines and beliefs etc., for the experiences to assume this character—even if the person having the experiences proceeds to revise or revolutionise these as a result. The primacy of ‘religious experience’ in generating ‘religion’ is thus far less obvious than it appeared to James and his contemporaries. This is important because, right at the outset, James uses this primacy as grounds for ignoring all the other aspects of religion and focusing on religious experience as the central Psychological issue, thereby limiting Psychology of Religion’s initial remit in the way mentioned earlier. Bearing this in mind, we can see how James was ideally placed, by temperament, generation and philosophical position, to produce a Psychological account of religion which was simultaneously reassuring to the faithful (up to a point) but also suggested exciting future developments (up to a point) and had some provocatively revolutionary facets (his rejection of religious philosophy and theology—to as far a point as he could manage). While intensely personal, The Varieties could thus serve as a kind of emblem or symbol of how Psychology should treat religion—with deep respect and yet with underlying caution and ambivalence regarding any specific religious doctrine as such. The upshot was a text adopting that ‘buffer’ position alluded to before, which is to say that Psychology was able to defuse the ‘science versus religion’ confrontation which so disturbed and dominated intellectual life in the late nineteenth century by interposing itself between them. While hardly a calculated manoeuvre, this was advantageous to all parties in a number of respects. For one thing it mitigated the threat which Psychology, as a putative natural science of human nature itself, might be seen as posing to established religion— the latter being already bruised by the evolution debate—while simultaneously continuing to hold open the prospect of that scientific vindication of religion which attracted many of the religious towards Psychology. The kind of modus vivendi between science and religion achieved, on mainly philosophical grounds, in Britain during the 1870s by e.g. the Metaphysical Society debates, might well now appear at risk again as the new scientific Psychology began to flex its muscles. But once reassured on this score, it became possible for the religious to seek, and often claim to have found, within Psychology a source of support, a source, moreover, which, if drawn upon wisely, would enable religion to retain its credibility in the new modernist scientific culture. Mental and moral philosophers, such as Noah Porter, had already firmly supported this notion. Psychology also benefitted for its part because, especially in the U.S., as indicated in the previous chapter, it enabled the discipline to make a relatively smooth transition from its doctrinally orthodox ‘mental and moral philosophy’ precursor to
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being a secular ‘scientific’ agency, essentially promoting the same moral project and keeping the main churches on side in doing so. G. S. Hall was undoubtedly a major figure in this, though this aspect of his historical role has received little direct attention. Nevertheless, by adopting the James position, it remained perfectly possible for Psychology to continue containing within its ranks those whose positions were antipathetic to religion, those espousing materialist, physiological reductionist and ‘hard’ experimentalist approaches. That is to say, the anti- and non-religious could also find Psychology a useful resource. Unlike geology, Psychology did not need to reach a disciplinary consensus for or against the orthodox Christian cosmology. To summarise then, James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience appears to have laid the basis for a particular relationship between Psychology and religion in which Psychology could cushion the frictions between religion and the physical sciences. Anglophone psychologists, henceforth, were mostly either in some degree of alliance with religion or scrupulously indifferent to it, refusing to pass judgment on religion as concerned with ‘values’ not ‘facts’ and generally posing as at least respectful (especially in the U.S.). Outright hostility to religion from psychologists continued to be relatively rare, at least in print, the main exceptions being from some psychoanalytic quarters and the behaviourist J. B. Watson in his more evangelical moments.
Classic Psychology of Religion We may now return from this somewhat protracted but necessary opening to postJamesian Psychology of Religion itself as a sub-discipline. The opening chapters of D. M. Wulff’s magisterial Psychology of Religion Classic and Contemporary (1997 2nd ed.) are of course a necessary source on this topic, and some of what ensues may be read as footnotes to his coverage. The author is also confessedly indebted to one of those modest, often forgotten, ‘overview’ books which offer a neat survey of the current state of the field or topic in question, in this case the Edinburgh-based Rev. A. Rudolph Uren’s Recent Religious Psychology. A Study in the Psychology of Religion. Being a Critical Exposition of the Methods and Results of Representative Investigators of the Psychological Phenomena of Religion (1928). That a surfeit of Psychology of Religion books was at that time on the market is reflected in his own prefaratory comment that ‘it were good for every author of a new book on the Psychology of Religion to render a reason why he should not be placed in the stocks by a suffering public’ (p.€viii), his own excuse being ‘to give an informing and critical account … of the American School of Religious Psychology, and to introduce clarity into a field which is rapidly becoming so overgrown that it is difficult to see the wood for the trees’ (ibid). Besides James and Starbuck, Uren identifies the following as representative figures: George Albert Coe, James Bissett Pratt, Edward Scribner Ames, G. M. Stratton, and Edward Leuba, but does not discuss G. S. Hall himself at length, despite his major contribution to the field, Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology having
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appeared in 1917 (a massive 733 page two volume work which pleased nobody). A further, less typical, American text which might be noted here is F. M. Davenport’s Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals (1905), a more sociological text influenced by contemporary work on crowd psychology, notably Le Bon (1896). Before addressing their doctrines, Uren helpfully identifies six methods used by researchers in this field: the questionnaire, biographical, historical, comparative and genetic, and experimental methods, to which he adds ‘an unclassified method’, that adopted in Harold Höffding’s The Philosophy of Religion (1906), which he praises but does not actually describe. This ‘American school’ is concerned to extend beyond James’ agenda to a broader examination of the psychological character of religion as it emerges when examined from such methodological perspectives, both as an individual and as a group phenomenon. To the nature of religious experience as such and the existing interest in religious conversion in a developmental context are added the nature of religious belief as such, especially when examined anthropologically (‘comparative’) and in the light of evolutionary theory (‘historical’), types of religious personality and the psychological character of prayer. The empirical orientation of these writers generally leads them to eschew metaphysical issues, such as the arguments for Theism, but this leaves them in something of a dilemma. How far is their aim to arrive at a ‘scientific’ reductionist, psychologistic, explanation of religion and how far is it to facilitate the survival and progress of religion under the new cultural conditions in which it finds itself, where science and secular ideologies (be they ‘democracy’ or ‘socialism’) are beginning to dominate intellectual and social life? Except for the adamantly anti-religious, Leuba coming closest to this, negotiating the situation involved various compromise strategies. Ames (1910), Stratton (1911), Coe (1916) and Hall (1917) were all proreligion in a broad sense but offered various Psychologised (if not psychologistic) explanations of its value. These tended to argue that religion embodied the highest moral values and served a quasi-psychotherapeutic function as a route for integrating inner conflicts (Stratton) and enhancing self-realization (Coe), while Hall casts Christ as the supreme psychotherapist. Pratt however requires further attention. He was more sophisticated, and his 1920 The Religious Consciousness: A Psychological Study was, as Wulff notes, one of the few works in the genre to retain its reputation beyond the movement’s dramatic collapse after 1930. It represented a maturer version of the position he had espoused in his earlier The Psychology of Religious Belief (1907). Wulff sees him as most closely pursuing the Jamesian approach espousing ‘an essentially disinterested and scholarly approach founded in systematic description of a wide range of phenomena from diverse traditions’ ╇ How far G. S. Hall was genuinely religious or orthodox in his Protestantism is a matter for debate. Some, such as his student and friend J. H. Leuba, felt it was largely a contrived public persona, yet why would anyone indifferent or hostile to religion strive so hard to promote its sympathetic study, to the extent of founding a journal? (See Wulff, 2000, p.€30 and Footnote€12 below.) There was plenty of other unploughed territory for Psychology around 1900. It is hard to write off simply as a calculated Machiavellian manoeuvre to keep the religious on-side during Psychology’s foundational phase. For a good overview of Hall’s role in promoting Psychology of Religion see Vande Kemp (1992).
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(Wulff, 2000, p.€30). Pratt (1875–1944), professor of philosophy at Williams College, Mass., was particularly comprehensive in the material he addressed, including much sympathetic attention to Buddhism (on which he published The Pilgrimage of Buddhism in 1928). He states at the outset that his purpose is ‘to describe the religious consciousness, and to do so without having any point of view. Without, that is, having any point of view save that of the unprejudiced observer who has no thesis to prove’ (p.€vii, italics in original). He begins by identifying four ‘typical aspects’ or ‘if you like, four temperamental kinds of religion’. These are fairly selfexplanatory: ‘traditional’ (taking its ‘attitude from the authority of the past’), ‘rational’ (based on ‘reason and verifiable facts of experience’), ‘mystical’, and ‘practical or moral’ which emphasises what ‘must be done’ rather than what ‘must be believed or felt’ (p.€14). He then proceeds to describe the nature of Psychology of religion itself as a genuine branch of science. ‘To describe the workings of the human mind so far as these are influenced by its attitude toward the Determiner of Destiny, is the task of psychology of religion.’ (p.€31) This raises all kinds of question, less obvious at the time he was writing. In particular his aspiration to work ‘without having any point of view’ sits uneasily with an implicit assumption that there is indeed a ‘Determiner of Destiny’. Secondly, like James, he clearly believes that religion is fundamentally a psychological phenomenon. While it has hosts of sociological and cultural manifestations its ultimate source lays in the individual human mind. (Theologically this is, strictly speaking, surely inconsistent with the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic core belief that its source is in divine revelation.) The body of the work tackles, in an impressively learned fashion, a fairly typical agenda: the role of the sub-conscious (including reference to Freud), ‘Religion of Childhood’, conversion, ‘Crowd Psychology and Revivals’, belief in God, cults, worship and prayer and mysticism. Much of this incorporates anthropological information. What is impressive, though, is how earnestly he strives to live up to his opening ideal, even if he does take it for granted at some level that religion is a ‘good thing’. While pervaded by contemporary Psychological information and ideas it evades psychological reductionism, but his scrupulous ‘disinterestedness’ ensures that advocacy of any specific religion is absent. The Williams University ‘Biographical Note’ enables us to place Pratt in context rather well: born into a somewhat intellectual New England family, steeped in the Emersonian tradition, his doctorate supervised by William James (similarly steeped) and, from 1902 onwards, an inveterate traveller including spells in India, China and Korea and married to a scion of the Italian aristocracy. His last work, Eternal Values of Religion was issued posthumously, edited by his widow, in 1950.
╇
http://archives.williams.edu/manuscriptguides/pratt/bio1.php ‘Catherine, born Erminia Caterina Beatrice Giussehpina Maria in Rome in 1887, was the daughter of Commendatore Francesco Mariotti and Melanie Durfee. Francesco Mariotti had begun his career as private secretary to Queen Margherita, and had later become director of the royal palaces in Milan, Genoa and Palermo. Catherine, one of five children, received a multi-lingual education, learning Italian, English, French and German.’ (ibid) ╇
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James Henry Leuba (1867–1946) is quite a different, and untypical, case, and like Pratt, his work outlasted classic Psychology of Religion. He is, rather misleadingly, best remembered for his 1916 questionnaire study of the religious beliefs of college students and—which attracted most attention—physical scientists. This revealed relatively low levels of belief, especially among the more eminent, and a further decline in a 1933 replication10. On this basis Leuba predicted a continuing fall which a 1996 partial replication failed to confirm, suggesting that level of belief had plateaued (reported in the following year in Larson & Witham, 1997). However, while representing the first use of rigorous quantifiable questionnaire methods in the field, this was, as Wulff (2000) shows, really the least of his achievements.11 Born in Neuchâtel, Leuba was raised in a church-going family, although his father was not uncritical and broadly tolerant. From the outset, it seems, Leuba had difficulty understanding religious services and doctrines, but did subsequently undergo a conversion experience. But this was not of the normal kind, pertaining to the moral ideal, ‘an Absolute which it was my duty and privilege to realize’, rather than to Christian doctrine. He later described it as an ‘ethico-religious experience’.12 Exposure to contemporary scientific developments at university gradually eroded what was left of his orthodox religious convictions. In 1886 the family moved to the United States and, although serving as general secretary for the French YMCA in New York, he left after two years. He was now undertaking a doctorate in Psychology of Religion at Clark University under G. S. Hall, the dissertation appearing in 1896 as his first book: Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena: The Religious Motive, Conversion, Facts, and Doctrines. By now convinced that religion could only be understood by using rigorous scientific Psychological methods, and increasingly hostile to formal institutionalised religions, Leuba was depressed by what he saw as the reluctance of his academic peers to come clean on their own doubts and their hypocritical reluctance to offend the religious establishment which held sway in most American universities and colleges. Relief came when, in 1899, he joined the new and tolerant Quaker-founded Bryn Mawr College, charged with creating a department of Psychology, where he remained thereafter. Two features of his work and thinking emerge as distinctive. Most profoundly he combines an intense hostility to organised religious and specific religious doctrines ╇
J. H. Leuba (1916, 2nd ed. 1921) The Belief in God and Immortality. The fullest straight exposition of his core position was the 1912 A Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origin, Function, and Future. 10╇ Reported in J. H. Leuba (1934) ‘Religious beliefs of American scientists’, Harper’s Magazine 169, 291–300. 11╇ D. M. Wulff (2000) ‘James Henry Leuba. A Re-assessment of a Swiss-American Pioneer’ in J. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion. This includes discussion of the Larson and Witham findings. My discussion of Leuba here draws heavily on this throughout. E. J. Larson and L. Witham (1997) ‘Scientists Are Still Keeping the Faith’, Nature, 386, 435-436. 12╇ Wulff (2000) op. cit., p.€29, quoting J. H. Leuba (1937) ‘Making of a psychologist of religion’, V. Ferm (ed.) Religion in Transition, pp.€173-200.
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with a passionate belief in the ‘spiritual’. This is well captured in the closing lines of his short, early The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion (1909): As belief in a God seems no longer possible, man seeks an impersonal, efficient substitute, belief in which will not mean disloyalty to science. For man will have life, and have it abundantly, and he knows from experience that its sources are not only in meat and drink, but also in ‘spiritual faith’. It is this problem which the Comtists, the Immanentists, the Ethical Culturists, the Mental Scientists are trying to solve. Any solution will have the right to the name Religion that provides for the preservation and the perfectioning of life by means of a faith in a superhuman psychic Power. (p.€95)
The second feature is his methodological pluralism and the extent to which, if it is not widely acknowledged, he anticipates positions and views which have become widespread among the new psychologists of religion since about 1990. Wulff’s paper is in large part an exposition of these and a plea for Leuba’s contribution to be more widely recognised. On his methodological pluralism Wulff observes: … he … drew freely and extensively on findings from anthropological and historical research, clinical observations, personal documents, interviews, case histories, and other such qualitative methods. Moreover, convinced of the continuity of the species, he cites certain animal studies at length—including observations of altruistic behavior in apes—that anticipate sociobiologists of our own day. (Wulff, 2000, p.€31)
(On this last point I cannot resist noting that, adumbrating Kohler, Leuba (1909) refers to his recollection of a chimpanzee recovering an out-of-reach stick with a piece of burlap which it threw over it and used to gradually roll the stick back.) Among the other prescient aspects of his work, the hard distinction between religion and spirituality and the notion of the latter as involving ‘the search for a value underlying all things’ is one which is now widely made. Wulff again: ‘… for Leuba, what is “spiritual” is essentially positive, whereas matters religious, because they are entangled in historic beliefs that reason and science have made untenable, are largely negative’ (p.€33). In his very substantial The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (1925, rev. 1929) Leuba, having systematically explored the topic from all angles, concludes that mystical states are purely physiological in origin (though can be induced) and that their interpretation as ‘religious’ is simply due to their being so construed on the basis of the individual’s beliefs and expectations. Exactly the same thing can happen to non-believers, who interpret them differently. No genuine encounter with the divine has really happened, the ‘impression of revelation can be explained as an illusion’ (1929, p.€279). (This is obviously quite opposite to the James–Martineau position.) Wulff comments that this anticipates attribution theory by nearly half a century, although I do not think it is entirely original with Leuba, except in the sheer detail of its advocacy. (One ought, of course, to remember that not all ‘religious experience’ is ‘mystical’.) Leuba also equates ‘the mystical method of soul-cure’ with ‘the present-day, more or less scientific, methods of psychotherapy’ (p.€331). Nor does he think mystical experiences are especially inspirational of the creative process, and he rejects Freudian type accounts which invoke the unconscious or sub-conscious as causing apparently sudden insights. Another ‘anticipatory’ notion is that religion involves a social relationship with the ‘divine’, though Leuba again evades the standard Freudian view of this as implying
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that ‘God’ is rooted in, and cast in the role of, the individual’s image of his or her own father. There is much more in Leuba than can be tackled here—his arguments that religion and magic are quite distinct, that the source of concepts of deity lie ultimately in the need to ascribe ‘causes’ generating ideas of non-human power and agency, the impossibility of identifying a single core definition of religion and so on. His stress on the inextricable inter-relatedness of ‘willing, feeling (or desire) and thinking’ in this connection is not dissimilar to G. W. Allport’s central tenet, which probably did not please the latter13. Of most relevance here is that on Wulff’s showing Leuba emerges as both the least typical of the classic psychologists of religion yet the most similar in approach to current workers in this field. In mainland Europe three figures may be singled out. Karl Girgensohn (1875– 1925) a Latvian Lutheran theologian based at the University of Dorpat in Estonia sought to adopt the Würzburg school’s introspectionist methods, establishing a ‘Dorpat school’ of Religionpsychologie. His first major work was published in 1921, Der seelische Aufbau des religiösen Erlebens: Eine religionpsychologische Untersuchung auf experimenteller Grundlage, with three more appearing during the early 1920s. Closely associated with this school was the journal Archiv für Religionspsychologie, founded in 1913. After Girgensohn’s death the project continued under his former student Werner Gruehn14. Wulff (1997) notes that an earlier German journal Zeitschrift für Religionpsychologie was founded in 1907, although it only lasted until 1913 (being subsequently revived in Vienna in 1928), by a group at odds with the Dorpat school’s introspectionist methodology. A second figure, Théodore Flournoy (1854–1920) is better known now for his early contributions to the study of the unconscious, links to psychoanalysis and his 1899 book on multiple personality translated as From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia. He too was, as F. Vidal (1988) describes, deeply involved in the issues surrounding the bearings of Psychology on religion from a liberal Protestant angle and greatly influenced by William James’ pragmatism, publishing Les Principes de la Psychologie Religieuse in 1903. Vidal describes his ‘efforts to “detheologize” and “psychologify” religion’. A long-time opponent of the Dorpat school was the Zurich-based minister and advocate of psychoanalysis Oscar Pfister (1873–1956), who was among the most pro-
13╇ G. W. Allport (1950), The Individual and His Religion, see discussion of Allport in Chap.€12. G. W. Allport (1944) in The Roots of Religion: A Dialogue Between a Psychologist and His Student, a 36-page-pamphlet, explicitly rejects Leuba’s ‘naturalistic’ view of religion. See H. Vande Kemp P&T 332. Incidently her annotation to J. H. Leuba (1933) God or Man? A Study of the Value of God to Man, New York: Henry Holt (P&T 317) describes Leuba as an ‘early reductionistic and behavioristic psychology’; this is quite misleading as behaviorist reductionists are not known for their high valuations of the ‘spiritual’. 14╇ See Wulff (1997, pp.€32–33 and passim) and Nørager (2000) ‘Villiam Grønbaek and the Dorpat School. Elements of a “History” based on the correspondence between Villiam Grønbaek and Werner Gruehn’ in J. A. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion, for more on Girgensohn, Gruehn and the Dorpat School.
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lific writers on Psychology and religion during the 1920s and early 1930s15. From the outset Pfister had been at loggerheads with Girgensohn and Gruehn. For the Dorpat school Psychology of Religion had to be an academic laboratory-based discipline, and both its leaders were vehemently opposed to psychoanalysis. Pfister on the other hand believed that progress could only be made by working in the pastoral care field, dealing with individuals using psychoanalytic methods and theoretical concepts. Gruehn, if not Girgensohn, did consider pastoral work important but felt traditional religious wisdom was adequate for this. Pfister scorned Girgensohn’s mighty 1921 opus in no uncertain terms as little more than a scandalous waste of paper given the post-war paper shortage. Pfister’s objection to Psychology of Religion as it had established itself since the late nineteenth century, exemplified in Girgensohn’s approach, was that, despite its widening agenda, it was restricting itself to a purely descriptive level of research, concerned only with the ‘psychology of consciousness’, which was all that its commitment to natural scientific methods could achieve. It had yielded nothing of value to the pastor engaged in tackling people’s religious fears and obsessions. Only a ‘developmental-historical’ method would suffice, and for Pfister this meant psychoanalysis. Pfister’s full position is too complex for an adequate résumé here. A man of deep piety and compassion, he is driven into a profound critique of what Christianity has become, while striving, using the resources of psychoanalysis, to forge a ‘Neo-Protestantism’ centred on love, and purged of its ‘neurotic’ elements. The best account of his mature position is the 1948 (German, 1944) Christianity and Fear. A Study in History and in the Psychology and Hygiene of Religion. E. Nase locates Pfister in the liberal Protestant tradition initiated by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1786–1834), and places him in the post-1920 context of theological reaction against this tradition associated with Karl Barth which rejected Psychology as an irrelevance16. For our purposes here Pfister cannot be considered as representative of classical Psychology of Religion, being more a signifier of its demise, while his own productive career long outlasted it. A fuller exploration of non-anglophone Psychology of Religion is beyond my expertise, but it would be a mistake to think of it as an exclusively American phenomenon. The religious camp itself (e.g. in Britain, Uren himself, and later the English author B. H. Streeter, 1927) responded to the challenges being raised by psychologists of religion such as Leuba and the psychoanalysts by asserting that Psychology was extending its remit beyond its legitimate territory if it believed or claimed that ‘science’ could adjudicate on ‘metaphysical’ matters such as the existence of God. But they could also gain some comfort from the fact that these investigations had, by deploying the notions of ‘suggestibility’, ‘dissociation’ and the ‘subconscious’, 15╇ I am indebted in what follows to E. Nase (2000) ‘Pfister’s Challenge to the Psychology of Religion’ in J. A. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion. Pfister’s first English publication was the 1915 The Psychoanalytic Method, much reprinted, with four more following in the 1920s: another on psychoanalysis (1923a), one each on education (1922) and Love in Children (1924) plus one on art (1923b). For his extensive correspondence with Freud see Meng & Freud (1963). 16╇ This theme will recur in Chap.€12 in connection with Piaget’s position.
The Demise of Classical Psychology of Religion
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demystified many of the more extreme forms of religious behaviour and phenomena which had now become a source of embarrassment (see Chap.€7).
The Demise of Classical Psychology of Religion In the present work I am less interested in the details of the content of classical Psychology of Religion than what it can tell us about the relationship between Psychology and religion. More immediately the question is raised, why the ‘precipitous’ (as Wulff has it) collapse of this sub-discipline after 1930? Wulff (op. cit., p.€29) ascribes it to a complex combination of, on the religion side, ‘the waning of progressivism after 1917 and the sharp decline of liberal evangelical theology’. The former involved ‘resurgent fundamentalism’ (though it must be said that this was very much a U.S. phenomenon). Among European theologians, such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner adopting what was termed ‘dialectical theology’, there was, meanwhile, a shift in interest away from the psychological aspects of religion and ‘religious consciousness’ towards the authority of the Bible. This move was part of a widespread post-1918 European Protestant reaction against the earlier ‘liberal Protestantism’ which had found Psychology so relevant and congenial. One might note here that Ronald Knox (1950) identified three possible sources of ‘authority’ in religion: religious scriptures, religious institutions and traditions and personal experience.17 This theological shift thus marked a switch back from the last of these (of which Martineau is a clear and explicit example) to the first after a century or more of decline. On the Psychology side Wulff implicates the ‘progression of positivistic science’ and rise of Behaviourism (ibid). Psychologists of religion were, he suggests, inadequately trained in the new experimental techniques and theoretical approaches. While this analysis is credible as far as it goes, there is more to be said. If we return to the methods identified by Uren—questionnaire, biographical, historical, comparative and genetic, and experimental—we can see in more focus the problem Psychology of religion was facing. The only two of these flourishing as Psychology adopted ever-harder ahistorical and nomothetic approaches were the first and last (see Danziger, 1990). Statistically-based psychometrics was rapidly extending from intelligence and ability testing into personality and attitude measurement, a move identified primarily with L. L. Thurstone, one of whose early ventures in this direction was indeed a scale for measuring attitudes towards the church (Thurstone & Chave, 1929). More widely, American psychologists, initially in the applied fields, were creating a field of study called ‘motivation’ research18. 17╇
R. A. Knox (1950) Enthusiasm. A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries. Despite a few somewhat cursory re-examinations of the work, I have been unable to relocate precisely where he says this. 18╇ See Danziger (1997) for an interesting account of this move. While ‘motivation’ is now such a common term we take it for granted, its adoption by psychologists with its present meaning was an intriguing manoeuvre.
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Although Gordon W. Allport would, by the end of the 1930s, be urging the importance of ‘idiographic’ ‘case-study’ methods in the study of personality, biographical approaches were now only to be found in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic literature on psychopathology. Comparative and historical studies of religion had also fallen below Psychology’s horizon. The former was now the province of a new ‘structural functional’ anthropology which had abandoned the discipline’s earlier evolutionary orientation. Historical methods of any kind were, for their part, incompatible with the dominant ‘natural science’ paradigm which assumed that psychological phenomena were ahistorical—or if, at some level, historical, they could nevertheless be explained as products of basically ahistorical psychological processes. As far as ‘genetic’ methods were concerned the focus of child psychologists, such as Arnold Gesell, was on establishing the order and norms of maturation of development of basic psychological processes. Any interest in the growth of religious beliefs would, in this context, be marginal and subsumed under other aspects of the child’s intellectual and emotional growth. (But see Chap.€12 for its covert persistence in Piaget’s early agenda.) This left only questionnaire and experimental techniques standing. The rapid emergence of statistically sophisticated psychometrics and questionnaire design during the latter 1920s, although facilitating research on attitudes towards religion and the personality traits of the religious, was by its nature purely empirically descriptive and unable to address profounder questions about the nature of religious experience or religion’s psychological functions. For a long time it was this methodological strand alone which endured (and continues), but the price was a dramatic shrinkage in the scope and ambition of the mainstream Psychology of Religion project. As for ‘experiment’—what kind of relevant experiments could one undertake? Laboratory-based U.S. experimental Psychology at this time was largely constrained within behaviourist or broader ‘functionalist’ theoretical frameworks and a small menu of designs. Only later did social psychologists begin to exploit the possibilities of ‘natural experiments’, such as in L. Festinger et al.’s When Prophecy Fails (1956). From a methodological perspective then the collapse of Psychology of Religion appears to result as much from an internalist decline in favour, or change in character, of the methodologies which supported it as much as from hostility or indifference. A. Cronbach’s Psychological Bulletin reviews of the field (1926, 1928, 1933a, b) dramatically reflect the rapid change in terms which largely confirm this reading. The first is still reasonably positive about the sub-discipline’s situation, but the second is more cautious, seeing stagnation ahead without radical shifts in approach, while by 1933b he had become utterly pessimistic. A major additional role must though be ascribed to the post-1918 explosion of interest in psychoanalysis and other ‘New Psychology’ theories and psychotherapies. These clearly threw the religious onto the back foot as they invariably offered explanations of religion (or provided the conceptual resources for others to formulate such explanations) that were psychologically reductionist and, to a greater or lesser extent, pathologising. As explored in Richards (2000a, b), from a British perspective the religious response to this was far from entirely negative, but it meant that energies were diverted from ‘Psychology of Religion’ as such. Instead, they largely
The Demise of Classical Psychology of Religion
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went into exploring the value of the New Psychology for purposes of pastoral counselling and psychotherapy.19 We can see the same trend in Oscar Pfister’s work. Even when they did not, the attitude of the religious was more ‘how can we use this?’, or ‘how can we interpret this as consistent with orthodox religious belief?’ than ‘what does this tell us about the nature of religion?’. This topic is explored in Chap.€7. What needs stressing here is that this aspect of the Psychology–religion relationship needs to be differentiated quite clearly from the ‘Psychology of Religion’ and has a quite different historical trajectory even if there are, at times, close contacts between them. While we may accept that the sub-discipline Psychology of religion collapsed after 1930, this is not the whole story, as will be indicated in the next chapter. Its two important legacies were the continued psychometric study of personality and other correlates of religious belief and the heavy engagement of the religious in psychotherapy and counselling. If primarily different in focus to classic Psychology of Religion, some of its themes remained unavoidable for those in both these offspring fields. While G. W. Allport’s The Individual and his Religion (1950) is viewed by some as initiating a post-war revival of Psychology of religion, this is rather to overstate it. Allport’s subsequent development of the Allport–Ross Religious Orientation Scale (1967) was central to the emergence of psychometric approaches to the ‘religion and personality’ issues (see Chap.€9), but The Individual and his Religion is, if somewhat more sophisticated conceptually, far more traditional in character, and rather than heralding a revival, looks—to me at least—more like a belated final text in the older genre.20 He was also an early member of the Committee for the Scientific Study of Religion (founded in 1949)21. Somewhat distinct from both traditional Psychology of Religion and the newer psychometric personality studies was a post-Freudian strand. The rise during the 1940s of the largely immigrant post-Freudian school had renewed attention to the psychological nature of religious belief at the individual level, a major exemplar being Erich Fromm (who in 1930 had published a book of essays on religion, from a psychoanalytic perspective, in Germany prior to his exile22). In 1950 he published Psychoanalysis and Religion, in 1960 co-authored, with D. T. Suzuki and R. De Martino, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis and in 1966 You Shall be as Gods. A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition. E. H. Erikson’s 1959 ‘psychohistory’ study Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History 19╇
Naturally, more traditional Psychology of Religion themes were still occasionally addressed even in Britain: W. L. Jones (1937) A Psychological Study of Religious Conversion for example, a fairly sophisticated study using questionnaires and interviews. 20╇ I consider Allport at more length in Chap.€12. 21╇ This became the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1955, which, in 1961, founded the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, see P&T 1025, 1045. The Psychological work published in this has tended to be of the psychometric personality research type. 22╇ Die Entwicklung des Christus Dogmas: eine psychoanalytische Studie zur sozialpsychologischen Funktion der Religion. This was translated into English in 1963 under the main title The Dogma of Christ.
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was another major contribution from this direction. This interesting genre seems to have petered out by around 1970. It has only been in the last decade or so that something like the traditional Psychology of Religion has enjoyed a revival of any significance.23 This has undoubtedly been boosted in part by Wulff’s aforecited overview The Psychology of Religion. Classic and Contemporary, in which, despite its subtitle, the ‘classic’ far outweighs the ‘contemporary’, if we mean by that the post-1970 period. One of the most significant recent works, consolidating something like a rejuvenation of the topic, was David Fontana’s 2003 Psychology, Religion, and Spirituality. In this the classical agenda partly returns to the stage, with chapters on ‘Religious Expression in Myth and the Creative Arts’ and ‘The Origins of Religious Belief’ for example. Fontana is also well aware of most of the conceptual issues and difficulties which underlay the topic’s earlier near-demise in anglophone cultures. While this work must be recommended as a starting point for those entering the field today, it is too recent for discussion in a primarily historical work such as this.
Conclusion Although the fate of Psychology of Religion, and indeed its character, has varied somewhat between different countries and its 1930 near-demise was less dramatic in some mainland European settings than in anglophone ones, we may make some provisional generalisations about its nature during the pre-1930 phase. I believe it may be broadly read as resulting from a feeling among liberal Protestants that such a project would confirm both the ‘normality’ of their faith and the authenticity of religious experience. This constituency was strongly represented among pioneer psychologists, obviously so in the United States but also in some mainland European countries, for example Théodore Flournoy in Switzerland, Karl Girgensohn in Estonia and numerous Germans, while the British R. H. Thouless (1923) might also be included. The case would be that this wing of Protestantism had, following the earlier ‘Darwin wars’, moved away from theological ‘transcendentalism’ and supernaturalism towards an ‘immanentist’ position in which God operated via the individual’s inner self. Although not denying the literal truth of the Incarnation, they now viewed much Biblical ‘truth’ as symbolic. Christ was a living internal reality not an externally located component of a transcendent Deity, and was often cast as, to be anachronistic, an inspiring ‘role model’. Under these circumstances Psychology, as a proto-natural science, naturally held much appeal. It promised, as mentioned in the previous chapter, both to endorse the ‘normality’ of religious belief as the healthy outcome of child development and, more to the point here, affirm the authenticity of 23╇
This is an appropriate point at which to note that the ‘demise’ story does not readily generalise to all European countries. Belzen (2000) for example explains in detail how, after failing to get off the ground in the Netherlands during the earlier period, its expansion only occurred during the 1960s.
Conclusion
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religious experience (see Chap.€6). The difficulty, never fully resolved, was reconciling ‘objective’, ‘value free’, ‘scientific’ Psychological methods with these clearly value-laden goals. But if religion could be seen as based on a ‘natural’ and universal spiritual striving, this problem could be, partially at least, outflanked. (Curiously, as we will see in Chap.€12, Jean Piaget’s initial agenda appears to have largely centred on this very issue.) Moreover, Psychology of religion promised to identify and clarify the nature of a number of matters close to liberal Protestant hearts. These included embarrassing religious fanaticism, how to handle pastoral care, religious education, why liberal Protestantism was superior to—or more ‘progressive’ than—all other religious creeds and how it could survive and prosper within an increasingly secular society dominated by science and technology. It is significant that there was little comparable Roman Catholic ‘Psychology of Religion’, since Catholicism was doctrinally committed to a transcendentalist theology and, as we have seen earlier, had, in Thomist theology, its own mode of differentiating off empirical ‘scientific’ Psychology—‘rational’ versus ‘empirical’ being effectively synonymous with the ‘value’ versus ‘fact’ distinction. With the Psychology of Religion’s momentum exhausted, at least in anglophone contexts, by 1930, the Psychology–religion relationship would henceforth be managed in rather different terms. We have seen that one of these would be in the psychotherapy and counselling fields, but before examining this, two other issues need to be addressed.
Chapter 5
A Boundary Problem
In this chapter I wish to draw attention to a group of writers of the mid-twentieth century whose work indicates that the collapse of Psychology of Religion after 1930 was perhaps not so thoroughgoing as the previous chapter suggests. The picture is not so much false as a little too narrowly focussed on U.S. (and to some degree British) academic Psychology. The problem these writers pose for the historian of Psychology is an interesting one. Basically, it is an issue of where the boundary lies between Psychology and ‘non-Psychology’. In truth, there was an extensive body of mid-twentieth century discourse on ‘the human condition’, much of it religious in nature. The (or perhaps only my) difficulty is deciding which of this latter is relevant to the present work and which is not. This arises for two main reasons. Firstly, a number of such writers are engaged in a sort of dialogue with contemporary Psychology, with which they are generally very familiar. Secondly, we may reasonably assume that many psychologists of the period knew this work and were psychologically, if not overtly Psychologically, affected by it. Some of it did indeed feed more directly into the climate in which the new post-World War II ‘humanistic’ and ‘growth movement’ psychotherapies emerged. One might also note that in some cases the critiques of Psychology, which religious writers on the human condition articulated, have a discernible affinity with later critiques, which arose within Psychology, particularly those more recently proposed by people like Michael Billig and John Shotter who stress the constantly changing dynamic, dialogic and interpersonal character of psychological life. Without claiming to have solved the difficulty, there are several figures who I would want to insist on as being relevant. All I am aiming to do here is to make a case for putting them on the historical agenda. Any detailed elucidation of their works and ideas would be both too lengthy and too far beyond my current expertise to offer here. I do, though, believe that admitting them to the agenda reinforces the case I have made elsewhere that the histories of Psychology and its subject matter, ‘psychology’, cannot be disentangled. In the cases of these writers they were, like psychologists, reflexively both expressing and engaged in changing the psychological conditions of their times. But who am I talking about? For me four figures in particular stand out, though the list could be extended. These are the Scottish-born Quaker philosopher John Macmurray (1891–1976), the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_5, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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the German theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965), and the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (1878–1965). Others might wish to sweep the net more broadly to include Teilhard de Chardin, though I baulk at that. Each in their different and profound ways continued to explore the psychological nature of religion, impacting more generally on the ways in which mid-twentieth century religious thinkers engaged with Psychology. More specifically, Tillich and Buber also influenced the development of post-Second World War psychotherapy. I am not, of course, claiming that either the Psychology–religion relationship, or the ‘psychology of religion’, was in any sense their explicit core concern, but rather that their positions involved them in addressing such matters. Here I will briefly consider just a few works illustrative of their relevance. These are Macmurray’s 1936 Terry Lectures at Yale The Structure of Religious Experience and, very summarily, the later Persons in Relation (1961, the second, belatedly published, volume of his 1953–1954 Gifford Lectures), Niebuhr’s The Self and the Dramas of History (1956), Tillich’s The Courage to Be (1953) and Buber’s I and Thou (1958, first German 1923, but see also his Between Man and Man (1947) collecting five works from 1928 to 1938).
John Macmurray To condense drastically, in The Structure of Religious Experience Macmurray proposes that science, art and religion are all based on the totality of common experience, but each relates to it in a different way and has, in that sense, its distinct ‘field’. ‘Starting from the same facts, religion and art and science move in different directions because they deal with the facts differently’ (p.€21). The question then is ‘what is the field of religion?’. And how is this distinct from the other two, given that all three relate to a single common world of experience? ‘What are the facts that have the same relation to religion that its data have to science?’ (p.€17). The answer, he argues, lies in the fact that in science and art ‘we were in fact leaving ourselves out … setting the world of common experience over against ourselves’ (p.€36), and that therefore its data are incomplete. Even in Psychology this is true: In psychology I appear as the object that is described, analysed and explained; and in activity which is based upon scientific psychology, I appear as the patient who is treated or manipulated by psychological devices, such as advertisement and propaganda. But I do not appear as that which describes and analyses, nor as that which treats me or manipulates me. In religion, however, I appear in both these aspects and in both at once. (p.€37)
‘In the field of religion, each of us appears twice, both as the source of valuation and the object of valuation.’ (ibid). This ‘natural, empirical fact’ (p.€38), that we reflectively pass judgement on ourselves, fusing ‘immanence and transcendence’, is near the heart of religion, but not quite its core. ‘The primary fact is that part of the world of common experience for each of us is the rest of us.’ (p.€39). ‘We are forced to value one another, and the valuation is reciprocal’ (ibid). In sum: ‘The field of religion is the whole field of common experience organized in relation to the central fact of human relationship. … [t]he field of religion is the
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field of personal relations, and the datum from which religious reflection starts is the reciprocity and mutuality of these’ (p.€43). Having established this, Macmurray moves on to ‘The Self in Religious Reflection’. In this lecture he offers an extended account of the nature of human mutuality and the role of reflection in creating and sustaining this, ending with an argument for the existence of God as the ‘universal Other’ ‘not primarily apprehended as an idea, but in life which is centred in the intention of mutuality, as that infinite person in which our finite human relationships have their ground and being’ (p.€81). This ‘universal Other’ is, he believes, logically entailed by our necessary engagement in rational reflection if we are to create and sustain mutual personal relationships. There is more, but I must cut it short here. From this, Persons in Relation comes as no surprise. This contains much further development of his concept of the Self as an agent, a person, for which he had extensively argued philosophically in the first volume of the Gifford Lectures The Self as Agent. While less explicitly about religion as such, in Chap.€8 he again insists on religion as being ‘the primary mode of reflective rationality … the matrix from which the other forms are historically derived’ (p.€167). He explores how art and science derived from this, and interestingly differentiates ‘two aspects’ of religion: ritual and doctrine, these being its artistic and scientific aspects respectively, integrated and complementing one another in action ‘both refer to the unity of action which constitutes reality; the one to its aspect as fact [i.e. doctrine], the other to its aspect as value [i.e. ritual]’ (p.€174). The essentials of his position have, though, not shifted from those previously described. Macmurray, professionally a philosopher (and A. J. Ayer’s predecessor at University College, London), clearly then occupies an interesting intellectual position. He is part moral philosopher, part theologian and, in his eschewing of metaphysics and focus on the centrality of human relationships in action, part psychologist. Both works, especially the first, are virtually reference-free philosophical expositions of his own thought. Is he ‘doing’ Psychology of Religion? In one respect, the answer must be in the affirmative, for he is offering an essentially psychological account of the nature of religion and religious reflection while insisting on these being absolutely central to human nature itself. In doing so, he is both expounding the psychological character of religion and using this exposition to establish the transcendence of religion (which is of course not a Psychological goal!). One significant aspect of his account is the central role which dialogue, including internal dialogue, plays in the formation of an individual’s religious understanding and concept of self. This is even more true of Reinhold Niebuhr.
