Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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induced them to murder him, overstated Freud’s case that the many irrational aspects of Mosaic religion betray its human, neurotic, and Oedipal origin. The book’s addition to Freud’s theory of religion consists of its analysis of the Mosaic commandment that prohibits the making of Divine images. Freud took the commandment to imply that Moses conceived of a God who has no form. Proceeding from this premise, Freud suggested that the abstract concept of God is derived from concrete images of God, through a ‘triumph of intellectuality over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation’. Freud remarked that ‘all such advances in intellectuality have as their consequence that the individual’s self-esteem is increased’ (p. 115).

Object relations and the revalorization of religion

Freud’s questions – what is religion? why are people religious? is religion healthy? – have remained the major concerns of psychoanalytic writings on religion. Although most psycho analysts outdid Freud in pathologizing religion, Oskar Pfister (1923, 1948), a Lutheran pastor, psychoanalyst, and personal friend of Freud, saw psychoanalysis as a means to purify religion by identifying its morbid components. The neurotic aspects of religion could then be abandoned, and only healthy aspects retained.

Pfister’s orientation was given powerful support by the clinical studies of Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1979), who noted that psychoanalytic patients’ relations with God are complex, nuanced, and in process of continuous development, in a fashion that is consistent with their relations with other people. Rizzuto’s finding has been amply confirmed by other psychoanalysts. It is inconsistent, however, with Freud’s theory that God is the exalted father. Were God a symbol that displaces memories of the father as he was seen by the young child, a person’s relation with God would be fixated and unchanging in its infantilism. It would not be in process of continuing growth and development.

Contemporary psychoanalysts favor an ‘object relations’ approach to religion that revises Freud’s diagnosis. D. W. Winnicott drew attention to the infant’s special attachment to its ‘first not-me possession’, a cloth, teddy bear, or doll that the infant cannot bear to be without. Its importance for the infant is accepted by the family, given social validation through tolerant regard, and surrounded with appropriate ritualized behaviors. Winnicott contended that a ‘transitional object’ is, for the infant, both part of the infant and an external reality. Logically paradoxical, it is experientially coherent, for it belongs to ‘an intermediate area of experiencing … which is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual’.

Winnicott was primarily concerned with infancy, but in a remarkable intuitive leap he extrapolated from the clinical evidence to a general theory of culture. Alluding to Freud’s designation of religion as an illusion, Winnicott revalorized illusion:

Illusion … is allowed to the infant, and … in adult life is inherent in art and religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is not their own. We can share a respect for illusory experience, and if we wish we may collect together and form a group on the basis of the similarity of our illusory experiences.

Winnicott asserted that illusory experiences range from the transitional objects of infancy through play to creativity and the whole of cultural life. Because illusory experiences are

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unavoidable, they must be considered normal and healthy. They remain projections that buffer the individual from reality. However, Freud’s either/or distinction between inner (psychic) and external (physical) reality is overly simplistic. Illusory experiences form a third class of phenomena.

Paul W. Pruyser (1974) added that an individual’s capacity for illusory experience determines ‘a disposition or a talent for the numinous’, as is also the case for artistic creativity and art appreciation. Not everyone needs or likes to develop the transitional sphere. Among those who do, differences in taste – which are partly constitutional and partly acquired – lead to different preferences among art, literature, drama, music, religious ideas, metaphysical speculation, and ethical propositions. Arguing in the tradition of the historians of religion Otto and van der Leeuw, Pruyser asserted the intrinsically religious character of ‘limit situations’ because they involve ‘transcendence and mystery … charged with cognitive, ontological, epistemological, and emotional implications’.

Pruyser emphasized that ‘adequate reality-testing is needed to keep the transitional sphere properly bounded, and its content and language consensually validated’. Religions have historically permitted illusions to shade over into hallucination and delusion whenever ‘excessive fantasy formation’ has led to ‘flagrant disregard of the obvious features of outer reality’. In Pruyser’s view, the truth claims of religions may be valid if they are maintained as illusions – that is, as matters of faith – but they are definitely and necessarily false if they are presented as theological certainties.

Pfister’s concern with the questions, ‘What is sick? and what healthy in religion?’, remains a major focus of clinical interest. The impact of religion on psychotherapy and the handling of religious issues in psychotherapy are pressing concerns for psychotherapists who work with religious clientele.

Spiritual awakening

A third major trend in the psychology of religion was begun by two founders of academic psychology, Edwin Diller Starbuck (1911 [1899]) and William James (1958 [1902]), but went into eclipse during the heyday of behaviorism. Familiar as Starbuck and James were with the evangelical tradition of American Protestantism, they conceptualized the psychology of religion, above all else, as the study of the process by which a non-religious person becomes religious. Where Freud had asked, ‘What religious phenomena become coherent through their resemblance to psycho-pathology?’, Starbuck and James implicitly asked, ‘How does religion differ from irreligion? What psychological phenomena are uniquely religious, that is, are unlike any and all non-religious phenomena?’ These questions led them to study religious experiences.

