The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice

The Psychology of Religion and Coping: Theory, Research, Practice is a work by Kenneth I. Pargament (1997).

Core claims

• Pargament treats religion not as a variable to be correlated with outcomes but as a process — a coping system with its own internal logic — thereby offering empirical psychology the functional grammar it has always lacked for engaging the sacred without reducing it.
• The book’s central construct, “the sacred,” operates as a psychological axis comparable to Jung’s Self or Hillman’s Gods: it is what orients the entire coping system, and its conservation or transformation determines whether religious struggle produces growth or collapse.
• By insisting that religion can be both helpful and harmful — that the same coping mechanism can serve preservation or transformation of significance — Pargament demolishes the ideological binary between Freud’s dismissal and Jung’s embrace, replacing polemic with empirical precision.

Related questions

• How does Pargament’s concept of “negative religious coping” map onto Kalsched’s Protector/Persecutor dynamic in The Inner World of Trauma, particularly regarding the self-traumatizing function of rigid defensive structures?
• Hillman argues in Re-Visioning Psychology that “the Gods become diseases” when consciousness has no containers for divine influxes — how does Pargament’s empirical research on spiritual struggle and psychopathology either confirm or complicate this archetypal claim?
• Edinger asserts in Science of the Soul that “there is no depth psychology for those contained within a specific religious creed because there’s no need for it” — does Pargament’s evidence that religious coping can both facilitate and obstruct psychological growth challenge or refine Edinger’s categorical distinction?

See also

• Library page: /library/recovery/pargament-psychology-religion-coping/

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