V. Mamleev’s psychology of religion

Abstract

This article analyses views of the psychologist V. I. Mamleev (1902‒1943) on the nature of religion. It scrutinises main elements of his doctrine, namely his criticism of foreign theories (S. Freud’s and L. Lévy-Bruhl’s), the distinction between religious ideology and religious psychology, conception of the unconscious and its influence on religious views, as well as the project of study of deconversion. The article also shows which of these topics were later employed by Soviet psychology of religion, and integrates the scholar into a certain tradition of the Soviet religious studies. The most prominent place in theoretical legacy of V. Mamleev is occupied by the criticism of Western approaches in religious studies, which he classifi es according to a range of grounds. The article pays special attention to this aspect and demonstrates which parts of this criticism may be regarded as reasonable (e.g. the erroneous character of some generalisations of psychoanalysts, non-historism of Lévy-Bruhl’s and Freud’s theories, etc.), and which are related to the scientist’s ideological background (e.g. the ideas of class-conditioned and idealistic character of foreign theories, their “bourgeois” fl avour). This distinction is signifi cant in the context of studies in the sphere of the humanities in the USSR in the 1920s. The article draws on rare and archival sources, which allows us to trace the evolution of Mamleev as a scholar. These range from studies in history and theory of law to the study of religious psychology. Besides, he was interested in both the processes characteristic of the religious consciousness and psychological features of the transition from faith to atheism, which is confi rmed by the plan of study of this phenomenon, discovered by the author of the article among Mamleev’s documents; this plan is analysed in the fi nal section of the article.

Keywords

• psychology of religion
• history of science
• religious studies
• scientifi c atheism
• thinking
• psychoanalysis
• culture
• unconscious