In this podcast, Dr. Christopher Harding uses his research on psychoanalysis and Buddhism in modern Japan to tackle the two-way dialogue between religion and the psy-disciplines. How have these shaped each other, and what are tensions between them?

Listen Now

A transcript for this episode is available below

About this episode

Thank you Charles Schulz!

A therapist, a chaplain, a guru, a psychoanalyst, a missionary, a university counselor: how do these figures interact? In a milieu where meditations take place as part of church services and mental health services incorporate a spiritual dimension, the relationship between religion and the ‘psy’ disciplines – psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy – bears thinking about.

In this podcast, Dr. Christopher Harding uses his research on psychoanalysis and Buddhism in modern Japan to tackle the two-way dialogue between religion and the psy-disciplines. How have these shaped each other, and what are tensions between them?

 Fund the RSP while you shop! Use an Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.ca, or Amazon.com affiliate link whenever you make a purchase. There’s no additional cost to you, but every bit helps us stay on the air! 

We need your support!

Want to support us directly? Become a monthly Patron or consider giving us a one-time donation through PayPal

Related Resources

Vernacular Religion

Podcast

Images of Jesus on a slice of toast; Koran verses in an aubergine; statues which cry blood; Angel Colour cards and Atlantean crystal therapies; popular religious expressions are everywhere. In this interview, Marion Bowman showcases her fascinating research into the ways in which religion permeates everyday life, paying particular attention to the manifestations at the famous Glastonbury Festival.
Brian Victoria on Zen Buddhist Terrorism and Holy War

Podcast

Is there something particular about religion which makes it a more potent ‘violence enabling mechanism’ than other factors? Are some religions more likely to inspire violence than others? And why should scholars even care? In this interview, Chris discusses these issues and more with Professor Brian Victoria, who, in addition to his scholarly credentials, is a fully ordained Zen Buddhist priest.

Responses to this episode

Psychology and religious studies: Towards greater understanding

Extensive research has been conducted by psychologists, and continues to be conducted, exploring beliefs, values and perceptions. However, despite being a central part of the lives of so many people, religion and spirituality continues to be a fringe concern for many psychologists - perhaps because they are frequently perceived as being unscientific.

Religion and the Psy-Disciplines [transcript]


Podcast with Christopher Harding (27 March 2017).

Interviewed by Krittika Bhattacharjee.

Transcribed by Helen Bradstock.

Krittika Bhattacharjee (KB): A therapist, a chaplain, a guru, a psychoanalyst, a missionary, a university councillor: how do these figures interact? In a milieu where meditations take place as part of church services and where mental health services incorporate a spiritual dimension, the relationship between religion and the psy-disciplines – psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis – bears thinking about. Speaking to us today about the psy-disciplines we have Dr Christopher Harding, who is a lecturer in Asian History at the University of Edinburgh. Chris is a cultural historian, working primarily in Japan and India. He has most recently published a co-edited volume called Religion and Psychotherapy in Modern Japan, which was published in hardback in 2014 and comes out in paperback next month. Chris is also a journalist who has collaborated with the BBC and was one of BBC Radio 3’s “ New Generation Thinkers” . Thank you for being here with the Religious Studies Project, Chris.

Christopher Harding (CH): Thank you.

KB: Just to start us off, could you tell us a little bit about the psy-disciplines?

CH: Yes. So when we use the phrase “ the psy-disciplines”  I guess we’re normally thinking of psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. So, psychiatry is often thought about as the poor relation of medicine. It’s the discipline of medicine which most people wouldn’t think of going into. Maybe now[they would], but a few years ago – certainly prior to the 1950s – it was the discipline associated with guesswork, with asylums heaving with people that were difficult to treat – really because their object of enquiry was so difficult: the human inner life.They were trying to guess at it, finding ways of examining it from the outside, or making some use of peoples’ own testimonies. It was very, very difficult to try to work out what was going on, to form theories and to form diagnoses. Things improved  in the 1950s and 1960s with new forms of drugs. And now, with new means of scanning and new sorts of theories, things are getting a little bit better. But, for a while, it was medicine’s poor relation. Psychology, most people will know of: working with experimental data, primarily, but also doing some work in the clinical setting. And then psychotherapy, I suppose really, from Freud, Jung onwards, and Carl Rogers – now we have any number of modalities. So, those three things working together, often we would call them the psy-disciplines. And each one has had its own relationship with different religious traditions in different parts of the world.

