The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

Chapter 11

Psychology of religion

Dan Merkur

The psychology of religion studies the phenomena of religion in so far as they may be understood psychologically. Religions and their denominations differ regarding the extent of the psychologizing that they each embrace, tolerate, and reject. For many religious devotees, psychological understanding is inherently antagonistic to religion because it ascribes to the human mind what those devotees credit to more-than-human agencies. They view the psychology of religion as a program that reduces religion to psychology. Other devotees are instead sympathetic to the psychology of religion. They value critical research as an irreplaceable means for the purification of religion from idolatry of the merely human.

Like psychology in general, the psychology of religion is an umbrella term for the findings of several, mutually exclusive schools of thought, each with its own research agenda and methodology. The major disciplinary affiliations include: the academic study of religion; academic psychology; psychoanalysis; analytic psychology; and transpersonal psychology. These several approaches to the psychological study of religion tend to be pursued in isolation from each other, as non-communicating and mutually disdainful subdisciplines. A useful way to comprehend both their strengths and their differences is to attend to the questions that they seek to answer. The overall project of each school of thought determines both what data it addresses and what methodologies it considers appropriate.

Psychology in the service of the history of religion

Psychologically oriented studies by historians of religion adhere to the methodological phenomenology of the history of religion in general. The manifest contents of religious experience are discussed, but no mention is ever made of the unconscious. The question of primary interest for this school of research has been whether psychology can explain otherwise inexplicable features of the historical record of the world’s many and diverse religions. The psychology of religion, so conceived, subserves the writing of the history of religion, addresses the religious past more frequently than the religious present, and has been minutely attentive to cross-cultural findings in world religions.

Rejecting theories of cultural evolution that contrasted ‘magic’ and ‘religion’, Rudolf Otto (1932) suggested that experiences of the holy or ‘numinous’ were the defining characteristics of religion. For Otto (1950 [1917]), the numinous was a sui generis category of human experience. The quality of numinosity is sometimes experienced as awe and urgency at the mystery and immanent majesty of the Wholly Other; it may alternatively be known as a fascination at an august and transcendent ‘Something More’. Otto’s student and

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colleague, Nathan Söderblom (1933), argued that experiences of the numinous explained the veneration of sacred books. The world’s Âscriptures are not held to be holy merely because of the ideas that they contain. Rather, the texts are sacred because their ideas concern living powers. Scriptures pertain to spirits, gods, or God that people encounter in personal religious experiences. When the numina cease to be experienced, interest in the books fails.

Many historians of religion pursued similar lines of inquiry with increasing detail. Söderblom’s student Ernst Arbman (1939) argued that myths are venerated because the gods that they portray are credited with invisible responsibility for the fortuitous events of everyday life. Should belief in providential miracles fail, however, the myths decline into folktales. Biblical scholars noted that some Israelite prophets were described in fashions consistent with physically active trance states. Other ancient prophets were clearly not in trances. Some biblical data pointed to hypnagogic states, which occur between waking and falling asleep. Other prophets may have experienced inspirations during dream-like states of deep trance. Attention was also called to the ecstatic, experiential side of classical Greek religion; and the distinctive features of shamanism were noted in a variety of contexts. Zoroaster, the prophet who reformed ancient Iranian religion, was alleged to have been a shaman; and the legend of the opening of Muhammad’s breast was treated as a folklore motif that described a shamanic initiation. The character of Vainamoinen in the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala, was identified as a shaman; and detailed studies were made of Siberian, Lapp, Native American, and other cultural variations of shamanism, past and present.

Underlying these psychologically oriented studies in the history of religion is the axiomatic assumption that most people are religious because they personally have religious experiences. Good and bad fortune may be attributed to demons, spirits, gods, God, karma, or what you will. Both conversions and subsequent encounters with numinous beings and numinous states of existence may proceed through dreams, visions, voices, or mystical unions. Notice needs also to be taken of occasional, highly emotionally charged rites. These orders of religious experience are, for those who have them, the very core of religion itself. In this approach to religion, people believe in myths, they subscribe to theologies, they engage in rites, precisely because they have religious experiences. For devotees, religious experiences confirm, prove, modify, extend – in short, motivate – the balance of what religion entails.

Two Swedish scholars who were trained by Söderblom formalized the axiomatic assumption with detailed psychological theories. Ernst Arbman argued that religious trance states, which he documented on a worldwide basis, varied in their contents in accord with the religious beliefs and expectations of the devotee. The religious belief complex was converted by the trance state from a series of ideas into a vivid, dream-like experience. Differences among visions, voices, automatic behavior, stigmata, solipsistic mystical unions, and all other trance phenomena, reflected differences in the pre-trance beliefs and expectations.

