This essay considers how we “create meaning” in the interplay of “felt sense” and “symbols,” and examines the direct and immediate interplay between some common everyday experiences and a series of concepts from psychoanalytic perspectives to reveal how this interplay has affinities with religion. Psychoanalysis and religion are overlapping projects. Psychoanalytic symbolizing of experience facilitates our knowing features of religion not previously known, as well as knowing features previously known, in new ways.
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The project of psychoanalytically understanding religion, following Freud's example, has often devolved into psychoanalytically “explaining away” religion. Freud engendered inhospitality at best, hostility and derision at worst, having used his theorizing to dismiss religion as an illusion, a neurosis, something to be understood solely on naturalistic—that is, psychological terms. (See, for example, Freud, 1907; 1913; 1927; 1930; 1939). As a result, conversations between psychoanalysis and religion have not been especially welcome in some circles in religious studies, (nor are they particularly sought in analytic circles). Some scholars have, regrettably, peremptorily dismissed anything having to do with psychoanalytic theorizing.
Ricoeur (1970), in Freud and Philosophy, provided a foundation for this kind of project when he demonstrated that and how psychoanalysis was subject to a variety of “readings.” Homans (1970) extended Ricoeur's efforts in Theology After Freud. Don Browning (1987), in part influenced by these contributions, explained how psychoanalytic psychology was an inherently normative project that sought to promote a movement of healing toward expressly normative goals. Browning characterized psychoanalysis as offering “concepts and technologies for the ordering of the interior life” (Browning, 1987, p. 2). Psychoanalytic psychology outlines a “positive culture,” “a system of symbols and norms which guides a society or group by providing general images of the nature of the world, the purpose of life, and at least some of the basic principles by which life should be lived” (Browning, 1987, p. 5). W.W. Meissner notes that “most analysts would balk at this [reading]” (personal communication, September 21, 2004).
Resemblance has to do with similarity in external appearance—what an observer or spectator notes, visually—“being like” (OED). Affinity has to do with a relationship or kinship, having a common purpose or intent (OED)—what may be inferred, and felt—“bordering upon” (OED). Of course, affinity does not mean “identity” or “equivalence.” Space does not permit consideration of the various differences between psychoanalysis and religion.
I have, in this regard, found Meissner's (2003) The Ethical Dimension of Psychoanalysis especially instructive. Meissner writes in his preface, regarding the relation between psychoanalytic and ethical perspectives: “Such interdisciplinary efforts encounter pressures for mutual adaptation, assimilation, and internal modification created by the transformative influence of each upon the other. This has certainly been my experience in pursuing this inquiry, and the reader may find himself or herself encountering similar pressures for rethinking basic issues in either discipline in order to take into account the data and perspectives engendered by the other discipline. This process involves both reshaping certain ethical considerations in a form more congruent with analytic conceptualization on one hand, and a corresponding rethinking of certain tenets of analytic territory on the other to allow greater integration with ethical perspectives” (p. vii). This inquiry between religion and psychoanalysis contributes to a “reshaping” and “rethinking” of each.
In keeping with the orientation of this essay, it is important to note that each of the brief characterizations of key psychoanalytic concepts has been crafted in a manner that assumes that the full meaning of each concept is accessible only within the particular network of concepts in which it is embedded, and that the full meaning of each network is accessible only in conjunction with the practices through which it has emerged and is enacted. (Although this caveat may find its origins in a number of thinkers, I am most clearly indebted to Wittgenstein's (1953/1958) appreciation of the interplay among “language games” and “forms of life”.) To say it another way, one cannot truly grasp the meanings of any particular concept without having achieved some fluency in the broader range of related concepts; further, grasping the meaning and achieving the fluency can only be accomplished by participating in the unique activities within which these concepts themselves emerged. It is worth noting that Freud (1926) argued this precise claim in his manuscript, The Question of Lay Analysis.
One might say that this essay pursues rendering religion more “intelligible”: “The cumulative evidence is that all of the distinctive approaches to the subject [of religion] share the same intention, namely, to make religion intelligible. Intelligibility is the key motivational factor in the progressive development of the subject-field [of religious studies]” (Capps, 1995, p. 334). This is, I believe, a variation on William James's goal of “immediate luminousness” (1902/1982, p. 18). The Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1951) argues on behalf of developing language that is appropriate to each context, thereby facilitating our grasp of problems as well as of potential answers to such problems. In that regard, he draws upon philosophical language to explicate religious (and Christian) issues (explicating sin, for example, in terms of “estrangement”).
With this in mind, the relation between psychoanalysis and religion can be cast in different—yet equally accurate—ways: psychoanalysis and religion (as language games and forms of life, as theories and practices), are analogous, or overlap. Psychoanalysis is, functionally, religion (though this casting runs the risk of implying that the category, religion, is more elemental). Psychoanalysis discloses religion (though again, this runs the risk of considering psychoanalysis as instrumental, and religion as elemental, and substantive.) Last, psychoanalysis and religion offer similar ways of symbolizing a somewhat common territory of experiencing.
