Freud And Augustine In Dialogue

"It is arguably the case," writes William Parsons, "that no two figures have had more influence on the course of Western introspective thought than Freud and Augustine." Yet it is commonly assumed that Freud and Augustine would have nothing to say to each other with regard to spirituality or mysticism, given the former's alleged antipathy to religion and the latter's not usually being considered a mystic. Adopting an interdisciplinary, dialogical, and transformational framework for interpreting Augustine's spiritual journey in his Confessions, Parsons places a "mystical theology" at the heart of Augustine's narrative and argues that his mysticism has been misunderstood partly because of the limited nature of the psychological models applied to it. At the same time, he expands Freud's therapeutic legacy to incorporate the contemporary findings of physiology and neuroscience that have been influenced in part by modern spirituality. Parsons develops a new psychological hermeneutic to account for Augustine's mysticism that will capture the imagination of contemporary readers who are both psychologically informed and interested in spirituality. The author intends this interpretive model not only to engage modern introspective concerns about developmental conflict and the power of the unconscious but also to reach a more nuanced level of insight into the origins and the nature of the self.

Offers a revised psychoanalytic theory of religion by sifting through the history of psychoanalytic models in dialogue with their multidisciplinary critiques.

This Element consists of three interrelated parts. 'What Freud Said' summarizes the salient details of Freud's psychology of religion: his views on the origins and development of western religions; on contemporary western monotheisms; on the 'unpsychological' proceedings of the religio-cultural super-ego; his qualified endorsement of religious forms of psychotherapy; and his cursory analysis of eastern religions.'What Freud got Wrong' surveys the history of the multidisciplinary critiques (anthropological, sociological, later psychoanalytic, theological/philosophical) that have been levelled at his interpretative strategies. 'Towards a Revised Psychoanalytic Theory of Religion' suggests that the best way forward is to employ a psychoanalytic theory of religion which, taking its cue from the history of its critique, houses reflective, inclusive and dialogical elements. It presents illustrations taken from a variety of contemporary religio-cultural phenomena (marvel movies; issues concerning religion, sexuality and gender; the Megachurch; QAnon) as portable lessons for such applications.

This work considers the fundamentally “oppositional” structure of reality, viewing Augustine as a “Christian Heraclitus” and focusing on his conception of dialectic. Matthew W. Knotts situates Augustine's anthropology within a classical Roman philosophical context, while characterizing his intellect by continuous questioning. In this way, the book grounds a constructive philosophical-theological enquiry in an historical-critical study of the sources and their context.

Interest in the psychotherapeutic capacity of Buddhist teachings and practices is widely evident in the popular imagination. News media routinely report on the neuropsychological study of Buddhist meditation and applications of mindfulness practices in settings including corporate offices, the U.S. military, and university health centers. However, as Ira Helderman shows, curious investigators have studied the psychological dimensions of Buddhist doctrine for well over a century, stretching back to William James and Carl Jung. These activities have shaped both the mental health field and Buddhist practice throughout the United States. This is the first comprehensive study of the surprisingly diverse ways that psychotherapists have related to Buddhist traditions. Through extensive fieldwork and in-depth interviews with clinicians, many of whom have been formative to the therapeutic use of Buddhist practices, Helderman gives voice to the psychotherapists themselves. He focuses on how they understand key categories such as religion and science. Some are invested in maintaining a hard border between religion and psychotherapy as a biomedical discipline. Others speak of a religious-secular binary that they mean to disrupt. Helderman finds that psychotherapists' approaches to Buddhist traditions are molded by how they define what is and is not religious, demonstrating how central these concepts are in contemporary American culture.

This book brings together a group of scholars from around the world who view psychology as the science of human ways of being. Being refers to the process of existing - through construction of the human world – here, rather than to an ontological state. This collection includes work that has the goal to establish the newly developed area of cultural psychology as the science of specifically human ways of existence. It comes as a next step after the “behaviorist turn” that has dominated psychology over most of the 20th century, and like its successor in the form of “cognitivism”, kept psychology away from addressing issues of specifically human ways of relating with their worlds. Such linking takes place through intentional human actions: through the creation of complex tools for living, entertainment, and work. Human beings construct tools to make other tools. Human beings invent religious systems, notions of economic rationality and legal systems; they enter into aesthetic enjoyment of various aspects of life in art, music, and literature; they have the capability of inventing national identities that can be summoned to legitimate one’s killing of one’s neighbors or being killed oneself. The contributions to this volume focus on the central goal of demonstrating that psychology as a science needs to start from the phenomena of higher psychological functions and then look at how their lower counterparts are re-organized from above. That kind of investigation is inevitably interdisciplinary - it links psychology with anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history and developmental biology. Various contributions to this volume are based on the work of Lev Vygotsky, George Herbert Mead, Henri Bergson and on traditions of Ganzheitspsychologie and Gestalt psychology. Psychology as the Science of Human Being is a valuable resource to psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, biologists and anthropologists alike.​

This study of Augustine's Confessions presents his testimony of conversion as an antidote to modern culture's tendency toward disbelief.

Augustine's philosophy of life involves mediation, reviewing one's past and exercises for self-improvement. Centuries after Plato and before Freud he invented a 'spiritual exercise' in which every man and woman is able, through memory, to reconstruct and reinterpret life's aims. In this 2010 book, Brian Stock examines Augustine's unique way of blending literary and philosophical themes. He proposes a new interpretation of Augustine's early writings, establishing how the philosophical soliloquy (soliloquium) has emerged as a mode of inquiry and how it relates to problems of self-existence and self-history. The book also provides clear analysis of inner dialogue and discourse and how, as inner dialogue complements and finally replaces outer dialogue, a style of thinking emerges, arising from ancient sources and a religious attitude indebted to Judeo-Christian tradition.