Making God real and making God good: Some mechanisms through which prayer may contribute to healing. (October 2013)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Luhrmann, Tanya Marie
• Is Part Of: Transcultural psychiatry. Volume 50:Number 5(2013)
• Page Start: 707
• Page End: 725
• Publication Date: 2013-10
• Subjects: healing -- prayer -- psychosis -- trauma; Psychiatry, Transcultural -- Periodicals; Social psychology -- Periodicals; Psychiatry -- Periodicals; Ethnopsychology -- Periodicals; Cross-Cultural Comparison -- Periodicals; Ethnopsychology -- Periodicals; Psychiatry -- Periodicals; 616.89
• DOI: 10.1177/1363461513487670
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1363-4615

Abstract

Many social scientists attribute the health-giving properties of religious practice to social support. This paper argues that another mechanism may be a positive relationship with the supernatural, a proposal that builds upon anthropological accounts of symbolic healing. Such a mechanism depends upon the learned cultivation of the imagination and the capacity to make what is imagined more real and more good. This paper offers a theory of the way that prayer enables this process and provides some evidence, drawn from experimental and ethnographic work, for the claim that a relationship with a loving God, cultivated through the imagination in prayer, may contribute to good health and may contribute to healing in trauma and psychosis.