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Multiple Selves, Multiple Gods? Functional Polytheism and the Postmodern Religious Patient

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Abstract

The experience of self as multiple and the sense of self as unified and continuous are both experiential realities with equal psychological importance. Clinically, appreciation of both the multiplicity and unity of self engenders a corresponding attention to the “functional polytheism” in the religious lives of patients. In both the psychological and religious realms, there needs to be some ground beneath us when we are standing in the spaces between multiple self-states and multiple god-states.

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Correspondence to Lisa M. Cataldo.

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Cataldo, L.M. Multiple Selves, Multiple Gods? Functional Polytheism and the Postmodern Religious Patient. Pastoral Psychol 57, 45–58 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-008-0152-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-008-0152-z

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