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, calling in leading experts from the new intellectual disciplines that had come to redefine the sexual in the preceding decades. Specialists were drawn from established fields like biology, medicine and theology, but a particular emphasis was placed on engaging with the ‘new sciences of man’ such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis. The process of ‘taking in’ the expertise of these
a similar turnabout for distributors of Catholic sexual advice. Marriage guidance provided by Catholic authorities before the 1960s tended to be sceptical of, if not downright hostile towards, psychoanalysis. A collection of frequently asked questions for Catholic couples, first broadcast on radio by Frs Rumble and Carty and then published in a booklet, set out the ‘Church’s’ opinion of Freud in
selfhood. Erik Erikson extended Freud’s ‘developmental theory’ in his work of 1950, Childhood and Society , identifying childhood as a determinative stage in the ‘psychosocial development’ of religious identities. 64 In the same year, Erich Fromm published Psychoanalysis and Religion , which argued that religion primarily constituted a childish desire to remain attached
welcoming the International Congress of Psychotherapy to Rome in 1953. 84 There is little evidence to suggest that psychology was used by sisters and nuns in Britain in the 1950s, but this awareness may have sown the seeds for the embrace of psychoanalysis in the late 1960s and 1970s. 85 This thinking replicated messages in the nun memoirs and Bride of a King : today’s novice was different from her predecessor. It adds, however, an important innovation – the novice mistress in revising her teaching methods must ‘adjust herself’ and, by implication, the convent too
an integral feature of a disciplined, spiritual religious life and introspection became even more commonplace for women religious by the 1970s as psychoanalysis developed into an important means of making sense of the disruption many faced. Teasing apart these layers allowed me a glimpse into women-centred communities and the ‘social and material framework within which they operated, the perceived choices and cultural patterns they faced, and the complex relationship between individual consciousness and culture’. 28 Religious life is a relational life and oral