JEREMY CARRETTE
The psychology of religion is a complex interdisciplinary area of study. It formally emerged in late-nineteenth-century European and American thought as part of the scientific endeavor to explain religious attitudes and behavior, governed and guided by notions of modern individualism. The scope and nature of its project are complicated by its diversity, its cultural location, the politics of science, and its unexamined philosophical assumptions.
The complexity of the area is further increased by the uneasy historical relationship between the different interdisciplinary domains and their competing claims. There is a conceptual struggle about the continuity or discontinuity between psychology and previous modes of thinking about the self. For example, the longer traditions of thinking about the self from the history of philosophy and theology shape the emergence of some early forms of psychological knowledge, as can be seen in Wilhelm Wundt’s folk psychology1 or Stanley Hall’s religious psychology.2 There is also a debate about the relationship between aspects of Germanic theology, such as Schleiermacher’s (1768–1834) idea of religious consciousness, and forms of introspective psychology. Psychologists who want to avoid any apparent contamination between theological ideas and supposed scientific methods fiercely reject any apparent crossover of ideas between the different disciplinary realms, but it is this tension that pervades the subject. There is an attempt to conceal a priori concepts of self from informing the assumed neutral ideal of scientific empiricism.
In a similar fashion, the study of religion has gone through various phases of ambivalence toward psychology as one of its founding disciplines. This uneasiness is caused by the fact that psychology shifts allegiance between the social, human, and natural sciences. Eric Sharpe3 attributes the tensions between the two fields to the impact of behaviorism on the psychology of religion, which reduced religion to secondary phenomena, but the problem rather relates to a more fundamental historical problem of its knowledge claims and its relation to the philosophy of self-knowledge and cultures of measurement.
The psychology of religion is pulled in different directions by the various competing methodologies and their associated institutional authority. It has therefore become incumbent on the various protagonists of the psychology of religion, as Antonie Vergote’s inescapably contentious essay on the subject recognizes, to “define the boundaries” and delimit the “competence and possible scope of the psychology of religion.”4 Each exponent of the psychology of religion holds different forms of allegiance to a type of knowledge about psychology and this defines and shapes what constitutes the “psychological” and what it can say about “religion.” This means that each psychological approach makes a religious object that is measurable and identifiable in terms of the philosophical assumptions of the method. It means that there are different meanings associated with the idea of the “psychological” and different forms of understanding of how the psychological relates to a natural science object. In other words, psychological forms of knowledge are contentious and compete against each other for authority and power in making truth claims about how we know and what we are within the domain of religious thought.
We thus find all sorts of appeals to the “strict definition,” “the real conception,” and what “should” be called the psychology of religion.5 Not surprisingly, the power relations between the two fields mean there are different kinds of relationship between religion and psychology, including reductionist, dialogical, and pastoral engagements. This creates slightly different disciplinary domains. The specific scientific claims of the “psychology of religion” are seen as distinct from “religious psychology” and “pastoral psychology,” though there is some methodological slippage between these subsets of knowledge. The dances of engagements employ the conjunctions “and,” “of,” “as,” and “with” between the two subjects, which reveals not only the shifting power relationship but deeper problems about the foundations of the subject.6
It can also be argued that psychology helps determine the object of religion, rather than psychology making a set of observations about religion from the position of psychological knowledge.7 This means that different types of psychology create slightly different ideas about the “religious” object of study according to the method and philosophical judgment implicit in the knowledge claims. For example, there is a difference between the claim that religious symbols reflect unconscious wish fulfillments (psychoanalysis) and the claim they are innate structures of the mind (cognitive science). The competing edges of the psychology of religion can be explained by the fact that this area of knowledge is determined by the interaction of three underlying forms of knowledge: philosophy, physiology, and politics. It is philosophical in that it holds assumptions about the kinds of knowledge we can have about the self, individual, mind, and body; it is physiological in that it attempts to use methods of the natural sciences to anchor its philosophical claims; and it is political insofar as the knowledge claims about the self, individual, and mind are of social importance and culturally varied. It is also political because the way you view the individual will shape how you can govern individuals.8
PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE, AND INTERPRETATION
