What happens when psychoanalytic knowledge leaves the clinic? What is to be gained from these interventions, and can psychoanalysis itself benefit from an application outside the context in which it originated? Those are the questions Stephen Frosh raises and attempts to answer in his nuanced and accessible new book. Writing from the relatively young discipline of psychosocial studies, he provi...

In Why Tolerate Religion?, Brian Leiter argues against the special legal status of religion, claiming that religion should not be the only ground for exemptions to the law and that this form of protection should be, in principle, available for the claims of secular conscience as well. However, in the last chapter of his book, he objects to a universal regime of exemptions for both religious and...

The state of "common unhappiness" presumably regarded by Freud as the end point of the psychoanalytic cure is examined as an ontological conviction reflected in a still-prevailing view of the self as ideally autonomous and fully demarcated from its surround. More recent contributors have envisioned individuation as relationally contingent rather than as essentially solitary. Yet, although more ...

The three requirements for a Darwinian evolutionary process are replication, variation and selection. Dennett (2006) discusses various theories of how these three processes, especially selection, may have operated in the evolution of religion. He believes that the origins of religion, like the origins of language and music, may be approached scientifically. He hopes that such investigations wil...

Psychoanalytic theories of mind consist of comprehensive explanations of human behavior and motivation. Such theories seek to account for normal and abnormal development at both the population and individual levels, but these abstract and global ideas can seem distant from our personal, moment-by-moment, lived experience. Intersubjectivity theory has reformulated psychological concepts of why p...

cognitive theories of forgetting. FOR many years the central role accorded to mechanisms of psychological defence was one of the characteristics that divided psychoanalytic theory and therapy from behavioural and cognitive therapies. Throughout his life Freud claimed that the purpose of psychoanalytic therapy was to lift the repression that excluded unacceptable mental contents from awareness i...

The main goal of the workshop is to introduce CSS members to topics that are cutting edge in the cognitive science of religion. The papers draw on a variety of methodologies and disciplines, which is one of the main characteristics of the cognitive science of religion. Even though the focus is on religion, the researchers are involved in broader issues relevant to cognitive science. So the expe...

The religion literature in Sociology remains largely disconnected from the ethnicity and immigration literature despite enduring connections between religion and ethnicity. This review helps to close this gap. It shows how the dominant theories in each discipline follow a similar trajectory and examines how exploring the theoretical connections between religion and ethnicity can advance our und...

This research studies the origins of identity among the female students in Khalkhal high-schools in 2012-2013. Data was gathered through the survey method (questionnaires) and the library method. The dependent variable was the study of identity seeking, but the independent variable includes the degree of religious orientation, social status of the family, the access to foreign networks, the sol...