Structural, Developmental, and Depth-Psychological Approaches

Fowler’s landmark account presents a developmental sequence extending from primal or undifferentiated faith through universalizing faith, drawing on Piaget, Kohlberg, and Erikson. The model has been enormously influential in seminary education, pastoral counseling, spiritual formation, and religious education. Its theological assumptions, stage structure, samples, and claims to universality have also generated sustained criticism that now forms part of the field’s own development.

Streib’s religious-styles perspective represents one of the strongest contemporary empirical revisions of Fowler. It emphasizes styles, trajectories, regression, change, and deconversion rather than one invariant ascent through fixed stages. His Bielefeld research program has produced substantial qualitative and quantitative work on deconversion, religious biographies, and changes that progressive stage models could not easily accommodate.

A Piagetian alternative to Fowler focused specifically on transformations in how persons construe the God–human relation. Its narrower attention to religious judgment makes the model more readily operationalized in empirical research, while its stage assumptions remain open to the same questions of culture, normativity, and universality that face the broader developmental tradition.

Kegan is not primarily a theorist of religion. His constructive-developmental account of transforming subject–object relations has nevertheless informed later interpretations of religious and spiritual development, especially in adult-developmental and integral settings. His work belongs here as a general developmental resource rather than as an established program in the psychology of religion.

Cook-Greuter’s work on ego development and postconventional meaning-making has been especially influential in integral, transpersonal, and leadership communities. It offers a framework for interpreting increasingly complex forms of self-understanding. Its extension into claims about religious maturity or spiritual realization remains contested and should be treated as an adjacent developmental resource rather than as established empirical psychology of religion.

The lattice distinguishes temporary access to religious or contemplative states from the developmental structures through which those states are interpreted, integrated, and expressed. It proposes that state experience and stage development vary partly independently: profound experiences may occur across different structures of meaning-making, while their interpretation and embodiment will differ. The lattice functions here as a Zone 2 analytic instrument for organizing Zone 1 reports. Its broader theoretical context is treated on the page explaining the atlas’s Wilberian derivation.

One of the more direct attempts to apply integral developmental distinctions to contemplative and religious life. DiPerna’s work is influential within some integral and contemplative communities and is particularly concerned with the coordination of states, structures, and spiritual traditions. However, his developmental claims are best situated as an integral extension with limited standing in the field’s established empirical literature.

The landmark modern statement of object-relations theory applied to religious life. Rizzuto argues that representations of God are shaped through many of the same early relational and imaginative processes that form other internal objects, while remaining open to revision throughout the lifespan. Her work offered an important post-Freudian alternative to accounts that treated religion chiefly as illusion or pathology.

A sustained development of psychoanalytic and object-relations approaches to religion, including detailed engagement with Ignatian spirituality and Christian contemplative traditions. Meissner’s dual location as psychoanalyst and Jesuit also makes his work a useful boundary case concerning the relation between psychological interpretation and participation in a tradition.

Jung’s theories of archetype, symbol, individuation, and the religious function of the psyche supply structural interpretations of religious interiority. His work also includes practices such as active imagination that can operate as first-person injunctions, placing him at a Zone 1 / Zone 2 boundary. Jungian psychology works through different forms of warrant from the empirical developmental and attachment programs represented elsewhere on this page. Lionel Corbett, The Religious Function of the Psyche (1996), offers a useful contemporary articulation.

Grof’s cartographies of nonordinary experience—including perinatal matrices and systems of condensed experience—organize first-person reports into structural maps that can also guide later practice. These maps remain influential in transpersonal and psychedelic communities. Their empirical, explanatory, and clinical standing is heavily contested in mainstream psychology and religious studies, making Grof an important but clearly marked boundary figure, with limited standing as a representative of established Zone 2 research of established Zone 2 research.

A foundational systematic treatment of attachment theory in relation to religious life. Kirkpatrick develops compensation and correspondence pathways as hypotheses concerning how religious attachments may either supply security absent in earlier relationships or reflect patterns established through them. His work helped establish religious attachment as a cumulative research program.

A mature contemporary articulation of attachment approaches to religion and spirituality, drawing on two decades of empirical work. Attachment theory has become one of the field’s most developed programs concerning God-relations, religious conversion, security, and relational experience. A growing cross-cultural literature supports the program, although Western, individualist, and often Abrahamic assumptions remain important subjects of scrutiny.

Pargament’s work established religious coping, spiritual struggle, and the search for significance as major objects of psychological study. His distinctions among positive coping, negative coping, and forms of spiritual struggle have shaped clinical and empirical research for decades.

Emmons studies spiritual strivings and ultimate concerns as organizing structures of motivation and personality. His work helps move Zone 2 beyond stage models by examining the goals and commitments that give religious lives psychological coherence.

Park’s work on global meaning systems, religious coping, stress, and meaning-making provides one of the major contemporary frameworks for understanding how religious commitments organize responses to suffering and disruptive events.

Exline’s research on spiritual struggle, anger at God, divine conflict, religious and spiritual distress, and the psychological costs of religious life complicates accounts that focus primarily on religion’s benefits. Her work gives negative and ambivalent religious experience a substantial place within the empirical psychology of religion.

The handbook tradition provides a broad map of the contemporary empirical field, including conversion, meaning, coping, personality, social relations, health, struggle, and spiritual development. Edition and editorial details should be standardized in the final bibliography.