Reinhold Niebuhr Despite his name, Niebuhr was a U.S. citizen, born in Missouri and son of a German evangelical pastor. His own early years as a pastor were spent in 1920s Detroit where he became deeply involved in political issues such as working conditions in the auto industry and the threat of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1928 he became ‘professor
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5 A Boundary Problem
of practical theology’ at Union Theological Seminary in New York, continuing to be very active politically and ardently opposed to Nazism. A central feature of his work was an interest in the nature of history and its Christian interpretation, on which he published Beyond Tragedy. Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1938), but while a fuller understanding of the later The Self and the Dramas of History may benefit from acquaintance with this, I think we can fairly safely ignore it here. The Self and the Dramas of History bears on our present concerns in several respects: the way in which the self is conceptualised, the critique of ‘rational’ or scientific methods and approaches as inadequate to the task of understanding either selfhood or the nature of human history, and the almost ‘social psychological’ character of Niebuhr’s general vision of the ‘human condition’ and diagnosis of its problems. One notes that some sections of the work addressing the contemporary Cold War situation find him espousing a rather conservative liberal position and viewing U.S. and European (especially constitutional monarchical) societies through somewhat rose-tinted lenses. (There are in fact some affinities between his political position and that of T. S. Eliot’s 1948 Notes Towards a Definition of Culture). He can also refer to nations emerging from ‘colonial tutelage’. Ironically, however, the divergence we can retrospectively see between his understanding of his historical context (and how it would develop) and that which we might now adopt (and what really happened) actually confirms one of his own central anti-historicist theses—the impossibility of a fully rational understanding of history and its capricious, contingent and unpredictable character. Let us then leave this problem aside. Niebuhr’s concept of the self has three major features. In the first place he argues that its existence has to be accepted as an empirical given despite the inability of empirical, natural scientific, Psychology to find it. However invisible or elusive the self is for psychologists, the fact that we are ‘selves’, responsible for our actions, free to make choices, constantly evaluating and judging ourselves and others, is nevertheless taken for granted in all our discourse. Without this assumption all literature and drama would be impossible. Secondly, somewhat adumbrating current critical and social constructionist approaches ostensibly coming from totally the opposite direction to his own, he clearly conceives of the self as dialogic in character. The self is engaged in three kinds of dialogue—with itself, with others and with God or some, albeit imagined, transcendent principle. He is insistent on the comprehensive nature of the self, rejecting Psychological images of the self being influenced, challenged or affected by entities such as the id, super-ego, passions etc. as if these were not all, ultimately, aspects of the self. Finally, and crucially, the self is in an inescapable dilemma or bind being on the one hand free and transcendent, on the other finite and constrained by natural, historical and social forces. It is in resolving and reconciling the individual with this tension that Christianity’s (and perhaps Judaism’s) greatest service lies, for it is the contradiction between our feelings of free, god-like transcendence of our circumstances, and our experiences of finitude and failure that generates, for example, our senses of being sinful and our fear of death. The essential consequence of this self is that the individual needs an over-arching framework of meaning which can
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contain its experiences of both the rational natural world and of the fragmented, arbitrary, ‘contingent’ worlds of personal life and its socio-historical contexts, including history itself. To understand this better we need to turn to the second aspect of Niebuhr’s argument, the critique of reason as incapable of supplying such a framework of meaning, to be found in the brief Chap.€12, ‘The Self and Its Search for Ultimate Meaning’. The self, he argues, possesses a freedom over its ‘faculties’, rendering it ‘impossible … to consider systems of rational intelligibility, whether conceived in idealistic or naturalistic terms, as a solution for the problem of the meaning of … life’ (p.€73). He notes the stirrings of unease about this in Hume and Kant, notably the latter’s notion of the ‘thing in itself’, ‘a noumenal reality which indicated the mystery beyond the rationally intelligible phenomenal world of finite entities and relationships’ (p.€74). Even philosophies and ideologies which assert the sufficiency of reason eventually prove unable to constrain themselves within its terms. A trio of broad tactics may be identified in responses to the challenge of finding ‘ultimate meaning’. The first takes the form of an effort by the self ‘to break through a universal rational system in order to assert its significance ultimately’ (pp.€74–75). This formulation is hardly very clear, but becomes a little more so when Niebuhr subdivides it into ‘individual’ forms such as romanticism and existentialism, and ‘collective’ forms in which the individual self submits to a collective self—this parcels up everything from ancient ‘idolatry’ to modern nationalism and ‘the pseudo-universalistic Messianism of communism’. The latter form has especially ‘baneful’ effects. The second tactic is more explicitly religious, captured for Niebuhr in Aldous Huxley’s then recently coined phrase ‘the perennial philosophy’, ‘an heroic effort to transcend all finite values and systems of meaning, including the self as particular existence, and to arrive at universality and “unconditioned” being’ (p.€76). This, ‘generally defined as “mysticism”, stands at the opposite pole of idolatry’ (ibid). Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism and Taoism are all thrown into this melting pot. The problem here is that it is unclear whether the undifferentiated ‘being’ aspired to is a state of fullness or emptiness, and that it ‘is certainly being bereft of all relationships and meanings’ (ibid). This then leaves only the Judaeo-Christian mode of explicitly religious response standing. In Niebuhr’s account this scores over the others on several counts. Most crucially, it maintains the reality of the self as existing in a dialogue with God. ‘The idea of such an encounter … permits the Biblical faiths both to affirm the self in history and to challenge its achievements in any particular instance’ (p.€77). This then avoids both romantic self-idolatry or erasure by the collective mind on the one hand and the grandiose self-inflation cum annihilation of mysticism on the other. He is indeed quite sceptical about mystical claims at merging with universal divine consciousness since the hallmarks of the individual personality are always obvious in mystics’ accounts of having done so; he writes of the futility of the self’s attempt to escape from the ‘body’ and time into an ‘undifferentiated eternity’ (p.€83). The key point of interest to us here is not the merits or otherwise the argument itself, but the fact that Niebuhr is making it on essentially Psychological terms. We have a Psychological model of human nature in which a ‘self’ exists as a transcend-
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ing principle of individual identity presiding so to speak over the other psychological ‘faculties’; we have an ascription to this self of a vital need for a ‘meaning’ within which its experiences of the world and the operations of these other faculties can be construed. And we have analyses of the psychological consequences of the various types of attempt at finding this meaning. It is only in making quite explicit claims regarding the superior, indeed exclusive, viability of the Judaeo-Christian response that Niebuhr leaves Psychology, in the broad sense, behind. Throughout all this his underlying concern is with the necessarily historical nature of human existence, the thrust of the book as a whole being that only Christianity can provide a meaningful framework for such an existence.
Paul Tillich While there can be little dispute that Niebuhr, however ‘Psychological’ in style his thinking could be, was ultimately a Christian Protestant theologian, in Tillich’s case the situation becomes more complex. Incontrovertibly a theologian as he was (after all, his most monumental achievement was the three-volume Systematic Theology, which it took most of his career to complete), his thought displayed deep and sympathetic engagements with existentialist philosophy, Marxism and psychoanalysis. Before his 1933 exile from Germany, he had been involved in the establishment of the neo-Marxist ‘Frankfurt school’, read Heidegger and, like others in that school, such as Erich Fromm, taken much from Freud. By the 1950s and 1960s he had become a major ‘public intellectual’ in the United States, writing for The Saturday Evening Post and featuring on a Time Magazine cover. In 1959 he moved from Union Theological Seminary to Harvard as a university professor, where his periodic sermons in the campus chapel were always crowded to overflowing. The existentialist concern with the nature of ‘being’ lay at the core of his work. A very useful recent critical review of his significance for psychotherapy can be found in Sayers (2003). His most popular and (except the first chapter) accessible book was The Courage to Be (the Introduction to the 2000 Yale University Press edition by Peter J. Gomes is also helpful and informative, though uncritical). It would be ╇
It will be spotted in Chap.€12 that Niebuhr’s ‘self’ is very similar to Gordon Allport’s ‘total personality’. ╇ The main biography of Paul Tillich is W. & M. Pauck (1922) Paul Tillich. His Life and Thought, London: Collins. An early, sympathetic but critical, evaluation of Tillich’s theology is Heywood Thomas (1963) Paul Tillich: An Appraisal, London: SCM Press. In Britain he was less well known than in the U.S. until John Robinson’s 1963 Honest to God, which cited him with approval and was clearly echoing much of his theological thought. This caused consternation and uproar in Anglican circles. Robinson had long been impressed with Tillich’s ideas, airing them to students during his time at Wells Cathedral Theological College in the late 1940s (see Eric James (1987) A Life of Bishop John A. T. Robinson. Scholar, Pastor, Prophet, London: Collins, p.€37). Leslie Weatherhead’s The Christian Agnostic (1965) contained only two passing references to Tillich’s The Shaking of the Foundations (1949) while King’s College, London’s professor of history and philosophy
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pretentious to claim to do anything like justice to Tillich’s thought here. My aim is solely restricted to showing that his position in The Courage to Be can, in the broad sense, be read as Psychological, and that it offers not only a penetrating analysis of ‘anxiety’ but also rests on a more implicit ‘Psychology of Religion’. The ‘courage’ of the title refers to the courage to acknowledge, accept and transcend the three types of anxiety, expounded in Chap.€2, which are inherent in being human: the anxiety of fate and death, the anxiety of emptiness and loss of meaning, and the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. These forms of ‘existential anxiety’ are normal, universal and inescapable. Each presents a facet of the underlying, unifying, threat of ‘nonbeing’; physical, ‘spiritual’ and moral (self-condemnatory) respectively. These, in extremis, generate despair or hopelessness, ‘nonbeing’ is felt to be victorious and there is no way out. But the very fact that it is felt implies that ‘being’ has not yet been lost. ‘Enough being is left to feel the irresistable power of nonbeing, and this is the despair within the despair’ (p.€55). The pain of this situation is the desire ‘to surrender this awareness and its presupposition, the being which is aware. It wants to get rid of itself – and it cannot’ (ibid). Suicide can liberate one from anxiety of death, but not from the others (well, obviously it would, but these are not about death, so suicide would not be an appropriate response). The anxiety of loss of meaning has been exacerbated for the religious by the loss of power of traditional Christian symbolism. This analysis will ultimately lead to Tillich’s controversial theological position, that the courage to accept and overcome this despair, to keep hope alive, can only be supplied by a principle of ‘being’ more profound than the individual, which we call God for want of a better word. In the book’s much-quoted final words: ‘The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.’ (p.€190). Chapter€3 pursues the consequences of the failure to accept ‘existential anxiety’, its transformation into three corresponding types of ‘neurotic anxiety’. ‘Neurosis is a way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being’ (p.€66). By various strategies the neurotic displaces or projects his or her anxiety in a way which circumscribes his or her own ‘being’, constraining it within a limited mode of ‘being’ which excludes or prevents its fullness. Thus, denial of the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness can result in dogmatic religious or ideological fanaticism, insistent on its certainty of knowing the truth, and responding with wrath against all that which would challenge it. In this context religion is an ambiguous factor. ‘Much courage to be, of religion, H. D. Lewis summarily, and wildly inaccurately, dismisses his ‘theological attenuation of faith … which reduces religion to some attitude we adopt towards our problems in the present world – an attitude, moreover, which involves much ethical relativism’ (pp.€172, grammar very slightly adjusted for quotation purposes) in his contribution to I. T. Ramsey (ed) (1966) Christian Ethics and Contemporary Philosophy, London: SCM Press. I have not, of course, scoured the British theological and Psychological literature of the period for citations, but his fame in the U.K. was never comparably widespread. Even so, R. D. Laing quotes Tillich’s view of neurosis with approval in The Divided Self (1960, p.€119). ╇ Tillich’s view of the nature of religious symbolism, and the distinction between symbols and signs, was elaborated in his paper ‘Religious Symbols and Our Knowledge of God’ (1955) The Christian Scholar Vol.€38(3), 189–197.
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created by religion, is nothing else than the desire to limit one’s own being and to strengthen this limitation through the power of religion. And even if religion does not lead to or does not directly support pathological self-reduction, it can reduce the openness of man to reality, above all to the reality which is himself. In this way religion can protect and feed a potentially neurotic state.’ (p.€73). In summary, ‘pathological anxiety, in relation to the anxiety of … death, produces an unrealistic security; in relation to the anxiety of guilt and condemnation, an unrealistic perfection [e.g. extreme moral self-righteousness]; in relation to the anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness, an unrealistic certitude’ (p.€77). To clarify the first of these: ‘… one avoids particular dangers, although they are hardly real, and suppresses the awareness of having to die although this is an ever-present reality’ (p.€75). Tillich considers in some detail the interactive roles which medical and religious professionals can rightly play in tackling pathological anxiety. This is hopefully sufficient to indicate how Tillich’s position transcends the Psychology/theology divide. His account of ‘anxiety’ and its healthy ‘existential’ versus ‘pathological’ forms presents what is clearly some kind of Psychological theory, with echoes of, for example, Freudian defence mechanisms and Festinger’s cognitive dissonance reducing tactics, even perhaps of Marxist ‘false consciousness’ as well as secular existentialist notions of ‘authenticity’. Again, Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy might be seen as closely related to Tillich’s view of the ‘anxiety of meaninglessness’. But it also contains, as I have said, an implicit ‘Psychology of Religion’ in which religion is cast as serving the purpose of providing frameworks of doctrine, symbols and ritual in which our core existential anxieties can be addressed and conquered. They provide means by which God, as the source of hope in the face of despair, of ‘being’ in the face of the overwhelming threat of ‘nonbeing’, can be accessed and experienced (notably in the form of the experience of ‘grace’). On the other hand, for his purposes here at least, Tillich is reluctant to equate this God with the God of any specific monotheism. On the contrary, Christianity has reached a historical point where its traditional symbols and concepts have become exhausted and no longer work for the majority of people. Thus, the ‘God beyond God’. Two further points should be made. Tillich’s approach is often highly historical, and he is greatly concerned with how existential and pathological anxieties manifest themselves over time, and how particular modes of anxiety can come to predominate, assuming a collective character. He would have immediately recognised the anxiety of meaninglessness and doubt at work in the Taliban, as indeed it was among seventeenth-century English Puritans. Soviet Communism under Stalin displayed similar symptoms. Finally, towards the end of the final chapter, he challenges theism and claims that his theological approach shows how this can be ‘transcended’. I return to this in Chap.€10. No American Psychologist of the 1950s and early 1960s could have been unaware of Tillich’s work and The Courage to Be was an immediate best-seller. Academically, as well as his influence within Union Theological Seminary and at Columbia University, at Harvard he would certainly have crossed paths with Gordon W. Allport (who also preached in the same chapel) and the Jung aficionado Henry A. Murray. Finally, it is intriguing that the Catholic John P. Dourley (1981) was able
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to argue for a deep affinity between Tillich and Jung, concluding that both insist on the ‘conscious confrontation of the powers, demonic and divine, which man meets in his own psyche. … And in this vital work performed in the depths of the human soul, the psychological task and the religious task are one.’ (p.€101). (I see the book carries no Imprimatur!) That Dourley, as a Catholic priest, was drawn to Jung, becoming a Jungian analyst, is unsurprising given the common revelling in religious symbolism, but his equally sympathetic response to Tillich’s apparently very different, existentialist, position is a curious testament to how successfully Tillich managed to get beyond doctrinal dogmas to the heart of the matter.
Martin Buber Buber’s I and Thou (1923) is a work of a different kind to those discussed so far. Although not translated into English until 1937 it is one of those great ur-texts of the 1920s, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) or James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), albeit now less familiar than these literary works. (Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West was also published in English in 1922.) Barely 120€pages, it is a blend of theology, philosophy, poetry, Psychology and moral polemic. But as its translator, R. B. Smith, rightly observes, really, ‘there is no word to describe the remarkable combination in Buber’s writing of concrete imagery and situation with a sense of overtones, and at the same time a kind of directness which lays a special claim upon the reader’ (p.€viii), it calls for a ‘special response’. Despite being written over eighty years ago, it remains remarkably undated, only some brief toying (around p.€21) with the then popular ‘primitive mind’ concept (Lévy-Bruhl’s La Mentalité Primitive had also, remarkably, appeared in 1922) and the occasional surfacing of Spenglerian notions of cyclical history betray its historical milieu. But even then, his uses of these are quite different to those of their authors. Buber himself was a Hassidic Jewish religious thinker, but this tradition is never made explicit in the work. It does, however, underlie his insistence on full engagement with the world and rejection of solitary world-abandoning mysticism. There are numerous adumbrations and foreshadowings, both overt and covert, of future philosophical and Psychological developments. It is easy, for example, to read his position as a variety of existentialism, while he clearly sees human life as dialogical in character—a theme which subsequently echoed through both ╇ John P. Dourley (1981) C. G. Jung and Paul Tillich. The Psyche as Sacrament. I only encountered this text in the final stages of completing the present work and have not had time to read and appraise it fully, or explore Dourley’s other works: The Illness that we Are: A Jungian Critique of Christianity (1984) from the same publishers and Paul Tillich, Carl Jung and the Recovery of Religion (2008). Whether he has remained a priest, I do not know. ╇ All citations are to the 2nd, 1958, edition. ╇ If in a very different register, the contemporary Russian writer, Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) was adopting a similar position, only ‘rediscovered’ in the 1980s.
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Macmurray and Niebuhr, before (as indicated earlier) being virtually ‘rediscovered’ by contemporary critical social psychologists such as Kenneth Gergen and Mike Billig; at one point (around p.€26) he even seems to be anticipating the Kleinian object-relations theory. Most crucial, for our purposes here (and I guess for all purposes whatsoever!) is his distinction between two modes of relating to the world captured in two ‘primary words’: ‘I–Thou’ and ‘I–It’. I and Thou is not a linear exposition of an argument, rather, starting aphoristically, it proceeds in a more circular meditative fashion, returning to and amplifying its central themes, evoking, rather than logically persuading, and frequently switching register. Two points must immediately be noted about the I–Thou vs. I–It distinction. Firstly, it refers not only to inter-personal relations, but to how we relate to the world in its entirety. Secondly, both are, for Buber, absolutely necessary, and thus complementary. Even so, it is the I–Thou mode which is in desperate need of reaffirmation. In the I–Thou mode one is relating to the world ‘with the whole being’ and is in a mutually constituting relationship with the ‘Thou’; there is no other ‘thing’. The ‘I’s of the two modes are different, for in the I–Thou condition the I exists in the relationship, while in the I–It condition the I is constituted as different from the It which is experienced as other than I. The I–It mode refers to the world of experiences—‘I experience something’, i.e. something other than ‘I’. From this starting point Buber proceeds to elaborate and clarify the ramifications of this ‘twofold’ attitude. We cannot pursue this in detail, but of most relevance here is how he touches on issues later taken up by psychotherapists and the group of thinkers considered previously. (Nor is he a million miles away from Pfister, discussed in the previous chapter.) One is the nature of meaning. For Buber the world as experienced in the I–It mode is devoid of genuine meaning. It is a causally governed world, devoid of freedom. Meaning only emerges in the I–Thou mode or attitude. In this context he introduces a distinction between fate and destiny. The ‘It’ world knows only preordained fate, beyond our control. If we operate primarily in the I–It mode, aiming only at material gratifications, power over others, and so forth, our life remains devoid of real meaning. In the I–Thou mode by contrast we are open to what being itself requires of us, which is, paradoxically, a state of freedom and choice, and our lives are a living out of a meaningful destiny in relation to the world as a whole. It is difficult to summarise his case convincingly in the short compass available here, but it has obvious links to later existentialist ideas, Frankl’s logotherapy (which centres on the pursuit of meaning) and Tillich’s anxiety of meaninglessness. While we have to live in both modes, excluding from conscious awareness the I–Thou mode and acting as if the I–It mode is sufficient for fulfilment is fatal. It is not entirely clear whether Buber genuinely believes that people can be neatly bifurcated into I–Thou and I–It ‘types’—it is though highly unlikely. Nonetheless he deploys a further distinction: someone living in the I–It mode is, he says, an ‘individual’, someone set against and differentiated from the world and others; whereas living in the I–Thou mode renders one a ‘person’, engaged in a genuine, mutually constituting relationship with others and the world as a whole. He also, it should be mentioned, uses the word ‘self’ somewhat differently from Jung, Niebuhr, Allport
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or Maslow (whose own usages all differ) to refer to the encapsulated ‘I’ of the ‘I–It’ attitude (more akin to the old Puritan ‘self’ to which ‘selfish’ refers). When it comes to the psychotherapist–client relationship, in which the therapist is truly engaged with ‘the regeneration of an atrophied centre’, the mutuality of the I–Thou attitude has to be kept partly in check. While it is indeed demanded of the therapist that ‘he’ ‘must stand again and again not merely at his own pole in the bipolar relation, but also with the strength of present realisation at the other pole, and experience the effect of his own action’ (p.€133, included in Buber’s 1957 postscript to the main text), the ‘healing’ relation ‘would come to an end the moment the patient thought of, and succeeded in, practising “inclusion” and experiencing the event from the doctor’s pole as well’. This asymmetry is also required in the educator–pupil and pastoral ‘cure of souls’ relationships. ‘Every I–Thou relationship, within a relation which is specified as a purposive working of one part upon the other, persists in virtue of a mutuality which is forbidden to be full’ (pp.€133–134). This passage came too late for any direct influence on events in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but it does signify Buber’s awareness of the pitfalls of over-identification with the client and the transference–counter-transference tangle. More obviously anticipatory is the I–Thou concept itself, of which Carl Rogers was certainly conscious in formulating his ‘unconditional regard’ axiom, while the very title of his On Becoming a Person (1961) recognisably echoes Buber’s use of the ‘person’ concept. Finally, theologically, Buber conceives of ‘God’ as the ‘eternal Thou’, ‘the true Thou of [one’s] life, which cannot be limited by another Thou, and to which [one] stands in a relation that gathers up and includes all others.’ (p.€76). He goes on, ‘But when he, too, who abhors the name, and believes himself to be godless, gives his whole being to addressing the Thou of his life, as a Thou that cannot be limited by another, he addresses God.’ (ibid). God is where the ‘extended lines of relation meet in the eternal Thou’ (p.€75). Like Tillich, Buber is uneasy about the word ‘God’, and like Tillich he too ends up with an undoctrinally defined concept of God as an ultimate ground of Being, paradoxically personal (by virtue of being the core of ‘Thou-ness’, so to speak) and yet unknowable. This is patently in hailing distance of Tillich’s ‘God beyond God’. How then are we to evaluate Buber’s ‘influence’? It is oddly elusive, we know that Tillich and he had been friends from 1924 onwards (both being at Frankfurt University) and that they had long engaged in mutually respectful debate, but explicit citation is at best scant in Tillich’s popular works, and nowhere in The Courage to Be. Niebuhr begins a brief Preface to The Self and the Dramas of History with a glowing acknowledgement of indebtedness to I and Thou ‘which first instructed me and many others on the uniqueness of human selfhood and on the religious dimension of the problem’, it ‘prompted my original interest’. But he then apologises for failing to do Buber justice in the book (there is in fact only one passing mention). Carl Rogers interviewed Buber and claimed that he became aware of his work when it was brought to his attention by students at Chicago (which would place it ╇
W. & M. Pauck op. cit., p.€262.
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sometime between 1945 and 1957), but it is hard to believe he really only first heard of him that late given his Union Theological Seminary and Niebuhr connection. Macmurray never cites him, but then he never cited anybody. Buber was a professor of philosophy of religion at Frankfurt from 1923 to 1933 (and emigrated to what was then Palestine in 1938). He would thus have been well known to the Frankfurt school. He continued to publish amplifications of his original position throughout the 1920s and 1930s, addressing education and, in 1938, philosophical attempts at answering the question ‘What is Man?’ (↜Was ist der Mensch?) (these writings were published in 1947 as Between Man and Man). There is so much in I and Thou which resonates with subsequent work in psychotherapy and the kind of Psychology of Religion I have been discussing here, so much evidence too of the very high regard in which Buber was held by contemporary thinkers, that it is difficult to conceive of him not being a major figure in their intellectual frames of reference. One concedes that his style would never have appealed to British philosophers or mainstream theologians, but the British scene was only one among many in which pre-1939 Psychology and psychotherapy were expanding. My suspicion is that the very character of I and Thou rendered it hard to incorporate into academic agendas, while at the same time equally hard for readers to exclude from their own evolving personal world-views. Perhaps his role then was a more deeply private one than something to be publicly advertised. My own experience has (among other things) been that having read it, the other writers I have been discussing here seemed to fall more clearly into place, as if Buber himself was a Thou towards which their relations converged, or rather, from which they extended.
The Union Theological Seminary Connection A strong case can surely be made that Union Theological Seminary (UTS) and to some extent Columbia University (on the opposite side of the same street), with which it had close relations, constituted the New York epicentre for the post-World War II emergence of the Growth Movement. This possibility is reinforced by K. Pandora’s observations regarding the 1930s. UTS had earned a reputation as a centre of radicalism, being nick-named ‘The Red Seminary’ by the political right (Pandora, 1997, p.€30). Gardner Murphy had attended courses there and his wife Lois Barclay Murphy received her post-graduate degree there in 1927. Pandora notes: Murphy was hardly alone in joining the sacred to the secular through a dual apprenticeship at UTS and Columbia. UTS was, in fact, the breeding ground for a number of students who would find their ‘way to psychology by way of religion,’ making the move across the street to Columbia University to pursue their Ph.D.s. (p.€31) ╇
Carl Rogers (1961) On Becoming A Person: A Therapists’s View of Psychotherapy, p.€199. Kathleen Pandora (1997) Rebels within the Ranks. Psychologists’ Critique of Scientific Authority and Democratic Realities in New Deal America. ╇
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Carl Rogers himself had briefly studied there (1924–1926) before transferring to Columbia University and interviewed Tillich, Niebuhr and Buber (the first of these interviews is now freely available on the web10), existentialist psychotherapist Rollo May had graduated as Bachelor of Divinity there in 1938, while Maslow too closely engaged with Tillich’s existentialist approach. Rollo May’s relationship with Tillich was long-standing and intimate, as emerges from his ‘personal portrait’ of Tillich (R. May, 1973). Of particular interest in the present context is that it was from Tillich’s intense supervision of May’s doctoral thesis, published as The Meaning of Anxiety (1950) that The Courage to Be emerged11. May also mentions, in passing, the presence of the post-Freudian Karen Horney at a Tillich dinner-party. Pandora notes social psychologists Theodore Newcomb and Rensis Likert along with sociologist Robert Lynd as other UTS students. How far was the ‘existentialist turn’ in American psychotherapy, with its stress on the quest for meaning and acknowledgement of the ‘spiritual’ (albeit in secularised terms), stimulated, affected and mediated by Tillich’s presence? (And Tillich’s own position similarly indebted to long-before conversations with Buber in Frankfurt?) UTS has continued to be a major centre for training in psychotherapy and counselling, a leading presentday figure being the Jungian and professor of psychiatry and religion, Ann Belford Ulanov. I cannot pursue this theme further here.
Conclusion My first concern in this chapter has been to suggest that, insofar as ‘Psychology of Religion’ is concerned, Macmurray, Niebuhr and Tillich each offered an implicit (occasionally even explicit) Psychological ‘theory’ of the nature of religion (and in Tillich’s case a theory of psychopathology), Buber’s role in this being akin to that of inspirational guru. During the late 1940s and 1950s there does appear to have been a constellation of various psychologists, psychotherapists and theologians in the United States, additionally including Gordon Allport, Henry Murray and Erich Fromm, which was sufficient in weight partly to counterbalance the dominance of reductionist neo-behaviourism and kindred experimental approaches in American Psychology. Moreover, they also exerted considerable cultural impact. More profoundly though, this mid-twentieth-century group and others like them, addressing the contemporary ‘human condition’ from Psychologically informed philosophical, theological and religious positions, present the disciplinary historian with an obvious ‘boundary problem’. Many psychologists and psychotherapists were well aware of, and actively engaged with, their ideas, especially in the U.S., but the senses in which they were themselves ‘doing Psychology’ as well as theology or philosophy are very broad. In undertaking disciplinary his10╇ 11╇
On: http://www.carlrogers.info/video.html See R. May (1973) pp. 21–23.
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tory, the historian generally has to accept the self-definition of the discipline in question, but in the case of Psychology (and other human sciences too perhaps), this becomes part of the riddle. Psychology’s on-going efforts to define itself, and its perennial failures to do so in a fashion which commands consensus, are themselves part of its history. We cannot then exclude by some ‘mainstream’ fiat thinkers like Tillich, Niebuhr and Buber when our enquiries reveal their close involvements with some aspects of contemporary Psychological thought. I am therefore quite happy to include them, since the mid-twentieth-century history of Psychology’s relations with religion cannot otherwise be understood—not least because they illustrate how the very distinction between the two can become extremely blurred.
Chapter 6
The Authenticity of Religious Experience
As we have seen Psychology was originally welcomed by many believers as promising a scientific vindication of the authenticity of religious experience. In this chapter I wish, somewhat perfunctorily, to summarise what I take to be the status of the authenticity issue. Although its prominence as a topic has oscillated considerably over time it is one which has guaranteed that the two camps remain unsevered, not least because it bears most directly on the mythos versus logos tension. On the religious side the promise persists, on the Psychological side the nature of religious experience is unambiguously a part of its subject matter. Three broad positions on this question may be discerned. The first, traceable from Martineau via James, Streeter, Jung and Tillich (among many others) down to contemporary religiously oriented psychotherapists is that much, if not all, experience considered ‘religious’ by the experiencer must be considered as in some sense ‘authentic’, though in what, precisely, this authenticity consists may be debated. The second, strongly asserted by Leuba and largely endorsed by Niebuhr, is that all so-called ‘religious’, especially ‘mystical’, experience may be explained reductively as a subjective interpretation of brain-states in terms of the individual’s past experiences and pre-existing religious ideas and beliefs, all these often operating unconsciously. Many contemporary, reductionist neuropsychologists would agree. The third position, taken by many psychologists disinclined to get involved in the issue, is to fall back on a ‘facts’ versus ‘values’ distinction and claim that as scientists they are in no position to judge the evaluative meanings people give to such experiences. We will consider these in turn shortly. One obvious difficulty many writers have addressed is that there are numerous kinds of religious experience, James’ Varieties of Religious Experience being the locus classicus for this. At one extreme are the ecstatic raptures of the mystic, at the other the apparent descent, or eruption and inner diffusion, of feelings of love, comfort and reassurance. (Logically, the opposites of these, such as encounters with the demonic or feelings of being in the presence of evil, should also be included.) Identifying their common feature is not easy but the positive experiences do all seem to involve a direct subjective encounter of some kind with a beneficent Other possessing at least some of the qualities of ‘personhood’. It is also possible to insist that the cumulative weight of testimony regarding the whole gamut of phenomena from mystical experience to mediumship, G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_6, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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ESP (extrasensory perception) and near-death or out-of-body experiences (NDEs and OBEs) is such we have no alternative but to conclude that the ‘soul’ and/or ‘spirit’ (terms with a long and complex relationship) can exist separately from the body and that posthumous life is a reality. Crookall (1969) exemplifies this position in his review of clairvoyance, ‘astral projection’, OBEs and similar phenomena. The central Psychological question remains, how we are to evaluate the testimony arising from what seem to be purely subjective experiences? A century of Psychological research has apparently demonstrated that subjective testimony regarding the nature of psychological phenomena is unreliable. This conclusion seemingly applies across the board. The failure of the early project of creating a scientific research programme using some kind of trained ‘objective’ introspection in order to study consciousness (more properly identified with E. B. Titchener than W. Wundt) was an early example. Psychoanalysis then revealed the unreliability of our reports of our own emotions and motives, while later experimental social psychologists exposed the fallibility of our memory and perception of events in the world around us. Levels of certainty expressed by witnesses also often proved to be unrelated to the likelihood of their testimony being correct. We were, it had to be concluded, at the mercy of the vagaries of our sensory systems when reporting on the outside world and of our cerebral neurology and unconscious when reporting on the inner one. QED, one might think. Not quite. There is an interesting argument, alluded to in the previous chapter, put forward in various ways by writers such as Martineau, William James (in The Varieties of Religious Experience) and Jung to the effect that subjective experiences of a religious kind which are felt to involve a direct encounter with some Other, a personlike agency, are in a sense less open to doubt than those involving our notoriously fallible perceptual faculties. Somewhat like pain, they are direct and unmediated. One hallmark of reports of such experiences is also precisely the insistence that they defy accurate verbal description, forcing the individual to rely on metaphors and analogies. The core content of such encounters is also generally an emotional one—a communication of love, comfort, wonder and the like (or dread and fear in the case of negative religious experiences)—not information about empirical facts. The only empirical ‘fact’ is the experience of being the recipient of such emotions. That brain processes are undoubtedly involved proves nothing one way or the other. You cannot have an emotional ‘illusion’ in such contexts any more than you can have an illusion of pain. In the case of pain, you may demonstrably err in identifying its cause, but in this case it is unclear how you could demonstrate an error in identifying the source of an emotional influx—especially if the individual is confessedly at a loss for words! Identifying an area of the brain which is activated during the episode tells you nothing about why it was activated or why its activation has the quality it does. One might object that the individual has engaged in some behaviour intentionally to elicit the experience and thereby activated the brain region in question, but you cannot explain a room away by explaining how its door was opened. The concept of an ‘illusion’ implies that there is an empirically identifiable disparity between the experience and ‘reality’. In the case of religious experiences, the experience is the reality. As a general point it is relevant here to remember that the
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very notion of ‘illusion’ or ‘error’ in relation to our interpretations of psychological phenomena is only sustainable on the assumption that these are deviations from ‘normal’ non-illusory or correct interpretations. To classify the ‘normal’ interpretations of an entire category of psychological phenomena as illusory is thus somewhat problematic in itself. What is true, though, is that in striving to communicate the experience and construe its meaning, the individual is thrown back on their cultural repertoire of beliefs and concepts. But this holds for all reports of subjective experience. It is the recognition of this which has driven the rise of social constructionist theories in general. We can never discourse on ‘raw’ sensations, feelings and emotions without structuring them in terms of this repertoire, which is all we have available. All of which puts us back to square one. There is another strategy, also going back to William James. This is to adopt a ‘pragmatic’ view of the matter and evaluate such phenomena not by whether they are ‘really’ what they are experienced as being (which is impossible to establish) but by their consequences for the individual. Before pursuing this further, a brief comment is required on the word ‘belief’. Over a substantial range of its uses, the term ‘belief’ implies that there is actually a shortfall of empirical or factual evidence to support it. We do not ‘believe’ that 1 + 1 = 2, we know it. In the early seventeenth century some people believed the Earth orbited the Sun and others did not. Nowadays it would be a bit odd to say ‘I believe the Earth orbits the Sun’, we simply accept it as an indisputable fact. In seeking to validate religious beliefs by finding facts which ‘prove’ them to be correct, people are striving to shift their status from ‘beliefs’ to ‘knowledge’. This is important because it constitutes an effort to transfer them from the mythos realm to that of logos. Ironically, success in this endeavour would subvert the key feature of Christianity, Islam and Judaism—that they are faiths. And ‘faith’ even more than ‘belief’ implies that one is going beyond the ‘facts’, that one has unquestioning trust and ‘belief’ in the doctrine through thick and thin. Proof, by logos, means that the doctrine is objectively true in a scientific sense and would render faith in its truth superfluous. One would have no choice but to accept it as conventional knowledge. (There is, of course, a weaker sense of ‘faith’ in which it is more or less synonymous with ‘trust’, but that is not what concerns us here.) And ‘free will’, on which the moral virtue of religious belief depends, would also be defenestrated. From the pragmatist perspective this problem need not arise. If their religious belief or faith enables a person to find meaning, purpose, moral values and support through life’s vicissitudes, that is sufficient reason for leaving it unchallenged. The question then becomes one of whether in general religion and religious experiences are a ‘good thing’ for humanity as a whole. The answer to this is far from straightforward. Where it leads us, as far as Psychology is concerned, is into attempts at identifying psychopathological forms of religious behaviour or experience, a task which in turn rests on some implicit moral assumptions, themselves ultimately derived from the mythos realm if not from specific religious beliefs. As we will see in Chap.€7, many Christians have been eager to collaborate with Psychology in this task.
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As far as the ‘authenticity’ of religious experience and validity of religious belief are concerned, the best we can do perhaps is to accept that, in extremis, many people have found themselves—either actively or passively—in contact with inner resources beyond any to which they normally have access and which they directly experience as involving an encounter with a transpersonal agency, a meeting taking place within their own minds or psyches. That this happens is as firm a psychological ‘fact’ as any other. Describing such events as ‘religious experiences’ may be a cultural convention, and the non-religious may have equivalent experiences which they describe in other terms. But if the individual does construe them as ‘religious’ and if their consequences are beneficial, then we can go no further, from the direction of logos, in evaluating their ‘authenticity’. We can only accept them as, to sound reductionist, ‘data’ which must be taken into account when exploring the psychological character of religion as a whole. And that extends way beyond religious experiences as such, even if these lie somewhere at the heart of all the major products of mythos thinking which we call ‘religions’. As a topic, the authenticity question therefore lies very close to the heart of the mythos versus logos tension which I have suggested frames the entire topic of this book. The subject has, I suspect, been bedevilled by a failure to examine precisely what the term ‘authentic’ means, and to acknowledge that its meanings may actually differ across different contexts.
