Walking Different Pathways: Coming to Know our Own Journey Better

Santa Clara\u27s new Core Curriculum, scheduled for launch in Fall 2009, resonates powerfully with the vision of General Congregation Thirty- Five

Religion: A Rorschachian Projection Theory

This paper offers a projection theory of religion based on an experiential analysis of Rorschach\u27s human movement response. An experiential analysis of the movement response reveals an understanding of projection particularly appropriate for the study of religion. The relevance of Rorschachian projection to religion is due to several reasons related primarily to the fact that projection and religion share epistemological concerns. First, because of its epistemological optimism regarding the knowledge of otherness, projection provides a legitimate means of understanding (radical) otherness. Second, in projection, knowledge of the other occurs through knowledge of the self, encompassing the same epistemological processes emphasized in contemporary theological interpretations of divine otherness. Third, Rorschachian projection can accommodate both theistic and non-theistic traditions in its understanding of religion since projection and religion are both attempts to formulate the nature of selfhood, otherness, and their relationship. Finally, a discussion of the origins of the human movement response and religious experience establishes a further link between the two. It is due to their common origin in early object relations that Rorschachian projection (the movement response) is most applicable to the understanding of religion. Both projection and religion emerge from a transitional or transcendent realm between self and other. Object relations theory enables us to extrapolate toward both culture and epistemology from Rorschach\u27s movement response

The Psychoanalyst and the Exorcist: Perspectives on Psychology and Religion

A century ago psychology declared war on religion. Describing religion as nothing but psychology projected into the external world, Sigmund Freud, the first psychoanalyst, mounted a campaign to expose religion as something far worse than a comforting illusion. He tried to show that religious belief and practice were harmful to both psyche and culture. In his view religion distorted and deformed the mind by demanding that we refrain from thinking deeply or from asking serious questions. Religion forces us, he claimed, to accept the authority of others, and it promotes excessive guilt and shame for transgressions of its mandates. In addition, he argued, it dissuades us from working toward social justice and equality: religion demands that we tolerate suffering and injustice in this life with the expectation of a blissful afterlife as a reward for our obedience

Introduction - Misogyny and Religion under Analysis Masterplot and Counterthesis in Tension

In this work, I expose the shadowy presence of this non-Oedipal counterthesis in the cultural texts on religion. My sources are not only Freud\u27s four major cultural texts, Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents, and Moses and Monotheism, but also some of his shorter writings related to religion and mythology ( Medusa\u27s Head and The Theme of the Three Caskets, for example), and some of his writings which address religious themes and issues only indirectly (such as Thoughts for the Times on War and Death and The Interpretation of Dreams). All of these are cultural texts in a larger sense (Homans \u271989: 196). They are not only about intrapsychic or interpersonal dynamics, but also about the intersections of body, psyche, and society. They address the sources and meanings of the fragile achievements of our civilization (SE 14: 307) embodied in art, literature, philosophy, ethics, religion, science, and education. Within these cultural texts, broadly defined, the counterthesis is apparent at several sites: it is particularly evident in Freud\u27s writings on the maternal body, death and the afterlife, Judaism and anti-Semitism, and in his writings on mourning and melancholia

The Swami and the Rorschach: Spiritual Practice, Religious Experience, and Perception

I propose that the Rorschach test might serve well as such a method for investigating religion, spirituality, psychological structure, and cognition. In addition, it might bring some clarity to the debate between the decontextualists and the constructivists. In this essay I discuss three unique Rorschach studies that, in my view, represent an important step toward such a psychology of religious experience and examine their implications for Forman\u27s decontextualist thesis

Introduction: Teaching Freud and Religion

Both education and psychoanalysis, Freud warned in Analysis Terminable and Interminable, are \u27 impossible\u27 professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfactory results. \u27 In spite of his understanding of the unsatisfactory consequences of psychoanalysis, Freud did not turn aside from his own impossible profession. Nor do the authors in this volume turn aside from theirs: all are educators; all teach psychoanalysis in some form; and, compounding the impossibilities, most teach courses on Freud in departments of religious studies. The contributors to this volume are both teachers and scholars: all have contributed in significant ways to the literature on psychoanalysis and religion. This volume provides an opportunity for these teaching scholars to articulate something we seldom write about: how we teach Freud and religion; how we integrate our scholarly lives with our pedagogical lives; how we live and work with the impossibilities of our professions. The contributors to this volume were invited to describe their courses on Freud and religion. They were encouraged to focus on the academic contexts within which they teach; to articulate their pedagogical goals, assumptions, and practices; and to explain their methods of integrating scholarship and pedagogy. The intent was to produce a volume as useful to the new professor constructing a first course on Freud in religious studies as it would be to the more seasoned professor interested in incorporating new ideas and pedagogical methods into a well-established course. The result is a collection that admirably fulfills this intention and, in fact, goes well beyond it: not only are the essays discussions of how we teach Freud but they are also scholarly contributions to the Freud and religion literature. In addition, they are written in a style that will be accessible to students. Each chapter is a thoughtful, informative, and often quite personal account of our courses, our departments, our students, and our universities. The contributors describe, in lively and engaging essays, their scholarly and pedagogical engagements with Freud as a critic and interpreter of religion; as a Jew in an anti-semitic milieu; as an architect of contemporary culture; as a creator of the modem, postmodern, or gendered self; and as a subject, particularly in the last few years, of acrimonious debate

Foreword: Notes on a Friendship

Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, reissued here more than 17 year after its initial publication, changed the fra1nework for understanding the nature and function of ritual. Catherine M. Bell\u27s profound insight was that ritual, long understood as thoughtless action stripped of context, is more interestingly understood as strategy: a culturally strategic way of acting in the world. Ritual is a form of social activity. This argument is meticulously established and beautifully presented in the chapters that follow. Unfolding like a commanding lecture, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice remains Catherine\u27s greatest contribution to the study of religion

Quest for the Religious Freud: Faith, Morality, and Gender in Psychoanalysis

The recent scholarship on Freud is guilty of the same kind of ideological projection as that uncovered by Albert Schweitzer in his 1906 exposé of the assumptions underlying the historical Jesus scholarship: the search for the religious Freud evinces a search for an atheist, Christian, or Jew who mirrors the personal and intellectual assumptions of the seeker. Ironically, of the three issues emerging as central concerns in recent literature on Freud-Jewishness, ethics, and gender-Jewishness and ethics were also the focus of heated debate among nineteenth-century Biblical scholars

When Throne and Altar are in Danger: Freud, Mourning, and Religion in Modernity

What can be said about the complex relationship between psychoanalysis and religion? I\u27ve found it useful to address this question from three perspec, tives: life, theory, and culture. These are inevitably intertwined, but can be separated, at least heuristically

Teaching Freud in the Language of Our Students: The Case of a Religiously Affiliated Undergraduate Institution

If the psychoanalyst must speak in the language of the patient, we, the teachers of Freud and religion, surely must teach in the language of our students. Who is Freud-and what is religion-in this language? The answer depends in part on academic context: Freud is taught in religious studies departments at public universities, private unaffiliated colleges, and religiously affiliated seminaries, colleges, and universities. This essay describes a course on Religion in the Theories of Freud and Jung at a religiously affiliated West Coast university with approximately four thousand undergraduate students