Introduction to Special Issue on the Theme of Multiplicity

Abstract

At the 2006 meeting of the Psychology, Culture, and Religion Group (PCR) of the American Academy of Religion, the steering committee responsible for each year’s Call for Papers noted a growing emergence of the trope of multiplicity across a wide range of scholarly discourses related to our Group’s interdisciplinary work (including philosophy, psychology—particularly psychoanalytic psychology, narrative theory, cultural studies, political theory, and constructive theology, among others). Both postmodern and postcolonial critiques of “oneness” and “totality” (as normative categories to define individuals and entire social groups) were stimulating significant reflections on the multiple nature of identities, subjectivities and selfhood. We saw interesting pathways for further exploration within our umbrella fields of psychology and/of religion, deriving from the postmodern insistence on the particularity of “subjects” rather than the normativity of unified “selves” shaped by the dominant culture; psychoanalytic distinctions between healthy dissociative processes and traumatically-induced fragmentation of personality; and postcolonial explorations of the concept of hybridity in the power relations between colonizers and subaltern (i.e., subjugated and othered) colonized subjects. The response to our resulting Call for Papers was overwhelming, generating two rich panels at the November, 2007 meeting. The first panel, entitled “Multiple Selves and Subjects in Psychological and Theological Perspective,” addressed multiplicity primarily at the intrapsychic level, with a series of papers by religion scholars who are also clinicians and teachers of pastoral psychotherapy. These papers, by Pamela Cooper-White, John Blevins, Amy Bentley Lamborn, Lisa Cataldo, and Hans Alma examined various psychological aspects of multiplicity, both conscious and unconscious, bringing these Pastoral Psychol (2008) 57:1–2 DOI 10.1007/s11089-008-0167-5