KB: How has this relationship traditionally been conceived?

CH: I suppose, early on. . . the period that I work on most is the end of the 19th century into the 20th century . . .  Early on there was a relationship of some hostility – especially, I suppose, with Sigmund Freud and with early Freudians. We know Sigmund Freud had his particular views on what religion is really all about,  but also, some would say that his views were actually more nuanced than he was often given credit for. But some of the people early on, who were attracted to psychoanalysis, were attracted to it as a way of fulfilling the good parts of religion – distilling and fulfilling the good parts of religion and getting rid of the rest – and helping people whose lives had been damaged very early on, often by religious upbringings. Particularly if there was harshness in the family background, a heavy emphasis on certain forms of behaviour, a moralising dynamic etc., lots of people would say, in that early generation of psychoanalysis, the kind of thing that Richard Dawkins says, which is that religion is child abuse. And so, from the religious side of things, people worried that that critique could become quite influential.They also worried that the human person was being reduced to a mere organism, or a mere machine, or that your personhood was really the outcome of your upbringing. So they thought that there were all sorts of reductions going on that really threatened the underpinnings of all sorts of different religious traditions .(5:00) But, I suppose, Christian religious traditions in the West were the ones who were initially objecting to people like Freud, but also psychology in general. Because the whole premise of psychology to them seemed wrong: that you can meaningfully study the human person purely in a natural scientific way.

KB: And so this is the context from which, in some ways, your own work departs.Is that right?

CH: Yes, that’s right. I suppose it’s partly from a professional historical context, but it’s partly because I was coming across work in Christianity and Buddhism – contemporary Christianity and Buddhism in the US,  in Japan, the UK and elsewhere – where there seemed to be this mixing and mingling of what seemed to me to be psychological language to talk about the emotional life and theories of childhood on the one hand, and your kind of standard religious stories, theories, theologies, philosophies on the other. And I wasn’t really sure what people were doing when they were mixing these two languages. Often you would get a kind of an opening pitch from an apologist of a particular religious tradition where they would say, “Come on, surely your life is a mess? There must be more to this. You must be suffering stress. You’re angry hurt people!”  And then they kind of shift into the pitch – the religious pitch. You see that in plenty of Christian traditions and books ,and the Dalai Llama and Japanese organisations do the same sort of thing. And I was just wondering, what is exactly is their view of being human, that they’re mixing these two things together, these two, three or four registers of language together, in trying to make a pitch? Is the kind-of emotional-psychological [language] a facade? Is it just that initial pitch to get people interested? Or are these worlds actually doing business in a way that could be very interesting and very fruitful? And I wanted to find a way of almost taking them to task, piecing their language apart, and saying, “ Where are you getting these bits and pieces from? What do you actually mean when you talk about what the emotional life is; what the significance of the emotional life is; how we might lead it in a religious or spiritual way?” And I was really looking around for ways of doing that – digging away, really, at some of the language of contemporary religion and spirituality.

KB: While also seeing them as part of a larger. . .  “ market place”  might not be the right word, but certainly, all of them as part of this milieu together? So language is shared, but they’re also part of the same network – you used the word “business” –  doing business with each other?

CH: Yes, I think so. There was a great book, which came out about ten years or so ago,  by Richard King and Jeremy Carrette: Selling Spirituality – a wonderful book which really helped get me thinking about this. I think one of the things they were concerned about was  –  it was broader than the mental health dynamic, which interests me – but it was this critique of late capitalist culture that exploits religious traditions for techniques or ideas that kind-of keep people going as producers and consumers. So there is that element to it, I suppose, as well. And the sense of doing business again – I think we can get into the history of this a little bit later on – but my basic take on it is: there are very positive ways in which they can do business – the psy-disciplines and various religious traditions . And they have been since the 1940s and 1950s at least, once this kind of initial Freudian hump of Freudian coldness between them was overcome. But there were also ways in which they could be antagonistic, or confusing, possibly quite manipulative when they’re used together. I suppose a prime example, that some listeners may have heard of, would be the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks on Tokyo underground, in 1995. Aum Shinrikyo talks about its being the love-child of Buddhism and pop-psychology – that kind of all-encompassing embrace of the world, all-encompassing take on the human person, which really reeled in quite a few people. And you get into the territory of , some people might say, brainwashing, I suppose. But certainly, having such an all-encompassing explanation of the world that it’s hard to fight your way out of it again. That’s potentially what religion and the psy-disciplines do, when they work together, is that they give you no other interpretative options. Almost anything that you might think, or feel, or desire, or do can be quite convincingly interpreted by this uber-framework that together they seem to create. (10:00) And, for that reason, it can have negative as well as positive consequences.

