PSICOLOGIA DA RELIGIÃO: DA ORIGEM DO CAMPO À PSICOLOGIA CULTURAL DA RELIGIÃO E À CONCEPÇÃO DO SELF DIALÓGICO

Abstract

This text will present the origins of the Psychology of Religion, considering the reasons behind the formulation of this specific field, the leading concepts that helped in its formulation, the history of the first authors to venture into the field, the first texts produced on Psychology of Religion, the efforts to establish it as a properly scientific theory, detached from theology, and its classical currents. In order to discuss these classical theories, the text will focus on the authors who originated them and on the renowned authors who made use of them, as well as on the main concepts discussed by them. The following theories will be presented: Behaviorism and Cognitivism; Deep Psychology and Psychodynamics; and Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology. After that, a brief history of Psychology of Religion in Brazil will be presented so that we can situate ourselves on how these theories entered our specific context. In the second chapter, the contemporary theories of Psychology of Religion will be presented. Amongst them are: Narrative Psychology; Attribution Theory; The Theory of Social Representations; the theory of religion as attachment; Evolutionary Psychology; contemporary perspectives of Psychoanalysis; and Cultural Psychology of Religion. Among the contemporary perspectives of Psychology of Religion, the text will direct its focus to the Cultural Psychology of Religion, due to it being responsible for the origin of a concept that today has great use not only for Psychology of Religion, but for Psychology as a whole, the dialogic self. The links between culture and the individual development of the self, considered, from then on, as capable of gathering several voices and also of taking the position of the Other and of multiple others in a polyphonic way will be discussed in its minutiae, as well as the evidence of the relevance of this theory and the tools used to obtain this evidence. Its ramifications, developments, complementary efforts and its criticisms will also be discussed. The text will focus mainly on the Vigotskian approach that precedes it: the notion of social roles. All of this will prepare the ground for us to discuss its relevance in the psychotherapeutic context, according to the method of self-reflection and the dialogical-semiotic criticism of traditional lines of psychotherapy. With that, the text will turn back to Cultural Psychology of Religion in all its amplitude and within the limits of psychotherapy, demonstrating the particularities of the religious dialogical self and the perspectives for the use of this model of self within psychotherapy. The dialogical self model is relatively new and much remains to be developed about it. Research on this model is indispensable for the constitution of a Cultural Psychology of Religion and it will be the purpose of this text to demonstrate how, taking concepts from different perspectives, the dialogical self as used by Cultural Psychology of Religion can solve some common problems that the traditional and contemporary perspectives could not.