• ARTICLES, Special Section, XIVth Biennial Conference of the EPCA - 2018

“In whom confide?”: Exploring the Christian-Catholic perspective

Sosero, V.

Keywords:
religion, spirituality, dependency, PCP

Abstract:
The religious dimension can represent an important aspect in a person’s life. How can Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) contribute to the understanding of this construction? The present work is an exploration of religious constructions in a group of Catholic-Christian believers, as well as in a group of people who do not feel represented by a religious credo. We will make some hypotheses and reflections around the construct of spirituality explored in both the research groups. Finally, we will use the PCP professional construct of “dependency dispersion” to understand to whom the people of both groups turn to, when they are in need. The present research finds its roots in a personal journey taken in the religious domain. If up until a certain point religion was, in the author’s experience, a matter of ultimate truth, meeting Kelly and Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) transformed it into something that could be looked at in different ways. In other words, PCP offered a key to overcoming the “true-not true” opposition and construing religion into new ways that gave deep meanings to what constitutes a more or less elaborative choice.