KB: It’s also worth talking about the kind of tensions that you’ve brought up. But I thought, before we get to a more in-depth analysis of the tensions, I thought we could also talk about what you called the “ two-way dialogue”  that happens between the psy-disciplines and religion. What did you mean by two-way dialogue?

CH: I suppose, that they find useful things in one another. So some of the more positive bits of dialogue, in terms of a Buddhist tradition, let’s maybe talk about Japan in this regard: Buddhist traditions making use of the modern psy-discipline. You get this trend around Asia, certainly in India, certainly in Japan, in the late 19th century, where countries that have been very much affected by European colonialism – whether it’s, as it were, boots on the ground, or it’s more of a kind-of cultural imperialism – they’re looking for ways of pushing back against colonial knowledge, against the whole sort-of Western canon. And what some groups do – I’m thinking maybe Swami Vivekananda in India and Hinduism, and a guy called Inoue Enryo in Japan who’s what-you-might-call a Buddhist modernist – what they do is, they look back into their own traditions and they say, “ Well actually, in Hinduism or in Buddhism you will find insights that match and trump those of the Western world. And that one of the ways in which we can state that case clearly to people is by spring cleaning Buddhism, spring cleaning Hinduism: reviving our religious traditions, but in a viable modern format.”  And someone like Inoue Enryo finds the psy-disciplines really useful. Because what we can do is separate out “ true mystery”   – the true mysteries of life – from the false ones. Psychology will tell us what the false ones are because we can investigate people’s patterns of thought, and we can find out why they believe in silly things like ghosts or goblins, that then leaves them free to redirect human wonderment and awe and faith and trust to true mystery. So it’s good for people and it’s good for a Buddhist tradition, because a tradition that looks to be anti-modern in Japan can suddenly present itself as being definitively modern and being worthy of people’s trust and their taxes. And, at the same time, you can say that Buddhism actually, in its own right, is the world’s finest psychology and always has been. And you see, of course, lots of people now who engage with Buddhism will say first-and-foremost that it’s a very convincing picture of what it’s like to be a human being. “It’s first-and-foremost a psychology and then we’ll take it from there.” You might want to call it a religion, you might not, but it can borrow in those sorts of ways. Some examples of how the Christian tradition has borrowed from the psy-disciplines are forms of spiritual direction which are open to the influence of someone’s upbringing on the way they think about God, on the way they process guilt, on the way they worry about sin. It doesn’t mean that you’re jettisoning all the teaching of the Christian tradition, but it means you’re more aware of how human beings work and you can help people who might be stuck. So now lots of monks and nuns and priests will get a certain degree of basic counselling training, so that they can help people. Things might get to a point where they need to refer on, perhaps to a therapist or to a psychiatrist, but these basic learnings can actually be very, very useful in their work.

KB: On the Buddhism example specifically, I wanted to ask a little bit about Kosawa Heisaku, who you speak a bit about in your book, referring to him as the Father of Modern Psychoanalysis in Japan. Is that accurate?

CH: Yes, absolutely.

KB: And I was really interested to see an example in the flesh of mixing Shin Buddhism, in particular, with Freudian ideas of psychoanalysis and the way he used both of those traditions to create his own practice. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

