Methodological Issues in the Psychohistory-Psychobiography of Religious Figures

This essay is about the psychohistorical, or perhaps more precisely the psychobiographical, study of religious personalities. The subject is of interest in two respects: first are the methodological issues involved in investigating an historical religious figure as opposed to any other kind of nonreligious historical figure and second the broader issue of the light such studies throw on questions related to the understanding of the interplay between psychoanalysis and religion. I begin with some reflections on the role of the analyst in studying religious subjects and the place of the psychobiography of religious figures for understanding religious experience, and then consider further the complexities of method and approach imbricated in this enterprise.

Study of the psychology of religious experience has its inherent limitations and problems. The primary limitations stem from the nature of analysis as a science and its methodology. The psychology of religious experience is, to begin with, a psychology, that is, a science of human behavior and experience. Psychoanalysis, as a form of psychology, has its own methods and methodological limits. By implication, then, whatever of religious experience can be focused and understood through the methodology of such a science must be seen inherently and specifically as a human experience and nothing more. The implications of this limitation are considerable. There is no area of human endeavor or existential involvement more profound, more far-reaching, more full of implication and significance, than that of religious experience. But through the eyes of a psychology, whether analytic or not, such experience remains essentially and restrictively human in its dimensions.