Substitutes for the soul included the self, personality, and the brain. “Self” kept the older issues alive without metaphysical baggage. Calkins’ “self-psychology” held that the self was the basal concept in psychology, and that soul was unnecessary. Allport found that “personality” enabled psychology to address topics vital to soul. The brain is the most significant substitute for the soul. Lashley sought to translate introspective findings into a physicalist language. Lashley retained terms such as meaning and self-consciousness, but articulated them in terms of stimuli and responses of the nervous system. Hebb dismissed introspection altogether. His “cell assembly” theory proposed neural networks as organized patterns of responses to stimuli. Thought is the organized activity of the nervous system. Given the emphasis on organization of neural firing, therein is the brain a substitute for the soul, since in the older psychologies, soul was a principle of form or organization.

Innovative conceptions of the soul flourished in the past century. Worcester and McComb discussed the subconscious as the soul, that unknown aspect of ourselves. The subconscious was the source of religious experience. Myers’ “subliminal self” produced automata that upsurged across the threshold of consciousness; while automata could be pathological, they could also be indicative of the future evolution of the personality. James speculated about souls beyond the individual, even of the earth itself. Jung articulated an understanding of the soul and of psychical reality. Holt recognized soul in the form of consciousness as the “cross-section.” Holt recognized form in “the wish,” as organizing consciousness and behavior. These innovations represented a shift in emphasis from the figural of mental life—consciousness—to its ground. They shifted the conversation about the soul from it being an efficient cause of mental life to it being the formal cause of mental life.

There were psychologists who insisted that psychology was a natural science and that the soul as a concept was essential to the science, which was to be as philosophical as it was experimental. Neoscholastic psychology illustrates well that a psychology has roots in a way of life, in a culture. The Neoscholastics represented—Edward A. Pace, Michael Maher, Desiré Mercier, and Albert Farges—supported the development of scientific psychology, although among this group only Pace actually conducted experiments, having studied with Wundt. Pace and Mercier addressed Catholic critics of psychology, critics who feared it would be materialistic. Not so, said these Neoscholastics, who articulated an empirical psychology with a Scholastic philosophical foundation. While the soul is not a phenomenon, its existence could be grasped from its effects, especially conceptual thinking and freedom of the will. These thinkers also addressed their peers in psychology who rejected metaphysical considerations in this new science.

Today, the soul appears in psychology as a noun, as an adjective, and as a verb. First is soul as a noun, where debates over dualism loom large. Dualism still has a place in psychology. Second is soul as an adjective: psychical reality. Casey and Meissner distinguish psychical reality from the “subjective” by finding that this reality can be shared. Psychical reality relates to what is given to an experiencing person. To discern this reality, one must participate in the unfolding of what is experienced. For Christou (1963), psychological experience has two aspects: “subject-object unity” and “dramatic quality” (p. 75). Third is soul-as-verb, that is, soul as activity, creative activity, imaginative work, or in general, “soul making.” This section concentrates on the archetypal psychology as well as its critics. The book ends by delineating characterizations of the soul developed in the book, a psychology with soul in a soulless psychology.

Historical psychologies of the soul kept soul in circulation in psychology. Hall’s genetic psychology was a history grounded in the theory of evolution. Müller-Freienfels read the history of psychology as an exploration of the soul. Neumann conceptualized this history in terms of archetypes, and Rank gave an account of soul-beliefs. These histories presupposed a soulless psychology. For genetic psychology, images of the soul appealed to the imaginations of children to encourage character development. Neumann saved the soul and its immortality by interpreting them to mean the individuation process. For Rank, belief in the soul is inevitable, because our deepest desire is for immortality. “Noble lie” (Hall), myth (Neumann), and illusion (Rank) are ways of describing the nature of the soul. Soulless psychology was at the foundation of these historical studies, which reaffirmed the necessity of the soul in soulless psychology.

Some psychologists who would return the soul to psychology sought an integration with theology. The soul, especially in pastoral settings, had a place. Other psychologists developed in various ways an empirical psychology with a Thomistic philosophical foundation. Moore and Arnold conducted empirical research as well, making important contributions in factor analysis and cognition (Moore) and appraisal theory in emotions (Arnold). Their message was that a concept of soul grounded empirical research. Strasser discussed the soul by bridging Thomistic with Husserlian thought. Critical of the Neoscholastic view that empirical studies rest on metaphysical foundations, Strasser found more complex relations between the empirical and the metaphysical in psychology. The soul is the event whereby phenomena show themselves. Metaphysical psychology studies this act of illumination (interiority), and empirical psychology studies interiority as it externalizes itself in “quasi-objects.” Empirical psychology, with its emphasis on becoming, considers the soul as it objectifies itself in acts.

