Varieties of Religious Experience

Introduction: Section Two

The Return to James: Psychology, Religion and the Amnesia of Neuroscience¹

Jeremy R. Carrette

We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience.

T. S. Eliot ‘The Dry Salvages’, Four Quartets²

In the one hundred years since the publication of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (hereafter VRE) the psychological study of religion has been endlessly transformed by the “varieties” of psychological theory. Psychoanalytical, behaviourist, humanistic, cognitive, social, evolutionary and neuro-scientific theories have all had their turn in shaping the subject since James delivered his seminal Gifford lectures in Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. In each of the various theoretical fashions of psychology, religion has been subject to examination and been positively and negatively scrutinised. The space of the academic study of psychology and religion has in this time been neglected and resurrected, critiqued and refashioned, and, even, refined and obscured. It has been pulled between the demands of scientific endeavour and the socio-political

¹ The idea of a “return to James” is taken from J. M. Barbalet, who saw how a return to James’s theory of emotion was necessary for a more comprehensive appreciation of his work within contemporary social psychology. See Barbalet, J. M., “William James’ Theory of Emotions: Filling in the Picture” in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Vol. 29, No. 3, 1999, pp. 251-266. The “return to James” in the present essay is in order to appreciate what is forgotten about James and to overcome “disciplined” readings, which ignore the archive and the complexity of his texts.

² “The Dry Salvages” from Four Quartets from Collected Poems 1909-1962, by T. S. Eliot, London, Faber & Faber Ltd., 1974, p. 195. © 1941 by T. S. Eliot and renewed by 1969 Esue Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc., I would like to thank to Faber & Faber and Harcourt for permission to use this quotation.

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reality of discourse, it has competed for institutional space and tested inter-disciplinary competence, and it has subverted and conformed to all sorts of ideologies. In its wake it has left a legacy to the political struggles of the Western world and its cultural interpretation of being human. Psychological theory is a reflection of the historical moments of the nineteenth and twentieth-century, transforming itself in science, technology and the media to form ever-new ways of imagining the subject. There is no doubt that since James, religion and psychology have been points of contestation in the twentieth-century landscape, struggling to find a platform between philosophy, physiology and politics. The continual historical interrogation of knowledge leaves the subject searching for an identity in the collapsing and competing boundaries of disciplinary practice.

The memory of James in this history of the psychology of religion conveniently anchors the subject and provides justification for disciplinary demands, but at times this very remembrance is also an act of “disciplinary amnesia”.³ James can be historically remembered, pictures of him can hang in departments of psychology, his name echoed in textbooks on the methodology of religion, but his work is often forgotten in practice and his texts buried in the contemporary fetish of the new. It is the climate of such disciplinary amnesia that I wish draw out in relation to James’s VRE, particularly with reference to the relatively new field of neuroscience and religion. Through such a consideration, I wish to show why the psychology of religion (including its branch of neuroscience) needs to return to James to consider it foundational practices.

Disciplinary Amnesia

The contemporary engagement between psychological theory and religion suffers from disciplinary amnesia, because it seeks to forget that which threatens it existence. Psychology is a discourse that seeks to suppress historical issues and problems in order to function as

³ Carrette, J. R., “Post-Structuralism and the Psychology of Religion: The Challenge of Critical Psychology” in Jonte-Pace, D. and Parsons, W., Ed., 2001 Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 110, 124.

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an authoritative discourse. The past needs to be forgotten because its legacy exposes the problems of the cohesion of the subject and its confused origins. The psychological subject wants to forget its history because its history uncovers the fragility of its disciplinary knowledge. If the contemporary field known as the “psychology of religion” (reconceived anxiously as “religious psychology” and “religious and psychological studies”) returns to its founding ancestors it reveals the blind spots of its contemporary practice, the uncertainty of its methods and the tensions of its discourse. But to forget the past in the psychology of religion is also to avoid the possibility of understanding what the fractures of historical thought can reveal about human knowledge and its attempt to understand the mystery of human experience.

The psychology of religion, from its formal disciplinary inception in the 1890s, is a subject at odds with itself. It is a discourse born out of Western Christian introspection, folded back upon itself in structured and measured conditions, and then extracted from its religious-philosophical foundation in the “secular” illusion of scientific fact. The early experimental laboratories of James in the USA (1875) and Wundt in Germany (1879) provided a way for methodical and systematic examination of the subject. Indeed, paradoxically, as Danziger notes, “the practice of introspection had helped to construct the object it was meant to investigate”.⁴ Historians of psychology have started to unravel the emergence of psychological theory and its dependence on social and historical moments, but few consider the extent to which models of self in Western psychology still remain attached to theological constructions.⁵ Like psychology, the psychology of religion forgets its history. It forgets its foundations in order to assert its institutional power over the religious body, like a powerful parasite that wishes to forget its host.

