The Discovery of the Soul as a Place of Pilgrimage within: German Protestantism, Psychology, and Salvation through Education

Abstract

This article casts a spotlight on various stages of the entangled history of German Protestantism and psychology from the 16th to the 19th centuries to make visible the hitherto neglected religious past of this discipline and the educational aspirations tied to it. In broad strokes, it retraces how the idea of psychology emerged in the wake of the Reformation and continued to be shaped by German Protestant thinkers for centuries to come. First, the article reconstructs how, after Luther, the term “psychology” came to denote Protestant attempts to construct a non-Catholic scientia de anima. The dissemination and popularization of this endeavor in the writings of German Protestants is discussed in the second section. The third and fourth sections are devoted to shifts in reasoning about the soul during the early German Enlightenment and the subsequent flourishing of attempts at establishing psychology as a scientific discipline in its later stages. Finally, the last section looks at the further “scientification of the soul” during the 19th century, which, as will be argued, was crucial to the constitution of the modern educational field in Germany.

Keywords

• psychology
• education
• Protestantism
• soul
• confessionalization
• history of education