CH: Yes, a very brief potted biography I suppose. Kosawa Heisaku was a student of psychiatry first, in Northern Japan, in the 1920s. He encountered psychoanalysis a little bit through one of his mentors who’d studied in the US. But Kosawa wasn’t really convinced with the way he was teaching it, so he actually went to Vienna, met Freud, worked with Freud and his circle in Vienna – only really for a year or so – and he had an analysis there and came back to Japan. He opened his own clinic in Tokyo and this is where he seems to have started to develop this kind of fusion of the two. It seems to have been the case with him that he saw Buddhism in Japan as being under threat. And he wanted to find a way – a little bit like Inoue Enryo I mentioned earlier –  he wanted to find a way of showing people what Buddhism really aimed at, what Buddhism was really about.(15:00) And on, an individual basis, he wanted to help his clients work towards, really, an experience that some people would say had a fair bit in common with enlightenment. His theory was basically that, if a client is in psychoanalysis for a certain period of time, they have a kind of releasing of all sorts of material from the unconscious, bit by bit, which gives them a certain amount of freedom. But what it also does is it shows them something which is absolutely key in Shin Buddhism, which is that human beings are, right down to the ground, corrupted; that we cannot really achieve anything useful, in terms of our own salvation, for ourselves and by ourselves,; that we need the help of – what Shin Buddhism talks about as “ other power” – Amida Buddha. It’s alright to discuss that in conceptual terms, in philosophical terms, but it doesn’t get you there. So Kosawa’s idea was that, actually, one of the things that does get you there, that goes beyond the philosophical conversation about things, is to be face to face with the therapist to tell them all the things you’ve done, all the things you’re thinking and all the things you secretly want. To get into all that material you suddenly see the reality of your corruptness and your helplessness. And by doing that, by seeing that, almost you can’t help yourself. By going through that process, then, you open yourself out onto realising that you need to rely completely upon other power, which is a key goal for Shin Buddhism.

KB: Almost like an involuntary confession?

CH: I think that’s absolutely right, that’s a lovely way of putting it. Because, while confession is voluntary, you’re still in control of the terms aren’t you? It’s only when you come face to face with things that you really don’t have any control over, that you finally feel helpless in the face of,  that’s the real moment of conversion for Kosawa and in Shin Buddhism. So that is how Kosawa sees the usefulness of psychoanalysis. He told one of his students,who I interviewed as part of my work, that unless psychoanalysis can bring people to that kind of an experience then it’ll never succeed in Japan, or anywhere else, actually. And now it’s a bit of a minority sport in Japan, so perhaps he was right! But I think the core of what he was getting at – this is back in the 1930 and early 1940s – is quite similar to some of the work that goes on now, trying to link up psychoanalysis with Buddhism: people like Mark Epstein, Jack Engler and others.I see quite a lot of what Kosawa was trying to get at being fulfilled and worked through in their writing.

KB: Was he seen to be religious at the time? Because of course, in Japan, religion itself would be a contested word. Was he seen to be religious, even at the time that he was practising in the 1930s and 40s?

CH: Some of his students. . . It’s often difficult to make a division – and its probably silly to try to make a division, actually – between the extent to which Kosawa was religious and the extent to which he was a man of his times. There were therapists like him and others working in Japan, in the early thirties and forties, who saw it as their role to be a kind-of kindly, but actually quite straightforwardly didactic father-figure for their clients. So, rather than being in the kind-of classic mirror as a therapist – where you simply reflect the client back to themselves and you don’t have much of your own input – Kosawa would give quite heavy advice. Some of his students described him as being quite motherly. There were other therapists around at the time: one of them I’m thinking of, another psychoanalyst, who would invite his clients – young male clients – out to his countryside home where he and his wife lived, spend the weekend with them and fulfil the father role that they’d never had. And so, after the war, lots of people would criticise Kosawa and others for having that kind-of really heavy paternalism in their work. Some of them said that was because he was a Buddhist, others said that was just because he was a man of his era. The theory behind therapy in Japan at this point – also the theory behind hypnosis, actually – was that it would only work if it was practised by a superior on an inferior. So women couldn’t be hypnotists or therapists for men, because they couldn’t give that kind of guiding element that a superior could give to an inferior. So Kosawa was a product of his time both in that kind of paternalistic sense, I think. . .  but also, his students would have recognised him, pretty straightforwardly, as a Buddhist. And they said, “ This is a disaster!”  Because psychoanalysis is supposed to be a science. You have to keep the two things separate. (20:00) Kosawa’s thing was that in the consulting room there would be no talk of Buddhism, but after your consultation you could come next door, have a cup of tea, and  he might unroll a couple of Buddhist Sutras and talk you through a bit of Buddhism if you were interested, as some of his young clients were. So, I think he would have identified as both. And his view was always that psychoanalysis was a proper science, and Buddhism – as it really should be understood – were really operating completely in tandem. And that if Freud had had a less narrow view of what religion meant – because Kosawa thought Freud was kind of shackled to a Judeo-Christian understanding of religion, and a very narrow one even at that – if Freud had had a wider understanding of what religion really was, he’d have seen that psychoanalysis and religion were really two sides of the same coin.