The complex separation of “psychology” from religious introspection and the ensuing tensions can be seen in the drama of late

⁴ Danziger, K., Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 52.

⁵ See Danziger, Constructing the Subject; Richards, G., Putting Psychology in its Place: An Introduction from a Critical Historical Perspective, London: Routledge, 1996; Gregersen, N. H.; Drees, W. B. & Görman, U., The Human Person in Science and Theology, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2000.

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nineteenth-century thinking, particularly in the works of Nietzsche. Psychology is a language that sets itself up against religion and returns to be healed in the formation of the psychology “of” religion.⁶ Such contestation is the power struggle for a dominant model of being human, the desire of modernity to find an authoritative discourse to position human experience.⁷ The late nineteenth-century psychologists, such as Ribot, Flournoy, Starbuck, Leuba, provide a fascinating record of the double movement involved in analysing the religious subject and the mental gymnastics necessary to avoid philosophical confusions in psychological accounts of religious experience. These early psychologists show the slow demarcation of the religious subject as separate and distinct from psychological knowledge, but yet grounded upon and defined in relationship to the new psychological space of knowledge.

The early psychologists of religion marked out a fragile territory in which human experience could be divided out, however precariously, into the so-called “religious” and the “everyday”. The “secular” and “religious” models of the self were illusory categories set up to establish a new order of power and the intervention of psychology enforced such ambiguous categories.⁸ Perhaps, more than most, the subject of the psychology of religion reflects the artificial imposition of boundaries between the religious and the secular, the failure to realise that psychology was born out of Christian history. The psychology of religion is in some ways the brilliant art of the surgeon cutting the tendons that link the immanent and transcendent, it is the separation of human observation from metaphysical speculation, empirical data from philosophical assumption. This piece of surgery was never successful. The history of the psychology of religion is witness to this failure.

Despite consistent attempts to delineate the nature and scope of the psychology of religion, continuing pluriformality can be partly attributed to the lack of clarity and consensus, and perhaps more recently some

⁶ Wulff, D. M., Psychology and Religion: Classic and Contemporary, 2nd Edition, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997, p. 3.

⁷ Shotter, J., Images of Man in Psychological Research, London: Methuen, 1975.

⁸ King, R., Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East”, London: Routledge, 1999; Fitzgerald, T., The Ideology of Religious Studies, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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active resistance to defining its appropriate limits and boundaries vis-à-vis other systems of knowledge.⁹

The plurality of contemporary studies in the area of the psychology of religion reveals the power struggles between psychological and religious discourse, each position giving greater or lesser authority to the respective terms. While such “multiple viewpoints”, as Jonte-Pace and Parsons reveal, are healthy for continuing the “communication and collaboration” it is also a reflection of the fragility of the foundations of psychological knowledge, something positivistic psychologists would wish to deny.¹⁰ If we are to understand the foundational problems of psychological knowledge of religion we need to return to the work of French psychopathology (Pierre Janet and Theodore Flournoy), the empirical methods of the Clark School (G. Stanley Hall, Edwin Starbuck, James Leuba) and James’s own efforts to position the religious subject. It is these early writers who map the terms that later empower disciplinary knowledge, but if these terms perpetuate confusion and continuing ideological struggle then it surely requires some historical reconsideration of the subject. The problem, as Jacob Belzen recalls Amedeo Giorgi, is that the varieties of the psychology of religion lack their own “self-understanding”.¹¹

It is surprising how many books in the field of the psychology of religion can still forget these early explorations of religion, as if they had no influence on present practice and as if the progression of knowledge has corrected previous errors. What contemporary psychologists fail to realise is that the early psychologists of religion set up the terms of the debate and wrestled with unresolved category errors in the attempt to determine different domains of knowledge. The textbooks of psychology avoid the history of the subject and its philosophical ambiguity in order to deny confusion, as if the field has moved forward, in true Whiggish fashion, and somehow resolved all epistemological and hermeneutical problems. Such is the disciplinary amnesia of psychology and the psychology of religion.

⁹ O’Conner, K. V., “Reconsidering the psychology of religion—Hermeneutical Approaches in the Contexts of Reason of Research and Debate” in Belzen, J., Ed., Hermeneutical Approaches in Psychology of Religion, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, p. 86.

¹⁰ Jonte-Pace & Parsons, Religion and Psychology, pp. 9-10.

¹¹ Belzen, Hermeneutical Approaches in Psychology of Religion, p. 8.

