Abstract
Psychology’s most explicitly direct involvement with religion has obviously been the sub-discipline Psychology of Religion. While enjoying an early flourishing in North America and mainland Europe, this went into a serious decline during the 1920s and by 1930 appeared to have run into the ground in anglophone Psychology, despite occasional fitful revivals for the rest of the century. Although C. G. Jung’s explicit endorsement of the psychological centrality of religion to human well-being had widespread cultural impact from the mid-1930s onwards, this bore little direct relationship to the older Psychology of Religion genre (however profoundly William James’s views influenced Jung personally). After 1950 psychologists began paying increasing attention to the social psychological and personality aspects of religious belief. Michael Argyle and his associate B. Beit-Hallami were major figures in sustaining this concern. This too only partially resembled older Psychology of Religion. Although the possibility of a revival was being raised in the late 1970s (e.g. G. Scobie, 1977, who also acknowledged its change in character), only in the 1990s did anglophone Psychology of Religion begin to enjoy more than a modest revival—it is, however, debateable how far this is a genuine revival or a distinct but homonymous development.
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Notes
- 1.
See Shamdasani (1995). This encounter was omitted from Jung (1963), thereby imbalancing the image of Jung’s early intellectual influences more in the Freud direction than was entirely warranted.
- 2.
J. Leuba (1896) Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena: The Religious Motive, Conversion, Facts, and Doctrines.
- 3.
On the Gifford Lectures in general see L. Witham (2005) The Measure of God. Our Century-Long Struggle to Reconcile Science and Religion. The Story of the Gifford Lectures. Chapter 4 of this discusses the background and religious context of James’ lectures in some detail.
- 4.
James On Immortality (1908), but the lectures themselves were delivered in 1897–1898.
- 5.
James only cites Martineau once in The Varieties—an in extenso quote from a sermon in the early Endeavours After the Christian Life.
- 6.
How far G. S. Hall was genuinely religious or orthodox in his Protestantism is a matter for debate. Some, such as his student and friend J. H. Leuba, felt it was largely a contrived public persona, yet why would anyone indifferent or hostile to religion strive so hard to promote its sympathetic study, to the extent of founding a journal? (See Wulff, 2000, p. 30 and Footnote 12 below.) There was plenty of other unploughed territory for Psychology around 1900. It is hard to write off simply as a calculated Machiavellian manoeuvre to keep the religious on-side during Psychology’s foundational phase. For a good overview of Hall’s role in promoting Psychology of Religion see Vande Kemp (1992).
- 7.
- 8.
‘Catherine, born Erminia Caterina Beatrice Giussehpina Maria in Rome in 1887, was the daughter of Commendatore Francesco Mariotti and Melanie Durfee. Francesco Mariotti had begun his career as private secretary to Queen Margherita, and had later become director of the royal palaces in Milan, Genoa and Palermo. Catherine, one of five children, received a multi-lingual education, learning Italian, English, French and German.’ (ibid)
- 9.
J. H. Leuba (1916, 2nd ed. 1921) The Belief in God and Immortality. The fullest straight exposition of his core position was the 1912 A Psychological Study of Religion: Its Origin, Function, and Future.
- 10.
Reported in J. H. Leuba (1934) ‘Religious beliefs of American scientists’, Harper’s Magazine 169, 291–300.
- 11.
D. M. Wulff (2000) ‘James Henry Leuba. A Re-assessment of a Swiss-American Pioneer’ in J. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion. This includes discussion of the Larson and Witham findings. My discussion of Leuba here draws heavily on this throughout. E. J. Larson and L. Witham (1997) ‘Scientists Are Still Keeping the Faith’, Nature, 386, 435-436.
- 12.
Wulff (2000) op. cit., p. 29, quoting J. H. Leuba (1937) ‘Making of a psychologist of religion’, V. Ferm (ed.) Religion in Transition, pp. 173-200.
- 13.
G. W. Allport (1950), The Individual and His Religion, see discussion of Allport in Chap. 12. G. W. Allport (1944) in The Roots of Religion: A Dialogue Between a Psychologist and His Student, a 36-page-pamphlet, explicitly rejects Leuba’s ‘naturalistic’ view of religion. See H. Vande Kemp P&T 332. Incidently her annotation to J. H. Leuba (1933) God or Man? A Study of the Value of God to Man, New York: Henry Holt (P&T 317) describes Leuba as an ‘early reductionistic and behavioristic psychology’; this is quite misleading as behaviorist reductionists are not known for their high valuations of the ‘spiritual’.
- 14.
See Wulff (1997, pp. 32–33 and passim) and Nørager (2000) ‘Villiam Grønbaek and the Dorpat School. Elements of a “History” based on the correspondence between Villiam Grønbaek and Werner Gruehn’ in J. A. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion, for more on Girgensohn, Gruehn and the Dorpat School.
- 15.
I am indebted in what follows to E. Nase (2000) ‘Pfister’s Challenge to the Psychology of Religion’ in J. A. Belzen (ed.) Aspects in Contexts: Studies in the History of the Psychology of Religion. Pfister’s first English publication was the 1915 The Psychoanalytic Method, much reprinted, with four more following in the 1920s: another on psychoanalysis (1923a), one each on education (1922) and Love in Children (1924) plus one on art (1923b). For his extensive correspondence with Freud see Meng & Freud (1963).
- 16.
This theme will recur in Chap. 12 in connection with Piaget’s position.
- 17.
R. A. Knox (1950) Enthusiasm. A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries. Despite a few somewhat cursory re-examinations of the work, I have been unable to relocate precisely where he says this.
- 18.
See Danziger (1997) for an interesting account of this move. While ‘motivation’ is now such a common term we take it for granted, its adoption by psychologists with its present meaning was an intriguing manoeuvre.
- 19.
Naturally, more traditional Psychology of Religion themes were still occasionally addressed even in Britain: W. L. Jones (1937) A Psychological Study of Religious Conversion for example, a fairly sophisticated study using questionnaires and interviews.
- 20.
I consider Allport at more length in Chap. 12.
- 21.
This became the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in 1955, which, in 1961, founded the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, see P&T 1025, 1045. The Psychological work published in this has tended to be of the psychometric personality research type.
- 22.
Die Entwicklung des Christus Dogmas: eine psychoanalytische Studie zur sozialpsychologischen Funktion der Religion. This was translated into English in 1963 under the main title The Dogma of Christ.
- 23.
This is an appropriate point at which to note that the ‘demise’ story does not readily generalise to all European countries. Belzen (2000) for example explains in detail how, after failing to get off the ground in the Netherlands during the earlier period, its expansion only occurred during the 1960s.
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Richards, G. (2011). Psychology of Religion. In: Psychology, Religion, and the Nature of the Soul. Library of the History of Psychological Theories. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7173-9_4
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