Chapter 7
Religion and Psychotherapy
If, as previously argued, claims of expertise on the child provided the major original route of contact between psychologists and religious constituencies, expertise on mental distress was soon assuming a distinct place of its own. It was in psychotherapy that Psychologists (including psychotherapists) and religious professionals came to work closest together throughout most of the last century. Mental distress had long been considered a province of medicine, and psychiatry (or proto-psychiatry) a fertile source of Psychological ideas. The Psychology/psychiatry borderline often becomes blurred when considering late nineteenth century and early twentieth century claims to scientific expertise on human nature. It was in this border zone that various forms of psychotherapy appeared around 1900, the term itself generally being traced to Swiss psychiatrist Dr Paul Dubois’ 1904 usage, although two Dutch doctors, F. W. van Eeden and A. W. van Renterghem published their Clinique de Psycho-therapie Suggestive in 1889, having set up a clinic of ‘suggestive psychotherapy’ two years previously. In 1887 the English word ‘psycho-therapeutics’ had first appeared in a Contemporary Review article and in 1889, again hyphenated, in the title of C. L. Tucker’s Psycho-therapeutics or Treatment by Hypnotism and Suggestion. Numerous other early equivalent terms in German, French and Italian are given in Baldwin (1905). A mediating factor in this fusion of psychiatry and Psychology was the contemporary interest in hypnotic phenomena and the role of ‘suggestion’. ‘Suggestion’ was to remain a psychotherapeutic buzzword into the 1920s. Among these psychotherapies was, obviously, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, the fame of which (outside Pierre Janet’s France) had, by around 1910, begun to overshadow all others. It is thus worth stressing that while the demarcation between Psychology and psychotherapy as professional specialisms has never been less than fuzzy, the overlap was even greater during the first half of the century. Rather than a comprehensive review of the religion’s role in all this, which would be a book-length task in itself, I will focus here on one relatively discrete episode. After a quick glance at the Boston Emmanuel Movement during the period before ╇
Dubois’ best known English-language exposition is Dubois (1909). Acknowledgements to Hendrika Vande Kemp for drawing these early English usages and Baldwin (1905) to my attention.
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G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_7, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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the Great War, I will examine in more detail the British situation during the interwar years and into the early post-war period. The latter initially centres on the Methodist minister Leslie Weatherhead, H. Crichton-Miller of the Tavistock Clinic and psychologist William Brown before culminating in the establishment of the Westminster Pastoral Foundation in the 1970s. We will also consider some religious aspects of the so-called Growth Movement which erupted during the 1960s. I am thus leaving aside the mainland European and most North American stories. Nevertheless, I hope points made in relation to British events will suggest issues that others may fruitfully explore in other national contexts, elucidating both similarities and differences.
Boston Emmanuel Movement (1906–1929) The history of the Boston-based Emmanuel Movement (which lasted from 1910– 1929) has been fairly fully tackled by Gifford (1998) to which I refer readers seeking a more detailed account. For us the interest of the Emmanuel Movement lies in what it can tell us about religion’s role in the emergence of modern psychotherapy and counselling. The three figures primarily associated with the movement are its founder, the medically qualified Rev. Elwood Worcester (1862–1940), psychiatrist Dr Isador H. Coriat (1875–1943), who had ‘converted’, as it were, to psychoanalysis by 1914 and Dr Samuel McComb (1864–1938) ‘a witty, talkative, Anglicised Irishman who had studied psychology at Oxford’ (Gifford, 1998, p.€60). The major account of their approach is Worcester, McComb and Coriat (1908, 1920). Also closely associated was the eminent physician Joseph H. Pratt (1872–1956) who actually set the ball rolling in 1905 by conducting what was in effect group psychotherapy with tuberculosis sufferers at the Emmanuel Church (which he termed ‘the class method’). Finally, we should mention Richard C. Cabot (1868–1939), scion of one of the oldest and most eminent New England families, already involved in medical social work and to become, in 1920, the first professor of Social Ethics at Harvard (Gifford, 1998, p.€45). Although never formally attached to the movement, Cabot was one of its most staunch defenders in the controversies it became embroiled in over 1908 to 1909. The long-term influence of the Emmanuel Movement in the U.S. was considerable; it introduced the notion of medical psychotherapy to the country, constituted its first psychiatric outpatient clinic, and pioneered the small group psychotherapy method, although it lost the battle for acceptance of lay ╇
Sanford Gifford (1998) The Emmanuel Movement: the Origins of Group Therapy and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy. ╇ Perhaps the most eminent—as the old rhyme has it ‘O, I come from the town of Boston/The land of the bean and the cod/Where the Lowells speak only to Cabots/And Cabots speak only to God’. I was delighted to see this fully quoted in Nicholson (2002, p.€32)—which enabled me to slightly correct my original quotation of it from memory. G. W. Allport apparently pasted it into a notebook after going up to Harvard. See the same work passim for extensive discussion of Harvard’s Department of Social Ethics.
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(medically unqualified) therapists—a major factor in its demise, although the issue resurfaced in the 1940s and 1950s (Holifield, 1983). Since, physically, the movement was based in the rectory of the Episcopalian Emmanuel Church and founded by its rector, its religious underpinnings are patently obvious. Pastoral counselling developed fairly extensively in the U.S. after 1920, this has been summarised down to 1970 by Vande Kemp (1984b, 1996). A major mid-century figure in promoting pastoral counselling was Seward Hiltner. Author of two books and numerous journal articles, Pastoral Counseling (1949) appears to have been his most important opening statement of his concept on the topic. Less well explored has been the British story to which I now turn.
Britain between 1918 and c. 1980 It is curious to ponder what the British mood over Christmas 1918 must have been like. Grief and relief of unprecedented depth and poignancy surely, in equal measure, suffused the festival that year. For devout Christians it would, we might assume, have been an especially testing occasion. The Great War traumatised all Europe to varying degrees leaving utter social, economic and psychological confusion in its wake, further exacerbated by the deadly influenza pandemic and the spectacle of the Russian revolution. Our focus here is on the psychological confusion. For thinkers of all ideological and religious hues one thing was clear—pre-1914 received wisdoms about human nature needed radical rethinking, perhaps even outright rejection. The familiar question of ‘How can God allow such things to happen?’, which resurfaces after every major disaster, was only part of it. For scientists, including psychologists, reared on the Victorian image of man’s glorious evolutionary ascent, culminating in the highest level of civilization, morality and power ever known on the planet, and set to ascend even further, the war was equally traumatic. It was not, after all, the ‘degenerates’ who had caused the catastrophe, the insane, feeble-minded, criminal and perverted who had been the targets of Eugenics, but the very rulers of the leading European nations—whom the old image would have cast as the evolutionary crème de la crème of our species. Interest in Spiritualism and Theosophy revived and surged, utopian attempts at promoting a return to a romantically viewed medieval society were widespread, and, more seriously, ideological class-hostility and rejection of the existing socio-economic order greatly intensified. The politicians wrestled as best they could to bring these forces under control, but never succeeded throughout the interwar period. There was, though, one spark of hope—science. Science and, more visibly, the technological innovations it was yielding, held out the tantalising promise of providing a new basis for western culture, revolutionising everything from transport to medicine, methods of industrial production to economic management, communications to agriculture. ╇
For other overviews of the field, see Clebsch and Jaekle (1964) and Clinebell (1966).
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It is important to bear in mind that, throughout the interwar period, the cultural milieu in which Psychological publications appeared included a wider literature concerned with what might loosely be called ‘man’s place in the cosmos’ and religious belief. This ranged from the Gifford Lectures of 1927–1929 given by the Bishop of Birmingham, Ernest William Barnes, Scientific Theory and Religion. The World as Described by Science and Its Spiritual Interpretation (1933)—which proved enormously controversial—via the astronomers Sir Arthur Eddington’s and James Jeans’ vaguely theistic respective best-sellers The Expanding Universe (1933) and The Mysterious Universe (1930) to J. W. Dunne’s sensational An Experiment with Time (1927), which married psychic research and the theory of relativity. At the same time public figures as respected as novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge were keenly supporting the Spiritualist revival. It is, in retrospect, becoming difficult hermeneutically to recapture the hectic temper of these two short decades between the World Wars, during which, in Britain alone, iconoclastic modernism in poetry and the visual arts commingled with scientistic utopianism, the nihilistic yet morally agonised aestheticism of the Bloomsbury Set, and a kind of mystical retro-antiquarianism (exemplified in the popularity of such works as Margaret Murray’s The God of the Witches, 1931, the cavorting of Aleister Crowley and Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 with its rumour-ridden aftermath), to all of which the new media of film, radio and gramophone records provided a ubiquitous backdrop, with Marxism, Fascism and psychoanalysis providing their various incessant commentaries. At a more grass-roots level the various genres of popular Psychology and selfhelp publications, in both book and magazine formats, boomed, providing the pervasive cultural matrix from which psychotherapy more directly emerged at this time. I am leaving this aside here, but it has been explored in depth in Thomson (2006), an invaluable work much of which bears fairly directly on the background of the developments under discussion. The debates between Psychology and religion are thus but one strand in an unremittingly fervent cultural scene in which, as the thirties wore on and Nazism loomed ever more ominously, the social and psychological tensions in play only intensified. British Christians and psychologists alike were fully immersed in the immediate post-war mood, and both were inevitably conscious of the need for a new, or at least ╇
My copy of this is the 1935 ‘3rd impression’ of the 3rd edition. It was tremendously successful and influenced J. B. Priestley in writing An Inspector Calls and his other ‘time’ plays. ╇ One could extend this riff considerably. On the technological front, in 1920 planes, automobiles, radio, recorded music, films and mains electricity (to select the most obvious) were barely 20 years old (sometimes less) and only then at the stage of development to become available on a mass scale, this last was also true of the slightly older telephone. Even if still directly accessible only to the better-off, their presence was visible and ubiquitous and expanded almost exponentially until 1939, alongside a constant improvement in quality. Recapturing the psychological impact of this technological ‘modernist’ revolution is particularly difficult. Revolutionary though later innovations such as TV, computers and, since c. 1995, the global internet have been, the nature of their psychological impacts cannot really be compared to that of the 1920s–1930s phase. This point clearly applies to North America and mainland Europe as well as Britain.
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greatly revised, account of human nature ratified by ‘science’. It is on this stage that we need to set the remarkably close interwar alliance between the mainstream Christian churches and psychologists concerned with understanding psychological distress. The religious position was, even so, naturally ambivalent. Psychology was, as we have been seeing, always both a threat and a promise. There was a constant tendency to explain novel Psychological ideas and theories as somehow no more than reformulations of traditional Christian concepts and doctrines. But this move typically co-existed with concessions to the added depth and insight which contemporary psychologists were achieving and which the religious should incorporate into their own pastoral practise. A significant expression of this was Mackenzie’s 1928 Souls in the Making, much admired by Leslie Weatherhead, which begins with an autobiographical account of his frustration with his university courses in philosophy and, presumably turn-of-the-century, Psychology as having nothing to offer the practising minister by way of actually understanding the human mind itself. This work also hints that the war experience was not the only factor predisposing the rising generation of Christian professionals towards a sympathy with the ‘New Psychology’, Mackenzie opening by explaining how a passage in Alexander Shand’s The Foundations of Character (Shand, 1914) opened his eyes to its possibilities. For much of the interwar period the two camps shared a discourse centred on this ‘New Psychology’. The phrase had been used before, in the 1890s, to refer to the new experimental, primarily psychophysical, Psychology which was emerging in the United States, and was bandied about fairly frequently thereafter with various nuances depending on the allegiances of the user (including the Theosophist Annie Besant’s usage in 1904 to refer to psychical research). After 1920 it entered popular discourse, to a large extent because of A. G. Tansley publishing his very successful The New Psychology that year. This new ‘New Psychology’ differed from the 1890s version precisely because it was concerned not with reaction-times and memoryspans but with the very depths of human nature, its underlying instincts and character. This was what the times demanded, as everyone attested—from psychologists, like W. H. R. Rivers, to Christian writers, such as F. R. Barry, and from Times leader writers to popularising authors on psychoanalysis, like the pious school headmistress Geraldine Coster—the war had thrown us all back upon ourselves, ‘we are all psychologists now’ (Barry, 1923). Even so, to what, precisely, the term ‘New Psychology’ referred remained somewhat hazy. In truth, it was an umbrella term for a wide range of theories and ideas. At the centre, indubitably, was psychoanalysis, treated initially with little clear popular awareness of the seriousness of the longstanding internal differences between Freud, Jung and Adler, while the powerful conceptual critiques of the theory, which led to its later marginalisation from academic Psychology after 1940, were as yet unformulated. There was indeed a great popular craze for psychoanalytic writings from the end of the war to the late 1920s, attracting hostile comment in The Times, sardonic epigrams from D. H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw, and a moral panic in the Daily Graphic. Beyond this ╇ ╇
See Richards (2000a). See Richards (2000b).
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the New Psychology also covered Shand’s book just cited, Emile Coué’s autosuggestion therapy, the widespread use of hypnosis and ‘suggestion’ in psychotherapy, and William McDougall’s instinct-based theory of emotion as expounded in his Introduction to Social Psychology (1908). Wilfred Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (1916), Tansley’s aforecited The New Psychology (1920) and W. H. R. Rivers’ Instinct and the Unconscious (1920) were soon being taken as central British exemplars of the movement. These were often read as offering a counterbalance to the more extreme or shocking aspects of the psychoanalytic vision, even while accepting large swathes of it. An additional boost came from the launching in the early 1920s of the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method series by Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner under C. K. Ogden’s editorship. Regardless of their diversity, these were, in the early 1920s, widely seen as representing the cutting edge of the emerging scientific discipline of Psychology. A close intimacy between religious and Psychological camps regarding psychotherapy was reinforced by a seeming convergence between more traditional Christian ‘spiritual healing’ practises and the New Psychology doctrines of suggestion and autosuggestion as shedding light on the efficacy of prayer, and also between ideas of ‘confession’ and the procedures adopted by psychoanalysis. Miller (2008) even makes a convincing case for viewing the development of psychoanalysis in Scotland (particularly associated with Ian Suttie, H. Crichton-Miller and W. R. D. Fairbairn) as ‘a movement in dialogue with Christian theology’ (p.€38). In the event many Christian writers in this field felt able to accept much of psychoanalysis and other contemporary psychotherapeutic methods, charitably dismissing the anti-religious component in these as due to a ‘blind spot’—such as failing to recognise that the ‘final transference’ has to be onto God.10 By the mid-1930s the later work of C. G. Jung began impacting on many Psychologically-oriented religious thinkers and a process of disengagement from Freud (from whose ideas Jung’s had hitherto remained largely undifferentiated) began.11 Psychology in general was also moving beyond the ‘New Psychology’ phase of the 1920s and in Britain, by the later 1940s, the close interwar relationship between the two camps had significantly weakened. The only sour notes I have come across from the religious side are T. H. Hughes’ quite comprehensive The New Psychology and Religious Experience (1933) and, late in the day, the Reverend J. C. M. Conn’s brief The Menace of the New Psychology (1939). Conn’s title is a little deceptive however, his tract being aimed almost exclusively at psychoanalysis, which is ‘unacceptable to Christianity’ (p.€62), continuing: ‘Some of the teaching is grotesque, absurd, indelicate, repellant, and a 10╇
C. Barbour (1931) Sin and the New Psychology, London: George Allen & Unwin. Notably Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) followed by other works later was brought together in C. G. Jung (1958) Psychology and Religion: West and East. Jung’s international rise to favour among the religious did not go entirely uncontested by the psychoanalysts. Fromm (1950), for example, argued that while Freud ‘speaks from the core of ethical religion in working for truth, brotherly love, reduction of suffering, independence and responsibility’, Jung by contrast reduces religion to a ‘psychological submission to an external power, in which truth is relative and moral responsibility undermined’ (quoting the Psychological Abstracts in the version provided by Meissner, 1961, entry 808). The journal Pastoral Psychology, in which it appeared, is generally unavailable in the U.K., certainly where I live, in Tunbridge Wells!
11╇
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menace to faith and morals. Many of the theories appear worthless, irreverent, impertinent and irreverent.’ (ibid). But Jung and Janet are cited with approval. Moreover, Conn had spent five years as a ‘research student in Experimental Psychology’ under H. J. Watt and R. H. Thouless, earned a Ph.D. with a thesis on ‘A Psychological Study of the Sequelae of Encephalitis Lethargica in Children’ and co-authored an MRC report on ‘Intelligence and Disease’ (p.€15, in the Introduction by Rev. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones). It cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered an attack on Psychology as a whole. Alliance was further facilitated by the fact that the rising generation of British psychologists and psychotherapists included numerous believers within its ranks. These included William Brown, R. H. Thouless, Francis Aveling (a Catholic psychologist based at Kings College London—he was a former priest, defrocked for reasons I have been unable to ascertain), J. A. Hadfield and H. Crichton-Miller. Conversely, there were numerous Christian figures who were either trained in Psychology or had fully acquainted themselves with the New Psychology such as Mackenzie, B. H. Streeter, Eric Waterhouse, Leslie Weatherhead, L. W. Grensted and T. H. Hughes. Psychotherapy was not the only topic of shared concern to which British Christian writers turned a Psychological eye at this time, and to provide a fuller picture of the situation we will later briefly consider this point further. Of those mentioned, the three figures upon whose writings and careers the episode we are examining most obviously centres are Weatherhead, Crichton-Miller and Brown. Before turning to them in more detail, the larger picture can be indicated by simply listing some of the numerous relevant British-authored titles, aside from Weatherhead and Crichton-Miller’s, published over this period (see Table€7.1). Table 7.1↜渀 A sample of British-authored titles on the religion–psychology relationship from the interwar period in Britain F. R. Barry (1923) Christianity and Psychology C. Harry Brooks and Rev. Ernest Charles (1923) Christianity and Autosuggestion (Brooks was a leading British exponent of Coué’s ‘autosuggestion’ therapy.) Sydney Dimond (1926) The Psychology of the Methodist Revival. An Empirical and Descriptive Study ; (1932) The Psychology of Methodism Cyril Flower (1928) Psychology Simplified (not in Vande Kemp, T&E) A. E. Garvie (1930) The Christian Ideal for Human Society (not in Vande Kemp, T&E) L. W. Grensted (1930) Psychology and God. A Study of the Implications of Recent Psychology for Religious Belief and Practice O. Hardman (ed.) (1925) Psychology and the Church T. H. Hughes (1933) The New Psychology and Religious Experience ; (1939) The Psychology of Preaching and Pastoral Work J. G. Mackenzie (1928) Souls in the Making Major J. W. Povah (1925) The New Psychology and the Hebrew Prophets T. W. Pym (1921) Psychology and the Christian Life ; (1925) More Psychology and the Christian Life R. H. Thouless (1923) An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion , (1924) The Lady Julian. A Psychological Study (on the Medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich) A. R. Uren (1928) Recent Religious Psychology Eric Waterhouse (1927) An ABC of Psychology for Sunday School Teachers and Bible Students W. J. Wray (n.d.) The New Psychology and the Gospel , London: The Religious Tract Society
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Vande Kemp (1984a) lists over 90 British works published 1917–1939 which might be considered as pertinent to the Psychology–religion relationship topic, leaving aside mainstream psychoanalysis and anthropology, and, as in any such exercise, there are inevitably a few she failed to notice. Numerous relevant works by the Freudian Swiss pastor Oscar Pfister (see Chap.€4) and C. G. Jung were also being translated into English, the latter’s especially, as previously noted, making a considerable impact after 1930. The rate of publication is fairly constant, averaging around four a year, although there are rather higher rates in the mid-1920s and late 1930s (the peaks in a fuller listing, unpresented here, are eight in 1923 and seven each in 1937 and 1939).
Hugh Crichton-Miller Hugh Crichton-Miller (1877–1959) is best remembered as the founder of the Tavistock Clinic for Functional Nervous Diseases in 1920 where he remained until 1933, when he resigned as director. A major ally in this was J. A. Hadfield, a devout British psychologist-psychotherapist based at King’s College London, to whom Leslie Weatherhead dedicated Psychology in the Service of the Soul and who later became his therapist during the Second World War.12 Its activities divided during the late 1940s with creation of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1946, the Tavistock Clinic itself continuing as a National Health Service affiliated operation after 1948. Both remain active. The son of a Presbyterian chaplain based in Genoa, Crichton-Miller graduated in medicine from Edinburgh University in 1901. His interests turning increasingly to functional nervous disorders, coupled with growing familiarity with the ‘New Psychology’, he established a private nursing home in Harrow (north of London) called Bowden House in 1911, which, with a short break during the Second World War, and subsequent relocation to a nearby site, has continued to operate to the present day (now renamed the Cygnet Hospital). The following year he published Hypnotism and Disease. A Plea for Rational Psychotherapy. As common for psychologists and therapists of his generation, the Great War found him dealing, albeit briefly, with ‘shell-shock’, in his case in Alexandria. It was against this background that the Tavistock was established, where, in 1926, he created the first British team dedicated to child guidance training. During the 1920s and early 1930s Crichton-Miller was thus simultaneously running the Tavistock and Bowden House as well as a private Harley Street practise. While a lifelong Presbyterian and, indeed, church elder prior to moving 12╇
The primary source on the Tavistock is Dicks (1970). On Crichton-Miller himself the biographical material is somewhat scanty, Irvine (1963) being primarily a brief account of his professional career and connections, with summaries of some of his books. This had been preceded by Hugh Crichton-Miller: A personal memoir by his friends and family (Anon (ed.) 1961), compiled, according to Irvine, by his eldest daughter (this is unclear from the work itself) with contributions from family and friends, plus a fulsome foreword by Jung, who held him in high esteem. On the Hadfield–Weatherhead connection see Travell (1999).
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to England, Crichton-Miller’s psychotherapeutic approach at the Tavistock was not overtly religious. My speculation is, however, that as someone coupling impeccable Christian credentials with a thorough knowledge of contemporary ‘New Psychology’ and psychoanalysis, he was able to promote psychotherapy to his Christian associates. The most powerful published evidence for this is The New Psychology and the Preacher (1924). At first glance, this work appears to have much in common with Psychology of Religion, but this is deceptive. It is clearly driven by what the author feels is an urgent need to revitalise the Christian faith by submitting it to ruthless scrutiny from the New Psychology perspective. This will purge it of its obsolete and objectionably extrinsic features, infuse genuine honesty in his target readership, and allow the divine ideal core of the faith to shine forth and play its full role in the difficult times ahead. The attack of modern psychology upon Christianity is largely directed at those aspects of it which are second-rate and extrinsic. The defence of Christianity will be successful only in so far as its champions join hands with the psychologists in a ruthless condemnation of all but the vital core of dynamic idealism which may confidently be expected to resist everything except the ‘the will to disbelieve.’ (p.€39)
He then systematically examines the implications for religion of the new insights into unconscious motivation and sexuality, the deleterious effects of mother and father complexes, the contrasting roles of the rebellious ‘prophet’ and conservative ‘priest’ in religion’s development, religious symbolism and much else, insisting all the while that religion, to survive, has to be progressive and forward looking, thereby serving its evolutionary purpose. He uses his New Psychology sources eclectically but critically, and, unlike many contemporaries at this point, clearly differentiates between Freudian and Jungian views of religion (naturally favouring the latter). The profundity of Crichton-Miller’s religious beliefs is a theme throughout the aforecited short 1961 volume of personal memoirs13. My reading of Crichton-Miller’s significance is that both at the Tavistock and in his writing he is laying the basis for the more explicitly religion-oriented psychotherapeutic projects which emerged in the 1930s. Given that the Tavistock was the first major psychotherapy clinic in Britain (though anticipated by other short-lived projects), this implies that a religious strand existed in British psychotherapy virtually from the outset. I suspect that J. A. Hadfield was a central figure in this. In 1925, for example, he contributed a chapter ‘The Psychology of Spiritual Healing’, co-authored with a Tavistock physician, L. F. Browne, to O. Hardman (ed.) Psychology and the Church.14 This included sympathetic discussion of psychotherapy and its relationship to traditional ‘spiritual healing’. (His best-selling Psychology 13╇
Pages€52–54 (Anon, ed. 1961) of the contribution from a former patient contains probably the fullest statement of his belief, transcribed from a personal letter. 14╇ This is an interesting and significant collection in its own right, written primarily from an Anglican perspective and introduced by the bishop of Southwark. It is powerful evidence of how willing even the established church was, at this time, to engage with Psychology across a wide range of issues, including education and preaching.
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and Morals (1923) was not explicitly religious but again sought to allay fears that Psychology would undermine Christian values.) By 1930 there was then a powerful clique of Christian psychologists and psychotherapists, mostly known to one another, including Crichton-Miller, Weatherhead, Hadfield, William Brown, R. H. Thouless, David Yellowlees (author of Psychology’s Defence of the Faith, 1930) and Henry Yellowlees,15 working in informal alliance with prominent religious ministers such as Eric Waterhouse, Percy Dearmer, L. W. Grensted and W. R. Matthews to promote both an engagement with Psychology and its application in pastoral care. One recurring theme with regard to psychotherapy is, as the Hadfield and Browne paper indicates, the ‘spiritual healing’ factor. This provides the religious with a traditional point of reference and persisted in Weatherhead’s work. By the late 1930s, however, the Tavistock itself had become identified most closely with psychoanalysis, notably the Melanie Klein-influenced group who would later be identified as object-relations theorists.
Leslie Weatherhead In retrospect, for psychotherapy Leslie Weatherhead is undoubtedly the major figure in this interwar group of ‘psychochristians’ (as I have called it elsewhere16). His story is both interesting and instructive regarding the ways in which the relationship between mainstream Christianity and Psychology could, with good-will on both sides, be managed.17 A freshly trained Methodist minister, the young Weatherhead had been introduced to psychotherapy while serving as a padre with the British occupying forces in Basra 1917–1918, apparently by Major Bennett Tombleson of the Royal Army Medical Corps who had published a paper in the Lancet in 1916 on the use of hypnosis in military psychiatry.18 Returning first to a missionary post in India and then to Britain in 1922, he initially worked in Manchester, then moved Leeds, all the while immersing himself in the psychotherapeutic strands of the New 15╇
These were, I assume, brothers, sons of eminent Scottish psychiatrist Henry Yellowlees (d. 1921). Henry, later Sir Henry, was certainly his son, and later became chief medical officer at the Department of Health for England (see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC1459531/). However, another very prominent, Glasgow-based, psychiatrist, of the same name, David Yellowlees, is also recorded as having died in 1921, so there must be lingering doubt regarding David Yellowlees. 16╇ Richards (2000a). 17╇ The fullest biographical coverage is Travell (1999) Doctor of Souls. Leslie D. Weatherhead 1893–1976. A further book-length treatment is Price (1996) Faithful Uncertainty: Leslie D. Weatherhead’s Methodology of Creative Evangelism, and most informative on biographical details is his son Kingsley’s memoir (Weatherhead, 1975). 18╇ This episode has a curiously archetypal character—an encounter between an aspirant and a wise man in the desert, in the biblically resonant ‘Mesopotamia’. That the British army’s presence in Basra was justified as a ‘liberation mission’ (from the Turks) further adds an odd, more contemporary resonance to it.
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Psychology and treating disturbed parishioners as part of his parochial duties. Additionally, he gave talks at local meeting halls as his son wrote: ‘He travelled about the county [Yorkshire], going first to places with names like Heckmondwyke and Clitheroe and Osset, lecturing in little halls where the rain beat noisily on the corrugated iron roofs. His talk filled a gap in a series, perhaps, between a lecture on the Nile and one on how to spray fruit trees … presenting the recently charted and still fabulous territories of the mind to the intelligentsia of the county borough’ (Weatherhead, 1975, p.€86), continuing ‘I can see him still, some dark evening, belting himself up in his motoring clothes – a great mackintosh and gauntlets… – and going off into the rain, out to some little chapel in the wilds somewhere, to tell them about the inferiority complex or the power of autosuggestion.’ (ibid).19 Far from treating Psychology as a rival, it is clear that some early twentieth century British Christians, such as Weatherhead, Waterhouse, Pym and Barry, were a major factor in promoting its cultural penetration beyond intellectual circles. We will return to this point later. This was not all. He now began writing columns on Psychology in The Methodist Recorder which he published in 1929 as Psychology in the Service of the Soul, an immediate best-seller way beyond the Methodist readership, following this with the 1931 The Mastery of Sex through Psychology and Religion, which was banned in De Valera’s Ireland and caused great controversy, being a frank, commonsensical and reassuring work aimed primarily at young people and far from the moralistic tirades common in traditional religious works of this kind. A less therapeutically focussed, best-selling work, Psychology and Life followed in 1934.20 Psychotherapy remained his primary interest and when in 1936 he made his final move to the City Temple in London, he established the City Temple Psychological Clinic with support from people like Hadfield, Brown and Crichton-Miller. This was the first institutional presence of religiously based psychotherapy in Britain and served as an important centre from which psychotherapy could be developed and made accessible to the general public, its services being generally free, or paid for on a voluntary basis. One work originating in this setting was Gregory (1939) Psychotherapy Scientific and Religious. A Coptic Christian from Kous in Upper Egypt, Gregory had thought of a career in medicine one evening ‘during a conversation with two fellow students’. That night a ‘white-robed figure’ appeared in a ‘vivid dream’ telling him he would become a ‘spiritual doctor’. But first he trained in theology in Cairo before becoming chaplain to the Archbishop of Ethiopia where he spent several years, finally coming to Oxford in 1934 as an ‘advanced student’. Here he came under the influence of William Brown and L. W. Grensted (1884–1964, then professor of the philosophy of the Christian religion), writing a D.Phil. thesis on ‘An Attempted Synthesis of Christian Spiritual Healing and Psychotherapy’. As well as earlier experience of pastoral care in Ethiopia, he worked at both the City Temple and Whitfield 19╇ K. Weatherhead (1975) Leslie Weatherhead. A Personal portrait, London: Hodder & Stoughton. See Tombleson (1916). 20╇ Psychology and Life was still in print at least until 1947, that being the 16th edition.
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clinics in London. The book itself is a detailed and level-headed attempt at integrating the new psychotherapeutic methods of healing with mainstream Christian faith, extensively and pragmatically drawing on Adlerian, Freudian and Jungian ideas and techniques (now more clearly differentiated) and the ‘suggestion’ literature. It also contains an extensive historical review of the Christian healing tradition (including what might strike many as a surprisingly sceptical analysis of Christ’s miracles as non-supernatural) plus a history of psychotherapy from Mesmer onwards. With a lengthy bibliography and eight-page glossary, it is perhaps the most impressive and scholarly of the pre-1940 ‘psychochristian’ works on psychotherapy.21 The City Temple Clinic was not the only institutional initiative, in 1936 the Guild of Pastoral Psychology was also founded, concerned with ‘spiritual healing’ in a general sense, but primarily with counselling. This was explicitly Jungian in orientation and indeed Jung himself addressed it in 1939.22 Marcus Gregory also refers, as active at the time he was writing, to the London Clinic for Religious Psychology, the ‘Whitefield Clinic of Pastoral Psychology’ mentioned earlier,23 the Milton Abbey sanatorium run by Rev. J. Maillard, a ‘healing chapel’ in Ealing ‘under the superintendence of Miss Dorothy Kerin’, and the ‘Guild of Health in England’, while the Archbishop of York had established a ‘Committee of Doctors and Clergy’.24 In a related development, the Reverend Herbert Grey founded the Marriage Guidance Council (now Relate) in 1938, in which a number of counsellors initially trained, including Bill Kyle (see below). A much earlier Christian organisation devoted to ‘spiritual healing’ was the Guild of Health, founded by Percy Dearmer in 1904. Brown (1946) cites their approach with qualified approval (p.€84) and recommends its ‘late chairman’, Rev. Harold Anson’s 1923 book Spiritual Healing as ‘full of valuable suggestions on the subject’ (ibid).
William Brown On the Psychology side, William Brown (1881–1952) deserves particular attention. He is perhaps the most important ‘forgotten’ British psychologist of the early twentieth century, largely, I have long suggested, because of his very ordinary name. His contributions included much on psychometrics and personality as well as psycho21╇ http:/marcusgregory.org/ includes details of his later life. He returned to Cairo in 1939 where, unable to return due to the war, he settled, continuing to practice as a psychotherapist at the Behman Hospital and being a founder of the Egyptian Association of Chartered Psychotherapists. In 1966 he returned to London, continuing to practise and research. He subsequently published Our Wonderful Psychoneural Systems (1996). This site has a rather fine photo of him in his later years, with an impressive medallion hanging from his neck and looking most distinguished. 22╇ Reprinted as Guild Lectures No.€80 in 1954 (Jung, 1954). 23╇ This is elsewhere spelled ‘Whitfield’; I have googled both in vain, but ‘Whitefield’ actually looks more likely, if it was named after the famous eighteenth century Methodist preacher George Whitefield, whose name was indeed pronounced ‘Whitfield’. 24╇ Pages 183–186.
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therapy. By the mid-1930s he was at Oxford University as both Wilde Reader of mental philosophy (thereby inheriting his teacher, William McDougall’s, post) and director of the Institute of Experimental Psychology (thus evading the first post’s prohibition of empirical research). Here, as we saw, he taught Marcus Gregory among many others. His first major psychotherapeutic work was Suggestion and Mental Analysis. An Outline of the Theory and Practice of Mind Cure (1922), but pre-war, under McDougall, he had undertaken research on hypnosis and anaesthesia. Like so many of his contemporary British psychologists, he had then treated ‘shell-shock’ cases. From the outset he was a committed Christian, closely associated with Weatherhead and others seeking to integrate new ‘scientific’ Psychological understanding into religiously grounded psychotherapy, pastoral counselling and ‘spiritual healing’. He had himself undergone 92 hours of psychoanalysis ‘for scientific purposes’ with a ‘leading psycho-analyst’ (Brown, 1946, p.€134). Coupled with this was a lifelong interest in psychic research, in which connection he served on the board of the Society for Psychical Research from 1923–1940. Although he felt it had failed to convincingly demonstrate posthumous survival, he does confess that having ‘devoted much time to the investigation of the powers of certain mediums’, ‘some of my experiences have been very difficult to explain on any alternative hypothesis’ (Brown, 1946, p.€173, also citing Brown, 1929). His major statement of his religious position and religion’s relationship with Psychology was Personality and Religion (1946), ‘a revised and abbreviated version’ of Mind and Personality (1926, see Preface). His theoretical position may be classified as a version of ‘personalism’, the very broad, ethically centred, philosophical approach unified by its placing the highest value on the full development of the person and focus on such categories as ‘meaning’, ‘respect’, and mutual ‘understanding’. Materialistic ‘explanation’ is, while important, necessarily ultimately subordinated to these. Those identified as personalists include both secular philosophers and religious thinkers, including apparently Pope John Paul II. Among eminent personalist psychologists, one might note Mary Whiton Calkins and Gordon Allport. A digressive linguistic point is necessary here. In the nineteenth century the phrase ‘personality of God’ was frequently used. In this context the word ‘personality’ does not refer to the ‘personality traits’ God exhibits (e.g. whether God is impulsive, imaginative or extraverted) or to God’s ‘personality type’. Rather, it refers to the quality of being a person, grammatically comparable to words like ‘sagacity’ or ‘virility’. One might say it refers to ‘person-ness’. By Brown’s time this and the new Psychological usage were becoming somewhat blurred, although personalism is clearly rooted in the earlier sense. While reluctant to define it, Brown roughly equates his usage to ‘mental unity and continuity, both theoretical and practical’, which clearly falls somewhere in the middle ground (Brown, 1946, p.€9). He contrasts it with the ‘individual’. Everybody is an individual, but personhood is something we strive for, a goal never in fact quite achieved, and theologically only God fully does so. To today’s readers this may be a little confusing, since large swathes of late twentieth century ‘personality theory’ have been concerned with ‘individual differences’, the two expressions sometimes becoming almost synonymous. From Brown’s perspective, ‘individuality theory’ would be more accurate. There are,
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however, obvious affinities between Brown’s concept and later psychotherapeutic notions such as Maslow’s self-actualization, as well as with Jung’s ‘individuation’. Psychologically, Brown’s reference points were fairly eclectic, mixing both Freudian and Jungian concepts with a typical ‘New Psychology’ stress on the power of ‘suggestion’ but always viewing the achievement of a mature religious consciousness, ‘personality’, as the highest goal of self-development (though he expounds this in less theoretical detail than G. W. Allport, see Chap.€12). He also, however, treats Christian Science and other ‘spiritual healing’ approaches with measured respect. From Brown’s perspective McDougall, Freud and Charles Spearman were the major figures in the development of modern scientific Psychology with nary a mention of behaviourism. But the key point is that however valuable these new ‘natural scientific’ Psychological theories may be, they cannot encompass religion or evaluate the validity of religious and mystical experience. There are three major ‘mental attitudes’ from which the ‘religious attitude’ needs to be distinguished: the logical (concerned with truth), the aesthetic (concerned with beauty) and the ethical (concerned with the good), (Brown, 1946, p.€20). This triad of ‘the True, the Beautiful and the Good’ was of fairly long-standing in philosophy, being, for example, the title of the French eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin’s best known work (Cousin, 1853). These are all modes of responding to the universe, yet they are also ‘abstract points of view, from which distinct and mutually exclusive aspects of existence are dealt with’ (p.€21). But logically, Brown asserts, there must be a further attitude ‘the attitude of the entire man to his entire environment … according to which he may more or less explicitly order his life’ (ibid). It is this which constitutes the ‘religious attitude’. Yet obviously not any old entire world view (such as pessimism or hedonism) would count as religious. The true religious attitude centres on ultimate value and worship and is concrete rather than abstract. To grasp the nature of religion we need philosophy as well as Psychology. This is somewhat to simplify Brown’s position, which covers some of the more obvious objections which arise from such a bald account. To return, at last, to psychotherapy. In practise, it is clear that, as indicated, Brown eclectically drew on a variety of contemporary approaches, especially psychoanalysis and suggestion/autosuggestion techniques (which he highly valued). He had no doubt regarding the profundity of the insights which the various forms of ‘deep analysis’ (as he called it) were yielding. On the other hand, the guiding motivation behind his psychotherapy was to bring the client to a fuller ‘personhood’, which necessarily entailed the achievement of some mature ‘religious attitude’. Contrary to the psychoanalytic view of religion as a form of infantile regression, he argues that the opposite is the case. If it were, then psychoanalysis would result in abandonment of religious belief, but both his own 92 sessions and experience as a therapist suggest the opposite. What emerges is a purer and maturer religious attitude or belief purged of its regressive elements. Brown’s career, influence and work urgently require more in-depth re-evaluation than can be given here. What is clear is that in William Brown Christian pastoral counsellors and psychotherapists had a powerful and eminent colleague centrally placed in the Psychology camp. Brown’s case also reinforces the ‘boundary prob-
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lem’ difficulty discussed in Chap.€5, since there are obvious affinities between his mode of argument and some of those advanced by Macmurray and Niebuhr.
