Psychobiography and the Psychology of Religion: A Tribute to the Work of Donald Capps

This article examines Donald Capps’s work on the psychology of major religious figures and the social forces that informed their psychic lives, spiritual worldviews, and teachings. Drawing on four texts that were published between 2000 and 2014, the essay explores Capps’s views on the importance of psychobiography to the study of religion and the specific contributions his thinking has made to a greater understanding of the historical Jesus. The article considers Capps’s analysis of Jesus’s illegitimacy and his role as healer within the society in which he lived and preached. Building on Capps’s work, the article also expands on feminist and postcolonial theories that offer insight into the psychosocial development of religious figures whose teachings and beliefs emerged out of their individual life circumstances and the larger socio-political culture in which they lived.     

A Psychological Biography for Jesus: Responding to Donald Capps'

Don Capps employed a Freudian Model and current biblical criticism models of Crossan, Borg, and others to evaluate the biblical data regarding the person and self-concept of Jesus of Nazareth. This article points to some vulnerabilities for serious criticism inherent in Capps's model and suggests the necessity of a wider range of psychological models for screening the data available on Jesus' development as a person in order to draw conclusions about his nature and motivations. Capps concludes that Jesus was a melancholic personality who was at odds with his society because he and his family were defamed regarding his problematic birth story, resulting in the violent symbolic action of cleansing the temple, thus expressing his arrival at self-confidence and self-affirmation.     

The Mother Relationship and Artistic Inhibition in the Lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Erik H. Erikson

In four earlier articles, I focused on the theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, and suggested that the melancholic self may experience humor (Capps, 2007a), play (Capps, 2008a), dreams (Capps, 2007c), and art (Capps, 2008b) as restorative resources. I argued that Erik H. Erikson found these resources to be valuable remedies for his own melancholic condition, which had its origins in the fact that he was illegitimate and was raised solely by his mother until he was three years old, when she remarried. In this article, I focus on two themes in Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci and a memory of his childhood (1964): Leonardo’s relationship with his mother in early childhood and his inhibitions as an artist. I relate these two themes to Erikson’s own early childhood and his failure to achieve his goal as an aspiring artist in his early twenties. The article concludes with a discussion of Erikson’s frustrated aspirations to become an artist and his emphasis, in his psychoanalytic work, on children’s play. Donald Capps is Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Princeton Theological Seminary. His books include Men, Religion, and Melancholia (1997), Freud and Freudians on Religion (2001), and Men and Their Religion: Honor, Hope, and Humor     

John Nash's Delusional Decade: A Case of Paranoid Schizophrenia

Continues the psychoanalytic study of mathematical genius John Nash in Capps (2003) by focusing on the decade, during his thirties, when he was most delusional. Explores the connections between the content of his delusions and his life history and immediate circumstances, with particular attention to the way in which his delusions reflected the bisexual confusion discussed in the previous essay. Uses Freud's analysis of the mechanism of paranoia in his Dr. Schreber study to account for the nature and progression of Nash's delusions.     

Historical Interpretation of Augustine: The Promise of James,Allport, and Capps

Capps' interpretation of Augustine is methodologically a contribution to historiography. Capps draws on the concepts/labels of James and Allport to explain Augustine's unique personality structure. In the end, he moves beyond the James and Allport concepts/labels to their historical strategies. Such work complements traditional narrative explanation.     

Reflections for Clinical Pastoral Education Students in Psychiatric Settings

This article focuses on Donald Capps’s books on mental illness. In doing so I highlight three key insights from Capps that I have applied in my own ministry with persons with mental illness in various psychiatric hospitals. These insights, together with my own experience as a chaplain, lead to three practical lessons for clinical pastoral education students in psychiatric settings. I provide some context for my interest in mental illness and my friendship with Capps, as well as some background regarding how Capps’s writings on mental illness fit with certain broader themes in his own work as a pastoral theologian. This essay is personal throughout.     

