Instructor: Matthew Dillon
[email protected] MWF 11:00-11:50pm Office hours: M 4-6pm and by appointment Psychology of Religion “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” ~ William James "Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires." ~ Sigmund Freud “All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. ” ~Carl Jung Course Description This course provides an overview of the basic approaches in the psychological understanding of religious belief and practice. Topics to be addressed in religious systems East and West include: sex, religious experience, ritual, myth, ecstasy, God and meditation. Course Goals 1) Introduce the class to some major thinkers in the field of psychology of religion: James, Freud, Jung, Erikson, Winnicott, Maslow, Kakar, Boyer and Tremlin. 2) Cover some major theories in the psychology of religion: psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, ego psychology, self psychology, object-relations, neurological and cognitive science, and comparative-dialogical models. 3) Survey the history of the psychological sciences and their intersections with religion from the “Discovery of the Unconscious” with Franz Anton Mesmer to the recent boom in neuro-cognitive studies. 4) Expose students to the problems and nuances in exporting western psychological models for the study of non-western or historical religious phenomena.