Augustine and Psychology

Sandra Dixon, John Doody, Kim Paffenroth

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780739179192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essays in Augustine and Psychology, edited by Sandra Lee Dixon, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth, relate St. Augustine to the modern theory and practice of psychology in several ways. The contributors analyze Augustine's own examination of himself (and occasionally others) to see to what extent he himself was a "doctor" or practiced "therapy" in ways that we can recognize and appreciate; they find connections between his theories of memory and mind, and modern theories of the same; they consider the influences and context in which he worked, and how those affected him and his ideas of the mind and soul; and, lastly, the contributors subject St. Augustine to the scrutiny of modern psychoanalysis (and critique such scrutiny where appropriate).

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1 The Journey to Simplicity: Augustine and the Plural Experiences of the Soul
• 2 Teaching Freud and Interpreting Augustine’s Confessions
• 3 Reading Augustine, Monica, Milan with Attention to Cultural Interpretation and Psychological Theory
• 4 St. Augustine: Archetypes of Family
• 5 Between Two Worlds
• 6 Augustine among the Ancient Therapists
• 7 Augustine and Freud: The Secularization of Self-Deception
• 8 Augustine and Dopamine
• 9 Tears of Grief and Joy: Chronological Sequence and the Structure of Confessions, Book 9
• 10 On Seeing the Light: Assessing Psychoanalytic Interpretations of Vision in Augustine’s Confessions
• 11 Augustine’s Extraordinary Theory of Memory
• Bibliography
• About the Contributors