Volume XI: Psychology and Religion: West and East

In the Terry Lectures given at Yale University in 1937, a demonstration is proposed of the persective from which medical psychology views religion. Religion must be taken into account by psychologists, since it represents one of the most ancient and universal expressions of the human mind; but it is felt that the approach of psychology must be scientific, empirical and phenomenological rather than philosophical or metaphysical. Religion is defined for the purposes of this study as the belief in an external dynamic force which controls the human subject, and as the ritual acts carried out by men to produce the effect of this dynamic force, the numinosum. Religion is seen as an attitude of mind rather than any creed, although the creed is a codified form of the original religious experience. In the story of a patient who was convinced he had cancer, but whose real difficulty lay in obsessive drives he did not want to recognize, the desire of men in general to avoid revelatory contact with the unconscious is stressed; from primitive times to the present, man is seen to construct ritual and taboo to protect him from the voices of his dreams and the content of his unconscious. The definite forms and laws of the Church are seen in this light. Two dreams with specifically religious manifestations are briefly analyzed to demonstrate the existence of these inner voices and experiences, particularly the two figures of the anima and animus. Each is seen as a psychic representation of the minority of genes in the body; the anima, or female figure, appears in the imagery of the male's unconscious, and vice versa. It is felt that the processes of the unconscious are just as continuously active as those of the conscious mind, and that dreams are manifestations of this chain of events that can be experienced in the conscious. I reference.