In Starbuck’s opinion, the spiritual path begins with conversion but culminates in a further experience termed sanctification. Because sin ceases to be tempting, evil habits are abandoned, altruism increases, and there is a sense of having achieved complete union with one’s spiritual ideals.

James expanded Starbuck’s model to address Catholicism as well as evangelical Protestantism. According to James, ‘healthy-minded religion’ develops straightforwardly, without dramatic processes. Because the healthy-minded are at peace with their own imperfections, they feel no need to undergo spiritual development in any meaningful sense of the term. It is only the sick soul that must be twice-born in order to attain its natural inner unity and peace. The divided self gains unity through conversion. Some conversions occur

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during mystical moments. Others do not. When conversion is not followed by backsliding but is permanent, the individual achieves saintliness – a quality that is characterized by asceticism, strength of soul, purity, and charity.

Following Starbuck and James, many studies were made of conversion, but the treatment of a theological category, ‘conversion’, as though it were a psychological one has proved unworkable. Discussions of religious conversion address three separate psychological phenomena: (1) a change from irreligiosity to religiosity; (2) a change of existing religiosity from conventional routine to personal and devout; and (3) a change of affiliation from one religion to another. Because studies of conversion often proceeded at cross-purposes with each other, the larger topic of spiritual transformation was neglected until the rise of humanistic and transpersonal psychology in the 1960s and 1970s.

A pioneer of humanistic psychology, Abraham Maslow (1964) suggested that people have a hierarchy of motives, that commences with physiological needs, safety, belongingness and love, and progress to less necessary objects of desire, such as self-esteem, satisfaction striving or growth motivation, the need to know, aesthetic needs, and Being-values. Maslow identified Being-values through an analysis of peak experiences, including mystical. The values included: truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, and self-sufficiency.

Maslow contended that psychological changes conform with progress along the hierarchyÂ

of values. The changes that are sought through psychotherapy serve to heal Âdeficiencies in the areas of belongingness, love, and self-esteem. Their function is to end existing psychic pain. Psychotherapy may be considered successful when these motives are satisfied. It is also possible, however, for the personality to move beyond health into excellence, when the further motives for growth, knowledge, aesthetics, and Being-values come to the fore. Maslow adopted the term ‘self-actualization’ in order to discuss the achievement of these goals.

Maslow argued, and quantitative studies have since confirmed, that traditional religious beliefs and observances are obstacles to self-actualization, particularly if they are conservative. On the other hand, because self-actualized people tend to have mystical peak experiences, Maslow and several other psychologists assumed the converse, that the world’s mystical paths are techniques, among other matters, for self-actualization. The term ‘transpersonal’ denoting progress beyond self, to achieve something more than self alone, was introduced by Roberto Assagioli, who had founded psychosynthesis decades earlier. As it was defined in the 1970s, the project of transpersonal psychology was to place spiritual transformation and spiritual direction, so far as possible, on cross-cultural and scientific footing.

Assagioli (1991) developed a longitudinal, psychodynamic account of a clinically observable process that he termed ‘self-realization’ or ‘spiritual awakening’. The process begins with an existential crisis regarding the meaning of life that is often attended by resistance of all solutions. One or more religious experiences occur next. The experiences are typically euphoric and profoundly meaningful. Their occurrence terminates the existential crisis, but frequently precipitates a crisis of another sort. The newly discovered meaningfulness of spirituality is made the pretext of narcissistic inflation or grandiosity. Once the inflation wanes, depression may set in. The depression often has an ethical content of remorse over past moral failings. If the depression is intolerable, the religious experiences may be denied, much as ideas born of alcoholic intoxication are discounted during subsequent sobriety. Alternatively, the newly appreciated spiritual values may be made the basis of behavioral

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change to embody the values. The reformation or transformation of character inevitably proceeds gradually, by small increments.

In many and perhaps most cases, spiritual awakenings do not proceed in uncomplicated fashions that would be consistent with Maslow’s concept of a growth from mental health toward excellence. Most awakenings are complicated by pathological symptoms that arise out of unresolved conflicts within the personality. Christina and Stanislav Grof (1990) introduced the term, ‘spiritual emergency’, to denote a spiritual awakening that is complicated by psychopathology. The differences between a spiritual emergency and a psychiatric disorder include: absence of physical disease; absence of brain pathology; absence of organic impairment; intact, clear consciousness and coordination; continuing ability to communicate and cooperate; adequate pre-episode functioning; ability to relate and cooperate, often even during religious experiences; awareness of the intrapsychic nature of the process; sufficient trust to accept help and cooperate; ability to honor basic rules of therapy; absence of destructive or self-destructive ideas and tendencies; good cooperation in things related to physical health, basic maintenance, and hygienic rules. Spiritual emergencies are among the syndromes that have been recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV of the American Psychiatric Association as ‘V62.89 Religious or Spiritual Problem’.