Human Development and Pastoral Care in a Postmodern Age: Donald Capps,Erik H. Erikson,and Beyond

This article discusses Donald Capps’s use of Erik H. Erikson’s life-cycle theory as the basic psychological framework for his theory of pastoral care. Capps was attracted to Erikson’s existential-psychological model, his hermeneutic approach, and his religious sensitivity. Capps’s thought develops from first exploring biblical foundations for using Eriksonian theory for pastoral care to gradually embracing certain postmodern features. The article concludes with reflections on the usefulness of Erikson’s life-cycle theory and Capps’s work for contemporary pastoral care.     

From “The Depleted Self” to “The Will to Believe”: Excavating the Hermeneutics of Donald Capps

The concept of “reframing” lies at the heart of the pastoral psychology of Donald Capps. In previous articles I have argued that the process of reframing follows a circular hermeneutics. An excavation of Capps’ hermeneutics reveals foundations in the fields of philosophy and psychology. This article focuses on the legacy of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James and Paul Ricoeur. It explores the differences and commonalities between William James and Friedrich Schleiermacher’s understanding of religious experience as well as Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of narrativity and traces these strains to Capps’ pastoral psychology. As illustration of his pastoral approach to healing and wholeness the problem of “the depleted self,” so prevalent in “our narcissistic age,” encounters the healing narrative of Jesus that appeals to “the will to believe.”     

Aesthetic Interdisciplinarity in Donald Capps’ Weltanschauung

This article considers the aesthetic interdisciplinarity of the work and Weltanschauung of Donald Capps. It suggests three themes of Capps’ Weltanschauung: reframing, confusion, and empiricism. These themes converge in an image of calmness that epitomizes Capps’ aesthetic interdisciplinarity. Capps envisions a world that is heimlich (homelike), and his aesthetic therefore pursues “homemaking” in this world by virtue of enjoying a certain calmness in the process of pastoral counseling.     

Review of Jesus

This new psychobiographical analysis of Jesus by Donald Capps promises to be a controversial but important book. While the venture is an engaging one, new theses about what and why Jesus did what he did suffer the same sorts of challenges as have traditional and critical presentations of the historical Jesus. This review engages theological issues and their implications, historical judgments and their plausibility, and methodological approaches and their fruitfulness.     

In Search of a More Reliable Truth: Mourning and Donald Capps’s Psychological Portrait of Jesus

This article is an abridged version of a chapter in my dissertation. In my dissertation, I examine the relationship between personal experience and public theory within certain strands of contemporary psychology of religion and pastoral theology. My guiding theory is Peter Homans’s “mourning religion” thesis. In this chapter, I examine the life and work of Donald Capps, who is the most prolific contemporary writer in the fields of psychology of religion and pastoral theology. I argue that Capps addressed various personal losses in a deeply personal way during his fifties, and I believe that the key moment for Capps in overcoming his melancholia occurred after his application of his melancholia theory to Jesus, because there Capps was able to integrate and to sustain in a satisfying way his various selves and, therefore, open himself up to mourn in a non-defensive way—the way of humor.     

A Religious Experience: A Psychological Interpretation of Kevin Kelly’s Conversion to Christianity

This paper, presented at the Group for New Directions in Pastoral Theology meeting in October 2012, uses the work of Sigmund Freud and Donald Capps to interpret a religious experience. The religious experience—a narrative about being born again—is recounted from the first story on the first episode of the radio program This American Life, which focuses on the religious conversion of Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired magazine. Using Freud’s “A Religious Experience” as a model for interpretation, I employ psychoanalytic ideas (such as the castration complex) to provide an initial reading of the experience, and I then use Capps’s work on male melancholia and on life cycle theory to further the interpretation. I argue that this young man’s religious experience is reflective of what Capps calls “the religion of honor” and “the religion of hope”; that the timing of his religious experience can be understood by means of life cycle theory; and that, theologically speaking, his experience can be understood using the language of the spirit and the soul.     

