ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the psychiatric tendency to ignore religion and identifies with science reflects a one-sided understanding of its own nature. Religion and psychiatry occupy the same country, a landscape of meaning, significance, guilt, belief, values, visions, suffering and healing. So far as psychiatry is concerned, there are a number of prejudices standing in the way of a closer relationship with religion. Religion is taken to be ‘revealed’, its knowledge claims being rooted in authority and upheld through faith. The separation between science and religion is perhaps a peculiarly Western phenomenon. Religion and psychiatry should therefore move from tolerant indifference to tolerant engagement as the basis of good practice in both disciplines. The world view derived from science may be mysterious, so this line of argument might go, it may indeed require certain presuppositions, but it differs from that of religion in being based on objective data, on the facts, rather than on divine revelation.
