Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 An introduction
- 2 The major fault line: modernism and psychology
- 3 Neoscholastic psychology
- 4 Psychology as the boundary: Catholicism, spiritualism, and science
- 5 Psychoanalysis versus the power of will
- 6 From out of the depths: Carl Jung's challenges and Catholic replies
- 7 Institutionalizing the relationship
- 8 Humanistic psychology and Catholicism: dialogue and confrontation
- 9 Trading zones between psychology and Catholicism
- 10 Crossings
- References
- Index
10 - Crossings
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 An introduction
- 2 The major fault line: modernism and psychology
- 3 Neoscholastic psychology
- 4 Psychology as the boundary: Catholicism, spiritualism, and science
- 5 Psychoanalysis versus the power of will
- 6 From out of the depths: Carl Jung's challenges and Catholic replies
- 7 Institutionalizing the relationship
- 8 Humanistic psychology and Catholicism: dialogue and confrontation
- 9 Trading zones between psychology and Catholicism
- 10 Crossings
- References
- Index
Summary
The paths cutting through the borderland between psychology and Catholicism are many. What we have seen has dispelled any notion of a rigid boundary or even of merely opposing forces. The situations have been much more complex, especially where the participants in a particular situation inhabited both sides of the boundary. However, it still makes sense to call the areas explored here a boundary region because psychology in all its variants has constituents other than the Catholics, and because Catholic communities have other interests than those of psychology. Now is the occasion to look back at the schema proposed in Chapter 1 to describe the lines between psychology and the Church. And then to move beyond that schema, not in the direction of erasing the border or of integrating psychology into Catholic thought, but rather, in effect, to make things worse. What I mean by this is to do something similar to what histologists do when they “stain” tissues with substances that make visible structures that would be otherwise undetectable. (Psychology likes to imitate other sciences, as we know.) The substance (if it is a substance, let's not prejudice the issue) that will be applied to this boundary tissue is, of all things, the soul. This stain of mortality and immortality opens up new regions of the frontier between psychology and Catholicism. A curious idea, to re-introduce the idea of the “soul,” which psychology discarded at the end of the nineteenth century because of its metaphysical and theological baggage.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Psychology and CatholicismContested Boundaries, pp. 396 - 434Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011