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.     

Trinity,Love, and Pastoral Mirroring

This paper focuses on the positive mirroring (admiration, acceptance, and approval) that Heinz Kohut posits as the primary healing agency in work with clients with narcissistic personality disorder. Donald Capps has demonstrated the pastoral significance of Kohut's theory. Capps' work is extended through an analysis of the role love plays in mirroring. It is suggested that mirror love has agapic, erotic, and philial elements. The loving action of the counselor is viewed as an image of the love of the triune God.     

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.     

Erikson's life cycle theory and the local church

This paper recommends the use of Erik H. Erikson's life cycle theory to clarify the dynamics of the corporate life of the local church. To support this recommendation, it illustrates how an incipient institutional crisis in an inner-city church reflects the conflict ofinitiative vs. guilt. In the analysis of this case, the initiative vs. guilt conflict is broken down into four basic themes. Each of these themes focuses on a different form of interaction between participants in the conflict, and each theme provides specific recommendations for the resolution of the crisis. While only one of the eight life crises has been applied in this study, the paper concludes that there is genuine merit in the application of the life cycle theory to the corporate life of the church.Dr. Capps is Associate Professor of Pastoral Care and Psychology of Religion at The Graduate Seminary, Phillips University, Enid, Oklahoma 73701. This article reflects research done for Dr. Capps' forthcoming book,Pastoral Care: A Thematic Approach (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979).     

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 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.     

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.     

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.     

The Saint

Today, within the Christian culture, the celebrity has replaced the idea of the saint. Very strangely, the celebrity is the dire opposite of the classic notion of the saint. Even more strikingly, the idea of celebrity runs contrary to Jesus' teachings. Of course, in Jesus' day, there were no celebrities, as we know them today. What passed for celebrities in his day were the rich and wealthy. They were the ones that everyone looked up to and admired, but Jesus tells us that they are actually the most unfortunate, and that wealth is the most dangerous of any of the idols that possess us and keep us from the fullness of life God has for us.     

Whistler’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Mother</Emphasis>: Devotional Center of Male Melancholic Religion

In previous writings, I have argued that the 3-to-5-year-old boy’s emotional separation from his mother is the key experience in his development of a melancholic orientation to life (Capps, Men, religion, and melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson, 1997) and that men’s religious proclivities (based on honor, hope, and humor) reflect this emotional separation (Capps, Male melancholia: Guilt, separation, and repressed rage, 2001). In an earlier article published in Pastoral Psychology (Capps, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: Iconic center of male melancholic religion, 2004), I argued that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the iconic center of the male melancholic religion, that it displaces the Virgin Mother Mary of traditional Christianity in this regard, and that the painting aids in the difficult task of transforming melancholia into the mourning of the lost maternal object. In this article, I argue that James McNeill Whistler’s painting of his mother plays a similar role in male melancholic religion, but with an important variation: I use Ernst Troeltsch’s classic church-sect typology to show that Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is the iconic center of the churchly form of male melancholic religion, while Whistler’s mother is the devotional center of its sectarian form.

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.     

Transforming Our Understanding of Theories, Paradigms, & Mental Disorders: The Legacy of Donald Capps in the Field of Pastoral Care and Counseling

The life and work of Donald Capps has transformed my thinking and practice as a teacher, minister, and counselor. Incorporating his research into my clinical practice has led me to greater compassion and grace toward those clients who present with personality disorders and characterological disturbances.     

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.     

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.     

Merton’s Melancholia: Mother,Monasticism, and the Religion of Honor

In this first of several successive articles on Thomas Merton, the author interprets Merton’s vocational call, identity conflicts, and radical asceticism in light of the psychoanalytic study of Donald Capps, Erik Erikson, and Sigmund Freud. The author argues that Merton’s early identity and religious development formed deep conflicts in his psyche. These conflicts remained unconscious and unresolved, leading to disastrous consequences. This article examines Merton’s life until his affair with Margie Smith in 1966.     

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.”     

Humor and the Rebellious Spirit of the Early Adolescent Boy

In my companion article on the making of the reliably religious boy (D. Capps, 2006c) I presented my argument that, whereas the younger boy of three to five is becoming religious as a result of his emotional separation from his mother, the early adolescent boy (age 11–14) has become reliably religious in that he has developed a religious habit of mind, a habit reflected in his embrace of the religions of honor and hope. I presented myself as a case study in this regard. I noted, however, that there is a third form of religion, that of humor, and that it relativizes—and thereby preserves—the religions of honor and hope. I also noted that religion and spirituality are capable of being differentiated. I suggested that my own spirituality took the form of rebellion and that this spirit of rebellion fueled and was fueled by the religion of humor. Employing Freud’s writings on humor, I explain in this article how this works.     

Mother,Melancholia, and Dreams in Erik H. Erikson’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">Insight and Responsibility</Emphasis>

In an earlier article (Capps, 2007a) on Erik H. Erikson’s earliest writings (1930–1931) I focused on the relationship between the child’s melancholia and conflict with maternal authority, and drew attention to the restorative role of humor. In a subsequent article (Capps, 2007b) on Erikson’s Childhood and Society (1950) I explored the same theme of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, but focused on the restorative role of play. In this article drawing from his Insight and Responsibility (1964) I continue this exploration of the relationship of melancholia and the mother, but focus on the restorative role of dreams. In support of this understanding of dreams, I focus on Erikson’s interpretation of one of Sigmund Freud’s dreams in light of the first two stages of the life cycle, and his view that the dream itself is inherently maternal. 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 (2002). He has served as editor of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and as President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion.