Abstract
An obvious conclusion to be derived from the previous chapter could be formulated thus: When we, like Wundt, understand religion as an element of culture, we need concepts and units of analysis that will enable us to investigate the nexus between a certain culture (or cultural context) and the person. Wundt himself did not yet dispose of them; but they have now become available with such concepts as activity, action, habitus, and also narrative or “story.” The theorizing about the “dialogical self” as initiated by Hermans and Kempen may count as an example as well. Their work – which has been well received by the international cultural psychology “movement” (Hermans 1999a, b, 2001a, b, 2002, 2003; Hermans and Dimaggio 2007; Valsiner 2001) – is promising for a cultural psychological analysis of religion. It is particularly interesting to take a closer look at this body of theory, as its development sustains historical relationships with the psychology of religion. The dialogical self may be regarded as a belated result of a much older Dutch initiative to integrate cultural psychology and psychology of religion, which led to the establishment of a department for the psychology of culture and religion at Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, in 1956 (although the roots of the initiative reach back to the founding Years of psychology in general in the Netherlands). As well as this, it catches up with a stand that has become fundamental to all psychologies of religion for a long time: psychological research on religion must be performed from a secular perspective (cf. Belzen 2001c). To corroborate these claims, it is necessary to draw substantially on historical information as well as on information about recent developments. I shall therefore present a mixture of historical and systematic argumentation.
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Notes
- 1.
To be historically correct and to use the proper terminology: Roels started out as an assistant to C. Winkler (1855–1941), Professor of Psychiatry and Neurology at Utrecht University. In 1916 he became a private teacher at the Faculty of Humanities and Philosophy. He was appointed “lecturer” at Utrecht in 1918, and “professor” in 1922. Since 1980, the lectureships at Dutch universities are called professorates. Neither function nor title exist anymore.
- 2.
In 1975, when at his former institute operationalism and testing of hypotheses had become dominant too, Rutten published a short article, in which he recommends psychologists to read “great literature” (philosophers, poets, novelists). He wrote that as psychologists, we “… are captured in a certain historical way of thinking. The professional Language we have been taught, and the methods and techniques that we have learned to handle, orient the way in which we perceive behavior. There is real danger that the expertise we have gained will hinder new developments. We are constantly forced to struggle to get hold of and to overcome the doctrinary conformism required by any training” (Rutten 1975, p. 391).
- 3.
In his text on cultural psychology, some ten Years later, Roels devotes only a small remark to religion: “A beginning has hardly been made with a psychology of worldviews, that is, a psychology that explores the psychic-spiritual structures or inner attitudes, from which different types of worldviews stem” (1928, p. 88). This sounds rather casual, unlike his earlier plea for the subdiscipline. But one cannot infer from this quotation that he had abandoned the apologetic aims he pursued with the psychology of religion: The 1919 text was addressed to a Roman Catholic audience; and the passage from 1928 comes from a publication by the Psychological Laboratory at the religiously neutral State University of Utrecht. To what “psychology of worldviews” Roels is referring here remains unclear. Perhaps to Jaspers (1922)?
- 4.
It is possible of course that they had read this work, or that Roels had become aware of this part of Wundt’s theorizing via his teacher Michotte in Leuven, who had been working at the Leipzig laboratory in 1906, precisely at the time when Wundt was working on his cultural psychology, which he considered a natural complement to his earlier, experimental work in psychology. According to Wundt, psychology would have to be plural. Psychology can only turn to experiment as an auxiliary method if it seeks to examine the “elementary psychic processes”; but if it seeks to study the higher psychic processes it has to consult other sciences for orientation (Wundt 1900–1909). Wundt’s own suggestion was that psychologists should consult history (see Chapters 2 and Chapter 7).
- 5.
Of course, Roman Catholic influences on the psychology at Nijmegen can also be detected in the strong interest in phenomenological psychology, a psychology that tried to be not natural-scientific in nature, and therefore according to many Catholic psychologists, would be more apt for investigating the psyche. Relations between Catholicism and phenomenology can be clearly pointed out in the work of such well-known Nijmegen professors as Strasser and Buytendijk.
- 6.
For a correct understanding, one should differentiate clearly the employment of the theorizing about the dialogical self from the employment of just the Self-Confrontation Method as developed by Hermans earlier. The use of the Self-Confrontation Method as such does not make an investigation a psychological one (it may be used in theological research too, cf. Putman 1988), and is not necessarily associated with a cultural psychological perspective. Research from the perspective of the dialogical self, however, will always also be an exploration of a subject’s personal culture, as I hope to show more concretely in an empirical study reported in Chapter 11.
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Belzen, J.A. (2010). A Cultural Psychological Promise to the Study of Religiosity: Background and Context of the “Dialogical Self”. In: Towards Cultural Psychology of Religion. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_8
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