Hjalmar Sundén instead adapted the notion of a ‘social role’ from its original context in reference to interpersonal behavior as observed by social psychologists. The term had greater application in the study of religion, he maintained, than in explaining the roles of shaman, prophet, priest, lay person, mystic, and so forth. Sundén applied the concept to the apparent behavior of a greater-than-human personality, such as a spirit, angel, or God, as it manifests in a religious experience. Sundén proposed that people may learn a variety of roles that may manifest in the course of their religious experiences.

The theories of Arbman and Sundén both imply that religious experiences are learned behavior, whose differences are to be sought in the contents of the learning. It then follows that whether discussion is to be made of belief complexes or religious roles, analysis of the

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learned materials can be pursued competently by historians, without need for special training in psychology. This conclusion is a product of historians’ methods, however. Only when the psychology of religion is limited to the identification of patterns in historical religious data does psychological expertise become unnecessary.

Religion as group pathology

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, once privately remarked, ‘Mankind has always known that it possesses spirit: I had to show it that there are also instincts’. A few sentences later, he went on to reject the validity of religion. ‘Religion originates in the helplessness and anxiety of childhood and early manhood. It cannot be otherwise’. The apparent contradiction is to be explained by the special senses in which Freud referred to spirit and religion. For Freud, spirit (in German, Geist, which also means ‘intellect’) was an objectively existing intellectual power abroad in the cosmos that is responsible for life, reason, self-consciousness, and telepathy. Echoing Aristotle, Freud named ‘the psychological ideal, the primacy of the intellect’ and spoke of ‘the voice of the intellect’ as an intrapsychic manifestation of ‘our God Logos.’

Freud used the criterion of evidence as a basis for defining religion in a contrasting manner.

Critics persist in describing as ‘deeply religious’ anyone who admits to a sense of man’s insignificance or impotence in the face of the universe, although what constitutes the essence of the religious attitude is not this feeling but only the next step after it, the reaction to it which seeks a remedy for it. The man who goes no further, but humbly acquiesces in the small part which human beings play in the great world – such a man is, on the contrary, irreligious in the truest sense of the word.

For Freud, spirituality pertained to the reality of the universe, inclusive of belief in its scientific knowledge. Speculation beyond the limits of intellect involved unproven and unprovable beliefs that he called religious. Freud further defined religion in conformance with liberal nineteenth-century Christian and Jewish theologies, as a ‘system of doctrines and promises’ concerning ‘a careful Providence’ that is imagined ‘in the figure of an enormously exalted father’. Freud saw both magic and religion as misunderstandings of the nature of spirit that substituted infantile hopes and wishes for a scientifically valid appreciation. In likening magic and religion to childhood neuroses, he was both likening them to premodern beliefs such as astral myths and Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy, and suggesting that they derived their contents from the same infantile fantasies that shape neuroses.

As a clinician who wrote very little of mental health but extensively of psychopathology, Freud mentioned spirit only in passing but discussed magic and religion at length. He regularly addressed the questions: What are magic and religion? And why do people engage in them? He expressed his basic view of religion in a dense paragraph in ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’ (1957 [1910]):

Psycho-analysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the fathercomplex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the

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almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather as revivals and restorations of the young child’s ideas of them. Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced to the small human child’s long- drawn-out helplessness and need of help; and when at a later date he perceives how truly forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life, he feels his condition as he did in childhood, and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy.

With very few changes, Freud maintained the same position for the remainder of his life. Religion functions primarily to offer consolation for human helplessness. The consolation is fictional. God is a fantasy that is based on infantile memories of father and mother and motivated by human helplessness.

In an essay entitled ‘Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices’ (1959 [1907]), Freud noted several parallels between personal rites that occur as symptoms of neurosis and the public rites of religions. He suggested that both arise as symbolic substitutes for unconscious guilt. In neurotic rites, the unconscious guilt is sexual; in religious rites, it is a response to egoism. Freud likely had in mind patients whose self-righteousness about ritual observances misdirected attention from ethical failings.

