Item Detail
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11948
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2
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0
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English
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You Are Healing Souls : A History of Psychotherapy Within the Modern Latter-day Saint Community
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Case Western Reserve University
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Ph.D. diss.
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"In the 1970s, many religious communities that had not previously embraced the techniques and mindset of the modern psychologies began a process of integration. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) experienced this process through two mechanisms. The Association for Mormon Counselors and Psychotherapists (AMCAP) was founded in 1974 and succeeded in convincing the General Authorities of the loyalty and usefulness of LDS psychotherapists. In the late 1970s, Allen E. Bergin and others created the Institute for Studies in Values and Human Behavior at Brigham Young University. While short-lived, and a failure in terms of its ambitious goals, the Institute's vision of an integration of LDS beliefs and the modern psychologies has continued to inspire LDS psychotherapists. LDS psychotherapists have also assisted the LDS community in confronting the dilemmas created by feminism and contemporary sexuality, especially homosexuality. Throughout this process of integration, the traditional values of the LDS community have always served as a guide. Because the LDS community maintained a literal belief in their scriptures and theological doctrines, and a strong commitment to their religious traditions, they were not overwhelmed by the modern psychologies like the mainline Protestant communities were. These communities had already redefined their traditional beliefs as metaphors and thus were more open to modernist tendencies. By the 1990s, the LDS community had been psychologized, where one's perceptions of people and reality are filtered through the wisdom of the modern psychologies. The community did reject selfist psychology, which is the tendency to define mental wholeness in exclusively self-oriented, ego-centric terms." [Author's abstract]