This course will examine the relationship between psychology and spirituality—as practices and as academic fields—inviting participants to develop provisional frameworks for integrating the two fields and for articulating the contributions that each field makes to the other. We will begin by tracing historical notions of self, psyche, and soul—in classical and early Christian usage, the Desert tradition, medieval and early modern understandings of self and spiritual development, etc.—relating these concepts to the work of theologians, spiritual directors, and psychologists in contemporary settings. We will proceed by engaging some modern psychologists’ approaches to religious experience, spiritual development, spiritual wholeness, and “the cure of souls.” In the end, the course will invite students to develop “psycho-hermeneutics” for interpreting classical Christian texts and to interpret implicit (and explicit) psychological assumptions in contemporary work on spiritual direction and spiritual formation.
