Spirit, Mind, and Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and Religion (Columbia Series in Science and Religion)


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Preeminent psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow believes that early childhood emotional attachments form the cognitive underpinnings of spiritual experience and religious motivation. His hypothesis, which is verifiable, relies on psychological and neurobiological evidence but is respectful of the human need for spiritual value.
Ostow begins by classifying the three parts of the spiritual experience: awe, Spirituality proper, and mysticism. After he pinpoints the psychological origins of these feelings in infancy, he discusses the foundations of religious sentiment and practice and the brain processes associated with spiritual experience. He then focuses on spirituality's relationship to mood regulation, and the role of negative spirituality in fostering religious fundamentalism and demonic possession.
Ostow concludes with an analysis of an essay by the psychoanalyst Donald M. Marcus, who recounts his own spiritual experience during a Native American-style "vision quest" in the woods. Marcus's account demonstrates the constructive potential of spirituality and the way in which spirituality retrieves and recapitulates feelings of attachment to the mother.
Persuasively and brilliantly argued, Spirit, Mind, and Brain brings the disciplines of religion, behavorial neuroscience, and philosophy to bear on a groundbreaking new method for understanding religious ritual and belief.
Spirit, Mind, and Brain: A Psychoanalytic Examination of Spirituality and Religion (Columbia Series in Science and Religion) Review
An excellent study of the infantile origins of awe, spirituality and mysticisim. Ostrow separates these three responses from religion. He understands religion as the human created explanation for the images indicated by the three responses named. He does not enter a philosophical evaluation of the source of awe, spirituality and mysticism. But he does quote extensively from the Tanakh and the New Testament. His own appreciation for the depth of Scripture is evident.As a Christian minister with a Ph. D. in Psychology and Pastoral Counseling, this book added new dimensions to my understanding of the relationship of the physical brain to the mind. I read the book as accepting the "reality" of the differences between neurological and mental, or spiritual, functioning. Dr. Ostrow's thinking is complex and profound without being reductionistic.
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