Abstract
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908: 9) once famously remarked that: “Psychology has a long past, but only a short history”. The short history tells us that Wilhelm Wundt founded modern psychology as an independent science when he established the first experimental research laboratory in Leipzig in 1879 devoted to the study of basic human reactions like sensations, attention and perception (Boring 1957). Psychology’s brief, yet highly successful (his-)story is well-known as this lesson is taught at most introductory courses in psychology around the world. However, psychology’s long past usually remains less illuminated, or if told, presents the listener with a narrative where modern day psychology is the unremitting highpoint of Western pre-scientific conceptions like Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s ideas of the soul (Parker 2007). Even so, the recurring idea of the present age as postmodern, and psychology as a project of modernity, means that the science of psychology might be out of touch with the current age (Kvale 1992). One of the many implications of postmodernity was a shift from the sole study of the interior individual psyche to the practical repercussions of psychological knowledge in society, including epistemological, ethical and political implications (Kvale 1992). The postmodern rupture in confidence in Western science means that psychology can just as easily be understood as a substitute for religion in providing the fundamental guidelines for life. Yet, the religious roots and assumptions of psychology are seldom explored in full.
Psychology and religion will perhaps in the future need to be seen as two different but related ideological frames for constructing images of the self.
Carrette 2001
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Notes
- 1.
Large-P psychology refers to the formal, institutionalized discipline of psychology with its academic departments, journals, organizations, etc., whereas small-p psychology refers to psychology in general and takes the form of everyday psychology through which people make sense of their lives (Pickren & Rutherford 2010).
- 2.
Communitarianism is a philosophical school that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. This critique of modernity has frequently reprehended psychology for promoting an ideal of the atomistic individual that only reinforces the ills it claims to heal (see for instance Bellah 2008).
- 3.
Yet, as previously mentioned, Vitz still acknowledges some parts of psychology as science.
- 4.
I deliberately leave out the option that psychology is neither a science nor a religion. From a strictly logical point of view this is of course a perfectly viable outcome, if psychology fails to meet the inclusion criteria either way. Yet, this possibility exceeds the scope of the chapter which sets out to discuss science versus religion.
- 5.
Critical psychology is a subdiscipline of psychology that “believes that mainstream psychology has institutionalized a narrow view of the field’s ethical mandate to promote human welfare” (Fox, Prilleltensky & Austin 2009: 3).
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Madsen, O.J. (2012). Psychology as science or psychology as religion. In: Øyen, S.A., Lund-Olsen, T., Vaage, N.S. (eds) Sacred Science?. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Wageningen. https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-752-3_6
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