Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry

22 Joel James Shumanway of understanding and coping with his longhistory of serious depression.(7–12)2. RELIGION AND RELIGIONSI have advocated shifting the focus on matters atthe intersection of religion and psychiatry fromthe individual patient’s beliefs and the therapeuticutility of those beliefs to the ways her beliefsare shaped by her membership in or associationwith a religious tradition. My advocacy is basedon the conviction that it is more descriptivelyaccurate, not to mention more clinically useful,to talk about psychiatry and a particular religion,such as Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, than totalk about psychiatry and religion in general.The truth is that it is impossible to say very muchabout psychiatry and religious faith in general,because there really isn’t any such thing as religiousfaith in general . The notion of a generic“religion,” as Nicholas Lash has shown, is inessence an epiphenomenon of the shifting philosophicalground of early modern Europe, oneaspect of which included an emerging suspicionof what traditionally had been a conspicuously“public” Christianity.(13) This is not to say thatthere are no resemblances among the traditionswe call “religions.” Certainly there are commonlyheld beliefs and practices among the adherentsof various traditions (or those of no traditionwho still call themselves religious or spiritual).More, the faiths we commonly call “Abrahamic”(Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share a commonhistorical heritage and comparable canonicalnarratives.(14) Still, too easily associatingthe beliefs, practices, and narratives of eventhese traditions avoids, rather than encourages,theological scrutiny. It has become fashionablein recent years in a wide variety of medical specialties,psychiatry not excepted, to investigateand in some cases even to commend the therapeuticeffects of actions and dispositions broadlyregarded as “spiritual” or “religious.” (15) Theoperational assumption in most of this work hasseemed to be that the subjective act of belief ismore significant than the objective content ofwhat is believed, insofar as the various historicalreligious traditions are but ways of referring toa universal characteristic of human subjectivity,which we might name religious feeling or religiousbelief. The traditions, that is, are butspecies of a common genus named “religion,”or now, more commonly, “spirituality.” As such,they may be exchanged or hybridized accordingto therapeutic effectiveness and the needs of thereligious consumer.(13, 15)Such a view of “religion” corresponds towhat the theologian George Lindbeck hascalled “experiential-expressivism,” wherein thetheological focus is on interpreting the alwayspersonal, usually inward, and often privateexperience of the believer. The content of thebeliever’s experience, the raw material informingwhat theologians typically call doctrine , isseen from this perspective as “noninformativeor nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings,attitudes, or existential orientations.” (16) Thisway of understanding religion not only fits,but also emerges as part of, the contemporaryNorth Atlantic sociopolitical context. The worldinhabited by most mental health professionalsand their patients is characterized by radicalindividualism and a sharp egalitarian impulse,a paradoxically reactionary suspicion towardtraditional authority, and a belief that someform of scientific reason is the only legitimatearbiter of public truth. Subsequently, we tend toassume the existence of a deep division betweenthe public and private realms, whereby we supposethat religious belief is a private, individualmatter that cannot and should not be critiquedwith respect to its content.(15, 17)Yet such a highly individuated, private, experientiallygrounded understanding of religionfalls decidedly short of accounting for what ithas for most of history meant to “be religious.”Lindbeck argues that the traditions we call “religions”are better understood as entire ways oflife, which may be participated in properly onlythrough initiation, extensive training, and lifelongritual reinforcement. Here he draws on thework of Wittgenstein in arguing that religions arenot unlike languages, in that they make possible“the description of realities, the formulation of