In Totem and Taboo (1958 [1913]), Freud expanded his argument to book length. He began by summarizing the anthropological evidence that incest is prohibited in aboriginal Australian cultures. Noting widespread practices of avoiding mothers-in-law, Freud suggested that extreme forms of avoidance had been added to a core prohibition of incest, in much the same irrational manner that obsessional neurotics multiply inhibitions. Because no one bothers to prohibit anything that is not desired, the two basic taboos of aboriginal Australian religions – not to kill the totem animal, and not to marry within the clan – indicated the content of the oldest and most powerful human desires. These desires are to kill the ancestral totem animal and to commit incest. Freud also connected guilt over the desire for patricide with the widespread belief in, fear of, and devotion toward ancestral spirits. In this way, Freud located the Oedipus complex – a boy’s unconscious wish to kill his father and have sex with his mother – at the core of totemism, which was widely regarded at the time as the most primitive form of religion worldwide. Freud further argued that Christianity presents a similar ambivalence. Its God, who is explicitly called Father, is both murdered in the gospel narrative and consumed ritually in the mass; and Christianity’s emphasis of virginity and celibacy can be seen as extreme forms of incest avoidance. The centrality of irrational Oedipal themes in both totemism and Christianity attested to the human origin and neurotic character of religion.

Freud maintained that magic was to be explained by the ‘omnipotence of thoughts’, a phenomenon that is found in obsessional neurosis in which thoughts are projected onto and substituted for reality. Magic is narcissistic in that it attributes supernatural power to the self, rather than to ancestral ghosts, totem spirits, and so forth. Because magic does not presuppose the existence of personal spirits, as religion does, Freud treated it as an older, pre-Oedipal stage in cultural evolution. Freud also demonstrated that the chief features of animism and magic occur normally in childhood; and he concluded with a speculative Âreconstruction of how the Oedipus complex may have evolved in the species.

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1955 [1921]), Freud created a theoreticÂ

bridge between individual and group psychology. He suggested that group members share an ego ideal that consists of or is embodied by the group leader. The devotion to the leader

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provides cohesion to the group, despite the rivalry that is also inevitably present. To illustrate the processes of group psychology, Freud used the examples of an army and the Roman Catholic Church.

Freud’s next major statement on religion, The Future of an Illusion (1961 [1927]), added several new points. Civilization depends on coercion and the renunciation of instinct. Prohibitions are initially external and imposed on the individual, but are internalized during childhood as the superego. In addition to performing self-observation and conscience, the superego houses both personal and group ideals that are the basis for forming cultural units. Religious ideals promote civilization through their internalization in the superego.

The valuable socializing function of religion does not mitigate its fallacies, however. Religion anthropomorphizes nature. Religion asserts that external reality is subject to personal spirits and gods, on whom one may depend as one depended on one’s parents in childhood. The belief that nature is benign and parental is an illusion. The illusion can be neither verified nor falsified; its treatment as true proceeds out of the wish that it were so, rather than through logical necessity. The illusion is maintained at the cost of denying the corresponding reality. Freud deplored religion, ‘the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity’, for intimidating the intelligence in order to maintain its illusions.

Responding to The Future of an Illusion, Theodor Reik observed that religion is perhaps the single most difficult source of resistance to psychotherapeutic change. Psychonalysts are able to help many people with disturbances in love and work, but make little progress on topics that religious beliefs and practices oppose. Talk therapy is still less effective with religious fanaticism. In private conversation, Freud told Reik that the solution to the problem of religion would likely not prove clinical, but would instead depend on the promotion of psychoanalytic ideas through public education.

Beginning with Civilization and Its Discontents (1961 [1930]), Freud struggled to comprehend the clinical problem of religion. Where he had earlier written of the superego internalizing civilization, he now stated that the superego turns aggression against the self in the form of guilt that makes civilization possible. Art, religion, and other illusions flourish under the protection, as it were, of the superego. Religion compares badly with art, however, ‘since it imposes equally on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner – which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence’. Freud now called religion a ‘mass-delusion’ – a Âmalignancy significantly greater than the merely fanciful error of an ‘illusion’.

Freud also acknowledged that religion has a third function, additional to consolation and socialization. Religion permits instinctual wishes to be ‘sublimated’ through their diversion to social valued and refined ends. Freud viewed religion as second only to art in promoting culture through transformations of sexuality and aggression into civilized behavior. At the same time, Freud suggested that the ‘oceanic feeling’ of mystical experience was not religious, but was connected with religion only secondarily.

In ‘Constructions in Analysis’ (1964 [1937]) Freud returned to his re-evaluation of religion as a delusion. He theorized that just as the fantasies of psychotics have delusional force because they distort underlying truths, so too the delusional quality of religions – their imperviousness to rational argument, and intractability to psychotherapy – must owe to their containing some manner of underlying truth. In Moses and Monotheism (1964 [1939]), Freud supposed this truth to be historical. The text’s rejection by modern Bible critics has been unequivocal; and its thesis that Moses was an Egyptian whose imposition on the Jews

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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