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An obvious conclusion to be derived from the previous chapter could be formulated thus: When we, like Wundt, understand religion as an element of culture, we need concepts and units of analysis that will enable us to investigate the nexus between a certain culture (or cultural context) and the person. Wundt himself did not yet dispose of them; but they have now become available with such concepts as activity, action, habitus, and also narrative or 'story." The theorizing about the "dialogical self" as initiated by Hermans and Kempen may count as an example as well. Their work – which has been well received by the international cultural psychology "movement" (Hermans 1999a, b, 2001a, b, 2002, 2003; Hermans and Dimaggio 2007; Valsiner 2001) – is promising for a cultural psychological analysis of religion. It is particularly interesting to take a closer look at this body of theory, as its development sustains historical relationships with the psychology of religion. The dialogical self may be regarded as a belated result of a much older Dutch initiative to integrate cultural psychology and psychology of religion, which led to the establishment of a department for the psychology of culture and religion at Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, in 1956 (although the roots of the initiative reach back to the founding Years of psychology in general in the Netherlands). As well as this, it catches up with a stand that has become fundamental to all psychologies of religion for a long time: psychological research on religion must be performed from a secular perspective (cf. Belzen 2001c). To corroborate these claims, it is necessary to draw substantially on historical information as well as on information about recent developments. I shall therefore present a mixture of historical and systematic argumentation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-3491-5_8

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