Minding Spirituality

Rating:
Summary: A Hopefully Successful Heresy
Review: As a relational psychotherapist who believes that truth is an emergent property of relationships and encounter, Sorenson himself exhibits many of the antinomies and creative tensions that he encourages in this book. He is a professional academic who is also deeply engaged in the clinical practice of psychotherapy. He is a Christian in a sometimes notoriously secular field of endeavor. He advocates a post-critical approach to epistemology bordering on constructivism, while subjecting that same approach to a strongly empirical analysis using advanced statistical methods. He seems as conversant in philosophy as in psychoanalysis.

The result of these tensions is a fascinating and worthy book. As Marx turned Hegel on his head, Sorenson turns the usual relationship between psychoanalysis and religion, if not on its head, at least on its ear. Using recent advances in the philosophy of science (largely Polanyi, Kuhn and Laudan), Sorenson subjects Freud's "naive realism" and the remaining vestiges of logical positivism within the psychoanalytic community to a gentle but ultimately devastating critique. Indeed, he argues that current models of theological education, more or less successfully pursued over the last several centuries both within and without a university setting, should serve as exemplars for psychoanalytic training. Given the question, "Can psychoanalytic institutes change so that they become full-time academies with cross-disciplinary faculty, with provision for research activities, and with an atmosphere that encourages challenge, doubt, and disputation?", Sorenson points out that, "We could well be describing currently established standards for theological education."

If there is any downside to Sorenson's work, it is that the author is so wide-ranging and engages sympathetically with so many different viewpoints, that he can be somewhat hard to pin down. As he himself acknowledges, the virtues of openness, curiosity and sympathetic understanding which he advocates can leave their practitioner without a clear sense of his or her own boundaries; certainly they can leave a reader without a clear understanding of his own position on some issues. While not without its problems, this approach should certainly lay to rest the contemporary stereotype of Christians as necessarily dogmatic and narrow-minded. It thus remains to be seen whether his heresy will be successful: but I have my hopes.