Psychological Categories Research Articles

A Religiological Analysis of Nursi's View of Sufism Expressed in the ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-ı Tis'a) of the Risale-i Nur

While Nursi stated explicitly that he was not a Sufi, he nevertheless expressed many Sufi perspectives in his work. In particular, his focus in the section of the Risale-i Nur called ‘Nine Allusions’ (Telvihât-ı Tis'a) was Sufism. This article uses a method of analysing religious perspectives called ‘religiology’, in order to coherently and systematically unpack Nursi's attitudes to Sufism. Organizing his Sufi perspectives in the categories of epistemology, ontology (including theology, cosmology, and eschatology), anthropology, psychology, teleology, and methodology, the article demonstrates that he agrees with certain aspects of Sufism and disagrees with others.

Contemporary Adulthood

Adulthood holds a paradoxical position in sociology. It is a central category insofar as it provides the unarticulated background to a majority of social enquiries, but it is largely defined by default as the taken-for-granted status of the social actor and the middle stage of life. Yet, the meaning of adulthood is rarely addressed directly. Those researchers who do, tend to note its transformation from a social to a psychological category. This article elaborates the social constitution of adulthood and thus offers an alternative as well as complementary view. First, the article explicates the status of adulthood in sociology and in everyday discourse, and identifies a standard model of adulthood against which individuals' practices are prevalently judged. Second, it outlines the prolonged adolescence thesis, an entrenched position in sociology and everyday discourse that posits an increasing number of individuals as deferring or rejecting adulthood. Finally, the article proposes a reconceptualization along recognition-theoretical lines and suggests that the association of adulthood with full personhood is the meaningful constant of this ultimately social category.

Functional homology and homology of function: biological concepts and philosophical consequences

“Functional homology” appears regularly in different areas of biological research and yet it is apparently a contradiction in terms—homology concerns identity of structure regardless of form and function. I argue that despite this conceptual tension there is a legitimate conception of ‘homology of function’, which can be recovered by utilizing a distinction from pre-Darwinian physiology (use versus activity) to identify an appropriate meaning of ‘function’. This account is directly applicable to molecular developmental biology and shares a connection to the theme of hierarchy in homology. I situate ‘homology of function’ within existing definitions and criteria for structural assessments of homology, and introduce a criterion of ‘organization’ for judging function homologues, which focuses on hierarchically interconnected interdependencies (similar to relative position and connection for skeletal elements in structural homology). This analysis of biological concepts has at least three broad philosophical consequences: (1) it provides the grounds for the study of behavior and psychological categories as homologues; (2) it demonstrates that philosophers who take selected effect function as primary effectively ignore large portions of comparative, structural, and experimental research, thereby misconstruing biological reasoning and knowledge; and, (3) it underwrites causal generalizations, which illuminates inferences made from model organisms in experimental biology.

Psychological categories as homologies: lessons from ethology

This paper takes up the project of studying psychological categories as homologies. Ethologists have numerous theoretical ideas concerning the phylogeny and ontogeny of behavioral homologies. They also have well-developed operational methods for testing behavioral homologies. Many of these theoretical ideas and operational criteria can be applied to psychological homologies. This paper suggests that insights from ethology should be incorporated in adaptationist and functionalist approaches to psychology. Doing so would strengthen those approaches.