Other Psychological Involvements with Religion Religious involvement with Psychology was not confined to psychotherapy during these years, as noted earlier. The application of Psychology to everyday life and church practise was prominent in Weatherhead’s own most popular works, as well as a trio of books by Crichton-Miller (↜The New Psychology and the Preacher, The New Psychology and the Teacher, The New Psychology and the Parent), while Waterhouse also contributed in this area and T. W. Pym’s Psychology and the Christian Life and More Psychology and the Christian Life were both, it appears, best-sellers in lay religious circles in the 1920s. A significant work aimed more ‘in-house’ at Anglican ministers was O. Hardman (ed.) Psychology and the Church (1925), mentioned previously. Also worth citing in this context is A. E. Garvie The Christian Ideal for Human Society (1930) which, while very broad in scope, includes discussion of Psychology. In 1930 Grensted, though primarily a theologian-cumphilosopher, gave the prestigious Bampton Lectures choosing as his title Psychology and God. A Study of the Implications of Recent Psychology for Religious Belief and Practice, he also provided a Preface for Gregory (1939) and an Introduction for Grace Stuart’s The Achievement of Personality in the Light of Psychology and Religion (1938). Finding a copy of the latter, provided me with a fortuitous glimpse into the late 1930s student Christian world—a copy of their The Religious Book Club Bulletin No.€3, March 1938, which contained three pages of ‘discussion questions’ about it. Grensted’s final work on Psychology was his 1951 The Psychology of Religion (see below). As far as education and the child are concerned, there is less explicit literature (Waterhouse’s 1927 An ABC of Psychology for Sunday School Teachers and Bible Students might be noted),25 but the concern is present in many of the works mentioned in the previous category, such as Crichton-Miller’s The New Psychology and the Parent (1925) and, for example, the prefatory endorsement by Weatherhead of E. G. Braham’s Psychology and the Child (1936). The common early U.S. claim that religion was the normal outcome of healthy child development was reasserted too in B. A. Yeaxlee’s Religion and the Growing Mind of 1939. Some historical work was also produced, notably Dimond’s two works The Psychology of the Methodist Revival (1926) and The Psychology of Methodism (1932). Other works which fit uneasily into these categories include Major J. W. Povah’s The New Psychology and the Bible (1924), The New Psychology and the Hebrew Prophets (1925) and The Old Testament and Modern Problems in Psychology (1926) (these being more akin to the older Biblical Psychology), Aelfrida Tillyard’s Spiritual Exercises and their Results. An Essay in Psychology and Comparative Religion (1927) 25╇
Interestingly, a U.S. author, E. Leigh Mudge, published a similar work, Our Pupils. Psychology for Church School Leaders in 1930.
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and Thouless’ work on the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich, The Lady Julian. A Psychological Study (1924). The Student Christian Movement Press26 and the Methodist-oriented Epworth Press were particularly prominent among the publishers of this ‘psychochristian’ literature. How did British Psychology respond to this intense religious interest and preparedness to co-opt Psychological ideas? Leaving aside Christian psychologists, it is difficult to find anything explicitly hostile emanating fromPsychology. The major exception is among some psychoanalysts, notably Ernest Jones. Jones’ bizarre papers on ‘The Madonna’s Conception through the Ear’ (1914) and ‘A Psycho-analytic study of the Holy Ghost’ (1922) proposed that this originated in a common (!) infantile fantasy that conception was caused by transmission of gases from father to mother via the anus—a theory as likely to have its religious reader rolling on the floor with hysterical laughter as bursting a blood vessel with holy wrath27. In Jones (1927) he published a more general attack on religion in the British Psychological Society’s journal The British Journal of Medical Psychology. The general ploy was to invoke the ‘facts versus values’ distinction while conceding, for example, that the evidence showed prayer to be psychologically helpful (a point made by both Cyril Burt and C. S. Myers). But much academic Psychology now concerned topics of no direct religious relevance such as memory and intelligence. This notable lack of conflict reflects in part the shared sense of a need for fundamental psychological reappraisal and renewal after 1918, but also, I would suggest, the fact that the two shared political and academic interests which outweighed any inclinations to confrontation. Both needed to prevent the handling of mental distress from becoming an exclusively medical monopoly, both were also on the defensive in the academic world—Psychology still having to argue for its legitimacy as a scientific discipline worthy of academic space, religion having to argue for its continued relevance in competition with the sciences and other humanities. Finally, of course, the religious were continuing to provide a major market for Psychological expertise and Psychology had no interest in alienating them.
The Interwar Period in Britain: A Summary All the foregoing raises, I think, a number of questions and possibilities for interpretation. My reading of the interwar period is that in Britain it sees a major shift in the nature of the relationship between the two camps. Earlier religious aspirations and hopes for Psychology as a potential source of ‘scientific’ ratification of religious belief and experience dissipated, and with them the rationale for Psychology of Religion as a sub-discipline, at least for the majority in the field who were themselves 26╇
The Student Christian Movement had been founded in 1889 and played a major role in founding the secular National Union of Students. There is what seems to be a fairly sound brief summary on Wikipedia. 27╇ Both of these were reprinted in Jones (1923) Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis.
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believers. The threat to liberal Protestantism posed by the new German conservative theologians like Barth was felt far less acutely in Britain than in mainland Europe and the United States, hence British psychologists interested in religion barely responded to it, as psychologists did elsewhere, by trying to keep the Psychology of Religion show on the road for some years longer. As a sub-discipline, Psychology of Religion had barely begun in Britain before it withered. On the other hand, Psychology was increasingly offering ‘scientific knowledge’ of a more immediately practical kind, not least for those dealing with mental distress or involved with education and providing child-rearing advice. It was on these fronts that the Psychology–religion relationship was most intense and sustained. At a different level, these new ideas offered a resource for policing the boundaries between ‘healthy’ religious belief and ‘enthusiasm’ or fanaticism—an important task in an increasingly secular and sceptical cultural climate. What we are seeing then is a decline in interest in the psychological nature of religion (see also Chap.€4), offset by a growing interest in what Psychology had to say about matters of practical importance to religious professionals.
The Post-war Period We may now turn to the rather different post-1945 period. While the City Temple Clinic’s work was interrupted by the war, which saw the City Temple itself largely destroyed in the Blitz, only reopening in 1958, its operations continued for some years afterwards in other locations and Weatherhead’s own interest in psychotherapy and healing always remained unabated, culminating in the previously cited Psychology, Religion and Healing (1951). While the Clinic itself finally closed in 1962 after a long period of slow decline, this was far from signalling the end of religiously inspired psychotherapy or counselling in Britain, quite the contrary. Frank Lake (1914–1982), for example, a medical missionary specialising in parasitology who then turned to psychiatry and psychoanalysis, was initially deeply influenced by Kleinian object-relations theory and began offering training seminars in ‘eleven diocesan centres’ in 1958 with later Archbishop of Canterbury, then Bishop of Bradford, Donald Coggan’s blessing. He was soon exploring therapeutic uses of LSD and in 1962 he founded the Clinical Theology Association (now the Bridge Pastoral Foundation). His best known work is the 1966 Clinical Theology28. Elsewhere a Committee of Pastoral Care and Counselling was created in 1970 in the London Diocese of Southwark and the following year the Roman Catholic Fr. Louis Mateau founded The Dympna Institute. The most successful, and more direct, successor to the City Temple Psychotherapy Clinic was the Westminster Pastoral Foundation (WPF), which opened for business in January 1970 after a long gestation period, with Weatherhead himself as one of the two honorary presidents (the 28╇ In Hendrika Vande Kemp’s opinion: ‘… truly a clinical masterpiece, probably the best material available on the schizoid condition’ (pers. comm.).
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other being film magnate Lord Rank). This soon took over the City Temple Psychological Clinic’s work. Its founder and Director until his death in January 1980 was William Kyle, a Methodist minister who had known and admired Weatherhead for many years. The feeling was reciprocated—among other things Weatherhead wrote an Introduction to Kyle’s 1964 Healing through Counselling29. Kyle was, however, a very different, though also charismatic, character. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1925 to a Plymouth family who had emigrated in search of work, he did not come to England until he was 11, and Black (1991) suggests that he retained ‘a secret Southern-State evangelical identity’. On Black’s account Kyle emerges as a particularly complex man; like Weatherhead a passionate and driven workaholic, but also, if unstrikingly conventional in appearance, a seductive wheeler-dealer with a hint, albeit sublimated to higher ends, of the social climber and, in currently common parlance, something of a control freak. Originally housed in the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster (hence its name), relations with the Hall’s management grew strained and, following a year’s intense pressure on Kyle, it was effectively evicted in 1978 after it had found new and better accommodation off Kensington High Street in the premises of the axed College of Education run by the Roman Catholic Sisters of the Assumption—one of whom, a WPF trainee, had tipped Kyle off the previous year. By 1990 the WPF was one of the central institutions in British counselling with 50 nation-wide affiliate and associate centres. The role of the WPF in the growth of British psychotherapy and counselling between 1971 and the early 1990s should not be underestimated. The ‘pastoral’ in its title was a misnomer from the start, since ‘pastoral counseling’ in its original U.S. sense (and spelling) referred only to counselling provided by recognised pastors, priests or church ministers and the WPF employed lay counsellors from the outset. Theoretically, its approach was initially somewhat Jungian, several of its first cohort of counsellors and psychotherapists being Society of Analytical Psychology trained, but with a Rogerian strand too. The impact of Rogers’ and Maslow’s ‘humanistic’ approaches expanded in subsequent years, as did that of Kleinian object-relations theory. As a prominent organisation within the early-1970s umbrella ‘Group for the Advancement of Pastoral Care and Counselling’, it was a major player in the 1977 emergence of the British Association of Counselling (BAC) and centrally involved in the post-1971 moves towards statutory training and qualifications for counsellors and therapists. (These had been triggered by Sir John Foster’s Report of the Enquiry into the Practice and Effects of Scientology and the subsequent Sieghart Report on Statutory Registration of Psychotherapists.) Its own WPFtrained staff, increasingly highly expert but with no recognised qualifications, were especially vexed by the professional limbo in which they found themselves, and in 1977 the WPF introduced a rigorous formal 3-year training course leading to an 29╇ See the chapter ‘William Kyle and the Westminster Pastoral Foundation’ in Frost (2006, pp.€103–114). This came to my notice too late to be taken into account here, but should be consulted for more detailed, and franker, coverage than Black supplies of the internal politics and debates within the WPF.
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officially recognised diploma. After Kyle’s death, the WPF took an increasingly secular direction, even though his successor was the prominent Anglican Canon Derek Blows. The WPF is an interesting case-study from our point of view for several reasons. Firstly, it reinforces the broad case that religious interests and motivation played a powerful role in the development of counselling and psychotherapy in Britain. Secondly, it is clear from Black’s account that a number of perennial debates and controversies received constant airing in the WPF, which unlike many other organisations was not promoting any particular theoretical school and became increasingly eclectic in its adoption of ideas from the widening array of ‘Growth Movement’ approaches. Most came to feel that the ‘psychotherapy’ versus ‘counselling’ distinction, for example, was actually quite artificial, the difference being in the images evoked by the terms rather than the practice.30 More seriously though, there was a profounder concern with the role that religious belief, on either the counsellor’s or client’s part, actually played in the therapeutic process. Although Methodist in setting and inspiration, the WPF had been ecumenical from the outset, and while its early staff were all Christian believers of one kind or another (including Russian Orthodox) they were generally using methods, and technical language, which had originated in the secular ‘scientific’ world. A microcosmic re-emergence of the religion versus science debate was inevitable, even though compromise formulations that appear to have arrived at a more secular orientation became dominant during the 1980s (and ‘spiritual healing’ disappears from the vocabulary altogether, I think). WPF members were also more sensitive than others, perhaps, to the enduring tension between the imperative to ‘professionalise’ and the ethical centrality of maintaining the compassionate, Buberian, ‘I-Thou’ nature of the therapeutic relationship, based on genuine love or respect for the other. To put it crudely, the WPF and other British Christian psychotherapeutic projects were successfully managing to maintain and serve a Christian mythos function within a secular ‘scientific’ logos wrapping. Finally, one might observe that part of the WPF’s success lay in the ability of Kyle and his allies to enlist supporters in the political world outside, especially during its first decade. Although it often required all Kyle’s diplomacy and charm to obtain it, over £Â€210,000 of central or local government funding had been obtained by 1978.31 Had someone in the Humanist Society launched a similar project it is hard to imagine them eliciting comparable support. The post-1945 years were, however, very different from the interwar period in one major respect. While religion remained deeply engaged with Psychology on 30╇
At the time of writing, the British government is trying to reassert this distinction in order to differentiate the pay grades of counsellors (lower) and psychotherapists (higher) in the NHS. For those working in the relevant services this is patently absurd. For anyone who knows about the history of the field it is plain ignorant. The intention of course is to sideline higher paid ‘psychotherapists’ in favour of lower paid ‘counsellors’. 31╇ See Table in Black (1991, p.€47). This is difficult to convert into current terms because even during the period in question, inflation makes 1972 figures incommensurate with 1978 ones, but it must be in the region of £Â€2€million in 2009 terms.
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the psychotherapy front, beyond this the two camps clearly drifted apart. Faltering efforts to revive Psychology of Religion were occasionally tried, but aside from Argyle’s descriptive Social Psychological work these were quite unsuccessful. A 3rd edition of Thouless’ An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion appeared in 1971, 43€years after the 2nd, and L. W. Grensted (by then 68) gamely published his The Psychology of Religion in 1952. The latter was in Oxford University Press’ little ‘Home University Library of Modern Knowledge’ series and was possibly, one senses, written at their request. At least his Foreword is hardly music to a publisher’s ears, referring to it as a ‘brief introduction to an exceedingly nebulous and illdefined subject’ and confessing that ‘no orderly arrangement of the subject-matter really represents its closely knit complexity or wholeness. No one part of it has any clear logical or scientific priority’ (p.€v). ‘I really have my doubts. But those doubts have not prevented the writing of quite a large number of books on the psychology of religion, and I do not think that they need prevent me from adding one more to their number.’ (pp.€v–vi).32 Throughout the post-war period, works relating either Freud or Jung to religion were regularly appearing, with religious authors tending to be increasingly confident in criticizing psychoanalysis (e.g. Guirdham, 1959), particularly with the alternative more congenial Jungian position now fully in play.33 Harry Guntrip is an interesting figure during this period, a devout Christian whose theoretical position evolved from object-relations theory into a synthesis of psychoanalytic and existentialist insights fully sympathetic to religion. Two works explicitly addressing the religious readership were Guntrip 1949 and 1956. Further discussion of this post-war genre of works interrelating religion and Freudian or Jungian thought here, would entail too great a digression, but see Richards (2008, 2009) for some additional coverage. It is surely reasonable, in the light of the foregoing, to conclude that both in North America and Britain the ‘psychologisation’ of the twentieth century ‘mentalité’ or ‘mode of subjectivity’ in those societies cannot be accurately viewed simply as a progressive triumph of the secular over the religious. The religious camp played a major part in this very process by its eager espousal of Psychological concepts and psychotherapeutic methods as resources for fulfilling its Christian mythos-centred duties towards the psychologically distressed. Not only this, but during the interwar period it was writers such as Waterhouse and Weatherhead who were most successfully popularising Psychological ideas among the population at large, even in Heckmondwyke. Engaging Psychology in this way had the consequences of giving the ‘scientific’ Psychological concepts a religious spin (psychoanalysis’ ‘sublimation’ being a classic example) and, even if it was not perhaps obvious on the surface, partially ‘religionising’ the relevant fields of Psychology—a converse move to that which is usually assumed. 32╇
Given that the grand old man of English letters, Gilbert Murray, was series editor, I cannot help wondering if a certain amount of arm-twisting did not lay behind Grensted’s acceptance of the brief. 33╇ The Christian pro-Jungian genre continued into the 1980s, e.g. Clift (1982).
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The Growth Movement The term ‘Growth Movement’ has come to refer to a welter of psychotherapeutic and self-discovery schools which, even if often originating earlier, rose to prominence in the 1960s and early 1970s. These broke the dominance which psychoanalysis had, even if with diminishing authority, hitherto held. They varied considerably in character from the ‘spiritual’ (e.g. Maslowian therapy and Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy) to the practical and hard-headed (e.g. Albert Ellis’ rational–emotive therapy from which cognitive behavioural therapy would later evolve). Others included, to list the most popular, Rogerian therapy, Gestalt therapy (founded by Fritz Perls), primal therapy (founded by Arthur Janov), transactional analysis (Eric Berne’s brainchild), and the approaches led or inspired by R. D. Laing and fellow ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as David Cooper and Joe Berke. Associated with these were phenomena such as ‘T–groups’, ‘encounter groups’ and—at some distance—Scientology, as well as the wider counter-cultural fascination with traditional Asian meditation techniques, astrology and other mystical or ‘occult’ traditions. Not all managed to mount the bandwagon—Blavatskian Theosophy, Steinerian Anthroposophy and old-style séance-based spiritualism for example figured only peripherally. More mainstream psychiatric hospitals also saw an increasing use of therapeutic communities, an expansion of Clinical Psychology from diagnostic and assessment roles into therapeutic practise, and the exploration of new theoretical frameworks (such as, in the U.K., though far less so in the U.S., personal construct theory, particularly as developed by Bannister and Fransella, 1971). While the religiously-rooted counselling just discussed may perhaps itself be considered as a facet of the Growth Movement, and certainly benefited from this wider (counter) cultural trend, it is worth noting the extent to which religious concerns were present within these schools and movements themselves. As discussed in Chap.€5, one background factor in the rise of Maslowian and Rogerian humanistic Psychology was indeed the impact of religious writers such as Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. Jung’s ‘individuation’ concept and high valuation of religion were of course more directly present in the psychotherapy world. Although only Jungians adopted his specific theoretical formulation of ‘individuation’, Maslowian ‘actualization’ and other Growth Movement versions of the quest for integration, discovery of one‘s ‘true self’ and G. W. Allport’s notion of the ‘total personality’ bear obvious affinities with it.34 Indeed the central thrust in nearly, if not quite, all of the new psychotherapies was an image of the individual as engaged in a quest for self-knowledge, self-integration and a higher level of consciousness. Certainly this fused in a complex way with the secular existentialist approach, as in Frankl’s logotherapy and the Laingian account of schizophrenia, although even here one should note that some existentialists besides Tillich (if you wish to so label him), such as Gabriel Marcel, were also devout Christians. The mainstream European version of existentialism as exemplified in J.-P. Sartre was though darker and more pessimistic 34╇
See Chap.€12 for more on Allport’s position.
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in tone, the quest for ‘authenticity’ being never-ending. Quantitative evidence of a broader coalition between American psychiatry and religion at this time is to be found in Samuel Z. Klausner’s Psychiatry and Religion. A Sociological Study of the New Alliance of Ministers and Psychiatrists (1964), an alliance he calls ‘religiopsychiatry’.35 All this amounts to a partial metamorphosis of psychotherapy from being a Psychological but nonetheless ‘medical’ method of treating mental distress into a route for quasi-religious enlightenment in quasi-secular packaging. By the end of the century terms such as ‘spirituality’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘sin’ had re-entered the psychotherapeutic vocabulary, while traditional religious meditation techniques had been co-opted and become commonplace. This confused blurring of the boundaries between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ modes of tackling psychological distress, self-knowledge and aspirations for self-fulfilment actually poses an important challenge. Even if definitional problems have always been present, the very distinction between the ‘Psychological’ and ‘religious’ which frames the current work has, since the 1960s, come close to losing its meaning altogether in relation to such concerns. I am not disputing that vast swathes of Psychology remain virtually unaffected by this. Rather, insofar as Psychology’s place in contemporary industrialised cultures has been popularly viewed as providing ‘modernist’, ‘scientific’, ‘secular’ accounts of human nature capable of meeting the long-drawn out (in some respects, yet ongoing) post-1918 psychological crisis, things have moved full circle. Psychology, in the fields with which this chapter has been concerned, now finds itself serving a central traditional religious function, and it has arrived at this point as a result of its own ‘scientific’ project. This is, I must stress, not a simple restatement of the familiar cliché that ‘Psychology has replaced religion’. In one sense, it in fact states the reverse, that Psychology failed to do this and in doing so rediscovered the inescapable inadequacy of hard-line ‘objective’ natural scientific approaches, if this function was to be served. Psychological distress, self-knowledge, aspirations for self-fulfilment and the understanding of those so-suffering or so-aspiring, do not entail the abandonment of ‘science’ but do, additionally, entail inter-subjectivity, an ‘I-Thou’ dialogue and, dare one say it, love36. They are issues in which meaning and value, morality in a word, is of the essence. Once this is admitted, we have returned to something like religion (whether one actually wants to use the word or not), not replaced it. Yet, a more downbeat coda needs adding to this. As Gergen (2007) has recently argued, the pressure for the quasi-medical ‘psychologisation’ of all psychological stress unrelentingly continues at the cost of alternative modes of discourse. I do not think that all counselling is implicated in this, but the hard-liners have, over the last 35╇
Nearly a decade earlier, W. Earl Biddle (a clinical director at Philadelphia State Hospital) had published Integration of Religion and Psychiatry (1955), reiterating on the third page of his Preface that ‘Freud’s great error lay in his lack of understanding of spirituality’. I also note from a decade before that, Landis (1946) ‘Psychotherapy and Religion’, Review of Religion, though I have not been able to consult it. 36╇ Invoking love was not an entirely new move in psychotherapy; it figured prominently in the earlier psychoanalytic work of S. Ferenczi, Otto Rank (Ferenczi & Rank, 1925) and Stekel (1922), the latter being a book of rather slushy aphorisms.
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dozen years or so, recouped much of their position. The main tactics employed have been, first, exerting economic and administrative pressure on health services to promote quick, ‘efficient’, easily evaluated therapies, notably cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). Secondly, outflanking Psychology altogether, the pharmaceutical industry is continually marketing new drugs to ‘cure’ an ever-widening range of supposedly pathological psychological conditions. And thirdly, many professionals see their careers being boosted by identifying new alleged psychopathologies. As Gergen has it, ever more psychological problems are ‘translated’ into a language of ‘deficit’ and we are on our way to a culture of ‘infinite infirmity’. This dynamic is, I think, real (though Gergen perhaps overstates it a little), but it runs somewhat counter to that just described. If the latter has been correctly identified, its counterpresence is therefore somewhat reassuring. What seriously confuses things is the erosion (welcome in itself) of the boundary between clearcut ‘psychopathology’ and ‘normal’ aspirations for self-growth, ‘actualization’ or even a need for help in facing psychologically difficult—though not pathological—situations. Post-1960 ‘psychotherapy’ and ‘counselling’ have taken both of these under their wing. What Gergen is pointing to is a dangerous, governmentally and pharmaceutically driven, tendency to pathologise the latter.
Chapter 8
The Problem of Prayer
As we have seen, it was generally assumed well into the twentieth century that the effects of religious belief were beneficial and religious belief the healthy norm. ‘True’ or not, religions promoted morality, provided guidance through the travails of life, and generally inculcated ‘healthy’ attitudes towards, and understanding of, both the self and the world. Even non-believers were disinclined to dispute its mostly beneficial effects, seeking instead to find ways of achieving the same ends by new, indeed better, means. That religion was susceptible to its own peculiar pathologies of fanaticism, bigotry and superstition was admitted by all parties, but Psychology, judiciously incorporated into religious understanding, could provide means of identifying and tackling these. Such a strategy would, in many eyes, even be essential if religion was to retain its cultural credibility and role in modernist societies. There is a conundrum though—should we ascribe the qualities of believers to their beliefs, or the nature of the beliefs to the qualities of the believers? If I am a forgiving individual is this due to my having taken to heart the Lord’s Prayer, or does my forgiving temperament incline me towards a creed in which forgiveness figures so centrally as a virtue? Clearly, it would make little sense to offer a generalised answer either way. What Psychology has tried to do is (a) evaluate the claims for beneficial effects made by the religious and (b) independently investigate the behavioural correlates of religious belief. I will look at some of these issues further in the chapter on Religion and Personality, but am concentrating here on the quite central issue of prayer, on the face of it one of the most purely ‘psychological’ of religious phenomena. Prayer’s nature and effects must be considered as lying close to the heart of the entire issue. Prayer cannot really be said to occur outside the context of a religious belief—disbelievers who, in some crisis, find themselves on their knees addressing the Lord are for that moment at least no longer disbelievers. It is usual to classify prayers into several types, and most earlier writers tended to see these as comprising an evolutionary sequence. At one end of the spectrum lay attempts at cajoling a deity by threats, promises and sacrifices into granting individual or collective wishes ╇
Though in the final analysis I have more or less concluded that it is the latter, as explained at the very end of the last chapter. G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_8, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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for specific outcomes—rain, victory, wealth, health or whatever. Obviously, this becomes increasingly unseemly as the concept of the deity becomes more exalted. Except in times of collective crisis, such as war or drought, such specific requests largely, if not entirely, yield, in collective prayer, to ritualised praise of the deity and a general plea that it look benignly upon its worshippers. Prayer becomes a matter of recitation—individually or collectively—of standardised texts in which praise, supplication and statement of belief are typically interwoven. Then, particularly in mysticism and post-Reformation Christianity, prayer took on a new, intimate, personalised form in which the believer communes directly with God regarding his/her anxieties, moral state and life problems seeking guidance, forgiveness and reassurance. Whether, how far, and in what form, God reciprocates or ‘answers’ the prayer are all highly variable and subject to interpretation. To these may be added what could be called intercessionary prayers individually or collectively undertaken on behalf of the well-being of a third person, typically in situations of serious illness, or in Catholicism via a saint or the Blessed Virgin on behalf of the soul of someone recently deceased or some more personal cause of a traditional kind. ‘Prayer’ thus covers a wide range of actual behaviours, but it is in personal and, to a lesser extent, ‘intercessionary’ prayer that modern Psychology has shown most interest. Of twentieth century writers on prayer one of the most influential was the German theologian Heiler (1932), whose analysis of its varieties remains among the most sophisticated. But at one point he produces such an expansive poetic riff on the sheer variety of types of prayer that it must remain an open question as to whether the rest of the work really succeeds in re-establishing comprehensive order. It has been quoted often but deserves another airing. Prayer, he says, can appear: … as the calm collectedness of a devout individual soul, and as the ceremonial liturgy of a great congregation; as an original creation of a religious genius, and as an imitation on the part of a simple, average religious person; as the spontaneous expression of upspringing religious experiences, and as the mechanical recitation of an incomprehensible formula; as bliss and ecstasy of heart, and as a painful fulfilment of the law; as the involuntary discharge of an overwhelming emotion, and as the voluntary concentration on a religious object; as loud shouting and crying, and as still, silent absorption; as artistic poetry and as stammering speech; as the flight of the spirit to the supreme Light, and as a cry out of the deep distress of the heart; as joyous thanksgiving and ecstatic praise, and as humble supplication for forgiveness and compassion; as a child-like entreaty for life, health, and happiness, and as an earnest desire for power in the moral struggle of existence; as a simple petition for daily bread, and as an all-consuming yearning for God Himself; as a selfish wish, and as an unselfish solicitude for a brother; as wild cursing and vengeful thrust, and as heroic intercession for personal enemies and persecutors; as a stormy clamour and demand, and as joyful renunciation and holy serenity; as a desire to change God’s will and make it chime with our petty wishes, and as a self-forgetting vision of and surrender to the Highest Good; as the timid entreaty of the sinner before a stern judge, and as the trustful talk of a child with a kind father; as swelling phrases of politeness and flattery before an unapproachable King, and as free outpouring in the presence of a friend who cares; as the ╇ I do not want to be thought over-cynical here. I recall at the age of about nine suffering an asthma attack in the middle of the night and praying fervently for its alleviation, and this being followed by the descent of a great feeling of calm reassuring relaxation and the cessation of the attack.
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humble petition of a servant to a powerful master, and as the ecstatic converse of the bride with the heavenly Bridegroom. (p.€353, also cited in Wulff, 1997, pp.€537–538)
One cannot but observe, in the light of this, that the category ‘prayer’ is comparable in character to that which Wittgenstein ascribed to ‘game’—there is no one unique defining feature common to all prayer, only a loose ‘family resemblance’. To bring things down to earth, if God is a person then the variety of ways of addressing Him or Her will match that in human social intercourse in general, to call this ‘prayer’ only signifies that the being who is addressed has been cast in a God-like role. We must perforce narrow our focus somewhat. A common approach during the early decades of the last century was to relate prayer to the new Psychological ideas of ‘suggestion’, ‘autosuggestion’ and the subor un-conscious. A very useful summary of this was provided in Thouless (1924). By the 1920s a situation had developed in which new ostensibly scientific Psychological accounts of the significance and operation of the unconscious and processes of ‘suggestion’ had gained wide acceptance and credibility. Taken in combination the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung on the one hand and the theoretical model of ‘suggestion’ proposed by the French ‘New Nancy School’ led by Charles Baudouin (with Emile Coué as its leading populariser) appeared, potentially at least, to supply something approaching a comprehensive explanation for the psychological character and effects of prayer and other forms of religious behaviour or experience, such as mysticism. The problem is by now familiar to us: these threatened to reduce such phenomena to being purely the product of ‘subjective conditions’. As Pratt (1920) ruefully observed: … since the subjective value of prayer is chiefly due to the belief that prayer has values which are not subjective, it will with most persons evaporate altogether once they learn that it is all subjective. Hence if it be true both that the subjective value of prayer is very great and also that it is the only value which prayer possesses, this latter fact should be assiduously kept secret. The psychologist who knows and publishes it broadcast (↜sic) is like the physician who should disclose to his patient the great value and the true nature of bread pills. … No, if the subjective value of prayer be all the value it has, we wise psychologists of religion had best keep the fact to ourselves; otherwise the game will soon be up and we shall have no religion left to psychologize about. We shall have killed the goose that laid our golden egg. (p.€336)
Thouless demurred. He accepted that Baudouin’s analysis of autosuggestion shed much light on the psychological processes involved in prayer (in which he included religious meditation more broadly), particularly the way in which the techniques of therapeutic autosuggestion mapped onto those recommended for successful individual prayer (Baudouin, 1920). This technique was a three-stage process beginning with a relaxation phase (↜le recueillement—an untranslatable term connoting recollection and contemplation) in which the effort of thinking is relaxed, and vague, free-floating images ‘outcropping’ from the unconscious are allowed to occupy the mind. Once achieved, ╇
There is also, of course, a derivative usage of the term, largely now obsolete in everyday language, in which ‘pray’ signifies a supplicatory attitude, ‘Be silent sir I pray you!’.
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a second phase (↜contention) can be initiated in which the mind allows itself to be permeated by a single idea, image or thought; this involves both attention and relaxation. Finally, a further stage, la concentration can be reached related to hypnosis, but it is contention which is crucial. During this phase the individual deeply assimilates the idea, which will result in autosuggestion. This can be learned by heart as a simple verbal formula and the state of contention be re-established, especially if la concentration has also been achieved, by repeating it as often as necessary. But while there are affinities between this and the types or stages of prayer (especially those identified by the Catholic Fr. Poulain) and yogic meditation, there are also important differences. In particular, Thouless defends prayer against several criticisms which could be levelled at it, were it taken purely and simply as a variety of autosuggestion. It does not entail loss of control and a weakening of free will, nor does it necessarily signify an infantile regression. On the contrary, disciplined prayer of, for example, the kind taught in Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, involves an education and harnessing of the un- (or sub-) conscious, not a submission to it, and actually intensively trained the ‘will’ rather than sought to weaken it. But more importantly perhaps, prayer is simply not about psychotherapy or the promotion of ‘healthy-minded thinking’. We must … be on our guard against the danger of taking for granted the assumption that the ideals of religion and of a healthy-minded system of autosuggestion, such as New Thought, are the same. If the ideal of religion were primarily to implant in its followers thoughts on health, happiness and beauty, so that they might be realised as beneficent autosuggestions, it is certain that existing religious systems do not succeed in that object very well. … Whether rightly or wrongly, [Christianity] has not considered that mental therapy was its principal aim. It has supposed that in thoughts of pain and disease, it is drawing on a source of spiritual enrichment compared with which the health and happiness drawn from the shallow optimism of healthy-minded thinking is a trivial and worthless thing. (pp.€182–183)
Another, American-based, writer on the topic was Karl Ruf Stolz, who in a 1923 work, The Psychology of Prayer, presented an enlarged version of his 1913 doctoral thesis Autosuggestion in Private Prayer. This is difficult to obtain, but Vande Kemp’s quite extended account gives the impression that this too sought to deny the sufficiency of reductionist Psychological explanation of prayer in terms of autosuggestion, whilst accepting that this was of value in helping understand the psychological mechanisms involved, and quotes him as writing “A study of the mental processes involved in prayer neither proves nor disproves the existence of God” (P&T 462). By 1930 there was a fairly extensive literature on the topic, usually Christian-authored, with most books on Psychology and religion including a chapter on prayer (or prayer and worship), although few devoted solely to it. Without exploring specific texts in more detail it is a fair generalisation that the Thouless and Stolz positions are typical of the pro-Christian response to the potential threat posed by the ‘New Psychology’, while their opponents continued to insist on the irrational and purely ‘subjective’ nature of prayer (as of much else!) even if acknowledging its pragmatic benefits in some cases. What nobody yet appeared to be in a position to see clearly, despite their intimations of it, is that much of what we call ‘prayer’ may be considered as one of the primary media through which the
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mythos facet of life is actually lived. Most writers are still entrapped in a schema which defines the matter empirically as one of the ‘authenticity’ of prayer as an encounter with ‘God’. By the mid-twentieth century some psychologists, though not many, were attempting to study the ‘efficacy’ of prayer experimentally, particularly in therapeutic contexts. Wulff (1997), however, dismisses the most cited of these, Parker & St. Johns (1957) as thoroughly flawed on methodological grounds. But curiously absent in any context from Wulff’s monumental book is Leslie D. Weatherhead, whose psychotherapeutic work has already been discussed. Regarding the prayer issue, Weatherhead’s work on the value of intercessionary prayer for the sick is particularly interesting. The fullest account is in Sect.€3, Chap.€7 of the 1959 further revised 2nd (1952) edition of his Psychology, Religion and Healing, originally a mid-life doctoral thesis which appeared in 1951. A closer look at this may, I think, be of benefit, not only in itself but for the broader light it sheds on the midtwentieth century state of play of the Psychology–religion relationship, at any rate in Britain. As a practitioner of intercessionary prayer for the sick, few could rival the experience of Weatherhead. He had begun exploring it in Leeds in 1926, and continued it for the rest of his life. Weatherhead was no fool, and what is initially impressive is the scrupulosity with which he spells out the conditions under which such prayer has most likelihood of success as well as its limitations and role in relation to orthodox medicine. The factors favouring a beneficial effect include the age of the invalid (the younger the better), that they are known to and loved by those praying for them, and the conduct of the prayer itself. On this latter point Weatherhead stresses that those praying should see themselves as ‘bringing’ the invalid to Christ, they should form a mental image of being present at the sick-bed and trying to surround the patient with an aura of love, as conduits, so to speak, of Christ’s presence in the ‘now’. In other words they are not to pray to Christ to bring about a future cure but to engage with Him in the healing process. This, he explains, is strictly analogous to the way in which Christ’s own healings of the sick took place. Whether or not the target of this intercession is aware of it taking place is relatively unimportant. Weatherhead recommends that the prayer sessions be not over-prolonged, and that no more than four cases be considered at one time. Ideally, each congregation should include a small group regularly engaging in this activity. For Weatherhead healing in the full sense is about establishing a complete relationship with God, and this, he believes, can happen as a result of intercessionary prayer even if a physical cure does not result. As to evidence, a number of medically attested cases of remarkable and complete recoveries from death’s door, involving extreme physical pathology, are described, some reported by doctors and surgeons, others from his direct experience. In explaining how intercessionary prayer works, Weatherhead is happy to invoke contemporary Psychology, including J. B. Rhine’s telepathy research and Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’, both of which show that there are deep and usually unconscious levels of connection between individual minds, and that mind should not be conceived in terms of isolated hermetically sealed units attached to single bodies.
