Commentary: Tending the Garden of Personality

ABSTRACT In this Commentary for the special issue of the Journal of Personality, we discuss the uses and limitations of taxonomies in personality, drawing on the role of taxonomic efforts in other sciences. We endorse Mc Adams's concept of several “levels” (perhaps three: traits, motives and cognitive structures, and core unity themas or identity) for ordering and arranging the major variables of personality. We argue that these levels should be considered independent and distinct: Each level has its own range of convenience, and no level can be reduced to any other level. We suggest that the concept of conflict—within and across levels—is a useful way to understand certain problematic cases. Finally, we argue that the social macrocontext (gender, class, race, culture, and history) has unfortunately been neglected in most personality theories and taxonomies of variables. We illustrate the importance of social macrocontext with a brief discussion of the case of Maya Angelou.     

Beyond Reductionism: Reinventing the Sacred

We have lived under the hegemony of the reductionistic scientific worldview since Galileo, Newton, and Laplace. In this view, the universe is meaningless, as Stephen Weinberg famously said, and organisms and a court of law are “nothing but” particles in morion. This scientific view is inadequate. Physicists are beginning to abandon reductionism in favor of emergence. Emergence, both epistemological and ontological, embraces the emergence of life and of agency. With agency comes meaning, value, and doing, beyond mere happenings. More organisms are conscious. None of this violates any laws of physics, but it cannot be reduced to physics. Emergence is real, and the tiger chasing the gazelle are real parts of the real universe. We live, therefore, in an emergent universe. This emergence often is entirely unpredictable beforehand, from the evolution of novel functionalities in organisms to the evolution of the economy and human history. We are surrounded on all sides by a creativity that cannot even be prestated. Thus we have the first glimmerings of a new scientific worldview, beyond reductionism. In our universe emergence is real, and there is ceaseless, stunning creativity that has given rise to our biosphere, our humanity, and our history. We are partial co-creators of this emergent creativity. It is our choice whether we use the God word. I believe it is wise to do so. God can be our shared name for the true creativity in the natural universe. Such a view invites a new sense of the sacred, as those aspects of the creativity in the universe that we deem worthy of holding sacred. We are not logically forced to this view. Yet a global civilization, hopefully persistently diverse and creative, is emerging. I believe we need a shared view of God, a fully natural God, to orient our lives. We need a shared view of the sacred that is open to slow evolution, because rigidity in our view of the sacred violates how our most precious values evolve and invites ethical hegemony. We need a shared global ethic beyond our materialism. I believe a sense of God as the natural, awesome creativity in the universe can help us construct the sacred and a global ethic to help shape the global civilization toward what we choose with the best of our limited wisdom.     

The Varieties of Sacred Experience: Finding the Sacred in a Secular Grove

This paper contends that the social scientific study of religion has long labored under a chafing constraint and a misleading premise. It suggests that our primary focus should be on the sacred, and that religion is just one among many possible sources of the sacred. Defining religion "substantively" but the sacred "functionally" helps toresolve a long-standing tension in the field. Broadened conceptions of the sacred and of "sacralization" help to defuse the conflict among the two very different versions of secularization theory: the "all-or-nothing" versus the "middle range." Meanwhile, a conceptual typology of the sacred pivots around the intersections of two distinctions (compensatory vs. confirmatory and marginal vs. institutional). This generatesfour distinct scenarios: the sacred as integrative, the sacred as quest, the sacred as collectivity, and the sacred as counter-culture. The paper concludes with three admonitions for research in the area.     

Psychoanalysis: The Sacred and the Profane

Colleagues from a variety of perspectives have written about the propensity to enshrine psychoanalytic theory. The meaning of the word “enshrine” is to cherish as sacred an idea or philosophy and protect it from change. In other words, the way we view psychoanalysis, our theories of mind and technique, become holy writ and we have divided the world of theory into the sacred and the profane. This is the kiss of death for theory, which must constantly evolve and change, but comforting for the analyst who believes he is on the side of the right, the sacred. In this paper I will discuss how our propensity to enshrine theory has had a debilitating effect on the development of psychoanalysis and, in particular, as a treatment for the most vulnerable people who seek our help. I also address the idea that movement away from enshrined positions allows us to construct different versions of reality. In this context, the notion of “action at a distance” is presented along with the attendant idea of psychoanalytic entanglement.     

Forms of the Sacred

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Sacred Violence: the dark side of God

The subject of this essay is the use to which biblical texts which sanction aggression in the name of God have been put by Jews and Christians over the past 2000 years. The divine injunction given to the Israelites to exterminate the Canaanites has been explained in various ways, but without much success. A literal reading of the Hebrew Bible by Jews and Christians, past and present, has led to its exploitation in support of particular ideologies. Given the appalling record of both faith communities in their relationship with those of a different nationality or religious persuasion, it is imperative that the biblical account of the barbarism inflicted by the Israelites on the people of Canaan be subjected to a searching critique.     

The Naked Goddess: Pornography and the Sacred

Abstract

In this article it is argued that contemporary forms of pornography represent an assault upon important sacred traditions which venerated female generative power and saw sexuality as a means of participating in the divine. The pornographic representations of the feminine in Western culture are part of systems of domination which not only support the abuse of women but also the colonization of peoples and the exploitation of nature. A celebration of the sexual cosmologies, which can still be found in cultural performances and ritual acts, is a means of countering this domination. So too is the process of speaking from the vulva; reclaiming the female genitals as a source of intelligent power that both manifest in and signify the creative forces that animate the universe.     

Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo-European Soul

In this paper the author endeavours to bring together discussions of Georges Dumezil's thesis concerning the tripartite structure of Indo-European mythology with discussions of Trinitarian theology. The claim is, first, that the mythology led to an intrinsically aporetic characterization of the soul as a sphere of 'self-government in space'. Second, that Plato, initially, and then much more emphatically Augustine, dissolved this construction and resolved its aporias by substituting an alternative construction in terms of 'government by the other through time.'     

Sacred texts

It seems indisputable that the way we define and classify texts influences the way we read texts. My concern is to develop methods for reading and understanding texts that are influenced by distinctions between the secular and the sacred, and then draw out some preliminary implications of these methods and distinctions for relationships between church and state in liberal democracies. Distinctions between sacred and secular texts can be tracked with the conjecture that a full textual reading of a sacred text requires a kind of interior commitment. I develop the conjecture, and then argue that this requirement increases the distance between scepticism and religious belief. The upshot of such distinctions and implications is that we cannot read sacred texts as sacred while maintaining the secular consciousness that defines liberal democracies. Acknowledging these textual differences between religion and politics lays to rest, permanently, the popular creed of exceptionalism, the belief that secular patterns of thought, grounded in compromise and toleration, can scan and comprehend religious beliefs from some impartial perspective.     

Mark Pope: Counseling's Sacred Weaver

Transformative cultural agent, networker and collaborator, professional leader, advocate for social justice, mentor, and scholar all describe roles that have defined the career of Mark Pope. Sacred weaver is a term that captures the essence of his unique place in the history of the professions of counseling and psychology. The authors use information from interviews with 6 widely recognized leaders in the fields of counseling and psychology and an interview with Pope himself to capture the essence of counseling's sacred weaver.     

Classroom Exercise: Interpreting Sacred Texts

The author uses a contemporary functional document (a campus map) to design an imaginative exercise which teaches students the limits of map (or text) as a guide to reliable information. Through the exercise, students learn about gaps in information and the limits of what any text reveals, even one which is ostensibly designed as a reliable guide for navigating a campus.     

Sacred Communities: Contestations and Connections

This article discusses a project whose purpose was to review existing qualitative and quantitative data from two separate studies to provide new insights about everyday religion and belonging. Researchers engaged in knowledge exchange and dialogue with new and former research participants, with other researchers involved in similar research, and with wider academic networks beyond the core disciplines represented here, principally anthropology and geography. Key concluding themes related to the ambivalent nature of ‘faith’, connections over place and time, and the contested nature of community. Implicit in terms like ‘faith’, ‘community’, and ‘life course’ are larger interwoven narratives of space, time, place, corporeality, and emotion. The authors found that understanding how places, communities, and faiths differ and intersect requires an understanding of social relatedness and boundaries.     

Spiritualising the Sacred: A Critique of Feminist Theology

This article submits feminist theology to a two-pronged theological critique. First, the article notes the overwhelmingly critical nature of feminist theology, and suggests that this concentration on critique at the expense of construction is itself a weakness of feminist theology. Further, it argues that the feminist critique tends to construe Christianity in a way which distorts the more complex realities of the faith, placing too much emphasis on the textual nature of Christianity. Second, the article argues that feminist attempts to construct new theologies are flawed because of their dependence upon the contentious notion of 'women's experience' and their consequent failure to engage with the traditional resources of theology. The article concludes with the suggestion that much feminist theology is dependent upon an influential post-Christian strand of religiosity, and that it uncritically appropriates the latter's unhelpfully individualistic, monistic and idealist stance.     

Personal Images of the Sacred

Jung’s works on religion focus on images of the divine, which people experience in various ways. Here, we consider a variety of such numinous experiences, ranging from childhood dreams to experiences of Christian saints and of 20th-century cult leaders, all of which can be described as images of God in the human psyche.     

Sacred space and the city: Greece and Bhaktapur

Conclusions Prompted by Levy’s observations and questions, our brief review of symbolic space in ancient Greece suggests that some features of Greek culture that at first sight seem rationalist and modernizing, signs of the transformation of the archaic city, were deeply rooted in the culture of the city-states from as early as we can study them.¹¹ It may be that they are factors that contributed to the intellectual process referred to as the breakthrough or enlightenment which is not easily attributed entirely to economic and social changes in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. The largely secular political tradition is sometimes, and plausibly, invoked as a cause (cf. Humphreys 1986). It should probably be seen as part of the overall ordering of the sacred vis-à-vis the profane. By the later fourth century BCE, contact with a larger, multiethnic world and the growth of impersonal market relationships produced or hastened secondary urbanization and with it the fracturing of a social coherence. In the intervening classical period, in some areas, such as drama, festival, and the visual arts, the first stirrings of the enlightenment may actually have fostered a more intense deployment of traditional resources. The symbolic use of space in the Greek cities probably never matched, despite important similarities, the more complex traditional systems of their South Asian counterparts. Greece’s traditional culture only reached its acme when new winds were blowing (and even because of them), but before they had swept away the delicate links that held the culture together.     

Memorializing the Sacred: Kristallnacht in German National Memory

This article uses field visits (including photographs) to examine the construction of religious memory in the commemoration of Kristallnacht (Crystal Night) in contemporary German society. Over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of Kristallnacht memorials to the synagogues that were destroyed during the pogroms of November 9, 1938. Based on research at 50 of these memorial sites, I explore the way in which violence against the synagogue (and Jewish sacred objects) has become the symbol of Jewish genocide in German Holocaust remembrance. The findings strongly suggest that the missing synagogue and its destroyed relics have replaced the murdered Jewish citizenry as the predominant subject of memory in public monuments and memorials throughout the country. However, this visual trope as a representation of the sacred is complicated by other attempts at humanizing (and thus implicitly Christianizing) the suffering and sacrifice of the Holocaust.