Religions and Psychotherapies / / Klaus Baumann and Frank-Gerald B. Pajonk.

• TeilnehmendeR: Baumann, Klaus,; Pajonk, Frank-Gerald B.,
• Place / Publishing House: Basel, Switzerland : : MDPI - Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute,, 2014.
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (xxii, 214 pages)

The birth of modern psychotherapies-along with the birth of psychology as a science on one side and with psychoanalysis, other depth-psychological treatments and behavioral therapies in addition to medical treatments of psychological disorders on the other side-in the 19th and 20th centuries was accompanied by positivistic and mechanistic paradigms underlying empirical research and claims of scientific dignity [1]. Affirmations which could not be tested or observed empirically had to be excluded from science-including any kind of metaphysics and religious belief, notwithstanding pioneering studies by William James [2], Granville Stanley Hall, James Henry Leuba and Edwin Diller Starbuck [3] for psychology in general and for psychology of religion(s) in particular. In particular, the critique of religions by Sigmund Freud has continuously exerted a strong impact in the fields of psychiatry and psychotherapies; in addition, regarding psychodynamics and symptoms of psychic disorders, religious phenomena in the lives of patients may be just as affected as other cognitive and emotional aspects and behaviors [4]. Consequently, religious experience and religious behavior of patients in psychiatry and psychotherapies have rarely been object of research and teaching apart from predominantly symptomatic and pathogenic perspectives.