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Of course, he qualifies the extent to which these newly discovered psychological phenomena offer a sufficient explanation of the efficacy of intercessionary prayer, but does argue that they provide insights into the mechanism or process by which it happens. In the end, naturally, it is Christ’s or God’s power which has been brought into play by deploying them. Elsewhere he is very ambivalent about Jung’s view of religion, especially Jung’s view that Christianity urges its adherents to ‘imitate Christ’. Weatherhead will have none of this, Christianity is about co-operating with, and submitting to, the love-infused divine will. And achieving this is what prayer is, properly, about. Clearly, simply wringing one’s hands and tearfully calling on God to cure someone is not the way to get results. Moving beyond the specific issue of intercessionary prayer, both this chapter and the work as a whole represent an especially interesting moment in the British history of our topic. In the 1950s recent ideas and theories emanating from Psychology, such as those of Rhine and Jung just mentioned, and the continuing impact of the earlier introduction of concepts like the unconscious and autosuggestion, had not yet become too contested and marginalised within mainstream Psychology. As we saw in the previous chapter, there were also, in Britain, a number of devout psychotherapists such as Henry Yellowlees, William Brown and J. A. Hadfield who had worked closely with Weatherhead at the City Temple Psychotherapy Clinic. Pious Harley Street medical consultants were not exactly rare either. For their part, within the churches, Canon F. R. Barry, W. R. Matthews (Dean of St. Pauls) and the Rev. Eric S. Waterhouse had all long been in the thick of forging a productive relationship with Psychology and were now in eminent positions. Set this in the context of a post-war culture in which the problem of ‘man’s spiritual crisis’ was only too evident, and too urgent, and conditions were near ideal for the creation of an optimistic alliance between all the parties which was guaranteed a widespread appeal. The dust jacket of the 1959 edition of Psychology, Religion and Healing has lengthy lists of review quotes lauding the work which seem to support this point. Publications cited include not only predictable church periodicals like the Methodist Recorder, Christian World and Theology (whose reviewer was a Dr Gilbert Russell of Harley Street—another of the same provenance, Dr Ernest White, supplied one for The Christian) but, to mention but a sample, Manchester Evening News, The Times Educational Supplement and Literary Supplement, The Yorkshire Post, The Manchester Guardian, The Nursing Times, The Medical Press and—glory indeed—The Lancet itself (“persuasive, constructive, sincere”). With the best will in the world, it must be confessed that in any comparison between Weatherhead’s book and the directly opposing position taken by the earnestly behaviourist American psychologist George B. Vetter (1894–1978) in his 1958 Magic and Religion. Their Psychological Nature, Origin and Function the latter would come off very badly. Learned he might be, but all is forced, in procrustean fashion, into a thesis of supreme simplicity. Religion is, at the day’s end, only a result of the trial and error reinforcement of stereotyped habits. As for prayer, it really just boils down to verbal conditioning. ‘Few indeed are the devout individuals who are completely reconciled to admitting that their ritualistic procedures can at best be expected to effect certain minor changes or revisions in their own desires,
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frustrations, or disappointments’ (p.€183). Wulff (1997) gives a fairly extended and dispassionate summary of Vetter’s book, but later lets his hair down: Vetter … reduces religion to a narrow fundamentalism. Within this limited context, he selects out as typical the worst of piety’s apparent fruits. He finds the essence of religion in the aspects which most nearly resemble the stereotypic behavior of rats or pigeons when placed in unpredictable experimental situations. He reduces the broad range of religious behavior to the simple dichotomy of entreaty and orgy. (p.€165)
Besides Wulff’s main criticism of behaviourist accounts of religion as guilty of an inadequate reductionism which has no place for experience, only overt behaviour, juxtaposing Vetter’s book and Weatherhead’s discloses something more fundamental. This is a failure on his part to grasp that religion, at its fullest, is not centrally about beliefs but is a complete way of life. And whatever one suspects about Weatherhead’s occasional tendency to cross the hazy line between open-mindedness and credulity, the person who emerges from his pages is a thousand miles from Vetter’s own ‘stereotypical’ image of the devout religious believer. We find ourselves engaging with a passionate, intellectually astute and caring man, with no illusions about the grimness of life, but thoroughly engaged with it. What is more we suspect that any minor revisions he needed to make to his desires, frustrations or disappointments he could handle quite well without praying at all. That was a far more serious matter. To finish with Vetter, there is, in all honesty, surely something absurdly arrogant in imagining that the key to the mystery of the ages can be provided by applying a theoretical algorithm, then barely 30 years old, based on the learning behaviour of maze-bound rats. The key to that psychological mystery probably rests in the sheer confidence which all early twentieth century scientists felt in Einstein’s wake that they could achieve similar revolutionary reconceptualisations of their subject matter. But Vetter’s own Psychological paradigm was, ironically, on the eve of its own dethronement by cognitivism. To return to the ‘Medico-Psycho-Christian’ (if I may so call it) alliance, its fortunes proved fairly short-lived. The ESP and telepathy research project has remained virtually stalled ever since despite much effort, Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ quickly fell from Psychological grace, and the energies of Weatherhead and his fellow Christian sympathisers with Psychology became devoted primarily to psychotherapy. It is difficult though to read Weatherhead on intercessionary prayer without acknowledging that something is going on here worthy of Psychological attention and respect. But for Psychology to do so without venturing too far for comfort into the mythos zone has proved too daunting a task. As a result, overtly at least, it just lost interest. What does the way Psychology has treated prayer tell us about the Psychology–religion relationship? For many people prayer is a centrally important feature of their lives, regularly engaged in either individually or collectively (or both). Others perhaps do the same thing without labelling it ‘prayer’, calling it ‘meditation’ perhaps or even nothing at all, simply engaging in some form of introspective selfexamination and dialogue with the universe. That being so, prayer is a phenomenon of considerable psychological importance, both experientially and behaviourally. What we have seen, however, is that Psychology’s interest in it has been largely
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restricted to the psychotherapeutic context and even then mainly undertaken by Christian psychologists or therapists. Non-believing psychologists on the rare occasions they have tackled it have usually done so in the context of broader critiques of religion in which it is cast simply as an example of superstitious or infantile behaviour. As we have seen, the impossibility of defining ‘prayer’ either behaviourally or functionally presents a problem. But the fact that the same is true of ‘play’ and ‘sport’ has not prevented them receiving much Psychological attention. There is no reason why more narrowly definable types of prayer cannot be studied. Psychologists generally keep ‘normal’ prayer at arm’s length. Psychologists of religion have, admittedly, occasionally looked psychometrically at the correlations between praying and other measures of personality, but this hardly amounts to close scrutiny. And yet, if not universal, for those engaging in prayer it is as major a component of their ‘psychologies’ as emotion, cognition or perception. As hinted just now, what we are seeing here is a shying away from dealing with the mythos realm. The anti-religious may condemn or pathologise it, but it is not scientists’ job to condemn their subject matter, and prayer is too normal to be classed as a pathology in any strict sense. Besides his statistical study of the ‘efficacy of prayer’, Francis Galton also undertook a self-experiment in which he, for some time, placed offerings before an image of Mr Punch, reverently bowed his head to it and prayed for its support. He hoped this would yield some insight into the mind of the idol-worshipping ‘savage’. When he ceased worshipping Mr Punch he was, he says, very uneasy for some time afterwards! One must give the old atheist his due here. Perhaps similar exercises should be undertaken by anti-religious psychologists in emulating the religious behaviour of believers in modern religions, and prayer would be the easiest place to start. At least they might thus obtain some ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ rather than relying on ‘knowledge by description’.
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This is reported in Pearson (1914–1930).
Chapter 9
Religion and Personality
One of the few relatively flourishing religious topics of empirical Psychological research for many decades has been the relationships between religious belief and personality. This has the advantage, from an orthodox scientific point of view, of sidestepping the issue of the validity or otherwise of religious beliefs themselves, and if seeming to have the underlying ‘reductionist’ thrust of treating belief as no more than a contingent personality trait, it can also be read by believers as aiding their proselytizing goals—a kind of ‘market research’ exercise. Methodologically this research has generally been quite conventional, involving psychometric analysis of questionnaire responses in order to identify the various ‘factors’ characterising religious belief, and often, moving on from this, to identify ‘types’ of believer. It has, of course, always been acknowledged that how religious belief is expressed and understood is deeply affected by what we now call ‘personality’ but prior to the 1930s was more usually referred to as temperament or character. In the ancient typology of the ‘four temperaments’, each of them—sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic—would tend to a distinctive style of religious expression: the melancholic would tend towards being meditative, the choleric towards fiery evangelism and public avowals of faith, for example. In early nineteenth century phrenology the size of the ‘organ of spirituality’ (located at the top of the head) was held to be correlated with religious piety and devotion. However, for the most part, these linkages received little direct attention. In The Varieties of Religious Experience William James offered, as we saw in Chap.€4, a subtler distinction between ‘once born’ and ‘twice born’ believers. The first were those for whom their belief had never been an issue, painlessly accepted at an early age it was simply accepted thereafter with no crises of faith or serious doubts. The latter were those who had experienced a profound and life-changing religious experience such as a dramatic conversion. This either brought them to religious belief or radically altered their understanding of their faith if they had previously been in the first camp—they were, as the familiar phrase has it, ‘born again’. James’ distinction has remained
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The historical relationship between these terms is complex and they should not be considered really synonymous. I cannot enter into this here but see Danziger (1997) and Nicholson (2002). G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_9, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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popular among religious writers and if not entirely novel, was greatly reinforced by the authority of James’ analysis. In 1914 the German psychologist Eduard Spranger (1882–1963) published the 1st edition of his Lebensformen, the 1925 5th edition of which was translated into English in 1928 as Types of Men: The Psychology and Ethics of Personality. Spranger’s primary interest was in the values which guided individuals and his approach was, to use Wulff’s description, ‘existential-interpretive’ (Wulff, 1997). In this work he identified six ideal ‘types’, each with a different central value-orientation or attitude: ‘theoretic, economic, aesthetic, social, political, and religious’. As Wulff’s account of his position explains, however, the ‘religious’ type is somewhat different in status to the others, none of which are incompatible with religious belief: ‘Spranger identifies the religious type with the mystic, who, from one or another perspective, “searches for the absolute unity of the highest values”’ (p.€552, quoting Spranger). Of these there are two sub-types, the ‘immanent mystic’ and the ‘transcendent mystic’. The first sees the divine as pervading ‘every sphere of human activity’ (ibid), the latter, by contrast, focuses on ‘a world beyond’ (ibid), the ascetic who abandons the world and strives for ecstatic communion with God. These are, though, ideal extremes and elements of both are generally present. To complicate matters further, religious attitudes are also affected by the other five ‘idealized attitudes’. The ‘theoretic’ attitude for example may be associated with an interest in theology and rational justification of belief, the aesthetic attitude with artistic expressions of faith such as painting or music. Spranger’s analysis of personality in relation to religion is but one, if very central, aspect of his fully developed Psychological-philosophical position and rather different in character to the kind of interest in personality which came to dominate mainstream anglophone ‘Psychology of Religion’ after the 1940s. Neither James’ nor Spranger’s accounts attracted much empirical attention during the latter half of the last century, attention shifting, as already said, towards the adoption of conventional psychometric, usually questionnaire-based, methods. Among the most popular has been E. L. Shostrom’s Personal Orientation Inventory: An Inventory for the Measurement of Self-Actualization, devised in 1966. This was an attempt at rendering humanistic Growth Movement ideas, especially, obviously, Maslow’s notion of ‘self-actualization’, empirically tractable. As Wulff summarises it, this ‘consists of 150 paired statements representing extreme, categorical positions on a number of general or abstract issues’ (op. cit., p.€612), respondents having to endorse one of them. This generates 12 scales. Wulff summarises a number of research findings using this ‘POI’, variously with students, Protestant minis╇
See Chap.€12, and, more extensively, Nicholson (2002) for Spranger’s influence of G. W. Allport. ╇ To wit: time competence, inner-directedness (drawn from David Reisman’s 1950 The Lonely Crowd), self-actualizing value, flexibility in application of values (termed ‘existentiality’), sensitivity to own needs and feelings, spontaneity (free expression of feelings), self regard, self-acceptance, ‘sees man as essentially good’, sees opposites of life as meaningfully related, accepts feelings of anger or aggression, capacity for intimate contact (most of these have somewhat enigmatic single-word names).
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ters and Roman Catholic priests, while it has also been used to evaluate the benefits of meditation. One can easily see why this instrument became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, since it has high face relevance to religious issues, as contrasted for example with R. B. Cattell’s 16PF scale, and tapped into the contemporary popularity of the Growth Movement. The results have though been far from earth-shattering. Of those discussed by Wulff, most simply confirm what one would expect anyway, while one on 271 American Roman Catholic priests (Kennedy & Heckler, 1972), sub-classified according to ‘level of development’ (‘maldeveloped’, underdeveloped, developing, developed), is striking only by virtue of the fact that none of the groups deviates from the norm by even a single standard deviation—though such deviation as there is, is almost entirely in the negative direction, except for the ‘developing’ group. There also appear to be ‘construct validity’ problems, with one critique of the test claiming that 72% of the variance boils down to extraversion, open-mindedness and ‘existential nonconformity’ factors (Tossi & Hoffman, 1972). More recently Fontana (2003, p.€135) has also passed a rather downbeat verdict on the POI. Michael Argyle’s psychometric approach was more modest (Argyle, 1958), seeking not some general personality trait, merely to identify some linkages between religious belief and personality variables which might help explain differences in religious belief and behaviour among those from otherwise similar environments. But note that each of these environments will presumably have its own specific religious cultural character. His survey of findings concentrates on political and religious attitudes, authoritarianism, suggestibility and intelligence (incorporating some data on achievement motivation). Using data of H. J. Eysenck’s, he shows that religious people are more conservative in (British) politics than non-believers (only 17% of whom voted Conservative in 1951). However, the data also show more nonconformists and Roman Catholics voting Labour than conservative. But this is surely all fairly specious, given that voting varies across time (which is the whole point!), while the numbers in his table purporting to show percentages voting for Conservative, Labour and Liberal for each denomination do not add up to 100%; presumably, though, this is because minor parties are excluded (notably the Communists, who were still significant in 1951). While the data available to Argyle (which included some other British and American studies) did indeed suggest (a) that the religious were more conservative than nonbelievers but less interested in politics, (b) that Protestants were more conservative than Catholics in voting, though Catholics held more conservative attitudes and (c) that Jews were left-wing with ‘radical attitudes’, he is unable to conclude very much from this, other than that it suggests that ‘possession of certain personality traits … inclines a person towards religious beliefs and organisations’ (p.€92). Given that this data was all drawn from a quite narrow historical time-frame, and the scales used, especially Eysenck’s radicalism scale, were, as we now appreciate, highly problematic for several reasons, it is hard to conclude other than that it tells us more about the social psychological condition of U.K. and American cultures at the time than anything permanently enlightening about the religion–politics relationship. This is also true of the race-prejudice data (all U.S.) which showed the ‘regular and devout church
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attenders’ to be less prejudiced than non-attenders, but the religious in general to be more prejudiced than the non-religious (presumably all data was on whites?). The level of prejudice was, in descending order, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and ‘sect members’ (p.€85). Regarding ‘suggestibility’, religious conservatives ‘are subject to prestige suggestion’ (i.e. most likely to change beliefs to conform with those of a high prestige person) and ‘various’, probably especially extreme Protestant, groups are high on ‘primary’ (i.e. psychomotor) suggestibility. (A modest, if unintended, gift to the anti-religious camp.) Again, using Eysenck’s 1953 two-dimensional radicalism/ tough minded scale data along with authoritarianism findings, he finds authoritarianism to be higher for the religious in general, especially Catholics and religious conservatives, but ‘low for Unitarians, Jews and members of minor sects’ (p.€91), explaining this in terms broadly drawn from contemporary neo-Freudianism. As far as intelligence and achievement are concerned, American data of various kinds show a negative correlation with religious belief, but with huge variation between Christian denominations. The anti-religious might cheer, but Argyle rightly notes that factors such as denominational differences in attitudes towards academic inquiry, intelligent students tending to be more critical and some social class differences are all probably implicated. Suicide and criminality are also briefly and somewhat inconclusively discussed. Despite Argyle’s claim that he has been looking at individual personality factors associated with religious belief, ‘environment’ as it were being held constant, it is, in hindsight, difficult to sustain this. There are a number of issues. Firstly, the data bank on which he was drawing was too small and the homogeneity of environmental background of those participating in the research (‘subjects’ in old parlance) is rarely clearly established. Secondly, the way the data findings are constellated now has its own historic flavour—we are looking at highly condensed images of the interplay between mainstream religions and socio-political attitudes in the U.S. and U.K., primarily during the mid-1940s to mid-1950s decade, a particularly fraught period in almost all respects. Finally, as Argyle more or less concedes in most cases, the causal direction between ‘personality’ and ‘religious’ belief or behaviour cannot be firmly established, even though he believes the flow from former to latter to be more plausible. This last however raises a more profound point—whether unidirectionality in either direction is credible. Without digressing too far, one does not have to be a radical social constructionist to accept that whatever ‘innate’ factors are involved in determining personality (some of which it would be tendentious to dispute), the meanings and values ascribed to the ‘traits’ or ‘types’ so determined are socio-culturally defined and historically in flux. And religion is a major agent in this process. A somewhat different angle was taken by the Allport–Ross Religious Orientation Scale (1967), still widely used. G. W. Allport was himself a devout High Church Episcopalian (or Anglican) regularly preaching sermons at Harvard and publishing ╇
I am drawing here primarily on Wulff (1997), pp.€232–237.
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numerous religious pamphlets. This scale seeks to differentiate between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ types of religious outlook, the former are those for whom their religion is their ‘master motive’ and who strive to live their religion. The latter those for whom religion is ultimately subordinated to personal, instrumental and utilitarian ends. This consists of 41 items, 11 drawn from an earlier 12-item scale devised by Feagin (1964), 20 scoring for intrinsic, 20 for extrinsic. This purportedly enabled the identification of extrinsic, intrinsic and ‘indiscriminate’ types. Wulff (1997) identified a number of problems with the scale as identified by subsequent researchers who challenged the notion of a single dimension, criticised the coherence of its definitions and suggested it may have been simply measuring general personality variables (especially the extrinsic component) (ibid, p.€236; Hunt & King, 1971). And I note that one critic (Dittes, 1971) holds that the typology ‘has served its users’ prophet-like concern for the purity of religion far better than the scientists quest for understanding’ (ibid, pp.€236–237). I leave readers to explore these criticisms further, but my own doubt is of a more fundamental kind. I have great respect for Allport’s work in general, but here he has fallen into a serious trap to judge by the scale items. This is that they are quite clearly generated within a broadly Protestant mind-set which takes for granted what counts as ‘religious’. There are references to church-going (Item 13) and a ‘Bible study group’ (Item 14) for a start, neither relevant to non-Christians and the latter a predominantly Protestant phenomenon. There are five on ‘prayer’ or ‘meditation’ as if these are unproblematic categories, which, as we saw in the previous chapter, is not the case. Item 7 ‘Quite often I have been keenly aware of the presence of God or the Divine Being’ simply refers to an autobiographical fact (as religiously defined) rather than an ‘orientation’—and even the non-religious might agree that they have had experiences which Christians would describe in this way, although they themselves would not. More broadly, all the items are couched within the terms of a particular mode of religious discourse, implicitly assuming that respondents will agree on their meaning. Regardless of the often interesting relationships found between scores on this scale and others of e.g. prejudice and attitudes to sexual permissiveness, it is hard to see how this takes us beyond the limitations already noted regarding Argyle’s account. In short, this is not about something called ‘religious orientation’ in any universal sense, rather its scope is constrained within a quite culture-specific concept of this. It would be interesting to explore how far signifiers of Islamic and Hindu ‘religious orientation’ would correspond to those used here, and even if the intrinsic vs. extrinsic ‘typology’ would have the same intuitive meaning
╇
These are discussed and summarized at length in Hendrika Vande Kemp (2000) ‘Gordon Allport’s pre-1950 Writings on Religion’ in Jacob A. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion, pp.€129–172. See Chap.€12 for fuller appraisal of Allport’s position. As arguably the principle founder of the subdiscipline ‘Psychology of Personality’, his brief treatment in the present chapter may seem odd. I wished, though, to use his case to other ends. ╇ Further queries about Allport’s religious position are discussed in Chap.€12.
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(accepting that it does mean something in this context—even if this scale fails to be entirely clear on the matter). The underlying difficulty in attempting to formulate links between personality (including ‘attitudes’) and religion per se is easy to see. As a thought experiment, assume that everyone was equally exposed to all the various religions and religious cults, along with their numerous internal subdivisions. They are then, free from social pressure, able to select to which, if any, they will commit themselves, starting as it were from a tabula rasa position. It takes little Psychological acumen to see that these choices will reflect individual’s ‘personalities’ (whether conceived in type or trait terms is irrelevant). In other words, religions themselves vary in the kinds of personality they attract, and some kinds of personality are not attracted by religion at all. Even granting a near universal aspiration towards actualization, integration, individuation, enlightenment or some such state (a major concession), the way the individuals conceive this, and the barriers or difficulties the task poses, will, as Spranger recognised, itself vary according to their personalities. And religions are similarly diverse, both in how they conceive this end-state and how they believe it can be achieved. There are also secular conceptions of this, not least Maslowian ‘self-actualization’. The dilemma then is how to reconcile this situation with the notion of ‘religiosity’ (or ‘religious motivation’ or ‘spirituality’) as itself a general personality trait/dimension or ‘type’. Either one narrows the definition of religiosity to that characteristic of a specific religion (as the Allport–Ross scale does) or one rejects the general concept and focuses on particular cases. The latter could take the form either of looking for relationships between specified religious beliefs and personality or, biographically, exploring how specified individuals reached their religious positions—how these beliefs function in relation to their total ‘personality’. Ironically, the religious may well draw some comfort from this, since it could strengthen the argument that religion is not, reductively, a matter of individual personality at all. And that comes close to actually excluding it from Psychology’s remit, except perhaps in relation to individual psychotherapeutic or ‘actualization’ (etc.) quests. In reality, the tabula rasa thought experiment situation is quite artificial. Social and cultural factors currently clearly override individual ‘personality’ in determining the majority of religious belief (and unbelief), not least because such factors generate the very meanings, values and categories in which ‘personality’ is understood (including, as Kurt Danziger, 1997, has shown, the term ‘personality’ itself), as well as the options available. Even conversions and apostasies tend to follow standard cultural scripts. This suggests that if Psychology does have a role in ‘explaining’ religious belief, it is at the Social Psychological level rather than the individual one (backed up by anthropology and sociology of religion). The mid-twentieth century shift towards empirical psychometric approaches exemplified in research on linkages between personality, attitudes and religion may be seen as an attempt within Psychology of Religion to co-opt the new psychometric and attitude-measurement paradigms and create a place for itself within a disci╇
The extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation polarity is, of course, generally accepted within motivation research, and is not under criticism here.
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pline at the height of its optimism about being an orthodox, ‘objective’, ‘valuefree’, natural science. In doing so, Psychology of Religion had, though, also to address the rising humanistic approach within psychotherapy, especially as centred on Maslow’s ‘self-actualization’ concept. This returns us to points made towards the end of Chap.€7. It seems to have managed this by recasting ‘self-actualization’ and related notions as referring to some sort of ‘natural category’ denoting a universal psychological phenomenon of ‘spiritual’ striving. Although this was necessarily positively valued, the value could be recast as one of mental health rather than ethics and the facts vs. values distinction maintained. Yet doing so had the effect of transferring attention away from Psychology of Religion’s traditional concerns towards psychotherapy, as we have already seen. This left the non-therapeutic study of ‘personality and religion’ isolated as secular psychotherapies assimilated ‘religious’ values of ‘spiritual’ striving and actualization, often taking religious counsellors and therapists with them (see Chap.€7). Meanwhile, as the century progressed, the facts vs. values distinction itself lost its credibility both philosophically (within philosophy of science) and as an accurate description of how Psychology actually functioned—its ideas and applications becoming rapidly unmasked, especially by disciplinary historians, as implicitly evaluative (including even the notion of ‘normality’). It is of some significance that in one of the most systematic recent attempts at reviving the full traditional Psychology of Religion project, Fontana (2003) gives barely four pages to ‘religiosity and personality’, even while accepting the ‘religiosity’ concept itself. After half a century of empirical research on the relationship between religion and personality we are left with rather a mish-mash of discrete findings variously, and usually inconsistently, linking religious belief to authoritarianism, intelligence, self-actualization tendencies, political attitudes, prejudice and open mindedness, while making scant headway in moving beyond fairly fuzzy typologies. This is not to say that specific findings lack their own intrinsic interest, only to conclude that as a research project it has been bedevilled by unacknowledged conceptual flaws, some of which I have indicated above. But we may close with another question. How far have religious concerns played a role in determining how psychologists have conceptualised personality? If this role were shown to be significant, it would give a covert circular twist to the whole idea of relating ‘personality’ to ‘religion’. This assumes personality to be an ‘independent variable’, but if the terms in which personality is understood in Psychology have themselves been significantly informed by religious values and concepts, then personality’s independent variable status is subverted. I do not want to overplay this point, but in Chap.€12 we will see that in the cases of both psychoanalysis and Allport—very major contributors to the study of personality—there may be grounds for suspecting that it is not without some basis.
Chapter 10
The Theism Question
Time to change tack. Theology cannot be dodged forever despite William James’ hopes. In the present case, I found one issue unavoidable and requiring discussion even if from a less systematically historical angle than the others, namely Theism. The existence or otherwise of God might, at first glance, strike one as an exclusively theological or philosophical issue rather than a Psychological one. Psychology surely only enters into the picture when we ask the rather different question as to the psychological reasons why people believe in God, the default assumption from an orthodox scientific view being that it is belief, rather than disbelief, which needs explaining. (Not a position which has always been held, atheism once being thought a form of insanity and, as we saw in Chap.€3, belief in God being thought by mental and moral philosophers to be the ‘normal’ outcome of healthy maturation.) Whether this belief actually has a real object has been considered by many psychologists to be a redundant query, or at least beyond their remit, for if the belief can be ‘explained’ Psychologically we have no need to ask it. Historically, religion’s defenders would have disagreed, tending to endorse Streeter’s position: … it is pure waste of time to ask the meaning of the psychological data on religious experience or belief unless one has first answered the question whether, apart from the data, the existence of God is a probable or improbable hypothesis. (Streeter, 1927, p.€269)
The same author subsequently expounds a ‘country of the blind’ analogy between a community of blind scientists’ scepticism regarding a sighted person’s claims to experience light—explaining it as an illusion caused by abnormally opened eyelids, I leave aside in the chapter the most sophisticated version (or versions) of something like the Theism argument: the case proposed by some physicists that the universe is governed by an ‘anthropic principle’ which ensures both the emergence of humans and its comprehensibility by them. This is an awfully crude summary however. For those wishing to pursue the topic, J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler (1986) remains the most thorough review of the topic by an eminent physicist and an equally eminent astronomer. It gets very technical in places. Notably it largely leaves religious questions aside, though has some interesting discussion of the ontological argument for the existence of God. ╇ At least one mid-twentieth century work appeared adopting this position and casting unbelief as the problem rather than belief: H. C. Rümke (1952, from Dutch of 1949) The Psychology of Unbelief. G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_10, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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and purely Psychological explanations of religious experience. The latter, like the former, are not exactly in error, but have wrongly assumed the sufficiency of the level of explanation they have proposed. This is perhaps a neat line of argument, but it does not fully meet the case. There is an important strand within nineteenth and earlier twentieth century theological thought in which the case for the existence of God is itself, to an important degree, ‘Psychological’. This may be termed the ‘Theism’ argument, although not all of its exponents widely deploy that term. The issue is whether or not there is an intelligent conscious force, God or mind, in nature. In the first decades of the 1800s the ‘Argument from Design’, as famously expounded by William Paley and subsequently elaborated on by various writers in the Bridgewater Treatise series during the 1830s, was widely thought to have settled the matter in the positive, but it was not long before some major holes in its simple analogical logic were being exposed. (In fact, David Hume had already made an effective assault on the notion in his 1779 Dialogues on Natural Religion.) These need not detain us too long here, other than to note that consciously designed objects, such as Paley’s now proverbial watch, are made to serve a purpose of the maker or makers, but animate natural objects, however intricate and complex, appear to have no purpose beyond sustaining their own existence. If the notion of God as a necessary conscious agency creating and/or sustaining the natural world was to be sustained, a rather more sophisticated tack had to be taken. And the urgency of finding one was greatly reinforced with the advent and general scientific acceptance of Darwinian evolutionary theory (or some variant of this) after 1859. New, dramatically expanded, time-scales and the purely mechanistic process of chance-driven ‘natural selection’ were now, it seemed, capable of engineering even the most intricate and perfectly ‘designed’ of organic phenomena. In our own time, Richard Dawkins has been in the forefront of the continued insistence on the sufficiency of such an account. We may now jump to 1875, and James Martineau’s Religion as Affected by Modern Materialism, a lecture originally delivered the previous year. In this and other writings (notably A Study of Religion 1887), Martineau proposes an argument which may be summarised as follows. The physical world as disclosed by science is governed by physical causes mediated by the transmission of force; ‘cause’ and ‘force’ (or ‘energy’) are its central concepts. And yet these concepts have been created by the human mind. Moreover, and this is where his argument becomes psychological, we have only been able to formulate them as a result of our own self-experience as causal agents operating forcefully on the world. In Martineau’s argument, the notions of cause and personal agency become inseparable. It therefore becomes unacceptably paradoxical to hold that while mind is necessary for the creation of these very concepts, it is absent in the physical universe itself which is only explicable by invoking them. This is indeed a genuine conundrum, echoed by the physicist Erwin ╇ One core problem is the meaning of ‘design’ and the criteria we use for ascribing it. Complexity as such is quite patently not a criterion (nobody denies that toothpicks are designed, but they are about as simple as it gets). The legitimate inference from finding a watch is not to a ‘designer’ but to the existence of an advanced technological culture. I could go on but will resist the temptation.
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Schrödinger in his 1956 Tarner Lectures published as Mind and Matter (1958), although he does not share Martineau’s conclusion. The corollary of this position is that, sufficient though scientific materialist accounts may be regarding the details of causal processes operating in the physical universe, that universe must be ultimately grounded in an agent-like mind which alone could conceive of or create such processes in the first place. This also reopens the door to the necessity of ‘final cause’ explanations—this mind’s purposes in creating a universe of this kind. One ought here to observe that religious and scientific thinkers alike have shared, until very recently, a common sense of awe at the regularity and harmony, as they see it, of the universe. And the burgeoning authority of scientific ‘laws of nature’ had, since Newton, only served to reinforce this impression. This had a doubleedged effect, for while it created psychological conditions receptive to some notion of divinely imposed or designed order, it increasingly marginalised the evidential value, for religious thinkers, of miracles and instances of divine intervention. Martineau and other Christian intellectuals had little difficulty in accepting the scientifically-minded case that such events were but rarely occurring natural phenomena, thus initiating the long decline of ‘supernaturalism’ in western theological and religious thought. By the end of the twentieth century, this partly aesthetic sense of cosmic harmony and order was less convincing. A digression on this is, I feel, in order; after all, the entire galaxy M82 exploded at some point, and ‘chaos theory’ has entered popular cultural awareness. The gammaray bursts of imploding stellar novae are, it seems, lethal to life forms like Earth’s within 1.000€light years radius, and astronomers are now identifying two a week in one small segment of the sky alone. The Ordovician extinction of 80% of Earth’s aquatic life forms was perhaps due to such an event. Asteroid collisions, pyroclastic flows and similar geological catastrophes have happened periodically throughout Earth’s history causing similar, if less extensive, mass extinctions. We now accept randomness and purely statistically defined probability as part and parcel of the scientific conceptual repertoire for understanding the world. Fractal geometry has also demonstrated how the iterative operation of simple rules might generate patterns of awesome complexity, and simulate the appearance of a wide range of natural phenomena. The regularities emerging from processes governed by such principles lend themselves far less convincingly to interpretation in terms of divine design than the unyielding mathematical laws of Newton and Maxwell. Our contemporary scientific image of the universe must, I feel, raise serious doubts about the wonderful harmony, regularity and order of the cosmos which so impressed our forebears. Psychologically, this vision has served a major role in theistic thought although its demise may not be entirely fatal, for the puzzle nevertheless remains in some ways a legitimate one—in general terms, the mental character of the concepts by which the universe is understood continues to stand in odd contrast to the ostensibly mind-free character of the universe governing the processes to which they purport to refer. Neither ‘cause’ nor ‘chaos’ are objectively there in nature, but are pragmatically useful human conceptual inventions. However, as G. Dawes Hicks (1937) argued, in critiquing Martineau, there is something akin to the ‘psychologists’ fallacy’ in play here. That is to say, ‘cause’ and ‘force’ are, however abstract, objects
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of consciousness, sourced in experience of the world, they are not properties of consciousness—so to deduce that they are themselves mental in character is to confuse the properties of the objects of consciousness with the properties of consciousness itself, the classic ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ as expounded by William James. Based on the foregoing, Martineau’s view of the religion–science relationship was one in which the legitimate authority of science was clearly circumscribed, being confined to the exploration of efficient and material causes and leaving metaphysical and moral issues in the hands of the philosophers and theologians. This he seems to feel is a reassuring position for both sides. They are not entirely unlinked however, for the centrality of psychological considerations in his thought necessarily brings Psychology into the picture. W. B. Carpenter, for one, was broadly convinced by his friend Martineau’s Theism. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Mental and Moral Philosophy school was confronting the same issue. The substantial final section of Noah Porter’s mighty textbook The Human Intellect (1868) is devoted to an exposition of the necessity for ‘final cause’ explanations while James McCosh’s The Religious Aspect of Evolution (1888)—far more sympathetic to evolutionary theory than Porter—strives nevertheless to salvage ‘Argument from Design’ conclusions, viewing evolution as God’s way of doing things. Carpenter, Porter and McCosh all played important roles in Psychology’s origins, as we saw in Chap.€3, and their theological positions were central to the visions of Psychology they were advocating. Given that the theist case is based on a particular view of the nature of ‘mind’, the very subject matter of Psychology, it cannot be ignored by psychologists in the way some other concepts of God can. The principle underlying argument for Theism throughout the last century has been that whatever science achieves, a kind of meta-scientific puzzle remains as to why the universe exists at all. This enigma is a clear manifestation of the mythos versus logos tension. Philosophically it has resulted, particularly in mainland European thought, in a notion of ‘being’ as such, and an equivalent dialectical raising of ‘non-being’ to the same status. Thus for Paul Tillich God becomes the ground of ‘being-in-itself’ engaged in an eternal conflict with ‘non-being’ (Tillich, 1953). There seems to be a mythos type need—how widespread one cannot know—to find an ultimate ‘ground’ for the universe in an agency which includes among its properties those of consciousness and personhood (for since humans have these qualities it is logically inconceivable that this agency should lack them, although their form will necessarily be incomprehensibly different to ours). Here, I suggest, theology, philosophy and Psychology become inextricably interwoven. (And, as an aside, it is noteworthy that while Psychology of Religion has attended to many things, there has been virtually no ‘Psychology of Theology’.) In striving to make this case, theologians such as Reinhold Niebuhr (discussed in Chap.€5) have found themselves compelled to try and reconcile concepts of God as immanent versus transcendent, of God’s creativity as operating within time (as a first cause) or as outside time (time itself being an aspect of what is created) in continuous ‘sustaining’ fashion, and of the apparent sufficiency of scientifically ascertained ‘natural law’ explanations for specific events, with the ‘divine purpose’ or ‘final cause’, which they feel is required for the cosmos as a whole.
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Two questions then arise. Firstly, how legitimate is this ‘need’ itself? Perhaps it is no more than a hankering after meaning beyond the bounds where ‘meaning’ can properly apply, or a vast petitio principi based on an inability or refusal to accept that there actually is no rational or logical need for such a ‘grounding’ divine principle at all (Richards Dawkins’ position, presumably) or perhaps an attempt at giving rational formulation to certain profound, but non-rational, experiences which require no such formulation but are sufficient unto themselves. (This last relates in some respects to what Streeter initially appears to be arguing.) Or is it, on the contrary, a need the full rationality of which can only be appreciated by entering wholeheartedly into a philosophical-cum-theological-cum-Psychological analysis of the nature of ‘being’, the limitations of the explanatory range of science as currently conceived, and the significance of ‘religious’ experiences? But secondly, even if we are persuaded that this issue, however problematic all efforts at formulating it have proved, is a legitimate one—that the question it poses is an authentic one and not itself the product of erroneous logic and psychological confusion—it still remains to ask: What kind of a question is this? Is it, that is, a ‘scientific’ question about the nature of the physical universe? Is it a question of a prioristic logic—a necessary truth? Is it a metaphysical or philosophical question? Or a psychological one? My own view, as indicated earlier, is that it emerges at the interface between mythos and logos type needs. Each is legitimate and necessary but they are governed by quite different principles and the challenge is to find a position from which their rational reconciliation can be articulated. But this challenge itself is a logos rather than mythos issue. And the fields of logos in which the task of meeting it most clearly falls are Psychology and philosophy. It may help to make a point which has not, to my knowledge, been much noticed before, namely that there is a similarity between this issue and a once widely discussed feature of what used to be called ‘primitive thought’, Lévy-Bruhl (1922 and other works) being a leading exponent of this concept. ‘Primitives’, it was claimed, commonly felt it necessary to invoke supernatural agencies such as witchcraft or malign spirits to explain everyday misfortunes. Suppose a branch falls upon someone’s head and injures them; without denying that it was indeed rotten and caught by a sudden gust of wind, this kind of thinking insists that why it fell at precisely this moment on precisely this person’s head still requires explanation. Such thinking was routinely scorned as irrational or ‘pre-logical’ until more astute writers, such as Bartlett (1923) pointed out that it was as common among the ‘civilised’ as among the ‘primitives’ (especially among the religious, which is somewhat ironic since much of Lévy-Bruhl’s information came from missionaries’ reports!). In effect, it was simply insisting on the need for ‘final cause’ explanations in addition to material and efficient ones. The Theism argument appears to this writer to be a particularly sophisticated and generalised example of the same logic. But having said this, it should be insisted upon that this is not in principle irrational, and moreover nearly all of us on occasion find it irresistible, experiencing an event as in some way an omen, a sign, a reward or a punishment directed at us personally. Achieving the reconciliation between mythos and logos is thus a complex task. Whether or not the Theism question is logical in character ultimately depends on
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where the boundaries of ‘agency’ or ‘intentionality’ are drawn. For Martineau it appears that all exercise of ‘force’ or ‘causation’ must ultimately have a willing agency as its source. It might look, initially, as if this is an empirical question, but such a view can be contested. The grounds on which we ascribe willing agency, intentionality or ‘personhood’ are actually quite elusive. In a previous work (Richards, 1989) I have argued that it rests on experiencing an object as, in the very broadest sense, a ‘language-user’, or an event as a ‘message’ originating with such a user. The paradox is that we can never objectively or empirically ascertain whether such ascriptions are correct, for it is always logically possible both that an apparent non-language-user is using a ‘language’ we cannot understand or perceive and that what is apparently an instance of language-use is not. The modernist scientific resolution of this has been, virtually by fiat, to restrict the category ‘language-user’ to humans, acknowledging that other animals can possess some, but never all, of the capacities necessary for full language-use. From that anthropocentric perspective, Theism clearly does become ‘illogical’. Conversely, the accumulated experience of religious believers compels them, psychologically, to adopt what one might call a ‘deocentric’ perspective. There is, though, another psychological difficulty which has not often been fully confronted except in the British linguistic philosophy debates of the 1950s and 1960s. We are all familiar of course with ‘It depends what you mean by God.’ as the standard evasive response to the question ‘Do you believe in God?’. This is, though, a very serious issue, because it is becoming ever clearer that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is extremely difficult to formulate any coherent concept of God at all. The theological dilemmas already surfacing in nineteenth century debates on Theism have not dissipated, only become more acute. As Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (1993) powerfully exposes, they have also been very longstanding, pre-dating Christianity, and common to all monotheistic creeds. Put starkly, if God is conceived as utterly transcendent and beyond human comprehension, anthropomorphism is avoided but only at the price of God becoming utterly irrelevant to human affairs. But when God is personalised, the anthropomorphic and culturally specific nature of the concept renders it too constrained to be credible to the educated. Steering between the two involves such tactics as postulating intervening ‘powers’ mediating between the absolute unknowable God and humans or, in Christianity, trying to have it both ways by formulating a Trinitarian concept in which one component, Christ, is, or at least has been, quite literally human, one remains the absolute God the Father and a third, the Holy Ghost, serves as a kind of mediating power between these and humanity (augmented by the intercession of saints in Roman Catholicism). This though smacks very much of ‘saving the hypothesis’, and in trying to give it a fuller, more coherent, formulation Christians have perennially found themselves riven by, often bloody, internal dissent, especially in relation to the nature of Christ himself. The final approach which attempts to ‘transcend’ the issue is Paul Tillich’s, alluded to in Chap.€5. ╇
At the very end of the final chapter, I have attempted to formulate my own position on the ‘God’ question.
