ABSTRACT
This chapter explores clinical and empirical implications emanating from the distinction between the dialectic process of conversion and the dialogic process of returning. It argues that following the recent influx of cult-based salvation-therapy movements, most social studies of religious conversion seem to have concentrated on providing causal models of the phenomenon. The difficulty in explicating religious conversion experiences in secular social scientific terms comes through clearly if one examines how endeavors to present alternative positivistic-sequential accounts of conversion processes criticize each other. While in psychotherapy, according to both linear-conversion and cyclistic-returning, re-biographing may occur; only the latter permits a favorable reinterpretation of the past, while the former insists that it must always be a negative-sinful past that caused present neurosis. Psychoanalytic linearity appears, however, to control not only the living people who seek therapy but also deceased personalities undergoing the postmortem process of psychobiography.