The nature of the psychology of religion is further complicated by its competing claims to be a scientific discipline. The first problem relates to the fact that psychology is not a coherent set of practices or agreed-on positions, but a set of miscellaneous theories, methods, and practices, including a spectrum of positions from folk psychology and psychoanalysis to behaviorism and neuroscience. Peter du Preez accurately captured this complex diversity in his Kuhnian analysis of psychology, when he stated, “psychology is more like gang warfare than harmonious family life.”9 Any attempt to reconcile the positions within the broad scope of psychological theory and method is always set to failure, because, as Howard Kendler concludes in his study of the data and methods of psychology, they employ “irreconcilable orientations.”10 This diversity of positions creates a complex shaping of the object of analysis as the psychological data (experience, behavior, cognition) reconfigures the religious phenomena. The second problem is that each tradition of psychology is determined by a set of philosophical assumptions about the nature of “science” and the correct “scientific” way to study the object of religion, and that set of assumptions also reflects the historical deployment of the idea of science in various periods of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science, as Fuller shows,11 is a variable form with competing Enlightenment (falsifiability) and positivist (verifiability) forms. It holds complex ethical choices and is—as is often forgotten—a human and social enterprise: not least linked to public policy and the history of error.12
In the light of these unresolved tensions, psychology has been variously marked out as a “fragile” or an “ambiguous” science.13 This is because there is a failure to establish a natural science object, except in those instances where psychology becomes more biological and physiological in nature. The problem is that the language shifts—somewhat uncritically—between the various forms of psychological studies. The aim is often to aspire to the social imaginary of rational deduction (so-called objective studies) and neglects the value of the interpretative formation (so-called subjective/social studies) and, in turn, it forgets a whole array of positions in between these options where the object of study is conditioned by the interpretative concept. The notion and importance of the “empirical” shift between these positions and, in the end, what we witness is different appeals to “science” as a validating order, which cover over hidden philosophical values, accounts of truth, and models of being human.14 It is perhaps hard to imagine that there may not be much difference between the appeal of Freud to science and the appeal of a neuroscientist; both assume the authority of the institution of science and interweave nonscientific languages in order to claim a scientific reading of religion.
The appeal to science also involves psychology in the polemical nature of the science-religion debate and issues of reductionism. The main problem relates to the question of naturalism and metaphysics. Here the assumption is that belief and metaphysical claims can be explained within different types of psychological analysis. There are, of course, different ideological concerns within the psychological community, from the desire to sustain a metaphysical reality to the desire to eradicate it. This can be seen from the early differences between such writers as William James (1842–1910), with an open attitude to religious truth, and James Leuba (1867–1946), an early exponent of a scientific naturalism. This difference is regularly played out in the history of the psychology of religion. It can be seen more recently in the difference between someone like Fraser Watts, a Christian psychologist working in the tradition of science, and writers like Pascal Boyer, who seeks to find a contemporary naturalistic model built from cognitive science.15
SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND TEXTBOOKS
Caught between questions of philosophy, belief, science, institutional allegiances, and ideologies of the self, every introductory textbook weaves a narrative about the subject—mostly without awareness—to support their own agenda and criteria of valid knowledge. For example, David Wulff takes an uncritical descriptive and inclusive position in his major account of the psychology of religion, where he attempts to defend and define a broad and diverse disciplinary space,16 whereas B. Spilka et al. and M. Argyle take a clear empirical stand.17 Jonte-Pace and Parsons give up trying to fix the subject and allow for multiple forms of relation and hold a politic of knowledge from empiricism to feminism and cultural theory.18 The theoretical divisions mean that there are clear and distinct competing traditions and groups of literature, covering psychoanalytical, humanistic, developmental, cognitive, and neuroscientific models. Each area of knowledge has little time for the other and rarely seeks to cross-reference the other. The aim is rather to offer political dismissal of the different areas of work, through either direct challenge or epistemic avoidance. It means the psychology of religion is—at best—diverse and conceptually muddled and—at worst—a philosophically imprecise area of knowledge. In response to the existing confusions, there have been a number of critical responses to psychological thinking about religion and an opening up of the area to its philosophical and interdisciplinary questions of power.19 The introduction of critical forms of the psychology of religion takes the subject back to its historical, philosophical, and methodological problems.
