Abstract
This article is a review of Donald Capps’s At Home in the World: A Study in Psychoanalysis, Religion, and Art (Capps 2013). After a summary of the book and its connection to other works by Capps on male melancholy, I address its subject matter from three perspectives: (1) a methodological perspective where my concern is whether psychoanalysis alone is a sufficient tool for interpreting works of art; (2) a broader cultural perspective where I attempt to situate melancholy in the broader context of modernity and a concomitant loss of faith; (3) finally, I comment on the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson who is at the same time very present and strangely absent in At Home in the World. It is argued that Emerson would probably have been more relevant to the thematic of the book than is William James. Despite these questions and reservations put forward in the spirit of critical debate, At Home in the World is not only a must for students of art, but is also a major contribution to psychology of religion and an illustration of the continued viability of psychoanalysis.
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Notes
And yet, music is not totally absent in the book. Thus, in a section called (with a polite nod to Freud) “Where Melancholia Is, Let Mourning Be” (pp. 46–49), Capps comments on the pop song Mona Lisa. I wonder, however, whether Capps’s preference for paintings is related to an implicit experiential, non-linguistic understanding of religion. Probably not, since in an earlier work (Capps 1993) Capps was occupied, albeit here with a view to pastoral care, with the resources of poetry for the formation of the self.
References
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Nørager, T. At Home in the World: Summary and Commentary from a Partly Emersonian Perspective. Pastoral Psychol 64, 523–529 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0585-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0585-x