Public/Private Religion in Context: When Psychologists Use Religion to Invigorate Therapy

Abstract

Previous studies have tracked how the penetration of psychological discourses into the religious sphere turns religion into a private, individual matter. These studies, however, overlook a process that is moving in the opposite direction—the influence of religion on psychology. Based on ethnographic research among licensed psychotherapists who integrate Buddhist or Jewish traditions into their clinical practice, we demonstrate that processes of privatization and de-privatization can take place simultaneously depending on context. In the setting of institutional training and professional gatherings, religion is visible and is used to produce a public, social, and moral vision for an invigorated psychology. By contrast, in the dyadic setting between psychotherapist and patient, religion is kept covert, and while it is significant to the psychotherapist in his/her practice, it remains invisible to the patient. Yet, despite its covert role in the clinical setting, psychotherapists see religion as having a broader ripple impact. We offer the notions of overt and covert sacralization to characterize how religion influences the field of psychology and discuss the implications of this study for the public/private debate.