KB: That’s an interesting idea as well. Because, if we broaden our scope now from Japan to general understandings of the relationship between religion and the psy-disciplines, the question that this particular case raises for me is: how do we  isolate religion, then? For example, in palliative care and end-of-life care it’s quite common now, I think – especially in certain countries – to incorporate mindfulness or meditations as part of palliative care. We’ve already seen, in the Kosawa example, someone who seemed to walk between religiously prescribed rules. He’s also a father figure . . . and [there are] cultural constructions of gender there as well, with his paternalism that you talked about. So, how do we isolate what is religion here? If you were to see meditation as part of palliative care practice would you see that as religious, or a cultural formation, or a product of its time? Does the question make sense?

CH: Yes it does. I suppose people are thinking through this in Japan in the context of end-of-life care, and also in the context of disaster care, say after the Earthquake Tsunami and nuclear meltdown disasters in 2011, in Japan. In the aftermath of that there was quite a lot of work done by Buddhists. And they’d been thinking through, “How do we pursue this kind of work and not upset the people that we’re dealing with?”  I think their view would be that all the care they offer is religious, but it’s how they present it. What can seem like quite simple things: what are they going to wear while they go about this care ; whether its on a vihara ward – which is a Buddhist end-of-life care ward – or working in disaster care; are you going to come in civilian clothing or are you going to dress in your Buddhist robes; are you going to use Buddhist language, prayers , rituals or are you going to use the language of psychology and psycho therapy? What they’ve found is. . .  I think their key aim is that you meet people where they are. Some people want all the trappings of Buddhism. That’s what is going to make them feel comfortable because it’s what is familiar. They absolutely don’t want to be talked to after a disaster or towards the end-of-life, about their feelings. Not a conversation that they want to have. So for those sorts of people you can move more towards these familiar signs and symbols of classical religion, as it were. But for others, still really doing religious care, you can now call it spiritual care instead – in Japan they make a distinction – where you won’t have your Buddhist uniform on, and you won’t be using that sort of language. Instead you’ll shift more towards the language of psychotherapy and counselling, if that’s what you think people want. And in order to get onto some public hospital wards in Japan you have to do that. Because there’s a clear separation, in Japan, being made of religion and the state. But this coming-together of psy-disciplines in the training – you now have clinical chaplains being trained in Japan from all sorts of religious backgrounds – that coming-together allows them to gently shift the emphasis depending on who they’re dealing with. For them it’s religiously inspired, so it’s all religious care. But what it looks like to, as it were, the consumer or the receiver of it, it’s endlessly flexible. And, I think, that’s what they see as being so useful about it. I don’t think they would make any fundamental distinction between religious and non-religious there. It’s about the nuances of presentation and perception.

KB: But how about when you take the case in Japan and try and apply it elsewhere, try and apply it in the contemporary situation in the UK for example, or in countries that do not have that very specific set of circumstances that we’re speaking about there? How would you isolate religion in those cases? Is it an East-West divide?

CH: (25:00) No, I think something very similar goes on. I recently wrote a piece for Aeon magazine on end-of-life care at two hospices in Edinburgh, and the concept of spirituality and whether that’s useful or not to people. And I was surprised to find a lot the interviewees say that spirituality is actually not a useful concept at all, because it carries so much of the baggage of religion. And for a lot of people, if you are religious then you just want to see the chaplain, or whoever the representative might be. You’re fairly clear on who you want to go to. But, for the vast majority of other people, neither religion nor spirituality is something they want to hear about. But what you do instead is, you find ways of being with people, forms of care. So: listening; closeness; sometimes even physical forms of care, like a bed bath; whatever it might be that, from a certain perspective, yes, you could talk about it as being religious.There’s a focus there on being, on attentiveness to the person you’re with, as opposed to doing – doing for them – rushing around a hospice ward. But you’re not employing any of the traditional language of religion or spirituality. A lot of the workers I talked to said that people would just be put off by that kind of thing. Because they’d say, “ Look, it’s too late for me now to go on some big search for the meaning of life and the meaning of the world. I need something that goes beyond concepts, or that goes beyond a fundamental change in who I am and how I look at the world.” [They] need something that,  some people would argue , was actually closer to the core of religion or a religious tradition like Christianity, which is love and acceptance, and showing that kind of thing. So I think in some of end-of-life care, that is more what people are doing than getting bogged down in the language of religion and spirituality. Again, one of the professors I interviewed at St Columba’s hospice said “ It’s really about training nurses in how to “ be”  with their patients, rather than just “ do”  for them. Do you know what I mean? Just running around and changing sheets and whatnot. Actually learning how to be with them is what they want. And whether the language of spirituality helps or not, that’s really a secondary consideration.

