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Story as Scripture, Therapy, Ritual

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Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion
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Storytelling is known to be a primal human activity, a ritualized interaction between teller and listener that wove the fabric of earliest societies; yet our contemporary conceptualizations of storytelling have, like our societies themselves, grown considerably more complex and sophisticated. The postmodern impulse has had far-reaching implication across such disciplines as literary criticism, psychology, and religious studies, especially in developing greater awareness of the ways in which the collected stories that are constitutive of history could themselves be considered discrete constructions. Increased appreciation for narrative calls for an interdisciplinary approach that makes literature, psychotherapy, and religion more mutually informative in this era. Because humans are by nature storytellers, constructivist investigations into storytelling can reveal something significant about the various meanings ascribed to the human condition.

Constructivist approaches regard endlessly...

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Correspondence to Kelly Murphy Mason .

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© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Mason, K.M. (2014). Story as Scripture, Therapy, Ritual. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_663

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_663

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-6085-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4614-6086-2

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