Religion and Lust or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire

Religion and Lust or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire by James Weir offers a provocative late-Victorian inquiry into the psychological ties between spiritual feeling and sexual impulse. Combining clinical observation, comparative psychology, and a physio-psychical framework, Weir examines how religious emotion and sexual desire intersect across individual cases, literature, and cultural practices. Published originally at the turn of the 20th century and revised with additional notes and essays, this scientific monograph situates its arguments in the era’s emerging theories of mind and behavior. Weir argues for measurable correlations rather than moral judgments, surveying historical examples and contemporary reports to map patterns of sublimation, projection, and symbolic transference between erotic and devotional life. Readers will encounter a scholarly, sometimes controversial, attempt to place religious experience within a biological and psychological context — a perspective that reflects both the insights and limits of early psychology. Ideal for students and listeners interested in the psychology of religion, history of sexology, Victorian intellectual history, or the development of scientific approaches to emotion, this audiobook delivers a challenging historical study that prompts reflection on how belief and desire have been understood across time. Genre: Science.