KB: And that’s interesting because that also gives us a sense of something we spoke of at the beginning: the idea of tension between different ideas of religion, spirituality and the psy-disciplines. And it’s interesting here because we see for the first time that tension between those who receive the care as opposed to seeing the tensions at an institutional level, or how they’re being interpreted by practitioner,  if that makes sense. So that’s very interesting. I think there was also a previous Religious Studies Project Podcast by Dr Harold Koenig, from Duke, and he’s spoken about how – I think the talk was about religion and spirituality and health. Speaking about, particularly, coping and how religious belief helps in coping, which seems interesting. A final point of tension, then: can you think of a specific example when the idea of healing itself is defined differently from a religious standpoint and then from the psy-discipline standpoint? Because they might be working with different ideas of what is transgressive, or what is disorderly, and so their ideas of what health is, and what healing is, might also differ.

CH: I suppose that’s true, yes. There’s an interesting parallel between working on religion and the psy-disciplines on the one hand and working on what’s called trans-cultural psychiatry and psychotherapy on the other. Because, in that latter area, what you find is that any form of psychotherapy, almost any form of psychotherapy is based on assumptions about what a human being is, what’s ideal for them what’s good for them. I suppose a psychotherapist might respond by saying that that ideal is something which gets generated over time in the relationship between the therapist and the client. The therapist isn’t there to say at the outset: “Here is the kind of person I’m trying to turn you into.”  So I accept that possible objection. But I think there’s a deeper sense in which there are certain assumptions, at least, in play. And if you transfer that back over to religion and the psy-disciplines – one of the things I try to do – I have a framework I tried to put together to work out exactly what bothers me about this relationship and how I want to investigate it. And I think one is the nature of the human person. And so, what does it mean to be healed? Does it mean to go back out and be once again a kind of coping, productive member of your society?(30:00) Or does it mean to go back out into your society and have a more prophetic role, and say, “Actually this is wrong, and that’s wrong. And the reason why I suffer from stress or anxiety or depression isn’t just that I’m wrong, or I’m failing to cope, it’s that the world around me is disordered.”  Those sorts of judgements, which border on the moral, are the sorts of things that would be comfortable to people with what we might call a religious background and less so to people who perhaps have a more secular orientation.Social justice can cross both lines, obviously. But I think in forms of psychotherapy and healing which have more of an explicit religious orientation, that element of judgement, which I suppose now is more pushed out onto the outside world – because the danger of internalising that judgement has become much more clear – that kind of judgement has become much more common, you see it more often. But one final thing on healing, which is: one of the things that I think can undermine healing is the difficulty, when religion and the psy-disciplines come together, of people making the same mistakes about the kind of language that they’re using. So there’s a writer called Jack Engler who writes about Buddhism and Psychoanalysis. So there are all these key terms in Buddhism which can be really badly misinterpreted if you’re not careful, and if Buddhism and the psy-disciplines come together in the wrong way. For example, a Buddhist concept like “ no self”  can easily be taken up and used by someone who has very low self-esteem and finds the idea of there being a fundamental unreality about themselves comforting. But they’re using it counter-phobicly, they’re using it in the wrong way. And actually they’re digging themselves a deeper hole, by using the idea of no self to justify very, very low feelings about themselves and wallow in it. He has a really nice line which, I think, cuts across  a lot of what we’ve been talking about. He says, “ You have to be somebody before you can be nobody.”  So, in his scheme, there is a role for the psy-disciplines in clarifying a person’s sense of themselves, building up an ego in the sense of a healthy single subject – not being narcissistic and arrogant and self-obsessed  but being a healthy subject – who is then able to cope with what Buddhism would say is the ontological fact that there is no self. And it’s mistakes over language that can come up when religion and the psy-disciplines come together that I think can often be quite damaging, that can give people either false hope or the wrong sort of hope, or just confuse them worse than they were confused before. And, in turn, can either undermine healing in particular contexts or just undermine their growth in a bigger way. Which is why I think interrogating the use of language in this dialogue is such an important task.