The conceptualization of single religious experiences in terms of creativity, commensurate with scientific and artistic achievement, was suggested by the social psychologists Daniel Batson and Larry Ventis (Batson et al. 1997). Merkur compared the longitudinal process of spiritual awakening with Wallas’s classic model of four phases of creativity: (1) the establishment of a problem, for example, an existential crisis, or an advance in maturity; (2) the unconscious incubation of the problem’s solution; (3) the manifestation of a creative solution as the content of one or more religious experiences, possibly precipitating a spiritual emergency; and (4) the refinement of the solution through its practical, behavioral implementation. In Merkur’s (1999) model, religious experiences differ from the creative inspirations of painters, writers, musicians, scientists, and so forth, in having numinous ‘limit situations’ as their subject matter.

Some writers conceptualize spiritual awakening as spiritual in a metaphysical sense. In other cases, it is psychologized, for example, as self-actualization in Maslow’s model or, alternatively, from Merkur’s psychoanalytic perspective as a process of positive superego manifestation and integration.

Transpersonal psychotherapy

Because transpersonal psychology was unable to find a home in the academy, many practitioners came to depend for their income on private practices as psychotherapists. These financial constraints motivated a change in many transpersonalists’ agendas. Rather than to research spiritual awakening, transpersonalists who were therapists came to promote spiritual practices as adjuncts to psychotherapy. Meditations, visualizations, prayer, and other religious practices were found to be useful in psychotherapy, for example, in learning selfobservation, in cultivating self-discipline, and in building self-esteem.

Valuable as the procedures are clinically, the results are inevitably sectarian. WhichÂever meditations, visualizations, prayers, and so forth that a therapist enjoins on a client inevitably belong to one particular religion or another. The practices never belong to religion in general. Some transpersonal therapists are syncretistic in their borrowings; others confine themselves to the practices of a particular religious tradition.

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The slippage of transpersonal psychology from the study into the practice of religion has given rise to a genre of apologetic literature. The writings claim that one or another tradition of religious mysticism (Zen, Sufism, Kabbalah, and so forth) is inherently therapeutic. Although the writings are published as psychology, they are better considered as theology.

Religious development

All authorities agree that religiosity takes different forms at different ages. No consensus has emerged, however, regarding the contents and duration of the stages. William W. Meissner, a Jesuit and a psychoanalyst, has argued that a person’s religion reflects whatever may be the person’s developmental stage at the time. Meissner suggested that faith and hope are issues in infancy. Contrition comes to the fore in early childhood. The central issues in later years are: penance and temperance in the kindergarten years; fortitude in grade school; humility in adolescence; the love of neighbors in young adulthood; service, zeal, and self-sacrifice in adulthood;Â and charity in maturity.

Recognizing that people’s experiences are not necessarily limited to their current developmental issues, but may involve reversions to previous concerns, Meissner (1984) later proposed a typology of five modes of religious experience. The first is dominated by an absence of subject–object distinctions. The second reflects the worldview of toddlers. The veneration of idealized religious figures is necessary to sustain and maintain the sense of self. Faith is ‘riddled with a sense of utter dependence, a terror of the omnipotence of the godhead, and a superstitious and magical need to placate by ritual and ceremonial’. The third mode reflects the anal stage of psychoanalytic theory. The self is cohesive, but efforts must be made to secure self-esteem. Concepts tend to be concrete, literal, and one-dimensional. Religious figures are authoritative, and myths tend to be anthropomorphic. Religious concerns address the permitted and the prohibited, the fear of punishment for transgressions, and the dutiful performance of obligations and rituals. The fourth mode presupposes the consolidation of the superego and, with it, the internalization of conscience around age six. Ethics and social concerns are at a premium. Recognition is made of the diversity of authorities. Conflicts are resolved partly through compartmentalization but partly through reliance on one’s own judgment. Meissner remarked that ‘by far the largest portion of adult religious behavior falls into this modality’.

Meissner’s fifth and final mode of religious experience becomes possible when still greater maturity has been attained. In the fifth mode, instinctual drives are managed successfully, so that the ego enjoys considerable autonomy. Anxiety is lessened dramatically and is largely restricted to realistic external concerns. Wisdom, empathy, humor, and creativity come to the fore, and conflicts tend to be resolved through synthesis rather than compartmentalization. ‘The religious belief system and its tradition are seen in increasingly realistic terms that affirm their inherent tensions and ambiguities and accept the relativity, partiality, and particularity of the beliefs, symbols, rituals, and ceremonials of the religious community’.

A significantly different developmental scheme was offered by James W. Fowler (1981), who worked with a Piagetian model of cognitive development. Fowler postulated a preverbal stage of undifferentiated faith and counted six further stages through the life span. He attributed a fantasy-filled, imitative ‘intuitive-projective’ faith to children between 3 and 7 years of age, a ‘mythic-literal’ faith to grade schoolers, and a ‘synthetic-conventional faith’ to adolescents. After remarking that many adults never progress beyond syntheticconventional faith, Fowler listed ‘individuative-reflective’ faith in young adulthood when