Character, liability, and morally unreachable agents

This paper will explore the relation between some issues of moral psychology, responsibility for action, and criminal liability. At the center of the discussion is the question of what we are to make of agents whose offending is grounded in their endorsement of wrong values or indifference to the values reflected in criminal law, rather than what appear to be, say, lapses of self-control, pathology, provocation, or negligence. There are agents who have vices such that they do not acknowledge their offenses as wrongs, but they are neither less than rational nor involuntary agents. These are people who are very bad but not psychologically disordered in a manner that constitutes excusing or exempting conditions. I want to show that there are grounds for holding such offenders liable. I shall proceed by giving a characterization of the relevant type of agents and then look at some of the considerations in favor of regarding them as liable despite their apparent incapacity to act rightly. The following are among the key claims argued for: (a) Agents can be voluntary, rational actors even though their states of character may constitute genuine limits on how they can act. (These are limits apart from such things as opportunity and what is causally possible in the broad sense.) (b) Some agents are firmly established in vicious character states and are thus morally unreachable in important respects, though not insane, psychopathic, or otherwise candidates for diminished responsibility. They have voluntarily become unreachable though without intending to become so. (c) A distinction between what I call the availability and the accessibility of values helps explicate why some unreachable agents are responsible and not to be excused from liability. (d) Although natural temperament and social conditions help to illuminate why an agent has become morally unreachable, the agent's voluntariness can still have a substantial role in explaining his character in ways that underwrite the the agent's liability. (e) It is difficult to ascertain if an agent is morally unreachable, but we can distinguish between conditions that defeat an agent's voluntariness and liability and those that do not. This discussion is intended to be relevant to questions of legal liability and moral responsibility more broadly. I hope that the characterization of the phenomenon in question and the examples offered provide a framework for pursuit of specific legal issues beyond what is presented here. I Character's Role in Practical Necessity and Possibility In order to begin clarifying and substantiating the above claims I should indicate the main moral psychological categories into which agents who act wrongly might fall. There are: (1) morally decent agents who infrequently commit wrong acts that they themselves recognize and regret as lapses; (2) dispositionally incontinent agents; (3) vicious agents capable of remorse and of acknowledging their wrongs; (4) pathological agents whose conditions are at least partially excusing or exempting; and (5) vicious agents who are seemingly incapable of remorse and acknowledgment of their wrongs but not in ways that excuse or exempt. (1) With this last class of agents, their cognitive and motivational limitations are brought about through their own voluntary activities and their endorsement of the (wrong or perverse) values upon which they act. These are agents whose characters are firmly fixed in vice in such ways that they do not, and perhaps cannot, recognize their wrongful acts as wrongful except in the sense that these agents are aware that their actions are regarded as wrongful by many others or by society generally. These agents have come to have vicious characters through their own voluntary activity even though they did not at any point intend to acquire vicious characters. They are not victims of brainwashing or coercion and they are not afflicted with compulsions or diseases of a sort that would constitute excusing conditions. …

Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice, by Robert C. Solomon and From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, by Thomas Dixon

Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice, by Robert C. Solomon and From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, by Thomas Dixon

Cultures of Categories: Psychological Diagnoses as Institutional and Political Projects before and after the Transition from State Socialism in 1989 in East Germany

How can psychological categories be understood as historical, political, and cultural artifacts? How are such categories maintained by individuals, organizations, and governments? How do macrosocietal changes-such as the transition from state socialism in East Germany in 1989-correlate with changes in the social and organizational structures that maintain psychological categories? This essay focuses on how--pre-1989--the category of neurosis (as a mental disorder) became entwined with East Germany's grand socialist project of creating new socialist personalities, a new society, and a new science and on how diagnostic preferences were adapted, modified, and extended by local cultural and institutional practices. It also examines how post-1989 the category of neurosis became redefined in accord with a formerly West German psychotherapeutic paradigm and was eventually obliterated by the bureaucratic health care system of the new Germany. East German practitioners adopted new therapeutic guidelines and a new language to make sense of the "normal", "neurotic", and "pathological" self in terms of "individualizing forms of knowledge" that tied in with efforts to remake East German citizens as liberal democratic subjects. At the same time, practitioners' clinical practice remained based upon face-to-face encounters in which formal guidelines and stipulations were often superseded by local, interactional, institutional, and cultural practices and contingencies.

Interdisciplinarity in Teaching Medieval Mysticism: the Case of Angela of Foligno

ABSTRACTThis essay addresses two related challenges facing educators who teach about medieval saints, mystics, and their texts. The first is how to relate to the theologies and spiritualities of people who inhabited cultures radically distinct from the modern and postmodern periods. The second regards the contemporary tendency to evaluate medieval believers in terms of modernist intellectual frameworks, most notably clinical psychological categories. A case study approaching the medieval mystic Angela of Foligno from three disciplinary points of view—clinical psychology, historical theology, and cultural history—illustrates how educators might respond to students' penchant to privilege clinical psychology when considering medieval mystics and saints, and shows not only the complementarity of interdisciplinarity, but also its limitations.

The Psychology of Fiction—and Vice Versa

Reviews the book, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Moby-Dick, L'Assommoir, and Buddenbrooks: Interpreting Novels Through Psychological Categories by Karen F. Jacobson (see record 2006-01588-000). In Karen F. Jacobson's monograph, the psychologizing draws heavily on mainstream, contemporary research, in this instance, on the psychopathology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). She selects the central characters of the three great 19th-century novels named in her title and relates their personalities and behavior to the symptoms (the phenomenology) and presumed causal dynamics of OCD. In a feat of enviable scholarship–steering freely among these American, French, and German authors' worlds and words–she presents her thesis that the novels represent fictitious but accurate early portrayals, even case studies, of OCD. To develop this argument, her erudition extends to a close reading of the current psychological research, especially drawn from the cognitive-behavioral treatment perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)

Editor's Column: Reconfiguring Borders

Editor's Column:Reconfiguring Borders Mary Ann Frese Witt Representative of the continued expansion of the terrain of comparative literature, the six essays in this issue of The Comparatist, as well as the books reviewed, take widely different approaches to their various topics. If there is a common theme here, it lies in the destabilizing or permeating of conventionally established borders, a transformation that illuminates in new ways the objects compared. The first group of essays reconfigures the borders separating literary genres as well as those between literature and the visual arts while proposing a contemporary look at traditional ekphrasis; the second group considers in both theory and practice the question of adaptation in the visual arts, literary forms, the cinema, and life. The third group, treating versions of a fairy tale, autobiography in two languages, and truth or fiction in the testimonial, questions in various ways the borders surrounding narratives. Borders are also reconfigured in a more literal sense here. Although this issue of the journal may seem more Eurocentric than previous ones, which have traditionally included clusters of essays on East–West literary relations, it expands considerably the borders of the traditional Western European literary canon. Discussing literary works from Denmark and modern Greece, two of the essays push those borders north and south, while the book review section, which includes an essay on a new literary history of East Central Europe as well as three reviews of books from Poland, pushes them eastward. Peter Bornedal's essay on "the fragmented Nietzschean subject" as an applied critical approach to a poem on a drawing of Michelangelo by the nineteenth-century Danish poet J. P. Jacobsen permeates the borders of philosophy, criticism, poetry, and visual art. Following Nietzsche's "dynamic" model of the mind, which does away with psychological categories such as the unified subject, Bornedal reads Jacobsen's "Arabesque" as the expression of the conflicts of a multiple self seeking to appropriate the enigma, and the danger, posed by the notion of "Woman." Drawing on letters and diary entries by Jacobsen, Bornedal supplements his reading with autobiographical material illustrating Jacobsen's conflicted relationships with women. Although he does not specifically discuss ekphrasis in his analysis, it is clear that the enigmatic image of woman portrayed in the Michelangelo drawing continuously informs the poem. Ekphrasis is on the other hand a specific focus of Robert Hamner's essay on the [End Page 1] incorporation of Giorgio de Chirico's painting The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon in V. S. Naipaul's fictional and autobiographical work The Enigma of Arrival. Extending the classical definition of ekphrasis as the written description of an art object to include the "envoicing" of silent objects, Hamner demonstrates how Naipaul's reading of the surrealist work of art, with its manipulation of perspective, informs his fragmented authorial presence in the text. Like Bornedal, Hamner also makes use of autobiographical material to reconfigure the boundaries of autobiography. In Naipaul's case, of course, "the enigma of arrival" is also intimately bound with his own subjective restructuring of the borders of India, Trinidad, and England. The two essays in the second cluster were both originally papers in a session on literary adaptation at the American Comparative Literature Association chaired by Elaine Martin, and it is thanks to Professor Martin that the revisions of these papers appear here. Both of these essays deal with the adaptation of a literary work into a cinematic one, but both also use the notion of adaptation in a broader sense. Working in three media, Ilan Safit argues that the film adaptation of the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring reveals the cinematic potential of the Vermeer painting of the title on which the novel is based. Like Hamner, Safit explores the narrative potential of visual images released by ekphrasis. In his "From Balzac to Iraq," Brian Martin proposes not only to discuss the cinematic adaptation of Balzac's Colonel Chabert, but also to explore the multiple significations of veterans' "adaptations" to violence in war and to their return to an indifferent society at home. He then asks how these adaptations can adequately be rendered in literature or in film. Although he...

Behavioural phenotypes in disability research: historical perspectives

Western medicine has a long history of accounting for behaviour by reducing the body to ultimate explanatory entities. In pre-modern medicine these were invisible "animal spirits" circulating the body. In modern medicine, they are "genes". Both raise questions. The psychological phenotype is defined by human consensus, varying according to time and place, while the genotype's DNA exists in a realm of material reality. There are deep philosophical and methodological problems in linking one realm to the other. Nyhan's original application of the phenotype-genotype pairing merely claimed that the two realms could be matched because of their common susceptibility to statistical treatment. His behavioural example was "stereotypy". It has since extended to include such things as "social cognition" in Turner's syndrome (Skuse), thus revealing increasingly clearly that the two realms are fundamentally and ontologically separate. The problems are not merely epistemological but ethical, since the looseness of psychological categories involves a blurring of the boundaries between behavioural phenotype and social stereotype. The latter may then be underwritten as "real" by being associated, spuriously, with the empirically demonstrable reality of genetic material.

Human Kinds and Looping Effects in Psychology

Recent work in the historiography of psychology has suggested that the discipline must be seen as involved in the constitution of its own subject matter. Two questions arise. First, what does this tell us about the subject matter of psychology? Second, how should we understand and investigate the processes through which such ‘making up people’ occurs? This article addresses these questions by arguing, first, that psychological categories refer to human rather than natural kinds. In contrast to natural kinds, human kinds can exert effects on themselves. Then two different approaches to the ‘looping effect of human kinds’ are sketched: a Foucauldian analytics of the techne of psychology, and a hermeneutic understanding of humans as self-interpreting beings. It is argued that Foucault’s perspective, while rich in its critical potentials, lacks an adequate understanding of those values and meanings which are a part of human practical life.

Some considerations on the use of the impact factor of scientific journals as a tool to evaluate research in psychology

This paper identifies and presents some characteristics of the psychology journals included in each of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) categories in 2002. The study shows that most of the journals belong to the categories of Multidisciplinary Psychology (102) and Clinical Psychology (83). Their ranking is seen to vary depending on the category, and the same journal may occupy different positions in different JCR categories. Journals included in the categories of Biological Psychology, Experimental Psychology and Multidisciplinary Psychology had the highest impact factor (IF).

Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture Julie Robin Solomon Carol Thomas Neely . Distracted Subjects: Madness and Gender in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xv + 244 pp. Ill. $52.50, £30.50 (cloth, 0-8014-4205-2); $21.95, £12.50 (paperbound, 0-8014-8924-5). Madness—as both medical category and dramatic icon—was heterogeneous, proliferating, gender-inflected, internally divided, and blurry around the scientific and cultural edges. This is a major contention of Carol Thomas Neely's study of the ways in which English doctors, dramatists, and other writers represented mental illness between 1576 and 1632. Neely claims that English playwrights reflected current and humane medical ideas about madness and its cure, made use of them for their own dramatic purposes, and, in certain instances, anticipated the less-humane attitudes of the eighteenth century. She also uses this book to argue against what she sees as an unfortunate historical misconception: the "myth" (p. 199) that before 1632 visitors to Bethlehem (or Bethlem) Hospital, London's refuge for impoverished mad persons, came in order to witness its comic spectacle. She begins her work in 1576 because that is the date for the opening of the first public theater in London. Less convincing is her choice of 1632, the year when the administration of Bethlehem Hospital completely reverted to the City (as opposed to the Crown), as her study's endpoint: why not end with the closing of the theaters in 1642? In her introduction, Neely contends that her researches counter Michel Foucault's claim that the early modern period represented a period of "expressive madness" (p. 9) that ended when a mid-seventeenth epistemic break inaugurated the suppressing, silencing, and isolation of the mad. To the contrary, she finds in the writings of seventeenth-century physicians and dramatists abundant evidence that distracted persons were not isolated, mistreated, or confined, but rather humored and cared for with kindness. Restraints or confinement in a hospital like Bethlem were thought of as temporary measures that would lead to eventual cure. While rejecting this Foucauldian notion of a radical epistemic break, Neely also distances herself from those social historians who "assume that medical theory and practice remain[ed] static from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration" (p. 8): instead, she sees "gradual shifts" (p. 8) in the medical categorization and treatment of distracted persons between 1576 and 1632. She thus finds common cause with Ian Hacking's notion of "the secularization of the soul" (p. 2)—the idea that, since the Middle Ages, Western culture has increasingly sought natural and material explanations for the ills of the mind and soul rather than supernatural and spiritual ones. One consequence of these explanatory shifts, claims Neely, is the proliferation of new categories of mental illness, as well as the regendering of certain varieties of psychic disease. After the introduction the book is divided into six chapters, some more, some less interconnected. In chapter 1 Neely considers the nature and dramatic influence of sixteenth-century representations of madpersons on the English stage, beginning with the comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle and the revenge play The Spanish Tragedy. In chapter 2 she examines the development of a particular [End Page 576] dramatic language of stage madness—made up of proverbs, fragments, rhymes, songs—in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. Here, she also shows how dramatic distinctions between feigned and real madness, supernatural and natural madness, and male and female forms of madness help to create depth and complexity of dramatic character as well as contributing to the cultural secularization of the soul. In chapter 3 Neely offers a nuanced reading of the emergence of the psychological category of female melancholy out of the early rubrics of male melancholy and uterine disorders such as suffocation of the mother. Chapter 4 extends the insights of chapter 3 to examine another emergent mental disorder, known as "lovesickness" in the works of Shakespeare and the paintings of Jan Steen. Neely argues in chapter 5 that three Shakespeare comedies—The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night—represent new, harsher attitudes toward the treatment...