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The founding figures of psychology remain important because they were trying to map out the possibility of studying the phenomena of religion according to the “methods of science”.¹² The act of forgetting may prove useful to maintaining the discipline through “ties of loyalty, power, and conflict”, but it perpetuates problems of method and hides philosophical debate.¹³ To go back to the sources of a field is to see all the confusions of a subject, its fault lines and paradoxes. By returning to the foundations of a subject we see all the provisionality and uncertainty of knowledge, which rather than being unhealthy, unscientific and untrue enable us to recognise the temporality of thought and the problems of “closure”.¹⁴ We see subject knowledge not as seeking the truth but as creating the truth.¹⁵ It is for this reason that we must return to James’s VRE as a key foundational text for understanding contemporary psychology of religion. Any course in psychology, the history and method of religion, or the psychology of religion itself, which ignores the detail of the VRE will fail to register the foundations of their subject and simply perpetuate the illusions of detached ahistoricism. Only those who fear the past will deny its importance, for history questions the authority of knowledge and demands humility in the provisionality and limits of understanding.

Varieties of Response to James

The limits of psychological knowledge can be seen in the reaction to the VRE itself, which has received a mixed reception over the 100 years since its publication in 1902. Its influence and impact on the field is extremely varied. The responses to James’s VRE are themselves witness to the diversity of the field and the irregularities that foundational texts in the psychology of religion hold. According to David Wulff, the VRE did not so much offer a “prototype” for the psychology of religion as the “possibility of a viable psychology of religion”.¹⁶ This recognition of the provisionality of

¹² Starbuck, E. D., The Psychology of Religion, London: Walter, 1899, p. 1.

¹³ Danziger, Constructing the Subject, p. 3.

¹⁴ Lawson, H., Closure: A Story of Everything, London: Routledge, 2001.

¹⁵ James, W., The Will to Believe and other Essays in Popular Philosophy, New York: Longmans Green & Co., [1897] 1903, pp. 14-22.

¹⁶ Wulff, Psychology and Religion, p. 503.

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the subject is important and shows how James’s work provides a context for future projects. As Troels Norager’s excellent assessment of James’s VRE reveals, “the truth is that modern psychology of religion has displayed ambivalent reactions to James”.¹⁷ Understanding this “ambivalence” is very important. James is not some super hero who solved all the problems of the field, we return to James because of the tensions and omissions are those from which the future basis of the subject can be built. What remains so rich about VRE is the way so many commentators can return to the text to discover ever-new ways of reading.¹⁸ The contemporary space provides continual resources for re-examining James’s insights, from cognitive science,¹⁹ feminist analysis²⁰ postcolonial theory²¹ and the history of the so-called New Age.²²

David Wulff’s annotated bibliography of the VRE gives a valuable overview of the critical reception of James’s work up to 1995, but it is only in the last decade or so, and after 1995, that critical explorations have brought forth some of the strongest appraisal.²³ The development of different types of critical inquiry in the second half of the last century have produced sharp new readings of James’s VRE. Any course examining the text will now consider—what have become—the ‘classic’ contemporary criticisms of James’s approach to religion: his “excessive individualism, privatism and elitism”;²⁴ his Protestant bias;²⁵ his attempt to get round the Kantian

¹⁷ Norager, T., “Blowing Alternatively Hot and Cold: William James and the Complex Strategies” of The Varieties in Capps, D. & Jacobs, J. L., Ed., The Struggle for Life: A Companion to William James’s “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and Princeton Theological Seminary, 1995, p. 61.

¹⁸ See, for example, Capps & Jacobs, The Struggle for Life; Lamberth, D. C., William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

¹⁹ Watts, F., “Psychological and Religious Perspectives on Emotion” in Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, Vol. 32, No. 2, June 1997, pp. 242-260.

²⁰ Jantzen, G., Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

²¹ King, Orientalism and Religion.

²² Barnard, G. W., “Diving into the Depths; Reflections on Psychology as a Religion” in Jonte-Pace and Parsons, Religion and Psychology, 2001, pp. 297-318.

²³ Wulff, D. M., “An Annotated Bibliography” on William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience’ in Capps and Jacobs, The Struggle for Life, 1995, pp. 281-305.

²⁴ Zaleski, C., “Speaking of William James to the Cultured Among his Despisers” in Capps and Jacobs, The Struggle for Life, 1995, pp. 40-60.

²⁵ Niebuhr, R. R., “William James on Religious Experience” in Putnam, R., The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 214-259.

