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Psychospirituality
| Article
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20253 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1992 |
3,874 Words |
| Author
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James Deese
James Deese is the Hugh Scott Hamilton Professor Emeritus of
Psychology at the University of Virginia. He is the author or
coauthor of a dozen books and more than one hundred papers,
mainly on psychological topics. His last published books are
American Freedom and the Social Sciences and the fourth
edition, with E.K. Deese, of How to Study. He is currently
completing a book titled Covenants and Contracts: An Essay in
Social Psychology. |
There are two kinds of books for which Americans have an apparently insatiable appetite: diet books and self-help books, particularly those concerned with psychological problems. The diet books seem to come and go without pause. Every once in a while, a psychological self-help book comes along that seems to have some staying power. It is evident that the publishers of this book believe it to be one.
What is this book by Thomas Moore about? Let the full title inform us. It is Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. So far, splendid. The title goes against the current. There is scarcely an undergraduate program in psychology that does not offer a course on the psychology of personality. But who has heard of the psychology of the soul? A teacher so bold as to propose such a course would surely be called in by his department chairman or dean.
But when we begin to approach Moore's text, it appears to be less than revolutionary. My first impression (up to, perhaps, the end of chapter 1) was that this was to be a book in a very old Christian tradition, though by this point it was clear that the book was not Christian in any orthodox sense. I had the feeling that it was a book of meditations, perhaps not those of Thomas a Kempis but nevertheless of meditations in a well-established tradition.
Subsequent chapters disillusioned me on that score. Although, like most books of meditation, this is the kind of work one could keep by one's bedside and dip into without any regard to logical continuity, it was not a book of meditations. It was something--to describe it soberly--about the relevance of myths, mainly Greek, and dreams for our daily life.
What Kind Of A Book?
What kind of a book is it then? Help comes from an unexpected source--the Library of Congress. In its information about cataloging on the copyright page of the book, tow topics are listed: 1. Spiritual life. 2. Psychology, Religious. This helps enormously. We now know that the book is not primarily a psychological treatise, at least as judged by the Library of Congress, despite its author's principal credential as a psychotherapist. It is a spiritual guide, albeit one that transcends any denominational or even religious limits. For the Christian or Jew looking for something like the forthright apologetics of C.S. Lewis or the consolations of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, it will not seem to be spiritual. It is spiritual in the sense that the
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