Abstract
The purpose of this article is to outline some of the religious implications of Western personality theory. It begins with broad comments about the general theoretical tradition of the West, especially of secular disciplines such as psychology. Next, it sketches briefly the religious implications of many aspects of the three forces of psychology, i.e., psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and humanism, with special emphasis on some of the more classical theorists, such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, B. F. Skinner, Albert Bandura, Carl Rogers, and George Kelly. Lastly, it paints some broad-brush strokes regarding alternatives to these three forces, specifically, two types of postmodern understandings of religious persons and their contexts, social constructionism and hermeneutics.
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Notes
Jung was influenced, for example, by the yin and yang of Taoism (Rychlak 1981).
This outlawing of the spiritual is totally at variance with many Islamic scholars who stress that science should have a spiritual as well as an empirical dimension (Saliba 2007).
Islamic psychologists often reject reductionistic approaches to science, where the heart (qalb) and spirit (ruh) are as important as the intellect or self (Nelson 2009, 366–367).
This is not dissimilar to the Islamic fitah, “a God-given innate state.” Unlike Rogers, however, Islamic scholars view this innateness as an “inclination to believe in God” (Mohamed, 1995, p. 2).
One of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that suffering stems from the creation of illusory dualisms (Nelson 2009, p. 84), especially the creation of an independent reality such as objectivity (p. 85). Islam also resists this type of dualism, opting to move away from divisions between self and world (p. 366–367). Christianity has historically championed some forms of dualism, but as Nelson comments, recent scholarship in Christianity rejects dualism and emphasizes the “unitive state” of life (2009, p. 90).
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Slife, B.D. Religious Implications of Western Personality Theory. Pastoral Psychol 61, 797–808 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-011-0363-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-011-0363-6