Coming to Terms with Our Terms

This chapter surveys psychotherapists’ common understandings for the primary terms the volume tracks: psychotherapy, religion, secular, science, medicine, Buddhism, spirituality, and terms for the ultimate aim of life such as enlightenment. Psychotherapists’ “conventional definitions” for these concepts are established as drawn from both textual analysis and data from interviews and ethnographic observation. The chapter then explains how therapists inherited these conventional definitions through brief histories of how European communities came to invent a modern concept of religion that is based on a Protestant prototype of inner belief or came to discover a Buddhism defined as atheistic (despite the evidence of Buddhist communities throughout history who propitiate deities). The chapter thus clarifies the socially constructed nature of these core concepts, concepts to which psychotherapists then contribute to in an ongoing revision and reconstruction.