KB: I’m keeping an eye on the time, this will be the last question. It strikes me that this idea of being nuanced, being careful about how language is used. . .  would you say this is one direction in which you hope to see the field grow? And that’s the last question: what direction can this field, that you’re working in, grow? Specifically of course, in Religious Studies: where can we go next?

CH: I wouldn’t presume to tell Religious Studies where to go! I’m just a plain old historian. But in response to the question, which I think is a good one,  what I would probably like to see and encourage is more of a creative and honest focus on the antagonisms that arise when religion and the psy-disciplines get together. Because I think we hear a lot, both within academia but also the wider world of publishing, YouTube, everywhere else, of the complementarities. There’s a great book by Frances Spufford: Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can  Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. A beautiful, beautiful book – highly recommended . But that kind of talk about how religion and our understanding, via the psy-disciplines, about what a human person is; how these things work together so well; how one can be a great means of explanation for the other; how one can draw a person into the other . . . . I think all of that’s true, and all of it’s wonderful.But there needs to be more of a focus on where these things actually break down; where they’re offering views of the world which simply aren’t compatible and people shouldn’t be told that they are; or where mistakes and confusions can arise that actually cause people suffering. And by trying to investigate those better and clarifying them and trying to be honest about them, I think the field gets more interesting and less harm is done to people as a result. So that’s the one big area I’d like to see that happen.

KB: OK. So on that important note, thank you very much, Dr Chris Harding, for joining us at the Religious Studies Project.


Citation: Harding, Christopher. and Krittika Bhattacharjee. 2017. “ Religion and the Psy-Disciplines”, The Religious Studies Project (Podcast Transcript). 27 March 2017. Transcribed by Helen Bradstock. Version 1.1, 30 March 2017 Available at: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/religion-and-the-psy-disciplines/

All transcriptions for THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROJECT are currently produced by volunteers. If you spot any errors in this transcription, please let us know at editors@religiousstudiesproject.com. If you would be willing to help with these efforts, or know of any sources of funding for the broader transcription project, please get in touch. Thanks for reading.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. The views expressed in podcasts  are the views of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of THE RELIGIOUS STUDIES PROJECT or the British Association for the Study of Religions.

Other EPISODES YOU MIGHT ENJOY

Alex Norman on Spiritual Tourism

Podcast

What would you think if I told you I had just come back from a holiday in Aya Napa? How about Santiago de Compostella or Glastonbury? How about Mecca? When does travel become pilgrimage, and what are the spiritual factors behind our holiday choices? In this week’s interview, Alex Norman and David Robertson discuss the history and modern relevance of journeys undertaken for spiritual benefit and transformation.
D. Mitra Barua on Immigrant Buddhism in the West

Podcast

"...Rebranding the Buddhist concept of Harmony to be a more politically comparable term to the Canadian mosaic..." Dr. D. Mitra Barua is an instructor of Religious Studies at the University of Saskatchewan, and has a Masters in Buddhist Philosophy undertaken in Sri Lanka.
Bruno Latour, Gaian Animisms and the Question of the Anthropocene

Podcast

Scholar of religion and nature Bron Taylor responds to Bruno Latour's 2013 Gifford Lectures, discussing the concept of the Anthropocence and contemporary spiritual-religious responses to the new epoch of climate change. The question about climate change has emerged as one of the defining debates of contemporary social and political discourse.
Religion, Spirituality and Health

Podcast

Religion, spiritualty and health – oh my! In this day and age, we might be inclined to ask if these three words, when combined, can contribute anything resembling a positive health outcome. In other words, can being religious or spiritual actually contribute to an individual’s overall health? Dr. Koenig answers the questions with a resounding yes!
The Psychology of Prayer: An interview with Kevin Ladd

Podcast

Ladd begins the interview by discussing what it means to pray. Perhaps most important, he explains how prayer is defined for research purposes, emphasizing that there is no essential definition, nor is one desirable. In taking care to uphold a scientific understanding of prayer, rather than a theologically apologetic one,...
Bricolage

Podcast

In this interview with Chris, Altglas discusses the complex genealogy of 'bricolage', tracing a movement from forms of cultural warfare to 'playful, postmodern bricoleurs' - what many might be tempted to dub 'pick and mix spirituality'. However, as Altglas goes on to demonstrate,...