A Review of ‘Spirituality and Psychiatry’

changeling—which Goodey suggests is the most immediate precursor to modern notions of those with congenital intellectual disability—turned on debates regarding the origin of the soul. As the emerging consensus was that changelings had the material form of human nature but not its substance (lacking, for Locke, intellectual or rational capacities), traducianists (who insisted that human souls were derived from their parents’) were left with the difficult task of explaining the aborted transference of souls from parents to these “children” while infusionists (who held that human souls were divinely imparted to the fetus after conception) were hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that God was responsible for the resulting “lumps of flesh.” However, although Locke himself distinguished between human beings with impaired capacities to reason abstractly (what marked true human nature) and changelings who were without these capacities altogether, the die had been cast: idiots were those whose abstractive powers were marred, which meant that their status as human beings and persons were questionable. Goodey’s major thesis throughout is to argue that both intelligence and intellectual disability are historically contingent constructions. His book is a tour de force toward this end. One could go further and see that our modern understanding of the individual itself emerges simultaneously with that of contemporary notions of intelligence and intellectual disability. Yet from a theological perspective, one comes away with a rather pessimistic conclusion: that there is no way to avoid, psychologically speaking, the association between intellectual disability and evil as human beings have traditionally understood it. Perhaps what is redemptive in turn is that if these negative associations are historical contingencies, then perhaps it still may be possible for positive constructions to emerge. Might Goodey’s volume be a catalyst for the latter? Amos Yong, PhD J. Rodman Williams Professor of Theology Regent University School of Divinity Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA