|
28-05-2008
Spirit, Mind, and Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and Religion
by Mortimer Ostow
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006
232 pp, cloth
ISBN: 0-231-13900-4
Columbia Series in Science and Religion
About this Book The author believes that early childhood emotional attachments form the cognitive underpinnings of spiritual experience and religious motivation. His hypothesis, which is verifiable, relies on psychological and neurobiological evidence but is respectful of the human need for spiritual value. He begins by classifying the three parts of the spiritual experience: awe, Spirituality proper, and mysticism. After he pinpoints the psychological origins of these feelings in infancy, he discusses the foundations of religious sentiment and practice and the brain processes associated with spiritual experience. He then focuses on spirituality's relationship to mood regulation, and the role of negative spirituality in fostering religious fundamentalism and demonic possession. The author concludes with an analysis of an essay by the psychoanalyst Donald M. Marcus, who recounts his own spiritual experience during a Native American-style ‘vision quest' in the woods. Marcus's account demonstrates the constructive potential of spirituality and the way in which spirituality retrieves and recapitulates feelings of attachment to the mother.
About the Author Mortimer Ostow was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose experience included the last three major revolutions in psychiatry: psychoanalysis, psychopharmacology, and neuroscience. As emeritus professor of pastoral psychiatry at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he saw himself as an informed amateur in the field of religion.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-13900-7/spirit-mind-and-brain |
|
 |
