英文摘要 |
Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and French litterateur and mystic Romain Rolland had a critical debate about the nature and interpretation of religious experience. While Rolland proposed that religious experience constitutes the core and essence of religion and characterized it as ”oceanic feeling”, Freud consider it something needed future psychological explanation and delineated it as an ”illusion”. The debate between Freud and Rolland is relevant to the critical issue of intelligibility of religious experience and the debate between reductionism and anti-reductionism in Religious Studies. Is religious experience incompatible with reason? Can we grasp the meaning of religious experience through scientific investigation? This essay attempts to tackle this difficult debate by analyzing two precursors’-William James and Sigmund Freud-interpretations of religious experience in the field of psychology and religion. James and Freud both proposed psychological reading of religious experience and offered theoretical insights, although James is usually regarded as one of the important figures in the camp of antireductionism and Freud is considered the typical exemplar of reductionism. Through the analysis of two scholars’ subtle reading of religious experience, this essay attempts to explore the other possibilities of interpreting religious experience beyond the dichotomy of essentialism and reductionism. |