How can Psychology Cope with Religion?

Abstract

Coping has recently become a pivotal concept in certain tendencies within the psychology of religion, significantly in studies focused on the relation between religion and mental health, which is eventually linked to psychosomatic well-be ing. In this recent interest there is more at stake than a reaction against a former psychiatric distrust of religion, as in the context of W. James' work a century ago. What then is the interest of the psychologist of religion when he uses the concept of coping? Does it present a new working category? These were questions circulat ing in my mind in connection with the topic of the present congress. By his very nature, a person copes with the purpose of his never accomplished and always endangered well-being, in the most universal sense of this word. Cop ing is the procedure for meeting the inner needs and desires, and for dealing with menacing inner impulses and with exterior dangers, whether this comes from hu mans or from the natural world. When we consider human coping, we at least vaguely entertain the idea that human beings are predisposed to shaping them selves and behaving in a way which they think is meaningful. So we are led to ideas and questions which are no longer ready at hand, questions which immerse us in the cultural context of conceptions about the world and the human person. Be fore we restrict our scope, we must pay attention to this given: an individual copes with himself as well as with his world. Religion has been, and often still is, most important in this perspective, pre cisely because it concerns the human being in his most personal coping with his own existence, as is also the case with human love. Therefore religion as well as human love can raise conflicts with ways of coping in other fields of interest, such as the national, rational and techno-economic ones. This was the ancient dramatic conflict between Antigone and the civil authority of Creon, the rational man of power preoccupied with what he thought to be useful for society. Is this not a par adigmatic conflict? The rational mind inclines to identify coping with the seeking after that which is useful. In this context, even members of a faculty of psychology sometimes regard psychologists of religion in the same way as Creon did the poor useless Antigone. Should the psychology of religion demonstrate, then, that reli gion is useful for human well-being?