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (review)

Reviewed by: From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category Max Rosenkrantz Thomas Dixon . From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 287. Cloth, $60.00 Thomas Dixon's From Passions to Emotions defends a provocative set of theses. (1) The concept of "emotion" is of relatively recent vintage, having been designed by secular Scottish writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. (2) That concept embraces a range of phenomena that earlier Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas understood in terms of a manifold of concepts such as "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." (3) The concept of "emotion" is too crude an instrument for understanding human psychology. Further, (4) today the secular conceptual framework has completely displaced the religious one. This has nothing to do with the former's greater proximity to the truth, as is shown by the persistence of cogent Christian theories in the second half of the nineteenth century, the period of secularism's triumph; and (5) The opposition between reason and emotion arises only when theorists begin to think of "emotions" rather than "appetites," "passions," "affections," and "sentiments." Christian writers did not see the passions as simply the enemies of reason. The basis for Dixon's argument is his interpretation of nineteenth-century psychological theory in the English speaking world. Specifically he argues that the concept of "emotion" was invented by the Scottish thinker Thomas Brown (1778-1820). Brown's innovation was then appropriated and developed by Spencer, Darwin, and William James. The foil for this story is the Christian tradition represented most compellingly by Augustine and Aquinas and carried on by a host of lesser nineteenth-century figures. In my judgment, the story thus told cannot bear the weight Dixon places upon it. The centerpiece of Dixon's argument is his claim that Brown "invents" (109) the emotions and thereby initiates a conceptual revolution in western thought. While Dixon may be right in asserting that Brown is the first to use the word 'emotion' in a systematic fashion, this achievement is merely terminological. Brown deploys the term to develop a mechanistic account of human nature, one in which the springs of action are located not in the will and reason, but in the emotions. Replace 'emotion' in the preceding sentence with 'passion' and one gets a concise characterization of Hobbes's view. Dixon is aware that Brown and others work within a Hobbesian framework (250) but does not attend to that framework. Thus his claims for the significance of the developments he describes fail to convince. The real innovation in psychological theory—as in so much else—took place in the seventeenth century. Just as Dixon overestimates the importance and originality of the Scottish writers he discusses, so too he overestimates the intellectual importance of Augustine and Aquinas. His presentation of their views (26-62) is accurate, but he does not note that they take over the Platonic-Aristotelian view of the soul according to which reason can and should penetrate, educate and direct the passions. Thus the guiding thought that structures the work—the nineteenth century witnesses an ultimately successful revolt against Christian psychology—must be rejected. The revolt is against ancient, pre-Christian modes of thought and is undertaken and largely won in the seventeenth century. The events Dixon describes are skirmishes in that larger campaign. The rest of the theses Dixon defends can be dispatched with more quickly. The idea that the modern concept of "emotion" is insufficiently subtle is averted to frequently, but never adequately defended. At no point does Dixon demonstrate, or even claim to demonstrate, that Christian thinkers recognized something secular thinkers miss. Roughly the same can be said for his claims about the persistence of Christian psychology in the nineteenth century. What Dixon means is not just that such thinkers exist, but that their thought remains vibrant. Again I see no argument for such a verdict. Finally, there is the matter of the opposition between reason and passion. To his credit Dixon rejects the view according to which almost all Western thought is hostile to the passions. As he shows, this...

The history of psychological categories

Psychological terms, such as ‘mind’, ‘memory’, ‘emotion’ and indeed ‘psychology’ itself, have a history. This history, I argue, supports the view that basic psychological categories refer to historical and social entities, and not to ‘natural kinds’. The case is argued through a wide ranging review of the historiography of western psychology, first, in connection with the field’s extreme modern diversity; second, in relation to the possible antecedents of the field in the early modern period; and lastly, through a brief introduction to usage of the words ‘soul’, ‘mind’, ‘memory’ and ‘emotion’. The discussion situates the history of psychology within a large historical context, questions assumptions about the continuity of meaning, and draws out implications for the philosophical and social constitution of ‘psychology’ and ‘the psychological’ from the existing literature. The historical evidence, this paper concludes, does not support the conventional presumption that modern psychological terms describe ‘natural kinds’.

