In recent years the study of psychology, culture, and religion has taken on a more confessional tone, often encompassing a pastoral theological approach. In what ways does—or should—the psychological study of religion assume God? If so, whose God does it assume? What theoretical, material, or clinical difference does make? Alongside this framework exists a cultural landscape increasingly shaped by hierarchical classifications of religion, spirituality, and faith. Given these realities, how might the psychology of religion resist the growing force of Christian supremacy in U.S. cultural contexts?
This paper will make two, interconnected, claims: (1) that Modern Jewish thought (hereafter: MJT) must avoid choosing between an engagement with hermeneutics or a commitment to material realism, but must instead commit to both; and, (2) that MJT will be better able to do this if it more firmly brings Melanie Klein, and her work, into the “canon”.
This proposal aims to identify the theoretical connection between moral injury in the religious context and the clinical understanding of multiple self- and God-states in the healing process. Moral injury is painful insofar as one’s moral values are deeply ingrained in the life orientation and sense of self. When people experience a discrepancy between their religious values and the dominant norms of the powerholder or the larger community, like the church, it arouses moral injury that signifies a profound sense of betrayal of what is right. This proposal suggests that the clinical task of healing from moral injury in the religious context is to help the survivor recognize the multiplicity of her self-states and God-states so that she can navigate an alternative model of moral valence that is not intact from the moral transgression but transforms the traumatic religious experiences into a more mature view.
Psychology of religion with or without God? The answer to this question depends on what we mean by “God.” This paper suggests that we go beyond the conceptual fetishism so often associated with the idea of “God” to reflect on the experiences that first give rise to longings, images, or ideas of an ultimate significance, of which the notion of “God” in religions is but one explicit version. In light of paleoanthropological and neurological findings about the origin of the idea of God, as well as clinical material, this paper will suggest that attention to the infinitizing capacity of relational human self-reflective consciousness, which is principally open to harm or health, is key for the psychology of religion. The field of the psychology of religion has been vulnerable to conceptual fetishism when it makes pastoral theological confessional objectivist claims about God based on research on subjective uses of God representations.