Abstract
When psychology turns to autobiographies, it does not do so to examine the situations described in them or to reconstruct particular events or points in time; such research, interesting as it may be, is usually left to historians. Nor does psychology delve into the existent or non-existent literary qualities of an autobiography, or into the genre of autobiography as such; this is the realm of literary theorists. When psychology avails itself of autobiographies, it does so by asking psychological questions and from a psychological perspective. The most important argument for doing this is usually that working with autobiographical texts, in whatever form (they certainly need not be limited to published autobiographies but may include texts written at the explicit request of the researcher, diaries, and many other forms of autobiographical data; cf. Bruner 1990, e.g.), is the most effective way of gathering information for certain kinds of questioning. If the researcher is interested in studying the development of someone’s identity, for example, hardly a better method can be devised than to ask the research participant to provide at regular intervals a text that is as subjective and personal as possible. Even when psychologists look at existing autobiographies, published or not, they do so in order to find answers to systematic psychological questions concerning such factors as psycho-social development, parent–child binding, and social relationships in general, guilt and shame, experience of sexuality, mental disorder, and many others. For the psychologist who is interested in religion, autobiographies may provide a great deal of information concerning the development of individual religiosity and the influence that certain forms of religion can have on the development of the personality.
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- 1.
I will not weary the reader with too many quotes from her book, certainly not in a text that has been translated into English, which would fail to capture Mrs. Reinsberg’s original language. When it is obvious that I am referring to her book, I will not keep repeating “Reinsberg, 1898” where a simple page number will suffice.
- 2.
The other categories classified by Rambo (1993) are: apostasy or defection (becoming a nonbeliever), affiliation (when a previously unbelieving person joins a religious group), institutional transition (switching to another group within a particular religion) and tradition transition (switching to another religion) (pp. 12–14).
- 3.
Freud’s reflections here are more or less consistent with the dominant religious reflections in the West that preach love of neighbor and regard attention paid to the self as sinful. Narcissism usually has a negative tone: it seems like a vogue word for selfishness. It should be pointed out, however, that this was not the meaning expressed in Freud’s technical explanation.
- 4.
This is an example of Kohut’s often inconsistent use of language: he uses the same word to refer to the image of the self as grandiose (“self”) as to the self of which this image is a part.
- 5.
In the secondary disorders, as opposed to the primary disorders, such reactions are regarded as responses by an in principle structurally undamaged self to the trials and tribulations of life.
- 6.
That is, to be taken from foster care and admitted to the asylum once again.
- 7.
This is a well-known problem. Meissner (1997, p. 259) speaks of “the replacement-child syndrome” and cites a considerable amount of literature, from which it has been be shown that the syndrome played a role in the lives of such famous persons as Schliemann, Atatürk and Stendhal.
- 8.
The psychiatric stigma will also have been the reason why the autobiography was “hushed up” in intimate circles and why the memory of Doetje herself has barely survived.
- 9.
These five are known by the acronym “OCEAN”: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism.
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Belzen, J.A. (2010). Psychopathology and Religion. In: Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_11
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