Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices

instead of focusing on theology and psychology, or biblical studies and psychology, or theology and psychoanalysis. Psychology and psychoanalysis do not seem to have lost all contact with theology, at least not to such an extent as have psychiatry and theology. This book’s aim is to enrich and deepen our psychological understanding of biblical concepts and personalities. Such understanding is relevant for theology as well as for psychology and psychiatry. It may help theologians to contextualize their discipline by bringing it into contact with contemporary psychological and existential issues and tensions, both at an individual and a societal level. It also encourages psychologists and psychiatrists to develop and refine their vocabularies when they try to comprehend the existential meaning of what is transmitted to them by their clients. The book highlights the concepts of prophecy, martyrdom, and messianism from Christian and Judaic perspectives. Each concept offers one biblical figure as representative: Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus, respectively. The sections on these three subjects and personalities are sandwiched between a section on historical and conceptual issues, and a section devoted to select interdisciplinary issues. Biblical images of pain, anguish, suffering, hope, resentment, and awe are part of our cultural background and shape the way we understand our lives and sufferings. Biblical perspectives on human existence, on the other hand, differ in some important respects from modernist conceptions that prevail in psychotherapy and psychiatry. The book investigates the possibility of a theological criticism on common frameworks of psychological and psychiatric understanding of the inner world of the client. It also offers new ways to understand the ‘transformative’ power of religion. The chapters in this book are based on papers that were presented at the international conference Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Persons, 4–6 March 2002 in Amsterdam. The conference was organized by the Dutch Foundation for Psychiatry and Re- gion (in Dutch: Stichting Psychiatrie en Religie) a small, but active and lively organization, which organizes conferences and post-graduate education for mental health professionals and which offers a platform for interdisciplinary research and discussion in the field of mental health and religion. The organizers of the conference – Gerrit Glas, Herman M. van Praag, and Peter J. Verhagen – are m- bers of the board of the Foundation. All three are psychiatrists; two of them are also professionally occupied in another discipline: theology (Verhagen) and philosophy (Glas). The primary aim of the conference was to create a space for scientific dialogue between two disciplines with a troubled and complex relationship: psychiatry and theology. The exchange of opinions and viewpoints between specifically these two fields has dried up in the course of the past century and has virtually been absent from around 1960 till at least the early nineties of the previous century. I need to clarify that we were quite specific in isolating theology and psychiatry; instead of focusing on theology and psychology, or biblical studies and psychology, or theology and psychoanalysis. Psychology and psychoanalysis do not seem to have lost all contact with theology, at least not to such an extent as have psychiatry and theology.