Abstract
My first encounter with the psychology of religion must have been through the man I have always considered my true teacher: H. T. de Graaf.1,2 He was a typical liberal Protestant, who did not believe in the bodily resurrection, and for whom the significance of Easter and Ascension and other Christian feast days was not fixed, but formed the subject of inquisitive contemplation. He was a great scholar, an original and independent thinker, and a man of integrity and deep faith, but he was older than Roessingh, his predecessor at the University of Leiden, who died young.3 He commanded the respect of the students, but did not move them as Roessingh had done. During lectures he gave the impression of being someone who was genuinely interested in many things, who was very knowledgeable, thought about things seriously, and therefore had a lot to offer, yet struggled to find an adequate way of doing this (his explanations were dry and rather uninspiring) as well as being someone who lived a deeply pious life but was unable to share this with others.
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- 1.
This text is based on interviews given in the years 1988–1994 and on the autobiography inspired in part by these interviews (Faber, 1993). The footnotes, dates, and bibliographical and biographical references are the work of the editor (J.A.B.).
- 2.
Hannes Tjeerd de Graaf (1875–1939) first studied theology; his doctoral dissertation was an historical study of theology. He then studied psychology with Gerard Heymans (1857–1930), the first professor in the Netherlands who was required to teach, from 1890 onwards, the formal element of “science of the soul” (zielkunde). Heymans was the only Dutch psychologist to achieve international recognition before the Second World War. (William James, e.g., was very positive about him.) De Graaf was so interested in psychology that he obtained a second doctorate under Heymans’s supervision, writing an empirical dissertation (De Graaf, 1914). As a young clergyman De Graaf was already known to have an interest in psychology (including the psychology of religion): he was the author of the first Dutch article to discuss the publications on the psychology of religion that began to appear in other countries around 1900 (De Graaf, 1905). As a professor of theology (Utrecht, 1923–1926; Leiden 1926–1930), he always gave courses in the psychology of religion (and was very probably the first to do so in the Netherlands). His De Godsdienst in het Licht der Zielkunde (Religion from the Perspective of Psychology) of 1928 is still the most systematic introduction to the subject ever published in the Netherlands.
- 3.
From 1916 until his death, Karel Hendrik Roessingh (1886–1925) was Professor of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, and Encyclopedia of Theology at the University of Leiden. De Graaf was appointed as his successor.
- 4.
Georg Wobbermin (1869–1943) was an extremely productive and, in his time, very well-known German theologian. His notion of the psychology of religion differed from the usual understanding of it as an empirical science. He considered his systematic theology to be conceived along the lines of a “psychology-of-religion method.”
- 5.
Lambertus Jacobus van Holk (1893–1982) was a theologian, who was certainly interested in the psychology of religion, but he never published any writings in this field, nor did he ever teach the subject.
- 6.
Henricus Cornelius Rümke (1893–1967) was an internationally renowned psychiatrist and psychologist, with strong phenomenological leanings. He wrote a number of purely psychological books, and was for a short time Honorary Professor of Developmental Psychology at Utrecht (1933–1936) before being appointed Professor of Psychiatry there (1936–1963). In 1939 he published the first original study of Dutch vintage on the psychology of religion (Rümke, 1939), which, to his own surprise, was received very positively: it was reprinted at least 11 times in the Netherlands and was also published in translation in a number of other countries (Belzen, 1991).
- 7.
Franciscus Mattheus Johannes Agathos Roels (1885–1962) was the first professor in the Netherlands to be appointed exclusively to a chair of psychology. He did a great deal for the proliferation of psychology in this country, and his interest in the psychology of religion played a modest role in this. Roels specialized in psychology (as part of the discipline of philosophy) at the Catholic University in Louvain with A. Michotte (1881–1965), who in turn had studied with Wundt and Külpe. Even though he did not carry out any research in this field, Roels must have considered the psychology of religion as an ordinary subdiscipline of psychology; for a number of years, therefore, he lectured on the subject in the context of teaching “empirical and applied psychology” at Utrecht University, and in various places in his five-volume Handboek der Psychologie (Handbook of Psychology), he devoted some attention to religion (Roels, 1934–1947).
- 8.
In 1919 Géza Révész (1878–1955) was appointed Professor of Psychology in Budapest, where he founded the first Hungarian Institute of Psychology. From 1932 until his death, he was Professor of Psychology at the University of Amsterdam.
- 9.
Jan Hendrik van den Berg (*1914) was a student of Rümke, who inspired his phenomenological interests. Van den Berg was the first Professor of Psychology at a Dutch theological faculty (Belzen, 2007), and later became full Professor of Conflictology in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Leiden. He achieved great renown, also internationally (for a time he was the most frequently translated Dutch scholar), with his so-called metabletic studies. By introducing the method of metabletics, which eventually caused attention to be focused on the connection between simultaneously occurring dissimilar events, he thought he had devised a completely new scientific discipline. For a critical evaluation, see Belzen (1997).
- 10.
Fokke Sierksma (1917–1977) was a theologian who specialized in Religionswissenschaften (the science of religion). He wrote one of the most profound studies of the phenomenon of projection in the field of the psychology of religion, but it was never published outside the Netherlands. Some information about his work in this context can be found in Belzen (2010).
- 11.
This formulation was probably taken from Jaspers’ Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919).
- 12.
In 1956 Han Martinus Maria Fortmann (1912–1970), a priest and psychologist, was appointed Professor of the Psychology of Culture and Religion at the Roman Catholic University in Nijmegen. In the Netherlands he became well known for his popular scientific work.
- 13.
Willibrordus Johannes Berger (1919–2007) was a priest and psychologist. From 1963 onwards he held the post of lecturer in Pastoral Psychology at the Roman Catholic University in Nijmegen. Of particular interest is the fact that he was employed by the subfaculty of psychology, but was appointed to lecture in the faculty of theology and to be involved especially with the interdisciplinary department of “pastoral theology.”
- 14.
Paul Pruyser (1916–1987), of Dutch origin, was one of the best-known postwar psychologists of religion in the United States. He was active at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka (Kansas), where Faber became acquainted with him. He frequently supported Faber and the KPV in the Netherlands.
- 15.
In 1980 all of the lectureships at Dutch universities were turned into professorships, as part of the many austerity measures: the old-style professorship was abolished, all lecturers were now called professors. A lecturer’s salary was considerably less than that of a professor; professors appointed after 1980 were therefore much less expensive than their predecessors.
- 16.
Arnold Uleyn (*1926) studied theology in Louvain and Rome, and psychoanalysis in Vienna. Until 1986 he taught pastoral psychology and the psychology of religion at the Catholic University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
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Faber, H., Belzen, J.A. (2012). Pastoral Psychology as a Point of Transfer from Systematic Theology to the Psychology of Religion. In: Belzen, J. (eds) Psychology of Religion. Path in Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1602-9_4
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