Religion and Psychology – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns from Ken Pargament about Mixing Faith and Science

Ken Pargament presented to my department on Psychology and Religion on Friday.  What a treat.   Ken is a clinical psychologist who has been looking at how studying religion can help us provide better care to our patients in various settings.  He started – and ended – by pointing out that how we go about gaining knowledge differs tremendously between scientific and religious traditions.  He attributed the schism between the two camps, in part, to the differences between the assumptions about knowledge.  In particular, he noted that, as psychology matured beyond the original founders – Wundt in Europe and James here, both of whom were interested in religion as a psychological event- as psychology turned increasingly to an empirical base for its evidence, Freud’s psychoanalysts and Skinner’s behaviorists dismissed theology and religion as psychologically determined phenomena – Freud articulated it as a defensive strategy (see Freud’s Final Session) and Skinner as an example of superstitious behavior (meaning behavior that was randomly reinforced.  Pargament noted that science is characterized by skepticism, observation, empriricism, pragmatism, and replication while spirituality is characterized by faith, revelation, intuition, religious authority, and mystery.

The upshot of all this was that religious behavior was dismissed by scientists rather than studied.  But it was also the case that psychology (broadly) has attracted individuals – both basic scientists and practitioners - whose beliefs are wildly at variance with those of the population as a whole.  This can be measured in various ways, but religious believers make up about 25% of psychologists, while 95% or more of the people that they study and serve endorse religious beliefs.  And various factors including, I believe, beliefs about separation of church and state, but also more idiosyncratic stuff – like feeling threatened by religiously based practitioners - lead to health interventions by professionals who are largely uninformed by a big part of the patient’s life (and psyche).   This causes some disconnects – including between practitioners who believe they are offering a secular intervention, but, when participants are interviewed afterwards, it turns out that they have attributed changes that have taken place to the God they were praying to when they were supposed to be simply urging themselves to relax.

So a psychoanalytically sensible intervention that Pargament described is offered to women who have been traumatized early in life and have difficulty conceptualizing God in a benign or helpful manner.  Nichole Murray-Swank has created a protocol for helping people visualize a Loving God.  This makes all kinds of psychoanalytic sense.  We build concepts of people out of our earliest experiences.  When those are corrupt, so are our conceptualizations.  Helping individuals work to create benign or positive experiences of others – including God – is part of what we work to help individuals do through object relationally based conceptualizations and interventions.  Partly we do this through the integrity of our work.  Murray-Swank is proposing a more directed means of doing this.  She offers visualizations of God as a cleansing waterfall that pours through the body.

How would having a more benign view of God help?  Pargament proposes that religion and spirituality, when they are helpful, can be particularly so at transformative moments.  These moments are sometimes thought to be existential moments – when we are confronted with death or loss of meaning or a sense of being abandoned.  And these moments can, under spiritual guidance, prove to help individuals be able to cope with potentially debilitating experiences.  Of course religion can also be harmful at such moments, just as treatment can.  But we have a lot to learn from spiritual traditions (see a post about JesuitSpirituality).

Pargament offered some very simple and direct observations about how to improve our clinical functioning.  He suggested that we include questions about spiritual beliefs in our routine questioning at the start of a treatment.  Simply asking lets the patient/client know that this is not something that is off-limits, but something that the therapist is curious about.  A friend of mine – a Monk (see The Wired Hermit) – went into analysis and a number of his friends joked that his religious delusions would be analyzed out of him.  His position, and one that turned out to be the case for him, was that his beliefs, being an integral part of him, became more so as part of the treatment. 

Though my friend found that psychoanalysis deepened his faith, that is not to say that he has no doubts.  Pargament notes that doubting is part of faith and counsels religious advisors to discuss their own doubts and spiritual crises to help those who are confronting such crises normalize their experience rather than to feel further isolated – as if what they are experiencing is unique and a mark of failure.  Similarly, he believes that spirituality can be improved by using psychological principles and knowledge. For instance, in addition to supporting articulating crises of faith, he suggests that a developmental model of religion, one that clarifies how our sense of God changes across the lifespan, so that our childhood concepts, while still relevant, are fluid and become more complex and layered as we ourselves are better able to understand and integrate complexity.  While regular cognitive psychological developmental literature could contribute a lot here, psychoanalytic developmental theories may be particularly useful to religious and spiritual practice.

Of course, being at an institution that is both religiously affiliated and has a large undergraduate program, I think there are opportunities to integrate psychology of religion studies into the breadth of the curriculum.  Developmental psychology could, for instance, illustrate the developmental arc described above as part of the teaching of development.  Similarly, Social Psychology could talk about the influence of religious communities on members, Abnormal Psychology could talk about the distinction between hearing voices and religious traditions of having conversations with God – and could note, while they are at it, that auditory hallucinations of loved ones who have died are normative – more than half of us experience them – rather than a symptom of madness.

The most interesting part of the talk to me, however, was when Ken returned to talking about how it is that we know things.  A lifelong researcher who has put his faith in science, he recognizes that there is a faith aspect to being a scientist – Why do we believe that a probability of < 5% of an event occurring is the sign of something being valid?  But he also sees that data tell us about the world.  He believes, though, that most of us don’t count on data.  Nor do we rely on an organized faith based vantage point for organizing our view of the world.  He says that mostly we just know what we know – we believe what we believe and we don’t really question why. 

Some have argued that psychoanalysis is a faith based tradition.  That there is a shared vocabulary for understanding human experience and that this vocabulary is what is important, not so much how well it maps onto actual human experience.  That may be the case, especially at some moments in our work.  But we may be even more insidious.  We may just know what we know because it feels right.  Mark Solms (see the post on the Conscious Id) has maintained that this is how we know, even at our most sophisticated, but I think there may be lazy “knowing”, this every day knowing that psychoanalysts, psychologists, and people of faith engage in all the time.  And this kind of “knowing” is something that I think we are built to engage in.  It is the knowing of prejudice.  It helps us function more efficiently, but at great cost.  If I am understanding Pargament correctly, faith traditions and scientific traditions have a lot to learn from each other not just pragmatically – both have useful ways to intervene with people in need – but more fundamentally.  We can become better at knowing by working to understand how each other’s traditions come to agree on what is known – but also what is not known.  Pargament maintained that what is characteristic of both types of knowing, when practiced diligently, is that they lead us to be able to be surprised.  And thus, within both traditions, we remain curious, hoping to better understand the world and reveling in knowing that we cannot know all that there is to be known (including that our tradition, whichever it is, is the only one that can validly determine what is known in the world).

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...