This chapter addresses the rise of psychology without a soul. There were scientific conceptions of psychology with a soul in the eighteenth century. Psychologies without soul followed from David Hume’s treatment of mental life. Lange coined the phrase, “psychology without a soul,” promoting a scientific psychology free of metaphysics. Soulless psychology emerged with psychology as a natural science in Newtonian terms. It also reflected debates over the distinction between the mental and the physical and the status of the “knower” in consciousness. The chapter includes debates over “psychology without a soul," and the development of an objective psychology in behaviorism. The new psychology without a soul triumphed by 1910, when Angell declared that the funeral for the soul had been held.

There were other dissenters to soulless psychology. Montague proposed that the soul was something like “potential energy.” Ladd held that the soul was a concept necessary for psychology because consciousness cannot be reduced to nerve action; consciousness has “real existence” in itself. Ladd’s hesitation to affirm the reality of the mind reflected his ambivalent position between an older Christian culture and the newer secular culture of his day. Hall attempted to ground the soul in recapitulation theory, with the soul evolving. Hall proposed a sublation or Aufhebung of the soul, with “immortality” transformed into the future evolution of the species and our gradual perfection. Münsterberg distinguished a soulless causal psychology and an ensouled purposive psychology. The two psychologies were both necessary but incompatible. McDougall did fuse the two by positing the real existence of a nonphysical mind.

Despite psychology having no place for the soul, there are reasons to reconsider the soul. Soul has a place outside of psychology in many cultures. So we look at formulations of the soul from a variety of cultures. Then we turn to developmental cognitive studies of contemporary folk psychology. These studies explore intuitions in children about the existence of the soul. A final example of experiential dualism comes from studies of people dealing with severe pain and illness, who can experience that their bodies are something that they have and feel at a distance, albeit an oppressive distance. The soul addresses the “phenomenological experience” that people are not simply objects in the physical world. These studies suggest that psychology “with a soul” is the suppressed double of psychology without a soul. The former has not disappeared, it has been marginalized.

Forty years ago, one could speak confidently about ours being a secularizing age: the more science and technology progressed, the more religion receded (Cox, 1965). Carl G. Jung could write about “modern man in search of a soul” (1933) because secularization meant that religious symbols, rituals, and beliefs lost their meaning for an ever increasing number. There were for the first time in history entire nations, especially the Soviet Union, dedicated to atheism. The Positivist dream was being fulfilled.

But it has not happened that secularization simply progressed. The public sphere became increasingly areligious, but this remains highly contested ground. If much of Western Europe seems contentedly secular, in the United States, as in many nations in the east and the south, intense religious ferment explodes on the cultural and political stages. Religious and spiritual issues, once on the fringe of mainstream psychology, as represented by the American Psychological Association, have come front and center. Even biomedicine, that bulwark of secularized views of the body and illness, acknowledges more readily the spiritual and religious dimensions of medicine and their usefulness in preserving health and fighting illness. One cannot speak of desecularization, however, for secularization proceeds apace.

By the early twentieth century, psychology was securely a secular enterprise (Maier, 2004), even though this assessment was not universally affirmed, and even if this assessment did not necessarily carry modernist implications. As Wade E. Pickren (2000) observes, many early scientific psychologists sought to “make their case that they had something new to offer their audiences without its appearing to be a materialistic science, a psychology without a soul” (p. 1022). He writes that they did so often by portraying the new psychology as valid because it was scientific, and hence better than the old abstract theories (citing Edward A. Pace as an example) and useful in building character. Catholic psychologists, however, could not easily distance themselves from the old, philosophical psychology. They adopted a different strategy. In the Catholic world, moreover, psychology was a problematic development, because by its very name psychology was the science of the soul. How could Catholics participate in a secular science of the soul without crashing onto the rocks of materialism and modernism? Neoscholastic psychology was an answer.

When A. A. Roback (1952) included a chapter on “Neo-Scholastic psychology,” he was giving attention to something the larger psychological community had ignored. When he revised his book, he added “A puzzling attitude” to this chapter (Roback, 1964). The puzzling attitude belonged to Misiak and Staudt, who in Catholics in psychology (1954) objected to Catholic psychologists being considered a separate school.