Meaning-creation, selfhood, and religion: From religious metanarratives to spiritual self-narratives

Abstract

This paper attempts to support the idea that the psychology of religion might be developed as an applied branch of cultural psychology. The scope of the argument is both theoretical and empirical. On the one hand, it is argued that religion functions as the most powerful semiotic system which provides subjects with metaphors, narrative frameworks, rituals and other cultural resources for personalised meaning-construction and life-designing. On the other hand, it is illustrated with an exploratory qualitative study how a specific type of community, a Catholic Seminary, produces a particular set of religious symbols and how their members write their narrative identities in multiple and unstable ways through dialectical tensions and creative self-invention. Thus, the psychology of religion becomes a fruitful laboratory to further investigate the mutually generative interplay between culture and self in order to better understand the plastic process of continuous self-identity formation and transformation.