Santa Clara University

Diane Jonte-Pace, Ph.D.

Doctor Jonte-Pace is Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University. Her doctorate, from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, is in Religion and Psychological Studies. She is author, editor, or co-editor, of the following books: Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud’s Cultural Texts (University of California Press, 2001), Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (Routledge, 2001), and Teaching Freud (Oxford, 2003). She teaches courses on Psychology of Religion, Religion in the Theories of Freud and Jung, Feminist Theology, and Film and Religion. She served until 2004 as Chair of the Editorial Board of the Religious Studies Review. She currently serves as Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Development. She and her husband have been meditators in the Vipassana tradition for 30 years.

Doctor Jonte-Pace on her current interests:

"I'm interested in the intersections of psychology and religion -- and especially psychoanalysis and religion -- from a number of perspectives. In my current work I am developing a psychoanalytic interpretation of cultural mourning and melancholia in Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC and Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. My 2001 book "Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts" argued that Freud is neither a misogynist nor a religion-basher. Rather, I suggested, he is a careful interpreter of the dynamics of loss and mourning, gender and culture, religion and anti-Semitism. A more recent book, "Teaching Freud in Religious Studies" (2003) examines how scholars teach about Freud's contested legacy in the study of religion. In other work I examine the unusual commonalities in the Rorschach test records of advanced spiritual practitioners (enlightened Buddhist masters, Vedantic Swamis, and Native American Shamans)."