Religion and Critical Psychology Religion and Critical Psychology is a controversial attempt to build a new critical psychology of religion. It offers one of the most challenging philo- sophical and political critiques of the cognitive science of religion by linking it directly to the power of the knowledge economy, bringing economists, such as Smith, Jevons and Hayek, into dialogue with psychological knowl- edge and the category of religion. In this wide ranging and sharply critical study, Jeremy Carrette challenges the political naivety of psychological knowledge in the study of religion and shows how recent theory of religion has neglected to question the ethical and political order of its interdisciplinary methods. He examines foundational themes, such as religious experience, the individual and the social, the disciplinary formation of psychological knowledge, and interrogates different psychological approaches to religion. Through these explorations, he exposes the suppression of economics in the psychoanalytical appeals to a scientifi c and cultural theory of religion, and the close association of humanist models of religion with post-War American capitalism. Finally, Carrette argues that we need to develop an ethics of knowledge in order to overcome forms of absolute knowledge and absolute economy – the totalitarian impulses of our time. Religion and Critical Psychology will be of interest to students and researchers in the fi elds of critical psychology, religious experience and the psychology of religion. It extends a bold interdisciplinary challenge to the separation of psychology, sociology, politics, economics and religion. Jeremy Carrette is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author and editor of a number of works on Michel Foucault and William James, including Foucault and Religion (Routledge, 2000) and, with Richard King, Selling Spirituality (Routledge, 2004). Religion and Critical Psychology The ethics of not-knowing in the knowledge economy Jeremy Carrette First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Jeremy Carrette All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carrette, Jeremy R. Religion and critical psychology : the ethics of not-knowing in the knowledge economy / Jeremy Carrette. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Psychology and religion. 2. Critical psychology 3. Ethics. 4. Knowledge, Theory of. 5. Knowledge management. 6. Information technology. I. Title. BF51.C37 2007 200.1´9--dc22 2007012708 ISBN 0-203-93467-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–42305–8 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–415–42306–6 (pbk) ISBN10: 0–203–93467–9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–42305–2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–42306–9 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–93467–8 (ebk) For Cécile Contents Preface viii Acknowledgements xv Introduction: the politics of religious experience 1 PART I The ethics of knowledge in the human sciences 31 1 The ethical veil of the knowledge economy 33 2 Binary knowledge and the protected category 70 PART II Economic formations of psychology and religion 101 3 Religion, politics and psychoanalysis 103 4 Maslow’s economy of religious experience 138 5 Cognitive capital and the codifi cation of religion 163 Conclusion: critique and the ethics of not-knowing 204 Notes 214 Bibliography 229 Index 245 Preface When William James circumscribed his psychological analysis of religious experience, in his second Gifford Lecture at Edinburgh in 1901, he made it clear that he proposed ‘to ignore the institutional branch entirely’ (James [1902] 1960: 49). James has rightly been critiqued1 for the limitations of his approach, but he did not quite make the error of explaining social phenomena in terms of psychological phenomena, which Durkheim ([1895] 1982: 125–35), so ardently, regarded as a false explanation. James rather tried to isolate psychological processes and set up the terms for exploring so- called ‘religious’ experience within the psychological method of individual ‘feelings, acts and experiences’ (James [1902] 1960: 50). Cognitive science of religion, likewise, seeks to privilege and isolate the ‘mind’ as a category prior to institutional and social factors (Sperber 1985b: 79). However, the question remains as to whether the psychological method can so easily and coherently isolate ‘experience’ and ‘mind’ from the representational orders of knowledge established within institutional discourses; not simply in terms of including the social dimensions of religion and considering the social- institutional aspects of psychological knowledge (Danziger 1990), but in terms of the implicit values of knowledge and, more precisely, the ethics of the disciplinary division of knowledge and the way systems of knowledge protect and isolate their primary categories from external accountability. This ethical approach to the subject is to follow the French biologist and 1965 Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod (1972: 161) in seeing how ‘values and knowledge are always and necessarily associated in action as in discourse’, even within the study of science. Such an ethical attitude raises questions about how ideas are strategically excluded, privileged and ordered within the scientifi c or humanities enterprise. It raises important questions about the material context of all statements about the self and the mind and their ethical constitution within different regimes of knowledge. Such questions turn the modernist project of the study of religion towards a critical reading Preface ix of its once cherished – scientifi c – methods, which sustain the category of religion and make it an object of analysis through an uncritical preservation of the method and its inter-disciplinary alliances. It enables us to read the interfaces of different forms of disciplinary knowledge as ethical registers in the constitution of a subject of knowledge. The problem of inter-disciplinary knowledge, as it is articulated in the socio-political reading of psychology and religion, is therefore a way to understand the orientating values of knowledge about the world and the self. In this book, the complexity of ethical values within knowledge will be brought to the surface by examining – what for some, at this stage at least, will be a rather bizarre association – the interface of the history of economics and the study of psychology and religion. Unfortunately, in the endeavour to assess the values operating at the juncture of inter-disciplinary knowledge, we are faced with the problem that previous attempts to integrate the psychological with the socio-political world of institutions in the theory of religion have remained limited; although feminist and cultural readings did offer some important redirection on this front.2 The lack of engagement is, however, itself an important historical register of value. This division in the order of knowledge is established in the very formation of nineteenth-century disciplines, along the individual- social divide, that continues to plague the ways we think in the late modern world of academic study. The problem is not resolved by balancing different perspectives, but rather by fi nding ways to think through the binary divisions and institutional frameworks that shape modern forms of thinking. The solution is, therefore, to think in, through and beyond such frameworks in order to resist the disciplinary isolationism of modernity and reveal the values behind such knowledge. One way to understand the values behind the individual-social binary at the heart of nineteenth-century subject formation is to follow twentieth- century post-structuralist accounts of discourse (statements within social systems) and read psychological discourse as a socio-political reality; a central characteristic of what has become known as critical psychology. In this scenario, statements, to follow Foucault (1969), occur within a ‘fi eld of use’ and become bound by rules of formation and coherence. They operate according to a power-knowledge regime and function within the social order. However, while all of these views offer important questions for establishing some social justice within our models of self, they can easily become submerged in a ‘Cold War’ framework, as Gregory Alles’s (2001) incisive reading of Foucault and my previous study of Foucault reveal. Although distinct and in some ways counter to Marx, post-structuralist social models x Preface carry much of the same analytic of power and post-war European political discourse into a critical reading of psychology. While I am sympathetic to some of these readings, critique in a post-Cold War world can no longer be framed effectively in the same terms. Critique was once, according