Explorations in the Aesthetic Pastoral Theology of Donald E. Capps

This paper will examine the curative effects of art and the reorienting perspective of poetry in the aesthetic pastoral theology of Donald E. Capps by exploring two key volumes, The Poet’s Gift and At Home in the World. The paper identifies some of the key contributions of Capps’s exploration of art and poetry including the recovery of perception, the advancement of reframing perspective, the notion of embodied pastoral conversation and the roots of religious sensibility. The therapeutic effect of the imaginative aesthetic pastoral theology in these two volumes is further developed by integrating three corollary themes in Capps’s particular orientation to pastoral theology, namely hope, freedom and authenticity.     

Giving Counsel: Donald Capps’ Contributions to Pastoral Counseling

This article explores some of Donald Capps’ contributions to the ministry of pastoral counseling. In particular, several key attributes of pastoral counseling as a ministry of the church are identified and discussed. This is followed by identifying six features necessary for good enough pastoral counseling. A final brief section offers some musings that I wish Capps could respond to.     

Male Melancholia, Identity-Loss, and Religion

This essay posits a relationship between male melancholia, defined as a complicated form of grief that resists compensatory consolation, and experiences of identity-loss. I draw especially from pastoral psychologist Donald Capps’s views on male melancholia. Concurring with Capps’s claim that melancholic men seek relief from melancholia in religion, I also draw from the psychology of Erik H. Erikson to add this emphasis: that both the roots of melancholia and subsequent experiences of melancholic loss link with experiences of perceived threats to or loss of one’s identity. I also suggest how religious rituals may ameliorate melancholia.     

Revisiting <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Depleted Self</Emphasis>

This article revisits Donald Capps’s book The Depleted Self (The depleted self: sin in a narcissistic age. Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1993), which grew out of his 1990 Schaff Lectures at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. In these lectures Capps proposed that the theology of guilt had dominated much of post-Reformation discourse. But with the growing prevalence of the narcissistic personality in the late twentieth century, the theology of guilt no longer adequately expressed humanity’s sense of “wrongness” before God. Late twentieth-century persons sense this disjunction between God and self through shame dynamics. Narcissists are not “full” of themselves, as popular perspectives might indicate. Instead, they are empty, depleted selves. Psychologists suggest this stems from lack of emotional stimulation and the absence of mirroring in the early stages of life. The narcissist’s search for attention and affirmation takes craving, paranoid, manipulative, or phallic forms and is essentially a desperate attempt to fill the internal emptiness. Capps suggests that two narratives from the Gospels are helpful here: the story of the woman with the alabaster jar and the story of Jesus’s dialogue with Mary and John at Calvary. These stories provide us with clues as to how depleted selves experienced mirroring and the potential for internal peace in community with Jesus.     

Late Stylin’ in an Ill-Fitting Suit: Donald Capps’ Artistic Approach to the Hopeful Self and its Implications for Unacknowledged African American Young Men

Donald Capps stands among a number of pastoral theologians and psychologists of religion who in recent decades have examined the nature of Christian hope. His sustained research on this topic over the entire decade of the 1990s has made his a primary pastoral theological voice on the subject. This article examines how Capps, without declaring a formal method, uses an “artistic approach” to construct a Christian perspective of the hopeful self. Consideration is given to how this understanding of the hopeful self relates to African American young men who feel muted and invisible.     

Sin,Evil and Job: Monotheism as a psychological and pastoral problem

The Book of Job, as interpreted by Jung and Capps, reveals that evil exists in creation and has its source in God. Evil is the inevitable result of God choosing to be subject to logical norms in order to avoid a chaotic world. However, according to religious tradition, the good in God outweighs the evil, which is why believers in God go to God for help even when God seems to inflict suffering upon them.This paper arose from the course Personal Sin and Social Evil taught by Donald Capps and Richard K. Fenn at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1992.