Vol. 25
No.2
Summer 2002
Annual
Meeting, American Academy of Religion
November 23-26, 2002
Toronto, Canada
This issue is also available in Adobe Acrobat format.
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A58 Saturday, 4:00
pm-6:30 pm Kelley A. Raab, St. Lawrence University, Presiding Theme: Critical Dialogue between Religion William S. Waldron, Middlebury College Nathaniel Barrett, Boston University Kelly Bulkeley, Graduate Theological Union Responding: A265 Tuesday, 9:00
am-11:30 am Kathleen Bishop, Drew University, Presiding Theme: The Centennial of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience: Continuing the Discussion Habibeh Rahim, St. John's University Lynn Bridgers, Emory University Jill McNish, Montclair, NJ David R. Perley, University of Toronto |
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Friday, 2:00 pm-6:30
pm 2:00 Theme: Pastoral Counseling, Social Work, and Religion: An Interdisciplinary Forum Franz Metcalf, California State University Los Angeles, Presiding Horace Griffin, Seabury-Western Theological
Seminary Laura Praglin, University of Northern Iowa 3:30 International Psychology and Religion Program James W. Jones, Rutgers University, and 4:00 Coffee Break 4:30 Victoria Rue, St. Lawrence University Saturday, 9:00 am-
11:30 am 9:00 Works in Progress Catherine Roach, University of Alabama, Presiding 9:30 Theme: The Contextual Self Pamela Cooper-White Helen Daley Schroepfer, Temple University Kurethara Bose, Bronx, NY Charlene Burns, University of Wisconsin-Eau
Claire 11:00 Business meeting Franz Metcalf, California State University,
L.A. and |
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Chris Ross (Wilfred Laurier University) has the following news to share: "I have been continuing to work mainly in the area of the psychology of individual religious differences - applying Jung's personality typology to understanding the profoundly different ways people approach religion and spirituality related to their personality. The most salient personality difference across the board is between those who have an intuitive (big picture, contextual) way of perceiving and those who have a sensing (detailed, content oriented) way of perceiving. For intuitives religion and spirituality is a wonderful way to articulate the complexity of human living, whereas for sensing types it's a guide to right living. Accordingly I have found these personality preferences show up disproportionately in different religious groups. A second interest has been writing a series of four articles on the contemporary Hindu avatara Mother Meera. While experiencing with her the strongest single religious experience of my life, witnessing a conflict that arose when I visited her in her village in Germany threw me into the categories of ethical discourse, cultural psychology (Thanks, Greg Schneider), and contemporary psychoanalysis. Most recently I have been on sabbatical partly in Wales collaborating with Leslie Francis on studies in Jungian typology and religious affiliation and attending a Tibetan Buddhist festival in the New Kadampa Traditions at Ulverston in the Lake District in Northern England. Recent publications: "Personality Type and Quest Orientation of Religiosity." Journal of Psychological Type (2000) 55: 22-25, with Leslie Francis. "Reconciling Claims to Transcendence with Evidence of Cultural Relativity: Case Studies in Visiting Mother Meera." Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion. "The Perceiving Function and Christian Spirituality: Distinguishing between Sensing and Intuition. Pastoral Sciences (1998) 16, pp. 93-103, with L. Francis. "Relationship of Jungian Psychological Type to Religious Orientation and Spiritual Practices," with D. Weiss and L. Jackson. International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (1997) 6 (4), 263-279. "Experiencing Mother Meera." Canadian Woman Studies, (1997) 17(1):78-82. Under review: "Psychological Type and Denominational Affiliation among Undergraduates in Wales." With Leslie Francis (Senior). "Type Patterns among Evangelical Protestants in Ontario." With Paul Bramer (Senior). "Using cultural psychology to understand conflict around Hindu Avatara Mother Meera." James Jones (Rutgers University) also has several items to report: "First, my book Terror and Transformation: The Ambiguity of Religion in Psychoanalytic Perspective is now out from Routledge Press. From a contemporary (primarily Kohutian) perspective, it discusses how the same religions can sponsor both lofty moral sentiments with heroic acts of self-denial and also some of humanity's most terrible acts of inhumanity. The book has a strange contemporaneousness I never would have imagined two years ago when I wrote it. Second, my paper "The Experience of the Holy: A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis" was published in the Jan. 2002 issue of Pastoral Psychology and simultaneously a slightly longer version was published (in English) in the Dutch Journal Psyche & Geloof (Psyche and Faith). Third, my paper "Hans Loewald: The Psychoanalyst as Mystic" will soon appear in Psychoanalytic Review. As you may remember, this paper was first presented at a PCR Session in Nashville. Fourth, I have just signed a contract with St. Martin's Press to do a trade book on psychology and spiritual practice, tentatively entitled "Christian Faith as Spiritual Practice - Lessons from Buddhism and Psychotherapy." The Publisher wants me to emphasize the Buddhism-Christianity angle and so I am immersing myself in the Buddhist-Christian literature again. And I continue to travel to Sweden to teach in the program on "Religion, Culture, and Health" in Uppsala. More about this in Toronto." Dan Noel (Pacifica Graduate Institute) says he is thinking these days about research on the discourse of "belief," with some wariness toward the use of neuropsychiatry to make religious claims. He is writing entries on Jung and Joseph Campbell for the Continuum Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, and he just taught a course on the cultural texts of Freud, using readings from Freud and Peter Homans' The Ability to Mourn. Dan suggests PCR members take a look at David Tacey's book Jung and the New Age (Brunner-Routledge, 2001), which he is reviewing for Nova Religio. Lewis Rambo (San Francisco Theological Seminary) shares the sad news of the death in May of Liston Mills, Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Lewis says Mills "had been a leading figure among Southern Baptists in our field. He was one of the first students of the famous Wayne Oates who did pioneering work in the psychology of religion, pastoral care and counseling, and the field of religion and medicine. Liston mentored many students at Vanderbilt—among them Beth Liebert. Liston was a kind and generous spirit. He, along with James Lapsley, founded the Society for Pastoral Theology. Liston also served as the editor of Pastoral Psychology for many years. I met him in the late 1960's and early 1970's when he did a sabbatical leave at Yale Divinity School. I had the very good fortune to be in Liston's discussion group that he led while working with Jim Dittes at YDS." Jack Hanford wants to inform PCR members of the publication
of his book Bioethics from a Faith Perspective (Haworth,
2002). Because of changes in Jack's family situation (the unexpected
death of his mother), he is considering leaving retirement and looking
for possible faculty positions in bioethics, ethics in health care,
psychology of religion, moral and faith development, etc. Send suggestions
to him at jhan1722@tucker-usa.com. Welcome to New PCR Members: Four new members have joined the PCR group:
Welcome to all of you! |
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Sponsored by the Harvard Medical School Department of Continuing Education and directed by Herbert Benson, president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, the "Science and Mind/Body Medicine" conference held this spring was aimed primarily at medical doctors, psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and other health care professionals. I attended the conference hoping to learn something new about current brain/mind research. In that regard my hope was amply fulfilled. But I was surprised to find that the conference, in addition to providing abundant neuroscientific information, also offered a fascinating portrait of the way in which a certain scholarly community is conceptualizing the relationship between Eastern religion and Western science. As the conference proceeded I found myself thinking increasingly of conversations I have had with members of the PCR group over the past several years, conversations revolving around the tricky business of applying Western psychological perspectives to non-Western religions. In the context of those ongoing PCR conversations, I thought the following observations would be of interest. The first speaker was Eugene Taylor, who will be making a presentation at the PCR/Mystical Studies session on William James at the Toronto AAR/SBL conference. Taylor provided a tidy historical summary of mind/body research in Western science, and to his credit he explicitly acknowledged the Harvard-centric orientation of his perspective, which also turned out to be the perspective of most of the presenters. Taylor offered James' "philosophy of experience" as the best way for the conference attendees to conceptualize the connections between health and self-realization. Although many people who have studied these connections over the past 100 years have pursued the extra-institutional practice of what Taylor calls "bandit science" (a wonderful phrase), he encouraged the attendees to find new ways to reconcile conventional scientific verification with the elusive, poetic language of inner experience. The other speakers on the first day discussed issues in medical practice that are connected to mind/body connections. Alice Domar described various relaxation techniques she teaches her patients (primarily women dealing with fertility problems) to help them reduce stress. Esther Sternberg outlined the negative impact of stress on the immune system and the correspondingly positive effects of stress reduction on overall health. Both these presentations were essentially practical applications of the work of conference organizer Herbert Benson, whose best-selling books The Relaxation Response (William Morrow, 1975) and Timeless Healing (Scribner, 1996) present a highly simplified method of focused concentration that has measurable physiological effects on stress reduction. The second day of the conference included several presentations connecting Western medical practice with Eastern religious practices, particularly yoga and meditation. This