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How then are we to move forward? Our dilemma is that whilst, as psychologists, we may acknowledge the essential role of mythos in human life, as agents of logos we feel compelled to evaluate the contents of the beliefs and attitudes which constitute it according to logos type criteria of logicality and empirical validity. Unsurprisingly then, although the Theism issue is fundamental, Psychological attention has turned most frequently to the more ostensibly tractable question of the authenticity of religious experience. But, that, as we saw in Chap.€6, turns out to be equally problematic. I can then offer no easy answer, but properly acknowledging the conundrum is surely a necessary condition for finding one.
Chapter 11
Psychology and Non-Christian Religions
We have so far been treating ‘religion’ as almost synonymous with ‘Christianity’ (and mainstream Christianity at that). This has been largely unavoidable. The modern discipline of Psychology arose in overwhelmingly Christian European-type cultures, only spreading significantly beyond them in the latter twentieth century. Even when, as in the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, Psychology’s host society was explicitly atheist, Christianity was the reference point for any concern with religion. Having said that, as indicated in Chap.€3, non-Christian faiths have not been entirely absent from the historical picture. Those figuring most significantly have been Judaism and Buddhism. Islamic thought was largely ignored until the 1960s, when Sufism began to receive some attention. Hinduism, although the subject of a few works (notably Akhilananda, 1948), has overtly figured even less. There is, however, a quite major qualification to be entered regarding this generalisation. As we saw, one of the common features of earlier Psychology of Religion was its comprehensive ‘comparative’ approach. The evolutionary framework in which such writers were working required them to set religions on an ascending scale, with ‘primitive’ religion at the bottom and Christianity (often Protestant Christianity, and even, in the case of anti-religious writers, ‘post-religious’ scientific atheism) indisputably at the top. In discussing topics such as prayer and mystical experience they also inevitably drew on Buddhist, Hindu and occasionally Islamic examples in the attempt to generalise their accounts to all religions. Judaism was perhaps more difficult to manage, but as the source creed for Christianity, writers were inevitably drawn to what Christians call ‘The Old Testament’, and Jewish mysticism might also occasionally figure. ╇
One work which has come my way is Donald Anderson McGavran (1935) Education and the Beliefs of Popular Hinduism. A Study of the Beliefs of Secondary School Boys in Central Provinces, India, in Regard to Nineteen Major Beliefs of Popular Hinduism, Jubbulpore, India, which was ‘submitted in partial fulfilment’ of the author’s philosophy Ph.D. at Columbia University. This somewhat anticipates later psychometric studies of Christian religiosity discussed in 1910. During the 1970s and 1980s McGavran published extensively on ‘church growth’ and missionary work, the two titles relevant here being The Clash between Christianity and Cultures (1974), and Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from India. However, he does not appear to have ventured into Psychology again. G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_11, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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Relating western Psychology to non-western (primarily eastern) religions does though raise an interesting question. Psychology is a product of Occidental cultures in which Christianity was a virtually universal and central component, and, as we have seen in Chap.€3, this religious heritage fed into Psychology to a greater extent than is usually acknowledged. In looking at their relationship we are thus examining an essentially intra-cultural issue, how these two strands interacted, how they became differentiated—or not, and how each assimilated—or rejected—aspects of the other. Non-western religions present a quite different case. It may be that Psychology has, at various times, been ‘influenced’ by their ideas, but, to be Piagetian, in doing so its schemata have either assimilated, or accomodated to, them, but never experienced décollage. The situation has been somewhat obscured by the indiscriminate use of the term ‘Psychology’ to refer to any systematic account of human nature, regardless of origin or historical period. Thus, Akhilananda’s book is entitled Hindu Psychology, Lama A. Govinda’s 1961 study of the Buddhist Abhidhamma tradition is called The Psychological Attitude of Early Buddhist Philosophy and Its Systematic Representation According to Abhidhamma Tradition, Rune E. A. Johansson’s 1969 study The Psychology of Nirvana, and more recently we encounter M. Levine (ed.) (2000) The Positive Psychology of Buddhism and Yoga and a translation of a Buddhist text entitled Mind in Buddhist Psychology. There are also a Sufi Psychology Association publication, R. Frager’s Heart, Self and Soul: The Sufi Psychology of Growth, Balance and Harmony (1999) and A. Husain’s Islamic Psychology: Emergence of a New Field (2006). The list could be extended, but these are enough to make the point. Something quite complex is going on here. From one perspective this use of the term ‘Psychology’ beyond the discipline’s cultural sphere of origins can be read as a sort of cultural imperialism. Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are simply not Psychological theories in the western sense, nor are the psychological knowledge and beliefs which they contain generated in a western ‘scientific fashion’. One might then, at the risk of appearing pedantic, oppose these kinds of usage as signifying the continued hegemonic expansion of modern western culture. But conversely, one could equally read the situation as signifying a deliberate co-option of the term in the service of forging a genuinely non-occidental post-colonial Psychology. The problem does not arise with the physical sciences since there is, I think, nothing which could be called Buddhist or Hindu geology or chemistry, and early Islamic science is rapidly being integrated into our historical picture of the origins of modern science, in which it played a major role. (A query might be raised about astronomy, but we can leave that aside here.) These two options are not, when it comes down to cases, mutually exclusive, since the former could hold for earlier western-authored texts and the latter for more recent indigenously authored ones. Things are further muddied by the continued need to differentiate between Psychology (discipline sense) and psychology (subject matter sense), because quite obviously these religious traditions include sophisticated and elaborate accounts of the ╇ Guenther, H. V. & Kawamura, L. S. (trans.) (1975) Mind in Buddhist Psychology. A Translation of Ye-shes rgyal-mtshan’s “The Necklace of Clear Understanding”.
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psychological (i.e. ‘Psychology’), while their adherents may also be said to possess a distinct ‘psychology’ (as do Christians)—indeed, in the 1920s, the British psychoanalyst Owen Berkeley-Hill published several quite racist efforts at describing Hindu and Muslim psychologies (see Richards, 1997, pp.€210–211). A very difficult problem now confronts us. If the use of ‘Psychology’ cannot be dismissed as a mere linguistic quibble and the term happily allowed to apply to all systematic accounts of the psychological, this would, at a stroke, render most current debates about its definition and character pointless. The status of Psychology as a science, the insistence that it is, critiques placing it within some other western epistemological tradition and so forth become meaningless. Defining Psychology is hard enough as it is, being such a diverse discipline that it is already bursting at the seams. If it has any unity, this lies in the fact that its practitioners, from reductionist neuropsychologists to critical ‘narrativists’, do at least see themselves as working within some broad western secular tradition of ‘science’ or, at least, of rigorous academic scholarship and enquiry. If the systematic ‘Psychologies’ of non-western religious traditions are to be included however, the entire notion of Psychology as a coherent project departs through the glazing. Yet if these non-western ‘Psychologies’ are excluded, then the project is equally doomed as ‘Psychology’, unlike virtually any other discipline in either the sciences or the humanities, would be entrenching itself as a purely western cultural affair, and all its aspirations to universality have been in vain. To labour the point a little further, Psychology as currently conceived is a somewhat heterogenous discipline within which several broad theoretical positions are competing (cognitivism, social constructionism etc.), while within its numerous subdisciplines various theoretical schools may, again, be in contention. If Buddhist, Islamic and Hindu ‘Psychologies’ are admitted to the fold it is difficult to see what status they could have. They are not, on the face of it, broad ‘theoretical positions’ which would contest their virtues with rivals in the normal way. Nor could they be ‘subdisciplines’ in the usual sense, because these are generally defined by the specific research field which they address, while these other ‘Psychologies’ are totalistic or general in character. Finally, there is one universal assumption at least shared by all psychologists—in a phrase ‘further research is needed’. They are all engaged, in their own eyes at least, as engaged in generating knowledge. Again, these other ‘Psychologies’ are presented as complete and not involved in generating new knowledge, only in disseminating that which they already possess. In the western tradition only Thomistic Scholastic Psychology resembles this, and as we saw in Chap.€3, its adherents have found ways to circumvent the problem. Unable to offer any neat or immediate solution to this dilemma, I will move on. Aside from their treatment in early Psychology of Religion work, in which they did affect how some psychologists, notably J. B. Pratt, viewed religion (see Chap.€4), the only impact these religions have had on Psychology was as a strand in the eclectic post-World War II climate, centred on psychotherapy. A major figure in this was the post-Freudian Erich Fromm, who was especially taken by Japanese Zen Buddhism as being expounded by D. T. Suzuki. Although a long-established scholar, Suzuki first received wider western attention with the publication of his three-volume Essays in Zen-Buddhism (1949–1953), but it was the German writer
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Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery (1953), with an introduction by Suzuki, that really fired western interest, especially on the American West Coast, its appearance fortuitously coinciding with the emergence of the bohemian Beat movement centred on poets and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The seemingly transrational Zen approach to enlightenment and the role in Zen teaching of paradoxical ‘koans’ gelled in perfectly with this group’s radical rejection of mainstream American culture. In 1960 Fromm co-authored Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis with Suzuki and R. De Martino. Numerous new translations of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching also appeared at this time, as did the aforecited works by Govinda and Akhalinanda. From the Jungian direction came Richard Wilhelm’s translations of the Chinese I Ching (English translation, 1960) and The Secret of the Golden Flower (both with introductions by Jung), while the Islamic input was evidenced in the popularity of Idries Shah’s works on Sufism. While all this definitely affected some psychologists, especially on the psychotherapy wing, it is, in all honesty, difficult to untangle the Psychological side of the story from the broader cultural, or rather counter-cultural, one. One must, I think, conclude that any serious historical impact of these non-western religions on Psychology is hard to locate. But a major change now appears to be taking place as indicated earlier. We are entering a phase in which the longstanding western concept of Psychology is shifting as non-western cultures and countries begin to engage it in their own terms, striving to maintain the value of indigenous belief systems, primarily religious in character, and weave these into a genuinely non-western-centred Psychology. How this project will fare, cannot be predicted, but it is endorsed by many western psychologists also. What is surely evident though is that only such a genuinely globalised rethinking of the nature of Psychology can find a way through the apparent impasse identified previously. If that is the case, the relationship between Psychology and religion will have entered a new, and very different, phase. Judaism raises problems of another kind. It has always endured as the one significant non-Christian religious strand in western culture, and, moreover, the two are, as it were, joined at the hip. What really complicates matters in the present context is, that as far as Psychology is concerned it is difficult to differentiate between Judaic and Jewish. A huge number of psychologists of all kinds have been ethnically Jewish, but aside from those who chose to focus their work on anti-semitism and racism (of which there were a considerable number in the post-1945 period), and some therapists working with Holocaust survivors, this has had no immediately discernible effect on their Psychological research methods or the nature of their theories, and the careers of most were in mixed Jewish-Gentile settings. If anything, their Judaic religious background is less visible than in the cases of psychologists with an avowed Christian belief, and certainly their number contains a high propor╇
‘Koans’ are brief paradoxical questions aimed at disrupting the hearer’s presuppositions about reality; the best known, now a cliché, is of course ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ ╇ This version of The Secret of the Golden Flower had originally appeared in English in 1931, but was reissued ‘revised and augmented’ in 1962 and went into several editions in the 1970s.
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tion of non-religious people. If the Judaic background enters into their work at all, it will largely be as mediated by a broader cultural heritage, in which certain styles of, and attitudes towards, learning and scholarship loomed large. Only in psychoanalysis may a deeper role for the religious tradition itself be discerned, as famously excavated by David Bakan in Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958). I explore this in Chap.€12, so will set it aside here. More distantly, we might detect some input from the Hassidic tradition into post-1945 humanistic Psychology via Martin Buber (see Chap.€5), but it would be difficult to pin this down in concrete specifics. Certainly, Buber was not, in I and Thou, trying to promote Hassidic mysticism as such. In short, excepting psychoanalysis, it is doubtful if Judaism itself has had a significant impact on Psychology. As far as Jewish psychologists are concerned, one might, though, speculate that their presence has, if anything, reinforced Psychology’s ostensibly secular approach, since their presence in American Psychology departments may have inhibited the religious ardour of some of their Christian colleagues. But that is an untested hypothesis. This has been a brief, almost tokenistic, chapter, and I am aware that it leaves me a hostage to academic fortune. Detailed examination of the lives and works of nonChristian psychologists would, I am sure, reveal a subtler, more nuanced, picture of the interplay between their religious backgrounds and their Psychologies. The dilemma raised regarding the status of the ‘Psychology’ contained in non-western religions, and how it should be addressed, is though, I think, a quite serious and relevant one.
Chapter 12
Religion and Psychological Theory
In Chap.€3 I proposed that Psychology was jointly constituted by religious and scientific parties and interests rather than simply being a scientific development to which the religious had to respond. If this is the case we would predict that Psychological theories and concepts of its disciplinary goals would in some ways reflect the religious (and indeed anti-religious) convictions of those formulating them. It has long been acknowledged that Psychological theories vary in character along several dimensions. These include the perennial ‘nature versus nurture’ axis, holism versus reductionism, ‘top-down’ versus ‘bottom up’, social constructionist versus positivist, individual (idiographic) versus generalist or normative (nomothetic) and so on. Psychology’s goals are similarly diversely conceived as, for example, governmental/managerial, liberationist, therapeutic, ‘purely scientific’ and medical. Psychologists have helped design bomb-sights, devised educational tests, sought to fight race prejudice, tried to rehabilitate criminals, helped individuals in quest of their ‘true selves’, advised football teams on morale and a thousand other things. Our question here then is how far the explicit or implicit religious positions of Psychologists can be identified in that heterogeneity of both theory and practice. The last half-century has seen a variety of kinds of historical scholarship providing insight into how religious beliefs or cultural background can permeate into Psychological theory and practise. While not permitting a definitive answer to the question just posed, these certainly provide a good basis from which the matter can be further explored. The nineteenth century founding psychologists discussed in Chap.€3 are in a sense the easy case. For this chapter I have, from the extensive material available, selected three further cases to demonstrate different ways in which historical work can be illuminating. These are Fernando Vidal’s 1988 study of the role of Jean Piaget’s Protestant background in the initial formation of his theoretical position, David Bakan’s classic 1958 Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition and recent studies of the U.S. personality theorist and later, social psychologist, Gordon W. Allport, notably I. A. M. Nicholson’s 2002 biography.
G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_12, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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Piaget: Salvaging Protestantism by Other Means? Vidal’s 1988 paper offers a quite radical re-reading of the nature of Piaget’s original project and how this determined his theoretical position. In fully documented detail he chronicles Piaget’s early identification with liberal Protestantism and close involvement with the Swiss Christian Students Association (SCSA), to which, in 1915, he addressed an essay, published in the Association’s journal: ‘Essay on the Empirical Genesis of Consciousness and its Reconciliation with Religion’, and later the same year, in the same outlet, a ‘poetical essay’ La Mission de l’Idée in which the ‘Idea’ (capitalised) is in effect the divine, which works its way through two lower levels: ‘ideas’ (uncapitalised) and ‘human formulas of the ideas’ (Vidal, 1988, p.€278). ‘The mission of the Idea was the rebirth of true Christianity through the realisation of the Idea’s echoes in human individuals and communities, under the form of justice, equality, women’s rights, socialism, the solidarity of science and the people’ (ibid, p.€279). Vidal sums up thus: ‘The Mission of the Idea detached divinity from Jesus, replaced theocentricity by idealism, and announced a sort of biological hope of identifying evolution and morality’ (ibid). One might note echoes too of early nineteenth century German transcendental idealism. Piaget was 19 when he wrote these two pieces. A bright and intellectually omnivorous young man, Piaget was at this time somewhat under the spell of Bergson as well as absorbing a wide range of contemporary philosophical and, increasingly, scientific, ideas and information. The central issue taxing liberal Protestantism at this time was the relationship between values and scientific facts. One strategy was, as we have observed several times, to insist on these as distinct, science being concerned only with the latter. This did not satisfy Piaget. Gradually abandoning his youthful philosophical idealism and Bergsonian views, Piaget (now aged 22) had another stab at the topic in his 1918 philosophical novel Recherche, in which he ‘would characterize his theoretical solution to the problem of basing morality on science as an “advanced”, nonmetaphysical Bergsonism, not yet as a scientific endeavor.’ (ibid, p.€281). It is here that he introduces what was to become the cornerstone of his theory, the notion of ‘equilibrium’. I need to quote Vidal at more length here: On the one hand, he argued, science showed that the ideal regulating ‘norm’ of all organisms, including society, was an equilibrated organization of their component parts. Disequilibrium was illness …. // On the other hand, Piaget claimed that science gave knowledge of good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly; it therefore provided a basis for morality, even if an act of faith was declared indispensable to give ethical meaning to scientific statements. Science, however, always turned out to be consistent with the choices of faith. (ibid, p.€282, my italics)
Only after this did Piaget begin to immerse himself in Psychology, psychiatry and psychoanalytic thought. Over the early 1920s Piaget embarked on his lifelong research project of exploring the genetic development of all aspects of the child’s psychology, while continuing to address the SCSA on the promise Psychology held for providing a scientific basis for religious values. One crucial argument he used
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was that ‘… logical and moral experiences were closely linked; contradiction in logic and contradiction in morals were “the two sides of the same phenomenon.”’ (ibid, p.€285, quoting Piaget’s 1922 talk on ‘Psychology and Religious Values’). Vidal continues: Science could not only control and validate reasoning, but also establish, ‘from the immanent and biological viewpoint of life and thought,’ a criterion based on the principle of noncontradiction, interpreted as a ‘law of psychological equilibrium.’ From noncontradiction ensued the following criterion: the more a value has potential to generate other values, the higher it is. Love was therefore the supreme value. (ibid, quoting the same source)
The matter continues to concern Piaget throughout the 1920s and into The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), an especially significant statement being Immanantisme et foi Religieuse (1930), published by a group of former members of the SCSA. Get this: … if, beyond men, one examines the currents of thought that propagate from generation to generation, immanentism appears as the continuation of the impulse to spiritualization that characterizes the history of the notion of divinity. The same progress is accomplished from the transcendental God endowed with supernatural causality to the purely spiritual God of immanent experience, as from the semi-material God of primitive religions to the metaphysical God. Now – and this is the essential point – to this progress in the realm of intelligence corresponds a moral and social progress, that is, ultimately an emancipation of inner life. (quoted in Vidal, ibid, p.€287)
From Vidal’s account I draw the following conclusions and observations. Piaget’s initial aim is, in essence, to pursue, in more sophisticated hard scientific terms, the goals we have already seen underlying liberal Protestant Psychology of Religion. He manages this by doing several things. Firstly, he adopts the progressive evolutionary image of the history of religion which was widespread at the time. Instead of seeing this progress in Comtean terms as marked by a gradual abandonment of religion, the religious saw it as marked by an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the nature of the spiritual and ‘man’s’ relationship to God. From such a viewpoint liberal Protestantism represents the currently highest form of this relationship, both historically (the Reformation being Christianity’s last great progressive shift in character, Protestantism continuing to evolve thereafter) and philosophically, in the move from transcendentalism to immanentism and acknowledgment of the core role of individual religious experience. Secondly, using the notions of ‘equilibrium’ and a progressive process of logical resolutions of disequilibrium, he can view both morals and logic as governed by the same progressive principle. This outflanks the facts versus values distinction and integrates the former with the liberal Protestant latter. Thirdly, using this theory he can embark on an empirical project of researching the genetic trajectory of this process from infancy to adulthood. It might thus be argued that Piaget’s initial puzzle was not about child development; the study of child development was a route for exploring empirically a more general topic and establishing a liberal Protestant epistemology which could embrace religious values as well as descriptive ‘facts’. That Piaget was concerned as much with the philosophical question of epistemology as with child development
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has long been accepted, his deep programme being to convert epistemology from a philosophical topic into an empirical psychological one. What is not apparent from his later theoretical statements such as Structuralism (1971), The Principles of Genetic Epistemology (1972) and Psychology and Epistemology: Towards a Theory of Knowledge (1972) is how profoundly his entire project was determined by concerns which were, at heart, religious. More seriously, they occlude the degree to which these concerns determined the very nature of the theory itself. As Vidal notes, Piaget’s own autobiographical account also misleadingly underplays the role of religion in providing the opening framework for his Psychological thought. It is inconceivable that a devout Catholic, however scientific in outlook, could have produced Piaget’s Psychology.
Freud: The Mysterious Nature of Psychoanalysis The history of psychoanalysis is a sub-discipline in itself. On Freud alone there are hagiographies, demonographies (if that is a word) and an autobiography alongside accounts of his relationships with numerous colleagues, associates and analysands. More broadly, the history of psychoanalysis itself has been explored from numerous angles; its origins, its spread, its influences on twentieth century culture and so on. This is to leave aside its numerous theoretical expositions, refutations, empirical testings and popularisations. Among the works which stand out from this vast literature one, among a number, of the most enduring has been U.S. psychologist David Bakan’s Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (1958). Since psychoanalysis has been the single most conceptually fertile Psychological theory of the last century, its language and images of the human mind being assimilated far beyond adherents to the doctrine itself and permeating modern everyday psychological discourse, the notion that its character is deeply permeated by its founder’s Jewish religious cultural background is clearly within our remit here. Bakan’s exposition of this thesis in particular deserves a further brief airing after more than four decades. As an aside, I am increasingly struck by how, especially perhaps in the English-speaking world, even well-educated Gentiles know very little of Jewish diaspora cultural and religious history. Our image of this often amounts to no more than awareness that the Jews have perennially been persecuted, forced into exile and periodically massacred in large numbers on the basis of crude anti-semitic stereotypes and myths. But dates and places we cannot cite. We are aware that there are now three broad schools of Judaism—Reformed, Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, and though we may have heard of the Torah, the Talmud and the Kabbalah, have but vague notions of what these terms refer to. I mention this because appreciation of the power of Bakan’s thesis ╇
This appeared in E. G. Boring et€al. (eds) (1952) A History of Psychology in Autobiography, Vol.€4. ╇ There has been a long tradition, since the early sixteenth century Humanists, of Gentile Hebrew scholarship but this has been primarily focussed on Biblical studies. ‘Occultists’ have also tended to assimilate Kabbalistic ideas into their own eclectic esoteric systems. The only semi-Kabbalistic
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requires some sense of how rich and complex this occluded history has been, something unachievable in a brief secondary account such as this. Bakan was not the first to see an affinity between psychoanalysis and Jewish religious thought. A. A. Roback in particular published three articles on the topic in Jewish Forum and B’nai B’rith Magazine from 1918 to 1926, and was personally known to Bakan. Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition is a systematic exploration of the topic in a series of short, generally clear and succinct, chapters. He begins by making the case that a satisfying explanation of the origins of psychoanalysis must take cultural context fully into account. It is easy to identify anticipations of specific Freudian ideas but these cannot adequately explain the distinctively original character and mood of psychoanalysis, or Freud’s intention of radically and totally revising our concept of human nature. On the face of it, psychoanalysis seems to appear out of the blue as Freud’s personal brainchild. This clearly will not do. He begins his analysis proper thus: The thesis of this essay is that the contributions of Freud are to be understood largely as a contemporary version of, and a contemporary contribution to, the history of Jewish mysticism. Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularized Jewish mysticism; and psychoanalysis can intelligently be viewed as such a secularization. As we hope will become clear … Freud was engaged in the issues set by this history. (p.€25)
What then unfolds may be summarised as a claim that the ‘influence’ is evident at three levels. Firstly, Freud’s own profound Jewish, and indeed Messianic, identifications. Particularly significant here was the Sabbatian tradition ultimately derived from the seventeenth century ‘false Messiah’ Sabbatai Zevi (who finally ostentatiously work at all widely heard of (if not read) has been Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed dating from the twelfth century C.E. ╇ David Bakan died in 2004. David M. Wulff has kindly forwarded to me copies of an e-mail correspondence with him in 2001. With his permission I might cite the following extended passage from Bakan to Wulff, 10th August 2001: ╇
… I think it was the 1926 [Roback] article [which he had come across in the mid-fifties]. … Let me try to reconstruct this as best I can. I was teaching at the University of Missouri in the 50s. I remember the day that the idea of the relationship between Freud and Jewish Mysticism occurred to me. I was reading Gershom Scholems, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. At that time I had decided to give a seminar on what I called ‘The psychology of obscure communication.’ I was doing Freud, Alice in Wonderland, the English translation of the Zohar, the Bible, with a wonderful gang.// … Then I went to Harvard at the mentoring and encouragement of David McClelland [remembered for his work on achievement motivation] … I did a seminar on Freud and Jewish mysticism, taught Allport’s Theories of Personality course, and finished the book while I was there.// And I met Roback who, lived right near Harvard Square. I believe it was Allport who suggested I look him up. We had a good meeting. It was basically an ‘of course Freud derives from the Jewish mystical tradition.’// It is remotely possible that I read the Roback article when I was in Missouri. I know that I read it. I know that I forgot that I had read it. This could refer either to ‘Freud, Chassid or Humanist’ or ‘Is Psychoanalysis a Jewish Movement?’, both of which appeared in 1926. Roback himself was an eminent mid-twentieth century psychologist and historian of Psychology as well as an authority on Yiddish and author of Jewish Influence on Modern Thought (1929). A subsequent work on the significance of Judaism for understanding Freud was E. A. Grollman (1965).
╇
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converted to Islam). Secondly, close affinities and similarities between the structure and principles of Kabbalistic mysticism and those of psychoanalysis. Thirdly, the affinities and similarities between Kabbalistic and psychoanalytic techniques. To grasp the first of these, we need to set Freud in the cultural context of the 1870s–1880s Austro–Hungarian Empire and the position of Jews therein. The 1880s saw a major upsurge of demagogic anti-semitism and associated violent attacks. However assimilated some Jews may have become in their professional lives, their personal lives remained substantially confined within a fairly tight-knit Jewish community. The anti-semitic uproar peaked in 1882, providing immediate contextual background to Freud’s ‘turning point’ departure from Brücke’s Institute on Brücke’s advice, ostensibly because of Freud’s poor financial circumstances. This ‘official’ version of his departure does not, it transpires, quite meet the case. Bakan further details Freud’s family connections to eminent figures in the Chassidic tradition and claims: Freud, we believe, participated in the historical continuity provided by Chassidism. However, the Sabbatian elements were still present in Chassidism, even if in latent form. The encounter of the Jews with [late 19th century] Western civilization tended to arouse these dim Sabbatian elements. As we will see, Freud had strong heretical tendencies, yet he did not relinquish his self-identification as a Jew. His quarrel was with the older orthodox forms of Judaism. (pp.€115–116)
There is much else to Bakan’s argument of course, including evidence of how Freud’s position and attitudes were shared by many of his generation. One very important strategy Bakan adopts is a detailed examination of Freud’s Messianic identification as revealed in his two highly atypical writings on Moses: his 1914 paper ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, published anonymously in the psychoanalytic journal Imago and the very late 1939 Moses and Monotheism, published with great hesitancy which is ‘… by any of the usual criteria used to evaluate books, incredibly bad’ (p.€137). We should at this point note that Bakan has earlier dealt at some length with the issues of ‘dissimulation’ and ‘writing between the lines’ as common tactics in the writings of the oppressed and features of some of Freud’s other writings. The extended treatment of this theme is a real tour de force on Bakan’s part. The outcome is complex and seems a little less plausible when baldly stated than Bakan actually makes it. In short, Freud’s 1939 thesis that Moses was an Egyptian, not a Jew, echoes and continues the Sabbatian rejection of Moses and the authority of Talmudic law. Since Moses was also responsible for introducing the features of Judaic culture which Gentiles find so offensive (e.g. especially the notion that the Jews are the ‘Chosen People’), it is not therefore the Jews who are ultimately to blame for these but the Gentile Moses who ‘adopted’ them as his chosen people (the ╇
Sabbatai Zevi’s appearance coincided with the largest massacre of Jews prior to the Holocaust. ╇ Chassidism had originated around 1700, founded by Israel Baal Shem Tov, and had reconciled the diverging orthodox Talmudic and mystical Kabbalistic strands in Judaism which had become increasingly apostate or heretical in the wake of Sabbatai Zevi and another ‘false Messiah’, Jacob Frank (who eventually converted to Catholicism).
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childhood fantasy of being the adopted offspring of noble parents and the contortions this has undergone in the Jewish historical myth are deployed here). Bakan reads this as a way of spiking the guns of the anti-semites at the price of casting the Jews as history’s biggest dupes. Freud’s relationship with Moses is thus at two levels, both as the repressive father figure/super ego who has to be Oedipally slain and as a Messiah liberating his people from oppression into a ‘promised land’ (in the Sabbatian mould). The Michelangelo statue of Moses also becomes some kind of model for Freud of what Bakan calls the ‘suspended super-ego’, immobile in its wrath, and thus never actually implementing punishment. This clearly relates to the analyst’s role. In short then, Freud’s own personality structure and motivation was, in Bakan’s view, embedded in and largely determined by the historical and cultural circumstances of the Austrian Jewish community to which he belonged, resulting in a secular Messianic self-identification as an iconoclastic liberator. The affinities between the Kabbalah and psychoanalysis are numerous. The Kabbalah itself is a mystical tradition dating from Roman times, although the word itself is first known from the eleventh century C.E., its core text being the Zohar. In the Zohar it takes the form of a commentary on the Torah or Pentateuch—the five Biblical books ascribed to Moses from Genesis to Deuteronomy (known in Hebrew as the Tanakh). The central idea of the Kabbalah is that every word and phrase of the Torah is sacred and has multiple levels of symbolic significance. By scrupulous, supervised, pious study and meditation on these the Kabbalist draws nearer to God and successive layers of wisdom are revealed. Over time this attitude extended beyond the Torah to the Messiah himself. All the attitudes of reverence towards the Torah transferred themselves to the image of the Messiah. Later the person of the Zaddik, the Holy Man, the center of the Chassidic groups, came to be regarded as a Torah. … We may say that Freud carried this transition one step further. The Kabbalistic forms of interpretation were now to be used in the appreciation of any human being. (p.€246, Bakan’s italics)
Bakan, reflexively using a psychoanalytic mode of analysis (which is surely in order in dealing with Freud himself), makes a good case for Freud’s selection of ‘Dora’ as the name of the analysand with whom he discovered the ‘transference’ being a pun on Torah. A second basic resemblance between the two is the centrality of sexuality. There was a sense in which the world was ready for Freud’s ideas. Yet this complex message about sexuality was hardly present in the main stream of Western civilization. We find a conception of sexuality startlingly close to Freud’s in the Kabbalistic tradition, mixed with many supernatural notions which tend to turn the modern enlightened mind away from it. (p.€271) // Never in the Jewish tradition was sexual asceticism made a religious value. (p.€272)
This point is elaborated at some length in Chap.€33, again drawing attention to some specific similarities in the detail of how sexuality is conceived. Of particular signifi╇ To footnote a footnote—on p.€249 he footnotes that in the Kabbalistic work Sefer Yetzirah it is said that t and d are essentially identical and interchangeable.
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cance is the meaning of the ninth Sephira, called Y’sod, in the Kabbalistic doctrine of the ten Sephiroth, the ‘mystical emanations and dominions of God’ (p.€277). These are traditionally mapped onto the human body in the Kabbalistic ‘tree’ diagram. Y’sod is located at the genitals and the word means, in effect, ‘secret foundation’. ‘The sexual is the secret foundation of all things. … Thus the Y’sod is the locus and fountain of all life and vitality, and from it the world is nurtured’ (ibid). This notion obviously parallels the Freudian libido. While ultimately masculine, it is in many respects bi-sexual. Bakan explores this in much more depth than can be indicated here. Regarding psychoanalytic technique, there are, once more, a number of connections or resemblances. These include the idea that oral transmission is essential to full comprehension and that the quest must be undertaken with an associate and cannot be done alone. The requirement for training analysis and need for the analyst–analysand relationship obviously match this. Linked to this is the notion of secrecy, which applies both to analysis itself and the restriction of ‘wisdom’ only to those who have been properly initiated, so to speak, into the meaning and practice of psychoanalysis. More striking is, as already indicated, their similarities of interpretative technique, which include ‘free association’, the importance of dreams themselves, and a penchant for numerological games. The thirteenth century C.E. Spanish Kabbalist, Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia is identified as prominent among those who developed such methods in order to ‘unseal the soul, to untie the knots that bind it’ (p.€76, quoting G. G. Scholem’s account). It is not just the general idea of viewing the human as a ‘Torah’, whose actions and experiences have symbolic depths which require interpretation, which Freud shares with the Kabbalistic tradition, but the very procedures by which this is done. To summarise Bakan’s image of the Freud–Judaism relationship then, we have a multi-level penetration of the Kabbalistic tradition, especially but not exclusively its heretical Sabbatian element, into psychoanalytic theory. At the most basic level, it is only within this framework that Freud’s entire project and quasi-Messianic goals become fully comprehensible as historical and cultural phenomena. At the more directly theoretical level, the actual structure of, and centrality of sexuality to, psychoanalysis demonstrably represent a secularised version of the Kabbalistic image of human nature. Finally, the techniques and practise of psychoanalysis, extending to the social organisation of early psychoanalysis, can again be identified as resembling those of Kabbalistic training and meditation. There is much I have been unable to cover here, notably a fascinating examination of the symbolism of the Devil and the demonic along with a closing chapter on the ‘uncanny’. Bakan leaves open the question of quite how far Freud was consciously and deliberately working within the Sabbatian, Chassidic and Kabbalistic traditions, the evidence being most╇ The Oedipal ramifications of the complex idea of the feminine Shekinah, ‘God’s Divine Presence’, identified with the community of Israel itself ‘with God as her spouse’ (p.€273), and its links with Y‘’sod, are far too tortuous to summarise here, even if felt I properly understood them, which I do not. ╇ Gershom G. Scholem (1954) Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p.€131.
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ly circumstantial. This is only to be expected though, since Freud would, for obvious reasons, have been very reluctant openly to advertise any links, while secrecy was a central feature of Kabbalism anyway. That he knew, in general terms, about these aspects of his cultural–religious heritage must, I think, go without saying. What conclusions are we to draw from this for our present purpose? If we are prepared to grant that modern Psychology has been deeply, if often covertly, affected by the liberal Protestant tradition, we must concede the possibility that the Jewish one will in all likelihood have also made itself felt. What is intriguing is the twist that in doing so in psychoanalytic theory it took an explicitly anti-religious form, not of the orthodox physicalist and reductionist kind but one reflecting the anti-orthodox Kabbalistic Sabbatian mythos element in Judaism. The remarkable success which psychoanalysis enjoyed in twentieth century western culture at large, its infusion into the very ways we speak about ourselves and how we conceptualise psychotherapy (however diverse this now is), may be read as Freud’s own success in dramatically breaching the divide between Judaic and mainstream Gentile cultures while addressing the mythos function. That his fellow Jews would spot this more clearly than the Gentiles, and that they might be inclined to stay schtum on the matter, is unsurprising. Whether or not one buys the whole of Bakan’s thesis (some of it does, I confess, strike me as a little ‘off the wall’), the ball really rests in any would-be outright opponent’s court to demonstrate why the copious material he marshalls and the logic of his arguments are irrelevant or mistaken. And despite the stress which Freud and his followers have always laid upon the ‘scientific’ character of psychoanalysis, it is also, on Bakan’s evidence, clear that Freud himself had a very ambivalent attitude towards mainstream science. The real point surely is that it is extremely hard to envisage how psychoanalysis could have emerged within a purely orthodox physiologically reductionist, quantitatively oriented, late nineteenth century scientific context—as some sort of logical stage in the development of ‘Modern Science’. The existence of such a context, and Freud’s partial identification with it, could only provide necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the birth of psychoanalysis. Add the Jewish religious and cultural factor to the equation and the mysteriousness of this largely dissipates. Not least among the issues it illuminates are the eternal difficulties in adjudicating on what kind of a thing psychoanalysis is, along with its own, partly self-imposed, ghettoization as a school of Psychological thought. Enough food for thought there to be getting on with.
Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967): The Psychology of an Episcopalian Of all the major twentieth century American psychologists Gordon Allport was perhaps the most upfront about his religious beliefs, albeit calculatedly discreet about them in most of his public Psychological work prior to The Individual and His Religion (1950). Recently, Allport has attracted attention from several writers, not least regarding his religious position. In what follows I am drawing primarily
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on Nicholson (2002) and Vande Kemp (2000), as well as, more tangentially, on Pandora (1997) and Fuller (2006). His maternal grandparents, especially his grandmother, were austere Free Methodists of terrifying puritanical piety. While this moderated somewhat in his parents, especially after they moved from agrarian small-town locations to exploding industrial Cleveland, his mother sustained her religious piety throughout Allport’s childhood. With three elder brothers, all typically robustly masculine in temperament, the gentler, less macho, Gordon early on opted for scholastic achievement and disengagement from the more barbarian aspects of extra-curricular schoolboy life. He also internalised the religious ideals of his mother more thoroughly than did his siblings, and although by the time he entered Harvard his religious observance had waned, his spiritual yearnings remained unabated. At Harvard (where his elder brother Floyd had already graduated as a psychologist and was working as Hugo Munsterberg’s assistant) Allport discovered Psychology, becoming converted to the discipline’s hard scientific ‘natural science’ experimentalist ideals, then burgeoning in the wake of J. B. Watson’s behaviourism. At the same time he trawled the various churches, including the Unitarians, but none satisfied him. What happened next changed things dramatically. In 1919, having graduated, he began a year’s teaching English at Robert College in Constantinople (Istanbul), a missionary college, but ‘his reason for going to Robert College has more to do with his own sense of spiritual unease than with any larger concerns about saving humanity for Christ’ (Nicholson, 2002, p.€57). The episode had two major effects. First, the spectacle of impoverishment he found in Istanbul disenchanted rather than inspired him. Although on his return he would join Harvard’s Department of Social Ethics as a graduate student, he had become very sceptical about Psychology’s role in directly helping solve social problems. The second effect was triggered by his discovery of the intensity of Old World religious practise, initially when visiting the Church of St. Sophia, which had been converted into a mosque. Both the spectacular early Byzantine Christian architecture and the fervour of the Muslim worshippers struck a deep chord. On leaving Istanbul he visited Rome, where the aesthetic-cum-spiritual appeal of the architecture and elaborate religious rituals confirmed his feeling of having discovered a satisfying mode of belief. ‘Meaning, significance, and authenticity seemed to lie in the timeless beauty of premodern Christian forms’ (ibid, p.€66). While not becoming a Roman Catholic, on his return to the U.S. he joined the Church of the Advent in Boston, which represented ‘the ornate world of Anglo-Catholic Episcopalianism’ (ibid, p.€123). This was the U.S. equivalent of the ‘High Church’ wing of the English Anglican (Church of England) mother church. This remained his spiritual home ever after. (He was eventually confirmed during a visit to Cambridge, England; indeed, in the very pre-modern setting of medieval Ely Cathedral.) He had now fixed on the then unfashionable topic of personality as his Psychological research focus. By the end of the 1930s, especially following his own 1937 Personality: a Psychological Interpretation, this was to become a central sub-discipline in U.S. Psychology, due, in no small part, to his efforts. While his role has
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sometimes been a little overstated, it subsequently became commonplace to identify him as its founding father. It is to this project we now need to turn. Allport’s choice of personality as his professional field was no accident. By the time he graduated, he was already distressed at the seemingly reductionist, materialist, approaches Psychology was taking, both theoretically and methodologically. It was not that he rejected these outright, far from it, but that he felt they ignored the most important thing of all, each person’s possession of a unique, spiritual, individuality which transcended such reductionism. It was this that the term ‘personality’ ultimately denoted. He saw the enemy on several fronts: behaviourist approaches which reduced all to an assemblage of atomic S–R connections, sociological approaches which seemed to him to reduce individuals to mere products of external circumstances with no transcendent autonomous core and psychoanalysis which purveyed a degrading image of even human nature’s highest achievements as motivated by sexual instincts—another form of reductionism10. This attitude was reinforced and intellectually strengthened during a visit to Germany during 1922–1923. Nicholson reports Allport describing this, perhaps a little grandiosely, as a ‘second intellectual dawn’. The holistic philosophically-based Psychologies of Wilhelm Stern and Eduard Spranger, especially the latter’s typological analysis of personality in terms of ‘life forms’ defined by their unifying central motivational character, greatly boosted Allport’s confidence in his young project and provided him with the conceptual armoury to justify it. This came at a time when U.S. Psychology in general had turned away from German Psychology. As Allport’s personality theory and research developed through the 1920s and 1930s, an inner contradiction or paradox becomes all too striking, a leitmotif throughout Nicholson’s account. His religious motivation is quite explicit in a letter to his wife Ada on the publication of Personality: ‘… it isn’t my book, never have I felt possessive of it. I believe I was appointed by Providence to add a bit of push backward to the rising tide of barbarism and ignorance in psychology’ (quoted ╇
There is an interesting and complex story to be told about the relationship between the Psychological concept of ‘personality’ and the preceding morally-laden nineteenth century term ‘character’. Nicholson explores this at numerous points, but I am, for the most part, leaving it aside here. 10╇ His antipathy to Freud had not been helped by a brief visit he had made to 19 Berggase in 1920, aged 22, on his return from Istanbul. Having failed to think through what he would say before arriving, he found himself tongue-tied. To convey his psychological credentials, he then told Freud an anecdote about a little boy aged about four he had seen on the tram, accompanied by a ‘well-starched Hausfrau’ with a ‘dominant and purposive look’. The boy appeared to have extreme dirt-phobia and kept saying ‘I don’t want to sit there … don’t let that dirty old man sit beside me’. For Freud it must have been like shooting fish in a bucket. He simply made the obvious response ‘And was that little boy you?’. Allport was ‘flabbergasted’ and forever maintained that Freud had completely missed the mark. So here is Allport, son of a Puritanical mother for whom cleanliness would have been a standard virtue, going to visit the man who, because of his sexual theory, was already the canonical ‘dirty old man’ of Psychology—and he cannot see the link?! So Allport, like the little boy, refused to ‘sit beside’ him ever after. Unlike other U.S. psychologists, Allport’s rejection of psychoanalysis was not that it was unscientific on methodological grounds, Allport himself would insist on the value of the individual case-study, but its all-too-scientific reductionism as he saw it.
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in Nicholson, 2000, p.€205). And yet in practise, what he promoted was the rigorous development of psychometric personality assessment methods which measured ‘traits’ such as ascendence–submission and introversion–extraversion. He is constantly staying scientifically on-side by demonstrating a commitment to the very quantitative methods which he simultaneously claims to be incapable of actually capturing what the field is intended to study—‘personality’ in all its transcendent unique wholeness. In a nutshell, he was deeply anti-modernist in outlook, wanting to ‘protect personality from prying modernist eyes and controlling ambitions’ (ibid, p.€224) at the same time as he wanted to know personality scientifically. Allport’s personality theory has a number of key features, in each of which we can see an effort to reconcile the paradox. Methodologically he has become famous for differentiating ‘nomothetic’ methods, quantitatively using large numbers of ‘subjects’ from ‘idiographic’ methods, using case-histories of individual lives. Despite his insistence on the importance of the second of these, vital if the goal of study individuals as unique ‘wholes’ was to be achieved, it remained largely undeveloped and his own few ventures were not entirely successful. Conceptually he insists on ‘functional autonomy’ and ‘propriate striving’. As we grow, we develop or acquire new motivations aimed at new goals; these cannot be reductively explained (as psychoanalysis would have it) as serving instincts or as infant gratification masquerading as something more socially acceptable. These are genuinely self-sufficient ‘functions’ which we strive to serve and which can be understood and accepted on their own terms. Forward, future-oriented, striving is an intrinsic human characteristic for Allport, and he will deploy this in his defence of religion in The Individual and His Religion (1950). If achieved, full maturity is marked by the emergence of an integrated, functionally autonomous, system of values. But this emergence is achieved as much in a top-down fashion as from the bottom up—it is the achievement of the over-arching ‘total personality’ in its highest form, striving from birth onwards to order its experience. En route to this we will develop several subordinate but interlinked ‘selves’ appropriate for different circumstances, and below these numerous more holistic ‘traits’ will be exhibited which integrate lower level conditioned reflexes and habits. But nomothetic methods are only appropriate up to the trait level. In The Individual and His Religion Allport spells it out that the fullest maturity is marked by achieving what he calls a ‘mature religious sentiment’. ‘In any single life this sentiment is almost certain to be more complex, more subtle, and more personal in flavour, than any single definition of religion can possibly suggest’ (Allport, 1950, p.€64). By the end of the 1930s and during the 1940s Allport’s resistence to involvements in social issues progressively relaxes, although he never relents on his individualist concept of personality, rejecting for example the research emanating from the ‘culture and personality’ school of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict and exiled post-Freudians such as Erik Erikson. But conversely, he is a co-founder of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues in 1936. In effect he adds a second string to his bow, Social Psychology, separate from the Psychology of Personality. Between 1930 and 1939 he moved rapidly from rebel anti-reductionist outsidership to one of U.S. Psychology’s most eminent figures, serving as American
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Psychological Association President in 1938. Katherine Pandora (1997) has examined in depth how, along with Gardner Murphy and Lois Barclay Murphy, Allport and others broke the hard experimentalist stranglehold on U.S. Psychology in the Depression and New Deal social contexts. Another fellow-spirit was Henry A. Murray, the Jung-influenced director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and creator of the Thematic Apperception Test. With the Second World War no U.S. psychologists could remain on the sidelines. In this connection Vande Kemp (2000) cites two relevant Allport pieces: a 1941 talk ‘Does psychology conflict with religion’ and a 1943 address to the Massachusetts Clerical Association, Cathedral of St. Paul, Boston, The Clergyman as Mind Raid Warden. The latter in particular harangues the American people on several counts: tendency to scapegoating, thus displacing responsibility for the war, guilt, inactivity, distrust of allies, and tendency to isolationism. All these are things which the church should actively try and combat. Scapegoating had now become one of Allport’s major concerns, resulting in the short ABCs of Scapegoating (1944a), a foreunner of his last major work, The Nature of Prejudice (1954). His religious output during the 1940s was in fact considerable, although mainly issued by religious organisations or in his (usually) annual Sermons at Harvard’s Appleton Chapel (Vande Kemp identifies ‘at least’ 36 between 1932 and 1966, op. cit., p.€130). Most of these were eventually published posthumously (Allport, 1978). In his pre-1950 religious work he is far more explicit than he could allow himself to be in his formal Psychology. Religious faith, he affirmed, would always be the outcome of honest scholarship (op. cit., p.€131), the final form of each person’s faith is unique (pp.€132–133), and in religion we are striving for an unattainable ideal, but it is the struggle itself that matters (pp.€133–134). The aesthetic component in his faith comes across in a curious passage in one of his Advent Papers, written in fictional dialogue form, in which his alter ego says that, following ‘mystical experiences’ which had led him to believe in the probability of God’s existence certainty increased when he ‘observed the power and beauty of the lives of people who had a secure religious faith’ (p.€141). In a 1933 archival document he enumerates seven ‘roots’ of faith that ‘nourish not doubt but fear and suspicion’ (see ibid, pp.€143–146). What I find curious about this treatment of doubt is how resolutely negative Allport’s take is, with no recognition such as Weatherhead and Tillich articulated that doubt was an intrinsic component of a living active faith. I refer the reader to Vande Kemp’s paper for fuller coverage of Allport’s religious writing. What I find most striking about Allport’s religious position is that he is clearly one of William James’s ‘once-born’ believers. At no point in his biography is he genuinely racked by doubts. He is prone to what he takes to be occasional ‘mystical experiences’, generally aesthetic in nature, but until his commitment to High Church Anglicanism his struggle is to find a religion which lives up to his ideals or can meet his ‘spiritual’ needs, these ideals and needs are never called into question. In 1950, Allport is finally prepared to offer a clear statement in which he defends religion in terms of his own personality model: The Individual and His Religion. One early move is to rigorously differentiate the social functions of institutional religion from its function for the individual, reiterating that the latter takes a form
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unique to each individual (pp.€29–30). After a review of ‘The Religion of Youth’ which takes a fairly orthodox ‘Psychology of Religion’ approach he moves on to ‘The Religion of Maturity’. To explain his concept of the ‘mature religious sentiment’, he draws on the three criteria for a mature personality he had expounded in Personality (1937): ‘a variety of psychogenic interests … which concern themselves with ideal objects and values beyond the range of viscerogenic desire’; ‘the ability to objectify oneself, to be reflective and insightful about one’s own life’; ‘some unifying philosophy of life, although not necessarily religious …, nor articulated in words, nor entirely complete’ (p.€59). Thus the ‘mature religious sentiment’ has become ‘functionally autonomous’, it has become independent of its childhood origins, it no longer serves other motives but has become a ‘master-motive’ (pp.€70– 72). Finally it is directive: ‘New religious sentiments are maturing all the time, producing fresh moral zeal, and engendering consistency upon men’s purposes’ (p.€75). Passing over his discussion of mental health aspects, we may next briefly mention his extended chapter on ‘The Nature of Doubt’. This is notable mainly for its extended reiteration and expansion of the position on the topic he had taken earlier. What he is doing here is strenuously arguing against doubt, casting doubt on all the grounds for doubt. Granted he says many interesting things en route, but it all rather smacks of standard Christian apologetic rather than showing an in-depth appreciation of the genuine religious importance of doubt as such. Earlier he makes a fairly passing reference to faith being forged in dark nights of the soul, but one gets the feeling that once that’s over, everything is fine. He is here fighting doubt off rather than submitting to it in all its force in order to fully experience its psychological depth. We feel he never really knew despair and wonder how he reacted to Tillich’s Harvard sermons (assuming he attended them). Finally he addresses the ‘Nature of Faith’, sketching the various ways in which it can be validated, before closing inspirationally: ‘A man’s religion is the audacious bid he makes to bind himself to creation and the Creator. It is his ultimate attempt to enlarge and complete his own personality by finding the supreme context in which he rightly belongs.’ But even as he so confidently asserts the legitimacy of religious belief—or at least unceasing religious aspiration—there are lurking questions he has evaded. What, we may ask, of those ‘mature personalities’ whom he has diplomatically stated do not necessarily have religious beliefs? And if ‘mature religious sentiment’ is so uniquely individual in character, why has he been drawn so closely into High Church ritualism and collective worship? This had not simply been a matter of preference but was the result of an ethical evaluation of the merits of rival denominations. How relativistic is he really prepared to be? We still, in short, get a sense of a tension between what he really believes and what he is prepared to say. There is a further tension between his pluralistic understanding of the varieties of human personality and the uniquely high valuation he places on achieving the ‘mature religious sentiment’. And is it out of order to suggest that there is, in any case, an element of protesting too much in all this insistence on ‘mature religious sentiment’? The Individual and his Religion is in many respects the last gasp of traditional ‘Psychology of Religion’. Allport always had great respect for William James, often being cast as carrying the Jamesian pragmatic tradition, and his 1943 paper ‘Productive
Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967): The Psychology of an Episcopalian
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Paradoxes of William James’ remains a valuable overview of James’ often ambiguous positions. But his insistence on the existence of a ‘total personality’ contrasts with William James’ firm rejection of the notion of a ‘transcendental ego’ (James, 1890), and his account of religion, if more focussed and technically articulated than James’, represents a definite narrowing of James’ open-ended position. After this somewhat extended, albeit often cursory, coverage, we may return to the main theme. The Psychology of Personality became a major genre in U.S. Psychology between c. 1930 and the late 1970s, after which the period of grand theorising and methodological creativity was largely over. It has since become a rather amorphous and scattered field, with a core of pretty routinised psychometric research centred on factor analysis, principal component analysis and other advanced statistical methods. Its other concerns have become parcelled out among Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy, Social Psychology and studies of cognitive style, to name but a few relevant fields. The history of personality theory in Psychology is a fascinating and many-facetted topic with connections in all directions from cultural history to philosophy and physiology. As a distinct project, however, it was effectively launched by Gordon Allport and a handful of others around 1930, with his Personality (1937) rapidly acquiring the status of a canonical founding text (although R. Stagner’s Psychology of Personality of the same year was, in retrospect at least, rather subtler in its treatment of the social dimension). My case here is that the evidence provided by Nicholson and Vande Kemp as well as Allport’s own writings justifies us in viewing his Psychological theory of personality (and by implication, much of the sub-discipline it was so central in creating) as religiously driven. By Allport’s own admission, for the person of ‘mature religious sentiment’, their religion is the ‘master-motive’. His own initial religious position was untypical of many of his generation who, having accepted liberal Protestantism and social ‘Progressivism’, gradually lost their religious faith as such, but continued to espouse and advocate its values—sometimes finding, in Psychology, the vehicle for doing so (Pandora (1997) shows how this applied to Gardner and Lois Barclay Murphy, while Carl Rogers would be a similar case). Allport’s religious concerns (also widespread) were differently pitched—liberal Protestantism had become a faith which had lost its way, while, especially after his Constantinople sojourn, he saw Psychology’s role in promoting Progressivist social causes as extremely limited. He was, in truth, in something of a bind. ‘Spiritually’, emotionally and aesthetically anti-modernist, he was nevertheless committed to the natural science model of Psychology, with all that implied in terms of quantitative methodologies and laboratory-based experimental research. At the heart of his anti-modernism was a religious conviction of the existence of a sacrosanct, unified and unique individual ‘total personality’, a spiritual core which materialist science could never capture, but which was of absolutely paramount importance. The threats which psychologistic reductionism on the one hand and collectivist social theories on the other were mounting against this ‘total personality’ had to be fought off at all costs. For Allport this, professionally, meant insisting on the ‘total personality’
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as a legitimate focus for Psychological research, providing its ineffable heights were acknowledged, while personally it entailed being centred in a clearly defined form of religious faith. We should not, therefore, really be talking about the influence of religion on Allport’s personality theory, but see his personality theory as a direct product of his religious beliefs. That he never failed to resolve the inherent paradox in this strategy does not alter this. If his religious position was not entirely typical, it nevertheless spoke to deep religious and psychological anxieties widespread in the inter-bellum U.S. and beyond: ‘materialism’, decline in religious belief, a sense that liberal Protestantism had become anaemic and over-intellectualised, plus fears of the loss of individuality in mass urban culture. Ironically, we can only too well understand Allport’s own personality as a product of his social and historical circumstances. This does not mean it was nothing but such a product, it does though suggest that his clear resistance to biting the existentialist bullet or diving into his own unconscious carried a price as far as the historical longevity of his vision is concerned. I submit then that Gordon Allport’s case further illustrates how deeply the religious factor can penetrate into ostensibly mainstream ‘scientific’ Psychology. But there is a final, complementary, twist which needs a very short airing.
Atheism and Anti-religious Psychology It is one thing to be indifferent to religion, quite another to passionately oppose it. If religious beliefs can affect the character of Psychology, it is clearly possible that vehemently anti-religious, particularly atheist, beliefs can do likewise. As a supposed natural science Psychology, like any other science, eschews explicitly religious statements, even if, as we have been seeing, implicit religious assumptions and motives can exist just beneath the surface. Its overt discursive character is thus always ostensibly ‘atheist’ in the sense that references to God or religious beliefs are deemed unnecessary. Identifying any positive effects of atheism is therefore rather harder than identifying religious effects. At any rate, virtually no historical work on Psychology has been aimed at finding them. I am, therefore, only raising this possibility in a somewhat speculative fashion. While Freud’s case is too complex to fit into the simple category ‘atheist’, one other which does suggest itself is J. B. Watson, whose hatred of religion was well advertised and who saw it as supplying one of the superstitious fetters from which his behaviourism sought to liberate mankind (Watson, 1924, final paragraph). At the other end of behaviourism’s career as a major theoretical school, B. F. Skinner might be invoked to similar effect, but his autobiography does not, I think, suggest anything especially passionate about his disbelief (Skinner, 1976). While feeling bound to raise the possibility of strong ‘anti-religious’ motives sometimes being in play, at this stage I demur from pursuing the topic further. In the next chapter we will though be looking at the anti-religious view of the Psychology–religion relationship.
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Conclusion The message of this chapter has been to show that the character of very major Psychological theories can be affected by the religious positions of their proponents. These can operate at several levels; the psychologist’s own motivation, which underlies the theory, features of the theory itself, and the methods of research adopted. It could, on reflection, hardly be otherwise. Psychologists have, since the discipline’s mid-nineteenth century beginnings, lived, thought, worked and theorised in cultural contexts of which religion has been a salient feature. Their labours have necessarily been framed by prevailing ethical and religious preoccupations which they largely share. They have not stood on one side of some great divide between Psychology and religion, or even science and religion. It may be that some fields, such as psychophysics or perception, can proceed in ‘normal’ scientific fashion indifferent to the big issues facing their host societies. But when it comes to psychological topics such as child development, education, personality, psychopathology and social behaviour, there is no escape. Psychologists will naturally vary in their personal strategies for responding to their society’s demands, and some indeed will seek to disengage from any involvement with religion. But not all. The period up to about 1970 was especially marked by grand theorising, psychologists offering their various comprehensive theories of human nature in its totality. Producing these without reaching some position on religion (even if never publicly spelled out) was impossible. And it was surely unlikely that they could be produced without some level of ethical, if not explicitly religious, motivation.
Chapter 13
Conclusions, Hypotheses, Suggestions and a Stab at a Personal ‘Position Statement’
Three broad positions on the Psychology–religion relationship were in place by the early 1960s. 1. The validity of religious beliefs and the meanings of religious experiences are, as such, beyond Psychology’s remit. Psychology’s role is empirically to explore the ‘psychological laws’ which determine (perhaps too strong a word) the likelihood of a person becoming religious, the varieties of types of religious belief and their relationships to personality and motivation, the growth of religious belief in the child and the effects of variables such as age and social class on religious belief, and religious pathologies. Such explorations are of equal potential value to both believers and sceptics. The opening chapter, ‘Psychology and Religion’ of Michael Argyle’s Religious Behaviour (1958) is an excellent example of this. The key feature of this position, as I see it, is that religion is not held to be about psychological matters but about the nature of the universe and humanity’s place within and relationship to it. The psychological aspects of religion are thus akin to that of the perceptual process in relation to the external world—the psychologist of perception makes no claims at expertise regarding that world itself, only about the psychological processes by which it is known. Argyle’s position is, in effect, a slightly more sophisticated version of the ‘facts’ versus ‘values’ distinction widely invoked during the 1920s and 1930s to facilitate peaceful co-existence between the camps. 2. Religion and Psychology are both essentially concerned with the psychological. Religion is about achieving a psychological condition of wholeness in which believers gain access to profound sources of strength enabling them to endure suffering and obtain reconciliation with their own personal flaws and failings. While this does entail experiencing and understanding the external world in certain distinct ways, held to be correct, this is the outcome not the cause of religious belief. An instance of this is G. Stephens Spinks’ Psychology and Religion (1963) in which he devotes Appendix€II to ‘The Nature of the Soul’ and having, to his satisfaction at least, demonstrated that ‘soul’ and ‘psyche’ are effectively synonymous concludes:
G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_13, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
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We have, therefore, adequate grounds for holding that soul or psyche is the common concern of theology and psychology, and since religion everywhere and at all stages of development treats the soul (↜psyche) as in some sense a life-principle, psychology and religion are concerned with the same field of enquiry though not necessarily with the same set of conclusions. There are however several variations of this position reflecting different conceptualizations of how integration may be achieved. Some would argue that in psychotherapy the Psychological perspective can, non-reductively, enrich or deepen understanding of specific religious phenomena (this typified much of the 1920s–1930s ‘Psychochristian’ literature discussed in Chapter 7). Others would seek a more substantial convergence, perhaps even moving beyond the dichotomy into fusion, again especially in psychotherapy (e.g. J. P. Dourley, 1981, 1984, 2008). Concerns here may vary in focus regarding the weightings given to theoretical integration or attention to specific religious phenomena. William Brown's theoretical position (see Chapter 7) somewhat hovers between this and the preceding position, but his view of psychotherapy fits better here. (p. 195)
3. Religion and Psychology are not only ‘concerned with the same field of enquiry’ but the latter, jointly with other human sciences and biology in some respects, can actually provide explanations for the former (as part of its own ‘field of enquiry’) sufficient to render its claims obsolete and provide superior ‘scientific’ explanations for all the phenomena on which it bases them. Reducing religion to Psychological terms is generally refered to as ‘psychologism’. G. Vetter (1958), mentioned in Chapter 9, is perhaps the most forthright mid-20th century example of this from the mainstream experimental Psychological direction. For psychologists adopting this position religion becomes a quasi-psychopathology for Psychology to explain and cure. It should be stressed that in the case of the first two positions they are as much prescriptive as descriptive in character, motivated by desires to integrate and reconcile the two camps or at least find a formulation which facilitates mutual toleration. Since the later 1960s there has indeed a substantial post-1970 literature, mostly from the psychotherapy direction, expounding versions of the second position. This configuration was, however, rarely if ever spelled out at the time in such stark terms. One cannot help forming the impression that, bar a few exceptions like Vetter (1958), the issue was being debated in such a mutually respectful, civilised and non-confrontational manner that no thoroughgoing analysis of the broad picture of the relationship could emerge. Writers would politely propose their own readings and interpretations, but in a spirit of non-confrontational mutual tolerance. In some measure this has persisted. It may even be that in recent years a heightened reluctance to offend religious feelings has even further dampened passionate heartfelt critical discussion by non-religious psychologists. On the other hand, within psychotherapy and counselling, especially in the United States, there has been an extensive debate among religious practitioners as to how the relationship between the two camps should be clarified and developed. However, each of these positions is clearly problematical and we need to spell this out before venturing further. ╇ See for example, E. Becker (1975), D. D. Browning (1986), H. Fingarette (1962), S. Hiltner (1972), P. Homans (ed.) (1968), and P. W. Pruyser (1968, 1974).
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One underlying difficulty, already raised in Chapter 2, is the definitional one of what we mean by the two terms ‘religion’ and ‘Psychology’. To take them in turn. By ‘religion’ we may mean the entire gamut of religious behaviour, some subset of this, or doctrines regarding human nature, including concepts such as ‘redemption’, ‘faith’, ‘sin’, ‘guilt’ etc., as elaborated by theologians, always remembering that ‘human nature’ is only one facet of theology’s concerns. More sophisticated writers such as J. Macmurray and W. Brown view religion as a distinct ‘field’ of concern logically superordinate to the scientific, artistic and (in Brown’s case) ethical fields. These raise quite distinct kinds of issue. The psychologist may view religious behaviour in terms of a specific theoretical position, which it is claimed will ‘explain’ it – or some aspect of it. But theology explicitly offers (among many other things) alternative explanatory frameworks for understanding ‘human nature’ in general, and is thus more clearly in a rival position to Psychology. From the Psychology side, we cannot be meaning the entire discipline since it is so diverse and fragmented, and much of it has no evident bearing on religion anyway. In the fields which do have a bearing there is again diversity in which aspects of religion they engage. The social psychologist for example might be interested in revivalist meetings, the social class correlations of various religious beliefs and so on. The personality theorist is concerned with the role of religious beliefs in individuals' lives, the numerous forms which religious conviction takes and how these relate to other aspects of personality (as they theoretically conceptualize it). Therapists can be much more profoundly engaged with religion at theological as well as behavioural or descriptive levels, and, if they are believers themselves, they cannot segregate their religious and secular understandings of the nature of human distress from the ethical and religious aspects of their task. Under these circumstances any general accounts of how the two camps either do, or should, relate to each other must be considered inadequate. This is certainly true of the triad just outlined. As far as the first two positions are concerned we may usefully focus on the Argyle and Spinks texts just cited as being representative.
Religious Doctrines Beyond Psychology’s Brief Michael Argyle was a lifelong practising Christian as well as being British Psychology’s leading social psychologist, along with Henri Tajfel, for several decades. Religious Behaviour, which appeared relatively early in his career, was one of the few, but not the only, work he wrote which directly addressed religion. In some respects, he is using the topic as an illustrative example of the application of recently developed Psychological methodologies, especially psychometric attitude measurement. Aside from some passing mentions of Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, the work is entirely concerned with Christianity. He spells out his stance at the outset: ╇
See Chapters 5 (on Macmurray) and 6 (on Brown). As does ‘Personalism’, which, while a philosophical position, has been strongly espoused by man religious thinkers (see Chapter 8).
╇
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… psychologists are no more experts on the existence of God than are theologians on the theory of learning, or art critics on the nature of the atom. … The psychologist or social scientist is only concerned with the causes or empirical conditions for religious phenomena. He is not concerned with the other kind of question about whether the beliefs are true, the experiences valid, or the rituals useful; these are problems for the theologian … (Argyle, 1958, p.€1).
To those who would argue (like Leuba, 1925) that identifying the natural causes of religious belief is to refute them, he responds that ‘religious beliefs are not [empirically] verifiable in any straightforward way’ (p.€2) but that there ‘are other grounds for religious beliefs’ (ibid). His book is concerned only with empirically identified ‘individual differences between people in religious activities’ and with systematizing these. The body of the work thereafter reviews research relating to historical changes in religious activity in Britain and the United States, environmental factors, age, sex differences, personality, mental disorder, ‘sex and marriage’ and social class (see Chap.€9). Only at the end does he tackle ‘Theories of Religious Behaviour and Belief’. This last is a potentially risky move, for clearly many of the theories considered do, implicitly or explicitly, appear to challenge the authenticity of religion, particularly the ‘frustration’, ‘conflict’ and ‘obsessional neurosis’ theories rooted in psychoanalysis (he leaves Jung aside as too complex for immediate consideration). Virtually all of these, except a ‘cognitive need theory’, to some extent appear to pathologise religion, though he does not say this explicitly. Systematically ‘testing’ each of these theories as hypotheses against the accumulated empirical evidence, he concludes that, if not false, their confirmation is restricted to certain kinds of believers, doctrinal commitments or demographic groups. He closes with a fourfold typology of Christian beliefs: conservative, Protestant, sects (i.e. marginal—at any rate in origin—evangelical groups) and liberals. If ending somewhat abruptly, this theory-review can be read as consistent with his opening position, since it clearly suggests that there is a mode of religious belief suitable for everyone. While the motivational roots of individuals’ religious beliefs vary, leading them to emphasise different facets of religious doctrine and practice, these beliefs as such are, presumably, untouched by the psychologists’ endeavours. As remarked previously, Argyle’s position is in effect an updated version of the earlier ‘facts’ versus ‘values’ distinction so popular in the interwar period. There are two problems with this general position to which attention may be drawn here. Most importantly it leaves as uncontested, even unarticulated, the central premise that religion is not about the psychological but about the nature of the external universe and humanity’s place within it. It assumes, to use Streeter’s analogy, that the psychological and physiological processes and factors involved in religious belief are strictly analogous to those involved in perception (Streeter, 1927). The psychologist studying perception quite rightly claims no expertise on the nature of the external world which is perceived. These processes and factors are thus necessary conditions for religious understanding, with no bearing on the nature of the object of this understanding, legitimate expertise on which lies with theologians and other religious thinkers. Secondly, in adopting this position, it is further taken for granted that ‘religion’ has some kind of inherent unity as a phenomenon transcending all differences of
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faith, practise and belief. But one feature of the last half-century, typified in many of the branches of the ‘Growth Movement’, has been an increasing difficulty in deciding when it is appropriate to denote a belief system by this term. Anthropologically the behaviour of many of those obsessed with figures in popular culture, especially dead ones like Elvis Presley and Jimi Hendrix, or sports teams like Manchester United, or TV programmes like Star Trek, very closely resembles the religious—shrines are raised, relics cherished, images adored, rituals enacted, collective gatherings attended, praises sung and pilgrimages undertaken. It may be that few devotees of such cults have religious experiences in the normal sense, but one can also be a an orthodox religious believer without having such experiences. All I am arguing here is that the functions and varieties of religion are so numerous that in these cases clear-cut differentiation from religion becomes impossible because they serve and display so may of these. Moreover—and this relates to many of the Psychological theories themselves as reviewed by Argyle—even where correlations between religious belief and specific psychological traits of attitudes appear to characterise Christianity, this is surely not true of all other ‘religions’. To take a very obvious example, the sexual factor is generally seen as repressed, sublimated, or merely of less interest, among Christian believers. But this would not be case among many of the heretical Christian cults which have arisen at various times or Tantric branches of Buddhism. (And was it true of Old Testament Judaism or in the founding stages of religions where patriarchs were exhorted to multiply like the sand on the shore?) Another rather different example of this position is, as discussed in Chap.€3, that taken in Misiak and Staudt’s Catholics in Psychology (1954). Although more ambiguous by virtue of its complexity Allport’s position also fits most comfortably in this category. Taken jointly these two difficulties suggest that this position has only been tenable by virtue of (a) the overwhelmingly Christian focus of its proponents, (b) their felt need to protect Christianity in a cultural climate which seemed, until the early 1960s, to be possessed of an irreversible secular dynamic (this anxiety could affect non-believers as well as believers), and (c) over-reliance on an epistemological assumption about the nature of science (centred on the theory–fact and value–fact distinctions) which was being widely rejected by the mid-1970s.
eligion and Psychology Essentially Concerned R with the Same Issues This is a continuation of the original interpretation of how Psychology might bear upon religious questions—it could potentially offer a ‘scientific’ vindication of the authenticity of religious experience, show that religious belief was ‘normal’, and generally serve as a resource for those engaged in religious education and pastoral care. By 1960 such a view was widely felt to have been justified by the work of Christian psychotherapists and counsellors and, especially, by Jung’s later theoretical formulations. A great deal of energy was expended during the first half of the century in demonstrating how Psychological (and especially, by the 1920s, psychoanalytic) ideas, insights and psychotherapeutic practice could be mapped onto tradi-
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tional Christian concepts and practice. Freud’s correspondent, the Swiss Protestant minister Oskar Pfister was especially prominent among those seeking to reconcile Christianity with psychoanalysis. It was argued, not always entirely consistently perhaps, both that Psychology could now enhance, clarify and revitalise Christianity and that Psychology had not come up with anything which fundamentally challenged traditional Christian understanding and was guilty of a ‘blind spot’, or failure to follow through the new insights and knowledge it had gained to their logical, religious conclusions. Again, it must be stressed that by and large it was Christianity, not ‘religion’ as such, which was under consideration. In this respect, the pro-Psychology Christians could be read as co-opting the ostensibly ‘objective’ ‘natural science’ of Psychology to bolster the universalist aspirations of a specifically western cultural product. They did, nevertheless, routinely seek to anchor religion in a more universal way by asserting that its origins lie, if not in a religious instinct (although some claimed this), at least in a yearning, shared by all humanity, for some higher meaning beyond the everyday world. As Spinks claims: Man has had and continues to have needs, not all of them physical, which are common to all men everywhere. It is because of this that psychology is able to offer explanations of world-wide religious practices both as the expression of, and at the same time the means of satisfying these vital common needs. (Spink, 1963, p.€30)
Others, less moderately, propose that an aspiration for wholeness and relatedness to the cosmos, a hankering after some transcendent framework, a sense of wonder or awe, in short, a ‘spiritual’ striving, dwells within each one of us. This is indeed a Psychological proposition, and one which many psychotherapists, counsellors and clinical psychologists have, especially more recently, gone some way to endorse. Growth Movement and subsequent developments in counselling and psychotherapy, as well as the more recently revitalised ‘Psychology of Religion’ (e.g. Fontana, 2003) have also moved some way beyond the Christian-centred orientation which prevailed up until the 1960s. This is, again, a position against which objections may be raised. Two might be noted here. Most obviously, a vast swathe of the topics with which Psychology has been concerned have little or no bearing on religious issues, even if, as we have seen in the previous chapter, religious backgrounds can more covertly affect methodological orientations. It is hard to discern a religious dimension to, for example, the mechanisms of perception, learning, cognition and memory, the principles underlying interpersonal interaction, personnel selection or eye-witness testimony (although the findings of research in some of these fields might critically be brought to bear on some religious phenomena). Spinks nonetheless attempted to establish the identity of ‘psyche’ (the subject matter of Psychology) and ‘soul’. But there is a second, more serious, difficulty. There are, prima facie, no obvious grounds for belief in a universal ‘spiritual’ aspiration or drive. The term ‘universal’ is, admittedly, somewhat ambiguous, in that it can be read as meaning ‘every single (normal?) person’, or meaning that in all societies a significant proportion of the population possesses this trait. The first reading is, frankly, quite incredible for there are millions of people who live contented lives centred on family relationships and routine occupations, happy to restrict their diversions to sport and popular entertainment, or for whom wealth
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is the ‘highest’ dream. For these morality is unproblematic, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are little more than common sense, needing no divine ratification or articulation. There are others even more patently indifferent to any values ‘higher’ than the sensually hedonistic. To argue that they potentially have spiritual aspirations waiting to be awakened, or that unconsciously they have them, but do not know it, simply renders the proposition unfalsifiable. The second reading has more plausibility, although anthropology can always come up with difficult cases. Even so, problems of definition and of differentiating the ‘spiritual’ component in formal religions from their host of other social functions rapidly surface when one tries to establish this. Spinks’ position rests on the argument that Psychology is necessarily concerned with the higher goals and meanings of human life, and the ways of meeting or supplying them, and that in this respect its task converges with that of religion, and that the two should or could be mutually reinforcing. Nevertheless, this position can only be sustained by ignoring the reality of what Psychology encompasses, overlooking some fundamental differences in orientation arising from Psychology’s self-consciously ‘scientific’ character, and by projecting as universal a psychological trait largely specific to the religious themselves. From the psychotherapeutic angle, however, the position is less clearcut, and, as cited in Chap.€5, is evident in the Catholic Jungian analyst John P. Dourley’s closing words that ‘the psychological task and the religious task are one’ when it comes to understanding the ‘depths of the human soul’. But this position seems to be going beyond complementarity into fusion.
Religion is an Inferior Alternative to Psychology The argument here is that Psychology is able, at any rate potentially, to produce accounts of human nature which can satisfy all those psychological needs which religion traditionally served to meet. It can, moreover, recommend changes in behaviour and life-style which will prevent the less healthy of these needs from arising in the first place, or lead to their cessation. What Psychology offers in these respects is superior because it has been produced ‘scientifically’. Psychology does not though speak with one voice on what it actually has on offer. Non-believing behaviourists, psychoanalysts, cognitivists, social learning theorists, psychophysiologists and social constructionists would differ as dramatically in this respect as have the hundreds of churches, denominations and sects of Christianity ever since about 100€C.E. What they do all share, despite this diversity, is a belief that the human mind or psyche has within it sufficient resources—of intellect, creativity, emotion and discriminant observation—fully to comprehend itself and its place in the world, and to produce effective solutions to the problems which beset it. Many religious phenomena will, in the process, be revealed in their true light as entirely explicable in Psychological (or other physical scientific) terms, and religious beliefs will be seen as primitive myths and stories which have now exhausted their historical purpose in aiding humanity’s progress towards rational enlightenment. Psychology alone will not accomplish this, but it will play a major role alongside the other
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sciences. This is essentially the position of G. B. Vetter (1958) Magic and Religion (see Chap.€8). An earlier example would be Everett Dean Martin’s The Mystery of Religion. A Study in Social Psychology (1924). Again, such a position does not quite work. In the current climate it already sounds dated (despite Richard Dawkins’ best efforts). Its major flaw is that it views religion simply as a matter of adhering to a set of empirical beliefs which science can either refute or demonstrate as logically incoherent. But while certainly some kind of belief in a god or gods is central to religion, modern theologians such as Paul Tillich have offered conceptualisations of this which outflank simplistic empirical rejections of the idea. Beyond this, religion’s social functions and meanings extend far beyond believing a set of empirical facts. Religions are total ways of life both for individuals and for communities at large, including ethical attitudes towards social relationships, rituals of celebration and mourning, frameworks of meaning which can serve as the vehicle for artistic and literary expression and so forth. Embodiments, in short, of the mythos function. One might well reject some of religion’s historical roles in legitimating established power structures and exercising governmental control, but that leaves much untouched, and they have also served, on occasion, quite the reverse role, as during the Reformation and the English Civil War during the seventeenth century (or more modestly in twentieth century campaigns against apartheid and nuclear weapons). While we may doubt the universality of spiritual yearning, the universality of a need for collective rituals is far more plausible, and ritual is at the heart of even the most ascetic forms of religion. It is quite unclear to me how ‘science’, let alone Psychology, could frame many of the kinds of ritual which constitute core features of collective life in the way religion now does. Secondly, while psychophysiological correlates and psychologistic descriptions of religious experience clearly exist, it would be a non sequitur to argue that these reductionistically explain them away. Such experiences need not, of course, be taken at face value, but neither can their meaningfulness be reductively eliminated by scientific fiat. Proponents of this position have never, I think, seriously tackled the Jungian account, which, while it became marginalised within academic Psychology from the 1940s onwards, has remained a major strand in psychotherapy while also maintaining a broader cultural presence. As indicated in Chap.€6, the ‘authenticity’ of religious experience remains in some important respects an open question. The argument that by its very nature a reductionist ‘scientific’ approach to understanding religious experience must miss the point, being analogous to trying to understand a perceived object by studying the neurology of perception would also need more careful refutation than it usually receives before it can be summarily dismissed. Thirdly, one might also ask why, if Psychology and the broader scientific cosmology refute religion in such a logically clearcut fashion as Richard Dawkins and others claim, religion has not only endured but is now in a phase of resurgence? This ╇
Confronting and dealing with death (Tillich’s first ‘anxiety’, as we saw in Chapter 5) is the point at which the mythos function becomes most intense, it is interesting therefore that H. Vande Kemp (1999) found that ‘95% or more of the literature came from medical/nursing or pastoral/theological sources, and psychology had virtually nothing to say’ (H.Vande Kemp, pers.comm.).