In the end, the psychology of religion remains an incoherent and dislocated field with ever-diminishing professional positions and numerous theoretical heads buried in the sands of unexamined assumptions of knowledge. “Disappointment,” as Belzen has argued, seems “endemic to the field.”20 It fails to find a comfortable home in the study of religion or psychology and its affiliated subareas often emerge in idiosyncratic places, often under a new nomenclature, such as the emergence of cognitive science in anthropology or philosophy (for example, Whitehouse in anthropology and Boyer in philosophy). The idea of the psychological thus breaks up into diverse subareas with different ways of speaking, such that the language reflects subtle shifts of meaning. For example, we find studies of the self (humanistic), mind (cognitive/developmental), psyche/soul (psychoanalysis/archetypal psychology), and brain (neuroscience). This reveals the way the field contains competing narratives and epistemological confusions in the slips and jumps between these regions of description.
There are also ingenious rhetorical games played through the history of the subject that are used to displace and dismiss competing areas of psychology. This means that types of psychological language are employed against others. For example, as Fromm poignantly writes:
Academic psychology, trying to imitate the natural sciences and laboratory methods of weighing and counting, dealt with everything except the soul.… Psychology thus became a science lacking its main subject matter, the soul; it was concerned with mechanisms, reaction formations, instincts, but not with the most specifically human phenomena: love, reason, conscience, values.21
The attitudes to science and the nature of constructing what constitutes a science thus lie at the heart of the engagement between psychology and religion. All these different gestures to science say more about the attitude to the category of religion and how individuals wish to order the world than careful claims from the philosophy of science.
EPISTEMOLOGY, HISTORY, AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION
It is necessary for a critical introduction to the field of the psychology of religion to address the central problem of its knowledge claims in the area of the study of religion. We can achieve this critical purchase on the subject by focusing on the historically complex idea of introspection and raising the question of how we think about, or achieve some understanding of, ourselves (as defined by the psychological) inside the categorical space of religion. The psychology of religion can therefore be approached according the criteria of history and epistemology.
This approach demands we ask some preliminary philosophical questions. How do we know ourselves as human beings and how do we assess the ways of our knowing? How do such forms of self-knowledge and examination allow us to understand and interpret the practices and thoughts deemed to be “religious”? There are many ways of knowing and examining what we are and the problem of the psychology of religion is that the discourse of the religious itself has a purchase on truth-claims about self-knowledge that compete with psychological knowledge, which arguably is also formed by implicit Christian models of self-knowledge. The psychology of religion thus forms its own object of the religious as psychological. Making something into a fixed object of analysis sets up a relation of power by controlling the apparatus of knowledge or way something is known. It is, of course, equally possible to reverse the relation and make psychology the object of cultural introspection or individualism. We can make sense of these paradoxical and convoluted epistemological issues by framing the psychology of religion according to a philosophical question of how self-knowledge moves from religious/philosophical to scientific domains of knowledge. The distinctive shift to the scientific in the psychology of religion is based on the nature of psychological measurement and how the religious is captured under such logic. Those working in the institutions and professional orders of the psychology of religion often ignore such epistemological questions, because they do not wish to undermine or question the discourse that provides them with such authority. However, the diversity and internal confusions within the area of the psychology of religion require such a critical task. Much is then revealed in exploring the nature of introspection and measurement as critical categories for understanding the psychology of religion.
FROM INTROSPECTION TO MEASUREMENT
Although the term “introspection” is not formally employed until the modern era, and by John Locke in particular, its Western roots as a practice clearly go back to the Delphic principle “Know thyself” (Gnothi Seauton), though the Greek tradition of self-knowledge and self-examination is a complex one and different from a psychological tradition of the measured self.22 The greatest exposition of the Christian introspective tradition must to some extent be taken back to Augustine, not only in his Confessions (397–98), but in his work On the Trinity (400–16), where he expounds various models of the mind according to the Trinity.23 As Charles Taylor has argued: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that it was Augustine who introduced the inwardness of radical reflexivity and bequeathed it to the Western tradition of thought.”24 Taylor’s discourse of the self in Western thought supports a revival of Augustinian thought in the modern period and somewhat neglects the complex models of self in Thomas Aquinas and the problem of self-knowledge in both the modern and the medieval period. Jerrold Seigel specifically seeks to counter Taylor’s account of the self in Western thought and illustrates that it is not only present theory but historical analysis that is caught in the philosophical struggle of truth about the self and the nature of introspection.25 The question is, what, if anything, is constitutive of the modern sense of the psychological self?