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strictures by focusing on extreme experiences;²⁶ his privatisation and historically misinformed account of mysticism,²⁷ his avoidance of institutional religion;²⁸ his use of discursive mediating strategies;²⁹ the selective ordering of women’s religious experience.³⁰ In requesting essays for their fine collection on the VRE in 1995, Capps and Jacobs rightly recognised the “richly provocative nature of James’s text”.³¹ The continual cycle of interpretations, to some extent, reflects the changing times and the increasing awareness of omissions and gaps in dominant ideologies of Western consciousness. The selective nature of James’s documents, echoing the work of Edwin Starbuck and others, reflects the bias and elitism of academic practice at the turn of the century. James’s work does not reveal the contemporary assessment of minorities and assessment of religious experience from the perspectives of class, gender, race and sexual orientation, critical registers yet to fully inform modern psychological theories of religion after James.³²

Nonetheless, James’s work captured the imagination of religious scholarship and there have been suggestive corrections to James’s world with the “varieties of women’s religious experience” and the “varieties of African-American religious experience”.³³ These volumes on the varieties of gendered and black experience reflect the need of writers not only to acknowledge James but also the marginalised of his texts. Recognition of gendered experience also brings us to new critical registers of the body and sexual orientation. In James’s time, of course, discourses of experience related to sexual orientation were silenced and the idea of erotic religious experience was also muted. Given the history of erotic religious ecstasy, it is revealing of the times, and James himself, that he

²⁶ Jantzen, G., “Mysticism and Experience” in Religious Studies, Vol. 25, September 1989, pp. 295-315.

²⁷ Jantzen, “Mysticism and Experience”; King, Orientalism and Religion.

²⁸ Lash, N., Easter in the Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990.

²⁹ Norager, “Blowing Alternatively Hot and Cold”.

³⁰ Davis, P. H., “The Sky-Blue Soul: Women’s Religion in The Varieties” in Capps & Jacobs, The Struggle for Life, 1995, pp. 163-177.

³¹ Capps & Jacobs, The Struggle for Life, p. 2.

³² See Jonte-Pace & Parsons, Religion and Psychology.

³³ Hurcombe, L., Sex and God: Some Varieties of Women’s Religious Experience, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987; Pinn, A. B., Varieties of African-American Religious Experience, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.

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should not examine such experiences in any depth. These realms of experience are however all wrapped up in a politic of the body which contemporary theories of religion are beginning to redress, alongside postcolonial analysis of cross-cultural experience.³⁴ These are important issues for critical readings of psychological theory today and the emergence of “critical psychology” means that it is no longer possible for psychology to remain naïve about its assumptions and hidden ideologies.³⁵

Even after all the necessary critical assessments of the VRE, the work still stands, not only as an historical landmark, but also as an enduring force for the psychology of religion. It continues to illustrate problems of method, even in the limits of its historical assumptions, because its foundational creation of psychological theory still represents a concerted effort to find an authenticity in approach, which later psychology ignores in its ideological domination. Contemporary psychology of religion needs to return to James in order to examine its methods and overcome its disciplinary amnesia, which hides its epistemological errors. What, we may ask, is the psychology of religion forgetting in the VRE? What forms of amnesia surround the text?

The scope of this introduction and the richness of James’s text do not allow me to consider every contribution of the VRE for questions of theory and method in the psychology of religion—given the nature of the text this would be an impossible and foolish task to attempt. I will not, for example, explore the importance of the subliminal for examining the unknown dimensions of human experience, the politics of experience in humanistic psychology and mysticism, the questions of phenomenology and the bias towards a philosophy of consciousness, rather than a philosophy of the sign.³⁶ I will also not entertain issues related to discourse analysis and religious experience, or consider the importance of narrative construction. All that can be done in the limits of this essay is to pick one poignant example from contemporary psychology and show why the VRE still has much teach the psychology of religion today. In this essay, I will, therefore, take the example of neuroscience, as one strand of thinking dominating psychological theory a hundred

³⁴ King, Orientalism and Religion.

³⁵ Fox, D. & Prillensky, I., Ed., Critical Psychology: An Introduction, London: Sage, 1997.

³⁶ Flood, G., Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion, London: Cassell, 1999.

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years after James. I wish to show why the neuroscience of religion needs to return to the foundational text of James’s VRE in order to overcome its disciplinary amnesia. I hope, at least, to show—the ancient wisdom—that we forget history at our peril and that we only repeat the errors and misfortunes of our ancestors if fail to listen to their experience. James is one ancestor of the psychological theory of religion who can still teach us about the problems of psychological method.

One reason greater concern should be directed to the history of psychological theory is that the discipline is a relatively recent invention of human exploration; compared, at least, to the explorations of both Eastern and Western philosophy it is a mere infant. Given the nature of the history of religion, psychology has much to learn from the existing cross-cultural models of humanity. As Foucault declared in his critique of the discourses of the human sciences: “You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he”.³⁷ Psychology constantly needs to recognise the limitations of its project, and it is for this reason that the psychology of religion needs to return to the insights of James’s VRE.