was when things started to get interesting. As slide after slide was shown of Eastern practitioners (primarily Tibetan Buddhists) sitting in meditation while hooked up to a dizzying array of hi-tech physiological measurement devices, with Western scientists sitting nearby avidly watching the data streaming in on their computers, the impression began to form in my mind that this was THE goal—the slides revealed that the driving motivation underlying the whole conference was an effort to catch religion in the act. Catch it, analyze it, define it, and apply it to practical issues of disease and health. It also became apparent during the question-and-answer sessions that a significant percentage of both presenters and attendees were long-time practitioners of some kind of Eastern meditation tradition. Attendees would commonly preface their questions by saying, "I'm a psychiatrist from ___, and for the past 12 years I have been sitting in the ___ tradition, and my question is…" As more and more people testified to their own personal integration of Western science and Eastern religion, the conference developed into a kind of Winnicottian transitional space: Individuals were contributing pieces of their inner world to the collective micro-culture of the conference, and in return they received validation and support from other participants in that space. The third day was the reason I came to the conference: presentations on dreams by neuroscientist J. Allan Hobson (who gave a response at the 1998 PCR session on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams) and Jungian analyst Robert Bosnak, and then presentations on "mind/body/spirit" by James Austin ("Zen and the Brain"), Harold Koenig ("Religion, Spirituality, and Medicine"), and Andrew Newberg ("A Neuropsychological Analysis of Religious Experience: Why God Won't Go Away"). The content of these presentations was everything I hoped for, but as the day wore on and the conference approached its conclusion I felt increasingly troubled. I waited and waited for someone to raise even the slightest hint of skeptical caution about the headlong rush to marry Western science to Eastern religion, but it never came. I found myself no longer taking notes on what the speakers were saying, but rather writing pointed questions about what the speakers were not saying:
None of these questions were addressed, and in the end I couldn't help lamenting the absence of one particular voice from the conference: Freud. Despite his many failings, Freud had keen critical sense for the unspoken assumptions and motivations driving people's thought and behavior (particularly around the subject of religion). I wish there had been more of Freud's type of skeptical questioning to challenge some of the naively inflated, self-satisfied rhetoric that came to pervade this cozy, three-day long celebration of East-meeting-West-at-Cambridge. More than anything, the conference made me appreciate PCR gatherings, where these kinds of critical questions hold center stage and where a vastly more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of religion, psychology, and culture has been developed over the past quarter-century. |
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Biblical Violence and Consolation: Psychological Perspectives Schuyler Brown, St Michaels College Dan Merkur, University Of Toronto Daniel Terry William S Morrow, Queens Theological College Respondent: Dereck M Daschke, Truman State University Two Recent Books in Psychology and Biblical Studies Michael Willett-Newheart's Word and Soul: A Psychological,
Literary, and Cultural Reading of the Fourth Gospel Paul N Anderson, George Fox College W.W. Meissner's The Cultic Origins of Christianity: The Dynamics of Religious Development (The Liturgical Press, 2000) Donald Capps, Princeton Theological Seminary |
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| NEWS FROM OTHER CORNERS | What's happening elsewhere in the intersections of psychology
and religion?
At the 110th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, August 22-25 in Chicago, the Psychology of Religion Division (Division 36) will present sessions on:
The C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco has announced a conference and series of workshops on analytical psychology and spirituality. The "Depth Psychology and Spiritual Practice Conference" will take place October 11-13, and will feature Ann Ulanov and other analysts and practitioners exploring the integration of Jungian psychology and spirituality. The cost is $150 ($15 additional for 16 CEU). Held at the Presidio and the Lone Mountain Conference Center in San Francisco. The Fall and Winter will feature a series of Wednesday evening workshops under the theme of "Reading Jung and Jungians on Spirituality." The sessions will include reflections on writings of Edward Edinger, Ann Ulanov, Lionel Corbett, as well at the Jung-Buber conflict. Leaders include several Jungian analysts from the San Francisco Bay Area. Cost is $195 per term ($15 additional for 18 CEU). More information on these and other programs of the C.G. Jung Institute can be found by calling the Institute at (415) 771-8080; e-mail exed@sfjung.org; website: www.sfjung.org. |
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| PCR NEWS Volume 25; No. 2 Winter 2002 |
Editor: Kelly Bulkeley Layout: D. Andrew Kille |