From Passions to Emotions: The creation of a secular psychological category

Acknowledgments 1. Introduction: from passions and affections to emotions 2. Passions and affections in Augustine and Aquinas 3. From movements to mechanisms: passions, sentiments and affections in the Age of Reason 4. The Scottish creation of 'the emotions': David Hume, Thomas Brown, Thomas Chalmers 5. The physicalist appropriation of Brownian emotions: Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin 6. Christian and theistic responses to the physicalist emotions paradigm 7. What was an emotion in 1884? William James and his critics 8. Conclusions: how history can help us think about 'the emotions' Bibliography Index.

From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category By Thomas Dixon. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 297pp., hb £45.00 The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions By William M. Reddy. Cambridge University Press, 2001, 380pp., pb £17.99

<i>From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category</i> By Thomas Dixon. Cambridge University Press, 2003, 297pp., hb £45.00 <i>The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions</i> By William M. Reddy. Cambridge University Press, 2001, 380pp., pb £17.99

Whose Story Is It?--The Appropriation of Medieval Mysticism

Whose Story Is It?The Appropriation of Medieval Mysticism Elizabeth A. Dreyer (bio) This essay arises out of twenty-five years of interpreting the texts of Christian medieval women mystics both within the academy and for a wide variety of faith communities in universities, retreat centers, and local congregations. During these twenty-five years, interest in mystical texts has broadened from believers and scholars in specific faith traditions to specialists in philology, philosophy, literary studies, psychoanalysis, history, and history of religions.1 There are even scholars with a resolutely secular stance who have become interested in medieval mysticism. This is a new development. Ordinarily, academics who voice antagonism toward religion and all forms of religious expression, have dismissed or even denigrated mysticism as an inapt subject for academic inquiry.2 These new voices have brought provocative and enriching insights to the conversation, expanding and deepening our understanding of mystical texts. This explosion of research also invites questions about how to chart a course for fruitful and responsible conversation among voices that are at times harmonious, at times cacophonous. In the past several years, I have become uneasy with certain aspects of this retrieval of medieval mysticism, especially in the work of some feminist scholars, who give short shrift to the historical location of these texts.3 I have wondered whether there are criteria to guide the analysis and retrieval of this material. At the least, as scholarly interpreters of medieval mystical texts, we need to distinguish methodologies that honor the contexts and meaning structures of those writing the texts (to the extent that this is possible), from those approaches that are simply projections or ideological constructs. With this question in mind, I began to examine secondary texts more systematically, and to notice typical complaints in reviews of books that treat a wide range of historical material. My goal is not to seek definitive criteria, but to raise questions, and underline the importance of attending to historical context as at least one necessary step in the interpretation and retrieval of medieval mystical texts. While I focus on Christian medieval mystical texts written by women, what follows can be applied to a wide range of historical scholarship on a variety of sacred texts and traditions. [End Page 151] I begin by framing the question and listing some general criticism of work that seeks to retrieve medieval mysticism in light of contemporary needs and concerns. Then I address five specific problems: first, projection of contemporary agendas onto the medieval material; second, the reductionism that often results; third, a category I call "missing the point"; fourth, the role of belief; and fifth, the use of psychological categories. I conclude by arguing that openness to a wide range of interpretations of medieval mystical texts requires ongoing, self-critical awareness of criteria by which we judge how we are doing. We need to be able to know the difference between scholarship that is characterized by arrogant projections, ideological harangues, or defensive self-preoccupations, from that which is respectful, humble, and free. Framing the Question The very definition of a classic as a text that bears excess meaning mined throughout the centuries, points to the on-going generativity of this material. But while a text can always say more than we thought it could, is it also true that we can make it say less? Jeffrey Kripal, whose perspective on mysticism diverges quite sharply from mine, frames the question in his analysis of twentieth-century scholarship on mysticism. He sees himself as writing "within a radically pluralistic context about a deracinated, essentially 'floating' category with often only the most tenuous connections to the historical traditions." He acknowledges that this disconnect may be either "an opportunity to welcome" or an "unfortunate corruption to mourn and ultimately reject" but he is mysteriously silent about arguments on either side.4 Neil Douglas-Klotz addresses the diversity of interpretations by suggesting the use of an inter-subjective approach. When scholars acknowledge and reveal their location or perspective as fully as possible, then a variety of possible interpretations can be "valid" for specific groups or purposes. He suggests that the texts of medieval women mystics can be used legitimately as "midrash" on...