Visiting the labyrinth of religious transformation

Understanding the complexity of religious transformation requires empirical contextualized research on the continuous dynamic relationship between formation and transformation. Narrative study in context unveils the implicit meaning of phenomena made explicit in stories. This article, through a biographical case study of a Mennonite woman’s religious journey, explores the complex nature of religious transformation with particular attention to intricate interplay of factors. Critical insights regarding the inseparable relationship between formation and transformation are made clear through an in‐depth examination of lived experience, yielding implications for religious education.     

Touched by suicide: bridging the perspectives of survivors and clinicians

This article is a revised version of an invited plenary address given at the 39th Annual Conference of the American Association of Suicidology. The authors, a psychiatrist and a writer survivor, outline and summarize the different ways in which professionals and survivors come to an understanding of suicide. They explain how each group often exists independently and separate from the other--by cognitive and emotional dissonance, by private language, by psychological defenses and miscommunication--and call for dialog. They argue that both perspectives are essential to advance the science of suicidology and to give hope and meaning to those bereaved by suicide.     

Ongoing change in psychoanalytic theory implications for analysis of religious experience

Hans Loewald (1980) once made the distinction between ghosts and ancestors, the former always wanting to return to the land of the living, the latter being able to rest in peace and live forth through their progeny in the present generation. Extending this metaphor, Stephen Mitchell (1991) has noted that the intellectual integrity and vitality of psychoanalysis depends on our shifting our view of Freud from an unburied ghost who haunts us to an honored ancestor. I argue that perhaps nowhere is Freud's enduring presence greater than in psychoanalytic perspectives on religion, and it is often as an unburied ghost. Ongoing change in psychoanalytic theory, however, affords respectful amendment to his work in a way that allows Freud to be a dearly honored ancestor from whom we are all psychoanalytic descendents. Three developments in psychoanalytic theory have special implication for the analysis of religious experience. These areas of change pertain to contemporary understanding of illusion, narrative, and social constructivism. I offer in conclusion seven points for further consideration.     

Defense and resistance in the psychoanalytic process

"Defense" and "resistance" are usually regarded as two separate and distinct concepts, the first belonging to psychic functioning in general and the second to therapy, yet this distinction is far from constant. Clinical observations indicate a frequent overlapping of these two mental functions or positions. A patient's behavior may convey the meaning of either or both concepts, and a position or response that one assumes to bespeak resistance may reveal defense instead. This state of affairs may be seen in the analysis of patients with a relatively well-integrated neurotic identity, but its main import is in the analysis of psychosomatic patients and those with severe personality disorders. Insufficient holding experiences during the infancy of these patients do not enable them to develop functional structuralization. Deficient mothering in the first stages of life also prevents the stable differentiation between defense against threats from within and resistance against influence from outside.     

Touched by genius: on animals and madmen

Abstract

The paper starts with the question, posed by Wittgenstein, whether animals can feign or act as if they are performing in a theatre. It is argued that the idea that they cannot is widespread, not only in philosophy but also in biology or poetry. Animals are generally considered to be too honest for that. A second question is whether there are people who are too honest for feigning or acting. Foucault’s famous discussion about madmen sheds some light on this question. Two concepts play an important role in his discussion: ‘innocence’ and ‘genius’. These concepts are not only discussed in relationship to Foucault but also in relationship to Lorenz and Nietzsche. It will be argued that both concepts play an important role in combating an overly rationalist or logocentric ethics. According to the thinkers discussed in this article, an ethics which denies the animality in man is nothing else but dangerous.     

Touched by water: The body in scuba diving

Focusing on the leisure practice of scuba diving, I examine how ’touch’ works as a sense experienced through material engagement with the aquatic world for both physical and metaphorical effect. Technologically facilitated and environmentally positioned, scuba diving brings together the distal and the proximate to produce a particular experience of space and a particular mobilisation of emotion. The paper positions itself within the conceptual context of embodiment in order to consider corporeality in terms of its visceral and material capacities that effect and direct movement, as well as the experience of the sensuous via an engagement with the diving environment. In doing so, it draws upon work within the social sciences that has acknowledged the importance of an embodied engagement with environments that are seen as therapeutic or restorative for their ability to instil a sense of well-being and calm through a re-centering of the self. Drawing out the meditative capacities of scuba diving, the paper considers the aquatic world as, for some divers, a therapeutic landscape.     

Contemporary New Age transformation in Taiwan: A sociological study of a new religious movement

This article explores commentary in UK newspapers which, while sympathetic to the notion of Turkish EU membership, still deploys a discourse that remains exclusionary where assumptions of Turkey's intrinsic cultural and civilisational ‘Europeanness’ are concerned. Turkish membership is advocated as a sort of strategic supplement to a historical ontology of ‘Europe’ proceeding from a grand narrative of Latin Christendom – Reformation – Enlightenment – Modernity (adorned with the selective appropriation of Classical antiquity), superimposed upon a wider historico-cultural and religious milieu. Membership is supported on the basis that Turkey is an exceptional case, considered on the instrumental grounds of guaranteeing Turkish secular democracy within the context of EU institutions while presenting an ‘example’ to the wider Islamic ‘world’. Support for membership does not proceed from assumptions that Turkey may possess an existing, intrinsic, historically locatable European ‘right’, implied by the extension of the EU into Ottoman successor states in south-eastern Europe as well as Cyprus. The potential for the deployment of this latter discourse to support Turkish membership from an assumed a priori cultural and historical European belonging is explored.     

Day by day,hour by hour: Naturalistic language input to infants

Measurements of infants’ quotidian experiences provide critical information about early development. However, the role of sampling methods in providing these measurements is rarely examined. Here we directly compare language input from hour‐long video‐recordings and daylong audio‐recordings within the same group of 44 infants at 6 and 7 months. We compared 12 measures of language quantity and lexical diversity, talker variability, utterance‐type, and object presence, finding moderate correlations across recording‐types. However, video‐recordings generally featured far denser noun input across these measures compared to the daylong audio‐recordings, more akin to ‘peak’ audio hours (though not as high in talkers and word‐types). Although audio‐recordings captured ~10 times more awake‐time than videos, the noun input in them was only 2–4 times greater. Notably, whether we compared videos to daylong audio‐recordings or peak audio times, videos featured relatively fewer declaratives and more questions; furthermore, the most common video‐recorded nouns were less consistent across families than the top audio‐recording nouns were. Thus, hour‐long videos and daylong audio‐recordings revealed fairly divergent pictures of the language infants hear and learn from in their daily lives. We suggest that short video‐recordings provide a dense and somewhat different sample of infants’ language experiences, rather than a typical one, and should be used cautiously for extrapolation about common words, talkers, utterance‐types, and contexts at larger timescales. If theories of language development are to be held accountable to ‘facts on the ground’ from observational data, greater care is needed to unpack the ramifications of sampling methods of early language input.     

Spontaneity: a psychoanalytic inquiry

Abstract

This paper examines the experience of consulting to experiential groups and endeavours to draw some conclusions about this significant element in training.