Christian forms of introspection were developed according to models of self-examination in the long monastic traditions of the West, not least in the writings of Cassian and Ignatius. However, the Lutheran formation of self-examination brought a shift to the long tradition of inner reflection in Christianity by radicalizing the relationship of self in a demand for a new inner ethical relation to God. In line with this, the German Protestant tradition held within it the more immediate roots of psychological introspection by providing a structure and intensity of thinking about the self. It was Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith (1821) that brought forward the Protestant tradition of inwardness to new levels with his pietistic theological claims to “God consciousness” and the “feeling of absolute dependence.”26 The historical importance of these Western introspective traditions and other culturally powerful traditions of self-examination (in, for example, Buddhism) is the open-ended modeling of self according to various philosophical and theological assumptions. The problem for a post-Enlightenment tradition of scientific analysis of the self is that these models of introspection did not provide a stable self for measurement. The resolution of these problems and the desire to create a fixed and stable object of inquiry and close down the philosophical ambiguities, or the vague, transcendent horizons of meaning in theology, are a key part of the debate of whether the field of the psychology of religion is an open or closed scientific arena. The defining feature of the emergence of the psychology of religion was the introduction of measurement to account for the practices of self, which stabilized the self as a knowable entity that could be captured.
According to Danziger, modern psychology in the work of Wilhelm Wundt begins with the establishment of a “methodical” way of examining subjective events.27 Wundt, following Brentano, makes the distinction between “actual introspection” (Selbstbeobachtung) and “inner perception” (innere Wahrnehmung). This distinction between simply watching the inner world and some systematic approach led to the experimental condition by trying to create the conditions for observing subjective events as external events. Although, as Danziger makes clear, Wundt believed there was another type of nonexperimental psychology, Völkerpsychologie (a kind of folk or social psychology), it was soon overshadowed by the domination of the experimental method.28 “The triumphal progress of the natural sciences,” as Danizger indicates, “helped to promote the belief that their methods were the only methods for securing useful and reliable knowledge about anything.”29
The attempt by Wundt to hold different strands of psychological thought together and his attempt to locate psychology within a wider cultural process reflect the central politics of knowledge within the area of the psychology of religion. Jacob Belzen has mapped out some of these tensions in his evaluation of the psychology of religion in Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie, showing the ways Wundt can help in overcoming the problematic nature of individual psychologies that ignore cultural processes in the study of religion. Like Danziger, but within the historical study of the psychology of religion, Belzen’s critique focuses on the problem of psychology as a discipline adopting what he calls “methodological monism”: the move toward a natural science experimental method, including statistical analysis.30 There were models of psychology that resisted such approaches, but this only creates greater ambiguity between what constitutes the psychological knowledge and what carries older ideas of the self from philosophy and theology.
The key moment of the psychology of religion is then the ways in which a methodical study of human beings was employed to read religion and the central philosophical adoption of measurement as the key approach to study religion. It is therefore this philosophical shift to measurement that defines something of the psychology of religion, because even in works that would in time be rejected as valid science (Freud, Jung, Maslow, and so on) they all appeal to the context of science and its hallmarks of measured knowledge. It is an open question as to whether the models of self in Christian or Buddhist cultures offer a challenge to the measured self of psychology and whether measurement precludes an a priori model of self. To understand something of this problem we need to explore the issue of psychological measurement and ask how we measure psychological aspects of something categorized as “religion.”
PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURES OF MEASUREMENT
As Belzen suggests, a key part of the psychology of religion is the application of the methods of “general” psychology to the realm of “religion.”31 However, he believes this too creates a series of additional problems: applying invalid psychological models, using valid psychology but wrongly applying it to religion, or using a flawed application of valid methods. The idea of what constitutes “valid” knowledge and “valid” application is central to the psychological evaluation of religion, because the idea of religion is contentious itself. The question remains as to who gives the validation and approval. Valid knowledge is often framed as that which has undergone the rigorous test of scientific analysis, but these tests are themselves open to error and unresolved philosophical judgments. It is not that communities of scholars simply choose a valid type of knowledge, but rather they adopt agreed-on scientific principles, which they seek to employ in different domains that they assume to be measurable. Scientific method may be valid, but whether it is useful for psychology is the central contention.
