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The Subconscious and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

James Bissett Pratt
James Bissett Pratt
Affiliation:
Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
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Extract

There is no subject about which popular psychology just now has so much to say as the “subconscious.” Since the name came into wide use a dozen years ago, it has come to be regarded as something so definite and well understood as to be itself the explanation of many other things. Its bearing upon questions of religious experience has been particularly emphasized, and, in fact, it is largely on this account that it has aroused so much popular interest. In short, the word “subconscious” is spoken so glibly and taken to be the self-evident solution of so many spiritual problems that it will be worth our while to consider what we really know about it, and especially what its actual relation to religion may be. For, though often misused, there can be no doubt that the term stands for something very fundamental in our mental life, and that its connection with religion is in one way or another extremely important.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , April 1913 , pp. 209 - 228
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1913

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References

1 Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, i, 12.

2 Ibid., p. 15.

3 Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, p. 18.

4 Elwood Worcester, Religion and Medicine, p. 42.

5 Dreamer, Body and Soul, p. 39.

6 William Sanday, Christologies Ancient and Modern.

7 Sidis and Goodhart, Multiple Personality, p. 241.

8 Psychology of Religious Belief, pp. 15 and 23.

9 The substance of this paragraph and the quotations in it are taken from Prince, “Some of the Present Problems of Abnormal Psychology,” Psychological Review, xii, 135–139. See also Sidis and Goodhart, Multiple Personality, passim.

10 See Prince, Morton, Dissociation of a Personality, 1906, passim.Google Scholar

11 See Prince, “Experiments to Determine Co-conscious Ideation,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology, iii, 33–42. Prince and Peterson, “Experiments in Psycho-galvanic Reactions from Co-conscious Ideas,” Ibid., iii, 114–131.

12 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 25.