Psychology and Religion in the search for Personal Wholeness Johann Maree Summer School University of Cape Town January 2012

Contents of the Course Monday – William James: The Varieties of Religious Experience. Tuesday – Carl Jung: Individuation and Self. Wednesday – Erich Fromm: Productive love and humanistic religion. Thursday – Scott Peck: Discipline, love, grace & evil. Friday – Cognitive Behaviour Therapy: Mindfulness and Compassion.

Reasons for offering the course All of us have been broken or wounded at some stage in our lives and we strive to piece together and heal ourselves again. Consciously or unconsciously we make us of psychology and religion to help us do so. For the past forty years or so I have been drawing on both religion and psychology to help me in the search for personal wholeness. My aim with this course is to share with you what insights I have gained.

Why James, Jung, Fromm, Peck and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) The reason I have chosen James is because his Varieties of Religious Experiences is regarded as a pioneering psychological study of religion. The reason I included Jung, Fromm, Peck and CBT is because I have found them all helpful at different stages of my life and they all take religion seriously.

Personal Wholeness What do I mean by ‘personal wholeness’? I want to start by contrasting it with two concepts: Firstly, brokenness – we have all been broken at one stage or other in our lives. Wholeness will result when the broken pieces within us have been reconstructed into a whole self and we experience wellness and harmony within ourselves.

Image: wholeness from brokenness

Personal Wholeness: second contrast The second contrast is with woundedness. We have all been wounded and sit with emotional scars in our psyches. Wholeness is the outcome of the process of healing the scars of woundedness in our lives. Poets have provided us with sensitive perspectives of brokenness, woundedness and healing.

T S Eliot Darkness/Brokenness Four Quartets: East Coker O dark dark dark. … I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. … I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing;

Eliot continued there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Ingrid de Kok The process of healing of the psyche is captured very well in her many-layered poem, Mending, in which she uses the images of the seamstress and surgeon: In and out, behind, across. The formal gesture binds the cloth. The stitchery’s a surgeon’s rhyme, A Chinese stamp, a pantomime

Mending continued of print. Then spoor. Then trail of red. Scabs rise, stigmata from the thread. A cotton chronicle congealed. A histogram of welts and weals. The woman plies her ancient art, Her needle sutures as it darts, Scoring, scripting, scarring, stitching, the invisible mending of the heart.