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Article ID: CBB001201191

“Dark Ecstasies”: Sex, Mysticism and Psychology in Early Twentieth-Century England (2013)

Dixon, Joy (Author)

Gender and History
Volume: 25
Pages: 652--667
Publication date: 2013
Language: English

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Mysticism Sex Objectivity Senses and sensation; perception Modernization Psychology Science and religion Experience; witness Spiritualism 20th century, early Great Britain

Like many of her contemporaries, however, Underhill resisted what she saw as the reduction of religion either to a system of ethics or to a purely intellectual programme, arguing, for example, that the external religiosity of the social gospel movement was `the starved life'.12 As Leigh Eric Schmidt reminds us, historians cannot understand the world of liberal religious thought without recognising the extent to which that world was structured by `narratives of desire in which mysticism holds primary interest as part of a search for a living experience of God'.13 At the same time, however, in Underhill's work, as in that of many other commentators on mysticism at this time, considerable effort was expended in distinguishing between `normal' and `abnormal' experiences.14 In her attempt to `modernise' mysticism by incorporating the insights of the psychology of religion, Underhill was caught up in a dilemma which was itself produced by the historically specific configuration of the relationship between religion (in its liberal modernist form) and science (particularly religious psychology) in the early twentieth century: how to affirm the subjective aspects of the mystical experience, including those sensual and bodily aspects which testified to the `reality' of the experience itself, while simultaneously resisting the tendency to interpret religious ecstasy as a form of sexual pathology? [from article content]

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