The history of errors in psychology, as Joel Michell argues, is part of all science, but this becomes a greater concern when these errors remain part of the very practice of a knowledge community.32 Errors in the psychology of religion remain suppressed to service knowledge regimes and communities. Georges Canguilhem33 believed that much of psychological knowledge was set up to determine the normal and the pathological in the social order and this gave benefit to the established powers. But much of the psychology of religion is also trying to locate religion in the conditions of measurement. The majority of the studies of the psychology of religion are trying to identify the psychological attributes of religion and measure what they deem “religiosity”—the characteristics of religion. The methods established by Edwin Starbuck in his The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness, published in 1899,34 determine a tradition of thinking about the psychology of religion as an empirical science. Starbuck’s landmark text in the area of the psychology of religion attempts to “carry out the well-established methods of science.” Making links with the natural sciences of astronomy and chemistry, Starbuck wants, in Newtonian fashion, to mark out the “lawful universe” in relation to the “facts of religion,” but he—like many after him—cannot find any distinction between the religious and the nonreligious in mental life.35 The psychology of religion is always plagued by the fact that psychological attributes defy religious classification and that pretension to avoid this enigma only succeeds in making a mockery of the scientific method.
Nonetheless, Starbuck’s empirical method is supported by writers such as Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi and Michael Argyle in their work The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience.36 Here they assert: “The psychology of religion is, by definition, empirical.” Acknowledging a tradition of thinking from Starbuck, they want to find what would count as a “good measure of religiosity.”37 Wulff likewise wants to support the examination of religion according to what I will call the “measurable thesis.” But what this entire tradition of thinking in the psychology of religion ignores is the philosophical error of making psychological attributes and categories—within the field of religion—measurable. In this respect, the history of the psychology of religion can be seen through its subterranean history of diagrams and figures: the attempt to represent the religious inside mathematics.38
From Starbuck in the 1890s to the cognitive science in the 1990s diagrams form the statistical camouflage for the philosophical errors of measurement. The approach was pioneered by Starbuck, who claimed that “the use of the charts was found to assist, in lessening the personal equation.”39 But the use of the charts, diagrams, and figures tends more to reveal the desire to be an objective science and benefit from such knowledge claims than a clear articulation of data, because Starbuck’s text is caught in the problem of categories, interpretation, and the notion of the individual. The aspiration to the “purely empirical” is trapped,40 as Starbuck partly recognizes, in his “unavoidably selective” ideas and the “limits within which the inductions are valid.”41 However, this history also reveals the error of making psychological reality and religion a quantifiable entity. The psychology of religion can still provide valuable insights, but only by recognizing the basis of its epistemological claims. The future of any study in the psychology of religion must as a matter of course carry out the critical task of examining the claim that its concepts are scientific and the hidden errors that enable groups of scholars to sustain their community.
In Ludwig Fleck’s groundbreaking study Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (1935),42 he shows how scientific ways of approaching an object are shaped by the collective ideas of the time. This recognition of the socially determined scientific fact reveals the way the psychology of religion is continually shaped by a set of assumptions about valid knowledge in each historical wave of observation and experimentation. In this vein, Kurt Danziger recognizes, in his analysis of measurement in psychological knowledge, that the measurable requires the marking out of what can be measured: “The individuals who are counted must be endowed with countable attributes.”43 This creates the problem of what counts as data for the psychology of religion. Putting aside the problems of what counts as religion, the data becomes extremely precarious. Rather than having clearly defined objects for observation, the psychologists of religion stabilize the data with a theoretical assumption about the data. The empirical in this sense, to follow Flick, is already conceptually located and these concepts are validated by a series of institutional orders of power.44 What we see through each theoretical shift of the psychology of religion is a variety of appeals to constructed data, which assumes a given entity, such as the working notions of “character,” “cognition,” “experience,” and “unconscious,” or, where the object is material, an assumption that “mind” can be mapped on to “brain.”
