Karl Girgensohn

1875-1925. Protestant religious psychologist. Born at Carmel auf ösel, he was successively professor at Dorpat (1907), Greifenwald (1919), and Leipzig (1922). Concerned with the challenge of modern psychoanalysis to the Christian faith, he strove to establish the study of religious psychology on a firmly empirical basis, and in his most important work, The Spiritual Structure of Religious Experience (1921), he argued that religious experience is a synthesis of intuitive awareness of God and consciousness of self. The importance of his work was at once recognized in Germany, but far less readily in England and America. One of the leading architects of modern post- Freudian religious psychology, Girgensohn also wrote Foundations of Dogma (1924) and The Inspiration of Holy Scripture (1925) and founded the periodical Christentum und Wissenschaft (1925f.).