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is an interesting Psychological question in its own right. The strong anti-religious camps need not only to ‘explain’ religion, but also to explain why their explanations meet such resistance. They are in the same position as those early psychoanalysts who explained rejection of psychoanalysis as simply due to irrational ‘resistance’. One obvious answer is plainly that their alternative world-views just do not meet the needs which religion supplies. And one wonders if they could meet such needs without, in the process, becoming religions themselves (the ghost of Comte ever looms in the wings)? A host of more sociological factors also readily suggest themselves, which I will leave aside here, but psychologically the progressive disenchantment with science and technology as able adequately to address the current multi-facetted global crisis might be noted. What is curious is the genuine psychological inability of some hard-line materialist atheist opponents of religion to grasp at least the psychological reality of religious experiences and phenomena. In Jungian typological terms one wonders if extraverts consciously dominated by the thinking-sensation pairing might not be particularly blinkered in this respect (C. G. Jung, 1923). It is not my intention here to defend religion as such. All I am arguing is that the ‘Religion is an inferior alternative to Psychology’ position is both Psychologically and psychologically implausible, as well as probably logically invalid resting on a good old-fashioned ‘category mistake’: religion and Psychology are just not the same kind of thing. Can we move beyond this ‘trilemma’?
Reconstruing the Relationship The three broad positions just reviewed share a common failing. They are all essentially prescriptive, proposing what the relationship between the two parties should be in the light of their respective images of them. For the first camp, they are simply fundamentally different in character and Psychology is irrelevant to religion except in a purely descriptive fashion which says nothing about the validity of religious beliefs themselves. Psychology should therefore remain silent on religious belief itself. For the second, they are complementary, and potentially collaborating, approaches to the same core issues. Psychology and religion should therefore be encouraged to co-operate. For most of the third, Psychology is a wing of reductionist materialist science, destined to explain religion away and replace it by something better; for a minority both are ultimately historically embedded ‘social constructions’. Psychology should thus align itself with the anti-religious cause in general. A different tack is needed, grounded in the historical evidence. I provisionally suggest that we need to rethink the issue along the following non-prescriptive lines. We should stop seeing Psychology as an autonomous secular scientific project to which the religious simply had to respond in whatever ways they felt appropriate, while having minimal effect on Psychology itself. Rather we should see them as to some degree mutually constitutive. The evidence presented in Chap.€3 clearly shows how Psychology’s origins lay in a complex encounter between the two camps. In contrast to the physical science disciplines, Christianity had
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a long proto-Psychological tradition and had even generated a ‘biblical Psychology’ prior to Psychology’s formal emergence. In the United States the Protestant ‘mental and moral philosophy’ tradition had, contrary to the image which prevailed from around 1910 to 1980, played a major role in determining the character of the ‘new Psychology’ of the late 1880s–1890s, many major figures being themselves devout believers (or at least seeing it as in their best interests to pose as such). Moreover, in most countries the market for Psychology lay in fields such as education, child development and mental distress in which religion had a high profile, Psychology’s approaches to these issues thus developed in negotiation with the religious interests and attitudes of professionals in these fields. Reciprocally we can, as shown most clearly in Chap.€7, see that mainstream Christianity, for its part, to some degree reconstituted itself by incorporating Psychological ideas and attitudes towards mental distress, education and pastoral care in general. Only by doing so could it retain credibility in twentieth century modÂ� ernist cultures. As has been suggested in several places, far from viewing Psychology as a rival, one might even see liberal Protestantism at least as initially hitching its wagon to Psychology as a way of legitimising its own religious position and ensuring its survival in the new science and technology based cultures of the U.S. and western Europe. In doing so it might, additionally, have advanced its own universalistic aspirations by, to change metaphors, piggy-backing on Psychology as a universalisable natural science—though this was perhaps never consciously realised or articulated at the time in quite such forthright terms. That G. Stanley Hall’s mighty Adolescence (1904) culminates in advice to missionaries on how to convert the ‘adolescent races’ is, from this angle, interesting to say the least. Such a reading does though need to be nuanced. After 1920 there was, in the U.S. (and more so in Europe) a backlash among some Christians against liberal Protestantism, a hankering for a return to more traditional theology and modes of worship. Though often resulting in a distancing from, even rejection of, Psychology, this was not always the case. (According to H. Vande Kemp, this anti-introspective attitude could lead to probehaviorist sympathies among Calvinists.) As we saw in the previous chapter, G. W. Allport’s entire ‘Psychology of Personality’ was driven by his efforts to reassert the ultimate transcendence of the ‘total personality’ in a way consistent with his High Church Anglican ideals, coupled with a distancing, at least until the late 1930s, from the ‘Progressivist’ social reforming ideals of liberal Protestantism. Either way though, Psychology could continue being co-opted by Christians in a fashion which supported their faith. In this respect, the pro- and anti-religious factions at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries might be read as sharing a common point of departure in evolutionary thought. For the anti-religious this, combined with advances in the physical sciences generally, was clearly going to eventuate in outright atheism; and evolutionary, often quasi-Comtean, schemata of the ‘origins’ of religion in mag╇
And I spot that the Franciscan order held a symposium of essays published as: Claude L. Vogel (ed.) (1932) Psychology and the Franciscan School: A Symposium of Essays (P & E 26). ╇ Pers.comm.
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ic and ritual followed by progressively more sophisticated, more intellectualised forms were commonplace. The atheist mythos was that religion would thus die out to be replaced by science. The pro-religious simply drew the different conclusion that religion itself was evolving to ever more sophisticated levels, abandoning the crudities of pre-scientific doctrines but learning thereby to appreciate what the core nature, functions and goals of religion truly were. And these, in very many cases, conveniently turned out to be just such doctrines as liberal Protestantism was now espousing. Leuba somehow managed to straddle both camps (see Chap.€4). This reinforces the point made in Chap.€11 regarding the problem of how Psychology can relate to non-western religious ‘Psychologies’. If these conclusions are broadly correct, they bring into better focus the nature of ‘American Psychology’s continuing moral project’ (Richards, 1995). They are also consistent with Robert C. Fuller’s readings of the U.S. situation (Fuller, 1986, 2006). The first work explores in impressive depth the ways in which U.S. psychologists and psychotherapists utilised and interpreted the notion of the ‘unconscious’ in a way which preserved traditional religious concepts of spirituality and of inner psychic depths as the sources of spiritual growth, in contrast to the scientific reductionism of the behaviourists and psychophysiologists. He links this not only to mainstream liberal Protestantism but also to Emersonian New England Transcendentalism, Christian Science, fascination with psychic research and ‘self-help’ genres. In the latter Fuller argues for a thoroughgoing intertwining of Psychology and the underlying religious character of American culture in which Psychology has served to provide new concepts and, in effect, myths by which this character can be sustained. Psychology’s popularity and success in the U.S. is owing to ‘its continuing resonance with the nation’s popular religious imagination’ (p.€222). His argument extends beyond formal religion to what he terms the ‘unchurched spirituality’ of many who have rejected traditional institutional Christianity. ‘The key to understanding the cultural history of American psychology is … not assuming that psychology has altered the nature of America’s symbolic universe, but rather trying to understand how it has provided new vehicles for sustaining this symbolic universe’ (ibid). He also notes the pro-religion construal of the evolutionary image mentioned above. One intriguing observation is that conservative Protestantism, especially Calvinism, could find common cause with behaviourism and cognitive behavioural therapies precisely because it was opposed to the kind of self-scrutiny and introspection being proposed by more liberal Protestant and holistic psychologists such as Allport and Rogers. This opens an interesting can of worms I cannot pursue here. In short, Fuller appears to be moving towards a position not unlike that I will be proposing later—that the Psychology–religion distinction itself is misleading. ╇
Richards (1995) ‘“To know our fellow men to do them good”: American Psychology’s continuing moral project’. ╇ I only became aware of Fuller’s work (which includes a number of related uncited publications) too late in the day to fully assimilate into the bulk of the present work. His focus is naturally restricted to the North American scene, but on the face of it, we do appear to be on much the same wavelength.
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The argument just made applies only to some aspects of the story, of course. For any accurate and comprehensive historical picture, we would need to take full account of the sheer heterogeneity of the situation, which has at least three axes. In the first place, Psychology’s own heterogeneity of subject matter, ranging from psychophysiology and psychophysics to social psychology, personality and mental distress, means that both the presence and visibility of religion as a factor will vary enormously. Secondly, the ways in which the religious factor will manifest itself are also numerous, from being an often covert influence on theoretical or methodological preferences via its influences on Psychology’s agenda and assumptions in relation to topics such as child development, to a sometimes quite overt role in psychotherapy. Thirdly, it can be an important factor underlying diverse national traditions, most notably between predominantly Protestant, Catholic and atheist cultures (such as the former Soviet Union). Perhaps a Jewish strand of influence may also be detected in pre-1939 Eastern European countries such as Austria and Poland. I have, in this work, attempted to take into account the complexity of the topic, as just summarised, even as this disclosed itself in its writing. I thus recommend that future researchers take this complexity as their starting point, and work towards illuminating it further rather than taking for granted that their work can be framed within one of the simplistic received images.
Two Issues for Historians of Psychology There are some more ‘in-house’ lessons to be drawn. The most important perhaps is that addressing the Psychology–religion relationship once again forces ‘boundary problems’ into the open. Firstly, once historians realise that they cannot view ‘religion’ as an unproblematic ‘external’ factor ‘influencing’ the discipline, they will become compelled to venture beyond the boundaries of ‘Psychology’ as conventionally construed. Secondly, this move then has wider ramifications for Psychology itself. In Chap.€7, for example, we saw that modern psychotherapy was in large part co-produced by both camps. But our review of the religious factor in Psychology’s origins (Chap.€3) raises a more radical difficulty. We are getting used to the idea that, as a product of western scientific culture, Psychology is necessarily to some degree alien when deployed elsewhere, but it now seems to emerge that western Psychology is premised not only on a culturally distinct concept of empirical science but also on certain attitudes, values and images of human nature derived from western Christianity. This difficulty really comes home to roost when we try to relate Psychology to non-western religious-based ‘Psychologies’, as was argued ╇
This is related to, but distinct from, the now standard Critical Psychology mantra that western Psychology is premised on a culturally specific notion of the autonomous ahistorical individual as the discipline's ‘natural’ subject. While sympathetic, I feel that this has become something of a cliché which itself requires some critical attention. Whatever, the present point implies that ‘individualism’ is only part of the problem, being underlain by more longstanding religious-based cultural assumptions.
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in Chap.€11. One consequence of all this is that historical studies of the topic will inevitably end up being ‘critical’ in the sense of problematising the status and nature of Psychology, as well as the meaningfulness of treating it as some kind of unitary discipline or project. What an old-fashioned progressivist or celebratory ‘History of Psychology and Religion’ would look like is extremely hard to conceive. The second lesson more directly pertains to the historian’s own ‘psychology’. In most history of science, and much history of Psychology, there is little requirement for the historian to adopt a position on the topic they are studying. One can discuss the vicissitudes of theories in perception or memory without committing oneself to an opinion on their respective merits, let alone those currently in play, even if on occasion one feels bound to point out failings which have retrospectively become apparent. When dealing with explicitly ethical loaded topics such racism or Naziera German Psychology one also, quite naturally, makes one’s personal position clear (although this may, in some cases, be a little superfluous). ‘Psychology and religion’ is quite a different matter. The material being dealt with constantly puts one on the spot at a personal level because the issues at stake are so fundamental and not simply ethical in character. This remains true even if one moves beyond the three positions outlined earlier and accepts the heterogeneity of the topic in the way recommended. We may discover an Archimedean point above the public fray from which to do our history, but transcending our personal fray is another matter. Such personal fray must, after all, have been one of the factors motivating our interest, and it would be bad faith to compartmentalise this off from one’s historiography as a private matter. A project such as the present one has a number of goals, but among them is, inevitably, the lurking hope that it might prove of some psychological (or ‘spiritual’) benefit to the author. I would go further; readers themselves might rightly demand a closing position statement from the author about how, when the dust has settled, they now view religion. The situation would obviously be otherwise if the work was itself an exposition of a fully worked out prior position. But that is not the case here. With considerable trepidation I will therefore jump off the cliff.
An Attempt at a Final Position So, I now owe it to those who have stayed with me thus far to have a stab at formulating my own view of religion (my view of Psychology having been aired elsewhere on several occasions). There are some worrying potential pitfalls—pretentiousness, self-embarrassment and banality among them. Minds—and souls—far finer than mine have wrestled with this and had their say over two dozen centuries. A couple of points are necessary to clear the decks. One is that, as already observed, the notion that all people share some deep spiritual yearning is nonsense, unless one stretches the meaning of the claim so far that it becomes unfalsifiable, typically by insisting that even in the case of the apparent exceptions this yearning is unconscious or latent, or that those in question suffer from some kind of pathology. Nor is lack of such a yearning necessarily a failing in any straightforward sense. Millions
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of people live honest, moral and fulfilling lives betraying no hankering after the divine in any form. But then too there are the thousands of thoroughly wicked people from murderous cocaine barons in the Columbian jungle and professional torturers to child-brothel owners in Bangkok, whose humanity is, with the best will in the world, so alien to me that the very notion of their having a spiritual hunger becomes simply absurd. The word ‘spiritual’ has though become something of a problem in itself. We saw how Leuba tried to extend it to cover higher ethical values in general, and David Wulff appears to agree that the more recent extension of the word’s use in psychotherapy and its differentiation from ‘religious’ are positive moves. I beg to differ, seeing this as a weakening drift away from its stricter usage as denoting a sense of the divine and striving to live in relation to this divine (however conceived) to being an umbrella term endowing a vague glow of religiosity to any values and motivations above the purely material, hedonistic and self-centred. Severing it from ‘religious’ is to risk confusion, even if we concede that not all traditionally ‘spiritual’ people believe in a formal religious creed. The poet William Blake was about as ‘spiritual’ as it gets, though what he actually believed in, nobody has ever really figured out. But, in my book, going ‘ah!’ at the scenery and feeling sorry for starving people is insufficient to earn one the description. Secondly, while if not universal, the feeling that one is engaged in some kind of ‘quest’ for fulfilment, enlightenment, self-discovery, actualisation or individuation (or whatever label you choose) is extremely widespread. It largely underpins the numerous schools of counselling and psychotherapy which have flourished in recent decades. It would be easy to characterise this as a ‘spiritual hunger’, perhaps signifying a contemporary ‘spiritual malaise’. This is too facile. While, at various times and in various ways, I have shared this aspiration, approaching seventy a serious frown begins to furrow my forehead. I do not disown or devalue these past feelings and efforts. They have, I am sure, taught me much, but at the end of the day, I begin to suspect there is an illusion in play. The ladders fall away and one is left but a sadder and a wiser (perhaps) man. And where are all these individuated, fulfilled, enlightened and actualised contemporaries of mine who should now be so numerous? What evidence that the radiant spirituality they should be transmitting is having the remotest effect? Perhaps all our brows are furrowing; we’ve hit the door to which there is no key, the veil past which we cannot see, and some little talk awhile of me and thee is all the contentment available. The temptation at this stage is to lapse into a cynical, impotent and bad-tempered atheism, resentful of all the gods that failed. And Allport’s ‘mature religious sentiment’ looks like a last throw of the dice to affirm the healthy normalcy of American Protestant religious belief. But cynicism is no good either. When I began this book, I was concerned that I was engaging in a sort of highwire act, attempting to review both parties from a disinterested perspective separate from both. My immediate goal was the historiographic one of exploring the ways in which the two strands in western culture which most directly addressed the ‘human condition’, religion and Psychology, had managed their relations since the latter’s nineteenth century advent. It could have been called revisionist history had there been any history worth revising, but there was not. Only a clutch of clichés about ‘secularisation’, ‘Psychologists replacing priests’, mutual hostility and the like, none
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of which stood up to the briefest historical glance. But it was not lost on me that I was also putting myself on the spot in the way I have just described. Perhaps the very project was my own displaced mode of enacting a ‘spiritual quest’. One part of me hoped that when it was all over I might preen myself on surviving unchanged, having cast a cold eye over the entire issue. The other part hoped that maybe I could find a way of finally safely dismounting the wire having arrived at a position different from those which had been calling to me from either flank. Whether I have genuinely succeeded I do not know, but what follows is my best shot. An old-fashioned Psychological injunction suddenly seems pertinent—operationalise! How can I get to grips with the whole issue without some concrete exemplars of the people who, for me, instantiate my psychological-cum-spiritual ideals? In other words, I turn to my heroes and heroines. What have they got in common? I mean the real ones, not just people whose work I admire or old adolescent ego-ideals for whom I retain a nostalgic affection. I mean those whose lives, insofar as I can judge, exemplify something genuinely admirable and positive, who have left not just me but the world enriched in a profound way. When I ponder this, I am first aware of their sheer diversity. Samuel Beckett and Blind Willie Johnson, Bertrand Russell and Maya Angelou, Gandhi and Picasso, Freud and Marie Louise Berneri (Who was she? I leave you to find out.), Mary Wollstonecraft and Joseph Needham, Helen Bamber and Wittgenstein … the list rolls on, necessarily somewhat ethnocentric though it is. But I am not interested in ranking or listing ‘my one hundred greatest people of all time’. Suffice to say that many years ago I asked an American psychologist who he would throw out of the proverbial balloon, Galton or Van Gogh. Without hesitation he said ‘Van Gogh’. I am of the opposite persuasion. There are also those whose existence one can only infer. Among the countless unremembered peasant men and women throughout the centuries, among the victims of the gulag and the death camp, among all our ancestors in a thousand varied circumstances, were those in whom, had we known them, we would have recognised avatars of our ideals. The purpose of this exercise is that it is the best way I can come up with for focussing on the issue at hand. If religion and Psychology are ‘about’ the meaning and evaluation of human life, ‘about’ how to live, how to embrace one’s experience as fully and generously as possible without denial, fragmentation or self-deception, then how else to get a handle on what that aspiration itself actually means than to look at those who, in one’s own eyes (no others are available) best exemplify it? But when you do so you quickly realise they are neither a homogenous bunch of saints nor success stories nor psychologically stable nor even especially likeable (‘charming’ and ‘friendly’ are adjectives rarely applied to Blake or Wittgenstein). Of all those I have looked at in this book, for me the one whose formulation comes closest to hitting the mark is Paul Tillich in The Courage to Be (a work, significantly, which, if ‘officially’ theology, is just as much Psychology). The only generalisation I can make about my heroes and heroines is that they are the diverse embodiments of the affirmation of life, ‘Being’, or the ‘courage to be’ to the fullest extents of which they were, or are, capable, given their temperaments, times and circumstances. They seem devoid of serious self-illusions, many have had to wrestle with personal demons or social contempt. This is as true of Primo Lévi, for whom
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the burden finally proved too much, as for any of the others. But ‘mature religious sentiment’ appears to be in relatively short supply among them. They include both religious believers and non-believers. It makes no difference. Who is seriously suggesting that Samuel Beckett would have given of himself more wholeheartedly and honestly if somewhere along the line he had ‘opened his heart to Jesus’? Or that Freud’s achievement would have been even greater if he had donned his yamulkha and phylactery and returned to Orthodox Judaism? Would Picasso’s work have been even more original and joyous if he had gone to confession regularly and stuck with his first wife? Yet for others their religious faith was indeed at the core of their being. One of my more recent heroes has turned out to be Leslie Weatherhead. (Mother Teresa? I am afraid not, as my Irish partner puts it, she was a ‘strap of the first order’ who did whatever she liked, was unaccountable to anybody, hobnobbed with the famous and, I might add, dwelt in an unending glow of gratifying admiration and reverence, papally assured of her impending sainthood.) It is at this point, with the believing heroes, that I begin to get a glimmer of a resolution. Blind Willie Johnson (1895–1945) was a black American gospel singer and master of the steel guitar. Only one photograph of him exists. He recorded just 30 tracks over five sessions from 1927–1930. His life was lived in Beaumont, Texas in fairly unremitting poverty and illness, both of which grew worse with the years, and he died after his house burned down—of ‘malarial fever and syphilis’ according to Wikipedia. Two of his tracks I find especially moving and even comforting: the famous ‘Dark is the night, cold is the ground’ (though he himself left it untitled) and ‘God don’t never change’. The first is an extraordinarily powerful slow ruminative guitar solo punctuated with occasionally groans, ‘aah’s and, just once, the word ‘Lord’.10 The second consists of a series of repetitions of, and elaborations on, the title such as ‘God, always will be God/God in creation/God when Adam fell/God way up in heaven/God way down in hell/He’s God, God don’t never change’ and ‘In the time of the influenzy/He truly was a God to you’.11 So what is going on here? Why do I find these so moving? Are these, the second at least, not just simple expressions of Christian faith? I think not. ‘God don’t never change’ is not an exercise in theology. What makes them so powerful is that they are intense affirmations of life under nightmarish circumstances (no biographical details are needed, you can hear it for heaven’s sake). And they come from the very bottom of the social, economic and racial hierarchy. ‘Dark is the night’ is virtually subterranean in its force, it speaks to us from the ‘spiritual’ ground zero. It is not some triumphant affirmation of life but a down-facing of the ‘Dark’ (or ‘Nothinginess’ or ‘Non-being’) in the face of utter hopelessness. The only literary comparison which comes immediately to mind is the closing lines of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable ‘… in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. Now, to switch abruptly to a more philosophical tone, what I want to propose is that in the cases of my religious heroes and heroines it is not their religion which has 10╇
The Wikipedia entry says this is about the crucifixion of Jesus, but this is a quite unwarranted projection without any internal evidence. If anything, it is about his own crucifixion. 11╇ Definitely ‘influenzy’, not, as one on-line version has ‘influenza’.
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redeemed their lives, but their lives and/or works which redeem their religions. By this I mean that their heroic lives are not the direct result of their religious beliefs, but that, in finding within the doctrines of their religion the resources for living such lives they have, to that extent, demonstrated that these doctrines do have some value. This is not the same as saying this proves the doctrines are true in any literal sense. We need to get back to some linguistic basics here. A text in itself has no meaning at all; it is a series of ink marks on paper or pixel patterns on a screen. Meaning enters when someone reads (or hears) it. Meaning is read or heard into it. This is typically so routine and unproblematic that it causes no problems. We know by whom, when and why the text was created. But when it comes to more complex texts, especially historical ones, the work is harder. And it is even more so when we are dealing with texts which are apparently poetic, figurative, philosophical—or religious. I am not arguing that we read our existing ideas into the text (a theological heresy known as eisegesis), forcing it to mean what we want, but that, unavoidably, our existing ideas, knowledge and needs provide the matrix within which we provide texts with meaning. There are two tacks which can often be taken at this juncture. We might, by hermeneutic interpretative striving, try to ascertain what the author ‘really meant’ or we might, less anxiously, explore what meanings we can give it which are relevant to our own concerns and circumstances (shifting to eisegesis I guess). Neither of these is adequate. Firstly, the idea that the author knew clearly what they meant might well be erroneous—they were trying as best they could to put into words ideas which were never entirely clear, or maybe they were engaging in some amusing word-play, or maybe they were deliberately writing on more than one level of meaning, etc. But the opposite strategy can end up ruling out any criteria at all for evaluating or interpreting the text, collapsing into a post-modernist nihilism where I cannot mean anything because you are free to interpret the meanings of my texts—which I have tried too hard to formulate and articulate—in any way you want. The fact is that certain texts endure, achieving some transcendence of the present moment of their creation, because they are so rich in possible meaning. These meanings are not felt to be arbitrary, however. We do not entirely leave the author behind, rather our admiration for them increases. Very often we experience ourselves as encountering another human being whose voice or character pervades all readings of the text, who teaches or entertains or otherwise communicates to us an enrichingly new way of looking at things. Sometimes we feel this voice to be carrying great authority as we recognise that it is writing/speaking/singing of matters with which we too are concerned and taking our understanding of them to a different stage. (This is obviously true of music and painting as well.) What, then, we have to understand is going on when someone appears to be living a heroic life on the basis of their religious beliefs is that they have been able to read meanings into these beliefs which can guide and structure the way they maintain their ‘courage to be’. But it is the driven intensity of their awareness of the need for this courage which is primary—this need is not itself produced by objectively definable religious beliefs. Nor, in fact, are such lives particularly conflict free, on the contrary, as people such as Tillich and Weatherhead always insist, doubt is ever-lurking. One of Weatherhead’s last books was entitled The Christian
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Agnostic. We can go further; it is these very doubts and conflicts which yield their awareness of the need for this courage. In a Wittgensteinian fashion, the specific religious concepts and beliefs to which the religious hero holds are tools enabling him or her to give meaning and structure to their experience and ways of managing their lives without surrendering to one or other of the varieties of despair. Insofar as they succeed in serving this purpose, the concepts and beliefs are revitalised and prove themselves not entirely valueless. But this is a far cry from proving them true as concrete empirical categories or propositions with clear ‘objective’ meanings. The refutation of this is twofold: believers in other religions and non-believers alike may lead equally heroic lives; professed believers in the same religion may lead lives devoid of any significant merit. It is not in the religious belief or creed that virtue lies, but in what the believer makes of them. There are many concepts of heaven, from the sublime to the banal, but surely the least attractive is that which imagines it to consist of having a ringside seat to hell from which one can eternally gloat over the torments of those who refused to believe as you did. There are many believers, especially some fundamentalist Christians, who one suspects of gleefully anticipating just such a scenario. If so, this is surely sufficient grounds in itself for refusing to believe them! It should be added here that the meanings of religious doctrines constantly change over time. Many believers would accept this, insisting that this change is an ever-progressive one. While I doubt this, what is more important is that the very fact of such change itself undermines any religion’s claims to eternal and unique truth. What, more positively, it implies is that its doctrines remain pragmatically adaptable and, in the right circumstances, profoundly positive for the believer. There is little purpose in continuing to enumerate the evils committed in the names of either religion or science (nor—‘science’ or not—are Psychology’s own hands particularly clean). And there is scant point either in viewing the near universal core moral imperatives as religious beliefs. Even that cranky, crusty, old archatheist Bertrand Russell, asked towards the end of his life what he had learned, replied ‘We must love one another or die.’12 I fear, though, that I have been slipping into the error noted elsewhere of treating religion simply as a matter of beliefs and doctrines. It also, of course, serves a multitude of social functions and one of the major difficulties facing vehement opponents of religion is to come up with alternatives to these (see the discussion of the ‘Religion is an inferior alternative to Psychology’ position above). How do these relate to what I have being saying about the ‘courage to be’? Fairly closely, I think. Most of these functions, other than the governmental and juridical ones (for which alternatives are easy, and which are now largely historical in the West), are either celebrations of ‘being’ or collective efforts at coming to terms with death and other forms of ‘non-being’.13 12╇
1959 BBC Face to Face interview with John Freeman; I am quoting from memory. The interview was published in The Listener, March 19th 1959. 13╇ I am tempted here into a digression, relating back to the Blind Willie Johnson case, on the genuinely profound nature of traditional African–American evangelical Christianity. I have to resist, other than to insist that, far from the patronising white (especially European) stereotypical image
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My position, then, is that the core issue is indeed the existential one of how to live life authentically as fully as possible without being overwhelmed by despair in the face of ‘non-being’, more or less as sketched by Tillich. It is not, pace MacMurray, about social relations; not, pace Niebuhr, about sustaining a dialogue with God; not, pace Allport, about achieving a ‘mature religious sentiment’ and not, pace Leuba, about devising some post-religious religion centred on promoting the highest ethical values. Neither is it about achieving some happy ‘self-actualization’ or ‘individuation’, as much psychotherapy holds. Undoubtedly, all these are in there somewhere; undoubtedly too, Allport and Leuba were both correct in refusing to identify religion as rooted in a single emotional or intellectual cause. Yet their solutions fail fully to meet the case. Nor am I interested in following Tillich back from the frontier into the fold of Protestant theology and religious practice. Viewed from this angle, the boundary between religion and the relevant areas of Psychology evaporates. It ceases to be a matter of complementary religious, scientific and artistic perspectives on the cosmos as Streeter proposed. It is no longer the question of how Psychology and religion might co-operate to deal with, and promote, ‘spirituality’ as Spinks thought, and it can certainly no longer seriously be entertained that Psychology, or Psychology plus the physical sciences, can offer a wholesale ‘replacement’ of religion, at least without undergoing some quite revolutionary change themselves. Rather unexpectedly, I discover myself in hailing distance of Dourley! At this direr-than-usual historical moment, we are left with only the one, quite straightforward question—how, both individually and collectively, do we access the resources which will enable us to endure and continue? Both Psychological and religious thought—and practice—have much of value to offer (along with vast amounts of dross), but little that is any longer sufficiently inspirational or penetrating to suffice (for me at any rate). Whether our predicament is called religious or Psychological, or given any other tag, is now deeply irrelevant. Perhaps we do need, without worshipping them or swallowing them wholesale, to return to our species’ genuine heroes, in whatever sphere. Though planting trees, feeding the birds, and watching the sunset are hardly less important. And maybe we can scrap the word ‘spiritual’ altogether—as with the word ‘race’, it is the category itself which substantially underpins the problem, doing little real work and masking many real issues. So far, I have said little about God. The standard philosophical response to the question ‘Do you believe in God?’ used to be ‘It depends what you mean by God.’ of it being the happy, simple, emotional exuberance of uneducated ‘Negroes’ with lovely voices and a good sense of rhythm, it embodies the very essence of ‘religion’ as being described here, of which Johnson may be seen as the epicentre. It supplied the resources for African American collective and individual survival and, later, for their cultural and political energisation in the Civil Rights campaign and beyond. It is our intuitive sense of this profundity (whatever our ethnicity) which has given its musical expressions such universal appeal. Nor is it incidental that when the Christian light failed for them, radical urban African Americans turned to Islam. A full, insider’s, examination of the historical and psychological roles of religion for African Americans is urgently needed.
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13 Conclusions, Hypotheses, Suggestions and a Stab at a Personal ‘Position Statement’
Perhaps though the difficulty is even worse, is it even possible for anyone to state clearly what they do mean by the term? To reiterate a point made previously, after recently reading Karen Armstrong’s History of God (1993), I was left with an image of a concept constantly oscillating between the two equally unsatisfactory poles of crude anthropomorphism and abstraction so rarefied as to be useless, with endless efforts being made to resolve the tension by invoking mediating persons, powers and forces (Christ being the paradigm instance). This lack of clarity is not necessarily fatal, since one could argue that if God could be easily defined He, She or It would not be God, and the Jungian interpretation would be that the term is an archetypal symbol, the meaning of which cannot, by its nature, be fully defined or known as, like all archetypes, it is inexhaustible. I am not a theologian; so I will restrict myself to two brief comments in the light of the material I have been considering in this work. First, it again strikes me that Tillich’s position in The Courage to Be comes closest to the psychological heart of the matter, conceiving of God as referring to an inner, seemingly transpersonal, source of strength on which to draw in fending off despair, the principle of ‘Being’ as such. This does, though, have a Manichean ‘Light versus Darkness’ feel to it, with which I am not entirely happy. It is, as Dourley saw, not dissimilar to Jung’s more elaborated concept of God-as-archetype. It also echoes some of the arguments of William James and others referred to in Chap.€6. The second is that I do feel that the less psychologically focussed Theism approach also remains unresolved. The place of mind in nature continues to be a genuine riddle, and if one wants to use the term God in this context, so be it. Both of these interpretations are essentially ‘immanentist’ rather than ‘transcendentalist’, but neither could be said to be ‘psychologistic’ in the reductionist sense.
Concluding Remarks I suspect I am leaving no camp entirely happy. Christians will lament that I never really came to see the light, anti-religious radical psychologists will complain that the position taken is a typical soft liberal cop-out, and tough-minded experimental psychologists will dismiss the book as another subversive social-constructionist tract. Academic historians of Psychology, especially in the U.S., might additionally feel it is under-researched and ignorant of the many subtle nuances of U.S. cultural history and Psychology’s places therein. So be it. If it goads others into exploring the topic more deeply in order to demonstrate my errors, that will be excellent. If others feel my labours have let them down by, at the end of such a prolonged day, bringing forth, perhaps not a mouse, but a rather smaller mammal than they expected, I apologise. Both Psychology and religion may be viewed as striving, either as rivals or collaborators, to establish academic, scientific or spiritual rights over the ‘human soul’. But as far as these are concerned, they cannot really be assigned to any external authority, scientific, religious, literary or artistic regardless of how wise, inspira-
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tional, and informative we find them. They are inalienably our own, however much we might wish otherwise. They cannot be delegated. If, perchance, we discover or encounter an internal authority which trumps this, that too is our own business. We may wish, even feel obliged, to convey the event to others, who may in turn ‘read into’ our words something profound or meaningful in the way described above. But the authority itself stops with our own soul, it can exercise no legitimate rights over others.
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Index
Note: ‘n’ after an entry indicates that it occurs in a footnote. A Anglicanism, 14, 37, 46n, 77n, 83, 104, 132, 135, 150 Anthropology, 46, 76, 106, 145, 147 culture and personality school, 134 Anti-semitism, 120, 126–128 Atheism/atheist/atheistic, 16, 35, 36, 100, 109, 117, 138, 149, 150, 152, 154 B Behaviourism, 45, 63, 82, 99, 132, 133, 138, 151 Belief (concept of), 67 Bible, 10, 28, 45, 75, 83, 105, 127 Buddhism, 40, 47, 55, 117, 143, 145 C Child/childhood, 6, 10, 13–15, 17, 18, 29, 32, 46, 48, 67, 69, 83, 85, 124, 125, 136, 141, 150, 152 Child Study Association, 14, 15 Christianity, 1–7, 10, 11, 17, 22, 44, 54, 56, 58, 59, 67, 74, 75, 77, 78, 94, 96, 98, 114, 117, 118, 124, 125, 143, 145–147, 149–152, 158 City Temple Psychological Clinic, 79, 80, 85, 86, 98 Courage, 55–59 Creationism, 5, 6 D Dorpat School, 43, 44
E Education, 10, 13–17, 29, 49, 62, 77n, 83, 85, 117n, 139, 145, 150 Emmanuel Movement, 70, 71 Evolution, 10, 16, 19–21, 37, 71, 112, 124 Existentialism/-ist, 6, 55–60, 89, 138, 159 F Fundamentalist, 6, 158 G God, 10, 16n, 20, 21, 28, 36, 40, 42, 44, 48, 55–58, 61, 71, 74, 81, 83, 94–98, 102, 105, 109–114, 125, 129, 135, 138, 148, 156, 159, 160 Growth Movement, 51, 62, 70, 87–90, 102, 145, 146 H Harvard University, 56, 58, 70, 104, 127n, 132, 135, 136 Hinduism, 6, 55, 117, 118, 143 History of topic: neglect of, 1–7 Hypnosis/hypnotism, 23, 69, 74, 76, 78, 81 I Islam/Muslim, 2, 5, 6, 67, 118, 119, 132 J Judaism, 25, 54, 59, 67, 117, 120, 121, 126–131, 143, 145, 156 Jungian Psychology, 59, 63, 77, 80, 82, 86, 88, 89, 95, 97, 98, 120, 147, 148, 160
G. Richards, Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9, ©Â€Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
175
Index
176 L Logos, 7, 9–11, 30, 35, 36, 65, 67, 68, 87, 112, 113, 115 Logotherapy, 58, 60, 89 Love, 45, 65, 66, 87, 90, 97, 98, 125, 158 M Mental and moral philosophy (MMP), 15–18, 20, 29, 30 Methodism/Methodist, x, 14, 70, 78, 79, 83, 84, 86, 87, 132 Modernist, 1–3, 6, 26, 37, 72, 90, 93, 114, 134 Mysticism, 40, 42, 55, 60, 65, 82, 84, 94, 117, 121, 126–131 Mythos, 9–11, 30, 34–36, 65, 67, 68, 87, 88, 97, 99, 100, 112, 113, 115, 131, 148, 151 N New Psychology, 46, 47, 73–77, 82, 83, 96 P Personalism, 81 Personality, 19, 23, 28, 31, 36, 39, 43, 45–47, 55, 56, 80–83, 89, 93, 100–107, 123, 127, 129, 132–139, 141, 143, 144, 150, 152 Post-modernist, 1–3, 35, 157 Prayer, 18, 21, 39, 40, 74, 84, 93–100, 105, 117 Protestantism, 7, 17, 30, 39, 48, 49, 85, 124–126, 137, 138, 150, 151 Psychic research (inc.Spiritualism), 23, 29, 71, 72, 81, 89, 99, 151 Psychoanalysis, 2, 4, 6, 10, 31, 43, 44, 46, 47, 56, 66, 69–74, 76–78, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95, 107, 119–121, 126–131, 133, 134, 144, 146 Psychological theory, 58, 63, 123–139 Psychometrics, 11, 45–47, 80, 100–106, 134, 137, 143
Psychotherapy, 2, 4, 42, 47, 52, 56, 62, 63, 69–91, 96, 98, 107, 119, 131, 137, 142, 146, 148, 152, 154, 159 R Roman Catholicism, 24–30, 49, 94, 103, 104, 114, 128n, 132, 145, 152 S Scholasticism, 25–27, 119 Secularization, 3, 127 Self, 19, 23, 24, 48, 54–56, 57n, 60, 61, 89, 90, 93, 99, 151 Self-actualization, 82, 102, 106, 107, 159 Sikhism, 2 Social Constructionism, 4, 54, 67, 104, 118, 119, 123, 147, 149, 160 Soul, 25, 28, 42, 59, 66, 74, 76, 79, 94, 118, 130, 136, 141, 142, 146, 147, 153, 160, 161 Spirituality, 9, 42, 90, 101, 106, 151, 154, 159 Suggestion/autosuggestion, 34, 69, 74, 75n, 79–82, 95, 96, 98, 104 T Tavistock Clinic, 70, 76–78 Theism, 20, 21, 29, 39, 58, 109–115, 160 Theology/Theological, 5, 20, 26–28, 36, 37, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 56–59, 61, 63, 74, 81, 85, 102, 109, 111, 112, 142, 143, 150, 155–157 U Union Theological Seminary, 17, 54, 56, 62, 63 Unitarianism, 11, 18–21, 104, 132 Z Zionism, 6