The fact that the psychology of religion is caught inside a long history of physiology, philosophy, and politics is fundamentally a question about the empirical and scientific within the field. However, as Michell makes clear in his book Measurement in Psychology: “But if research in the history and philosophy of science over the past half-century has shown anything of value, it has shown that the methods that scientists use to test their hypotheses are not transparent windows on the world.”45 He rightly argues that any critical account of method must examine the empirical and conceptual. It is these two areas that illustrate the values that operate within measurement. Thus, in the fields of psychology in particular, the empirical is already theoretical.
Michell stands in a tradition of thinking from Immanuel Kant that showed that psychological factors were not measurable according natural science methods. According to Michell, the use of quantitative and experimental methods in psychology originated with the German scientist G. T. Fechner in his work Elements of Psychophysics, published in the 1860s,46 and was entrenched in S. S. Stevens’s Handbook of Experimental Psychology, published in 1951.47 In the latter work, Stevens sought to assign numerals according to a rule rather than following the traditional view of measurement based on the view that “numbers are only identified when relations of ratio are considered.”48 Can we classify psychology and religion according to ratio? The key question, as Michell asks, is: “What are the marks of quantity?”49 Michell’s work disentangles a complex error of measurement in psychological science, but the continued persistence of this central approach is more disturbing in terms of how the persistence of the error provided a scientific camouflage, which had wider social benefits. As Michell argues: “As a bonus, they [psychologists] feel safe to continue to market their practices as applications of scientific measurement and to reap the ensuing rewards.”50 What this means is that psychologists assumed that psychological attributes such as intelligence, cognitive abilities, and personality traits could be measured. In the context of religion, there was also the assumption that psychological attributes related to religion could be isolated, something William James had long shown to be an error. By returning to the founding fathers of psychology and religion we see the logical problems that are carried into the subject.
The move from the general history of introspection to the setting up of conditions for controlled measurement reveals something of the problem of knowledge in the psychology of religion. It is thus important to realize that the psychology of religion is determined by—what we can call—different “cultures of measurement” in each respective historical phase of scientific validity. In the nineteenth century we find the birth of the questionnaire method of empirical measurement, in the twentieth century we find the birth of the case study measurement, and in the late twentieth century and twenty-first century we find the birth of a kind of ideological measurement of cognition, not least in the “Decade of the Brain” in the 1990s. These forms of measurement shape the nature of experience and the representation of the experience of religion according to wider philosophical presuppositions, such that measuring religiosity and puberty in Starbuck’s original work from 1899 assumes religion is based on individual choice, measuring the unconscious in Freud and Jung assumes religion is an individual dynamic, measuring cognitive inputs in the work of Whitehouse assumes religion is individual thought. These different types of psychological knowledge all reflect the central underlying philosophical construct through which religion is made measurable: the isolation of the individual unit from the noise of linguistic, social, and political concepts of knowledge.
The explorations of William James, Jung, spirituality, and cognitive theory in this section of the work on the psychology of religion are all marked with a problem of knowledge about the individual as a central aspect of psychological knowledge. Psychological measurement of the individual is an arbitrary division of knowledge that reflects the claim that it results in an isolation of knowledge. The notion of the private individual as a unit of observation had opened the problem of the relation of the individual to the social and the somewhat false distinctions made to sustain the individual as a unit of measurement.51 The psychology of religion is by default determined by a series of a priori assumptions about the nature of self/mind in Western thought and the closure about the self/mind and the self-other boundary of more socially orientated models, which can eradicate the non-Western notions of self and histories of self-examination outside of the rationalist and imperialist Western model of individualism.
CONCLUSION: IDEOLOGY AND CRITIQUE
There is no neutral presentation of the psychology of religion and this critical outline reflects my return of the subject to the philosophical traditions of epistemology. It makes a claim not for relativistic acceptance of all types of knowledge as equal, but for critical examination of all knowledge within terms of a historical and epistemic critique in order to find the truth of claims to knowledge in the psychology of religion. It seeks to locate psychological studies of religion in such philosophical orders of critique, to draw out the implicit values and hidden errors. By interrogating the idea of science and the deployment of empirical claims to truth we see that much remains hidden in the ideas of psychology and religion. The question to be asked is, what do all the results of the psychology of religion reveal? What is the use value of this area of knowledge? The aspiration is to measure, because the measurable is seen as the mark of truth, but if the Kantian tradition of Danziger and Michell is right, then it might be that the psychology of religion is not a science of measurement at all, but rather a continuation of complex lines of imaginative introspection within diverse cultures and traditions. It might be that the future task of those within the psychology of religion is to reposition knowledge in the best forms of critical thinking in philosophy and the history of ideas. It will then be possible to see how our empirical claims reflect our will to power.
NOTES
1. W. Wundt, Elements of Folk-Psychology: Outline of a Psychological Development of Mankind, trans. E. L. Schaub (London: Allen and Unwin, 1916).
2. G. S. Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (New York: D. Appleton, 1904); and, G. S. Hall, Jesus, The Christ, in the Light of Psychology (New York: D. Appleton, 1923).
3. E. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1986), 98.
4. A. Vergote, “What the Psychology of Religion Is and What It Is Not,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 3, no. 2 (1993): 74.
5. D. Wulff, Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary (New York: Wiley, 1997), 15; J. Belzen, “The Future Is in the Return: Back to Cultural Psychology of Religion,” in Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain, ed. D. Jonte-Pace and W. Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001), 45.
6. Jonte-Pace and Parsons, Religion and Psychology, 3–6.
7. J. Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology: Religious Experience in the Knowledge Economy (London: Routledge, 2007).
8. M. Foucault, “Afterword: The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982).
9. P. du Preez, A Science of Mind: The Quest for Psychological Reality (London: Academic Press, 1991), 29.
10. H. Kendler, Psychology: A Science in Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 371.
11. S. Fuller, Science (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 26–27.
12. K. Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Kendler, Psychology, 9; J. Michell, Measurement in Psychology: A Critical History of a Methodological Concept (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xi.
13. W. James, Psychology: Briefer Course (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 334; Kendler, Psychology, 3; R. A. Wilson, Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
14. Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology.
15. F. Watts, Theology and Psychology (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1994); P. Boyer, The Naturalness of Religious Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); P. Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
16. D. Wulff, Psychology of Religion.
17. Spilka et al., The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (New York: Guilford Press, 2003); M. Argyle, Psychology and Religion: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999).
18. Jonte-Pace and Parsons, Mapping.
19. Ibid.; Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology.
20. J. Belzen, “A Way out of the Crisis? From Völkerpsychologie to Cultural Psychology of Religion,” Theory and Psychology 15, no. 6 (2005): 828.
21. E. Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion (New Haven: Yale University, 1978), 6.
22. W. Lyons, The Disappearance of Introspection (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).
23. Augustine, De Trinitate: Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1988). Original version written circa 420.
24. C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989), 131.
25. J. Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 41–52.
26. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (London: T and T Clark, 1999).
27. Danziger, Constructing, 35.
28. Ibid., 37.
29. Ibid., 41.
30. Belzen, “Way Out,” 825.
31. Ibid., 831.
32. Michell, Measurement, xi.
33. G. Canguilhem, The Normal and Pathological (New York: Zone, 1989). Originally published in 1966.
34. E. D. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Study of the Growth of Religious Consciousness (New York: Walter Scott, 1899).
35. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, 5; W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Glasgow: Collins, 1960), 27; E. Lawson and R. N. McCauley, Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9.
36. B. Beit-Hallahmi and M. Argyle, The Psychology of Religious Behaviour, Belief and Experience (London: Routledge, 1997).
37. Ibid., 40, emphasis added.
38. See Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology; J. Carrette, “Religion out of Mind: The Ideology of Cognitive Science,” in Soul, Psyche, Brain: New Directions in the Study of Religion and Brain-Mind Science, ed. K. Bulkeley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 242–61.
39. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion, 14–15.
40. Ibid., 11.
41. Ibid., 13.
42. L. Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
43. Danziger, Constructing, 136.
44. Ibid., 147.
45. Michell, Measurement, 1.
46. G. T. Fechner, Elements of Psychophysics, ed. Davis Howes and Edwin Boring, trans. H. Alder (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).
47. S. S. Stevens, Handbook of Experimental Psychology, 4 vols. (New York: Wiley, 1951).
48. Michell, Measurement, 18.
49. Ibid., 19.
50. Ibid., 22.
51. Carrette, Religion and Critical Psychology.