Readers familiar with 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich will recognize that allusion to his thinking: religion is a matter of ultimacy, that is, having to do with matters of being and non-being, life and death (Tillich, 1951).
James (1902/1982) introduces both terms in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. James writes, “It is as if there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’…” (p. 58). “He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck “(p. 508).
James is carrying out a particular way of examining and articulating things in the territory of religion and as such, some of the features of that “way” ought to be noted. First, functioning as (what he calls) “a radical empiricist,” James begins and ends his reflections with experience. As such, James provides numerous examples of religious experiences, examples that cumulatively illustrate a way of construing “religious experience.” Second, as the complete title to his Gifford Lectures indicates (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature), by exploring a range of experiences one may formulate a class of experiences (that is, religious), and from that, develop some basic ideas about the structure and processes of the human mind as that which experiences (that is, human nature).
James's definition of religion in the Varieties, “for the purpose of these lectures [italics in the original]” (p. 28) is “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider divine [italics in the original]” (p. 31). In James's judgment, common to the wide range of—the class of—religious experiences is an awareness of “something there,” “a MORE.” This “something more,” (if I could put it that way), may be apprehended in tradition-specific ways (that is, may be experienced in and through the language and symbols of a particular historical religious community and tradition); yet, “something there,” “a MORE”—like the term “religion” itself—represents the effort to name a class of experiences across communities and traditions. In sum, a comparative survey of a particular kind of experience leads to a way of regarding that kind of experience and, a particular aspect of it as involving the awareness of a presence of a certain sort.
As W.W. Meissner notes, in his comments on a draft of this essay, “This last consideration may be implicit in the definition, but not explicit.”
“Threefold” pays homage to Freud's (1923) own definition: “Psychoanalysis is the name (i) of a procedure for the investigation of mental processes which are almost inaccessible in any other way, (ii) of a method based upon that investigation for the treatment of neurotic disorders and (iii) of a collection of psychological information obtained along those lines, which is gradually being accumulated into a new scientific discipline” (S.E. 18:235). “Intrapsychic processes” is a shorthand for referring to what takes place, “in the mind.” “Via introspection and empathy” uses Heinz Kohut's language, though I believe Kohut's view is, in this regard, true to Freud's efforts. Freud might have said, “free association and empathy” (personal communication, A.-M. Rizzuto, September 14, 2004).
See, for example, Freud's essays, “The Neuro-psychoses of Defense” (1894); “Further Remarks on the Neuro-psychoses of Defense” (1896); “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900); “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1911); See, in particular, “The Unconscious” (1915), and “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920, where he discusses similarities in perceiving the external and the internal world (for example, “our perception is subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with the phenomena perceived”), and he employs the metaphor of a “vesicle” that evolves as the “ego” is attending to stimuli emerging in both the external and the internal worlds.
This distinction becomes increasingly crucial in clinical process. In technical terms, the “ego” or “I” can undergo “splitting” (“the splitting of the ego”), in which an “observing ego” stands alongside an “experiencing ego.” This distinction becomes the basis for the project of psychoanalysis: the analyst establishes a therapeutic alliance or working alliance with the observing ego of the analysand, and together they observe and seek to understand what arises in the experiencing ego. In the project of working through the transference, the observing ego practices observing, reflecting upon, and prospectively altering the ways in which the experiencing ego experiences (through “transferences,” or “templates”).
My thanks, again, to A.-M. Rizzuto for helping me make this point with more precision.
Freud writes, “Perhaps he may himself notice that a very remarkable psychological problem begins to appear in this situation—of a thought of his own being kept secret from his own self. It looks as though his own self were no longer the unity which he had always considered it to be, as though there were something else as well in him that could confront that self. He may become obscurely aware of a contrast between a self and a mental life in the wider sense” (1926, p. 188).
This systemic use expresses what came to be called the “topographic” model or assumption (topos = place): the mind is constituted—metaphorically, of course—of places.
In this regard, Ricoeur's (1970) reflections are invaluable, as he recommends approaching psychoanalysis as an energetics, a theory of forces, and a hermeneutics, a theory of meanings.
Again, these ideas are Ricoeur's (1970). I am not, in these comments, arguing that this is a way of construing psychoanalysis that Freud (consciously) intended. I am, however, proposing that this is a viable reading of his ideas and as such, it illustrates how his efforts were “an illusion of the future” that he hoped would displace the illusion of religion of which he wrote in The Future of an Illusion. One might suggest, rather ironically, that Freud was consciously writing about the future of the illusion—religion—yet preconsciously writing about the future of the illusion—psychoanalysis. Both illusions were, as he admitted, expressions of wishes.
The clinical stance is comprised, technically, of “introspection and empathy”: the person seeking care is encouraged to attend to internal experience and report that experience to the analyst (introspection); the analyst is to seek to understand that experience as if the person seeking care, via vicarious introspection (empathy).
Winnicott wrote, “The basis for all theories about human personality is continuity of the line of life… continuity which carries with it the idea that nothing that has been part of an individual's experience is or can ever be lost to that individual, even if in various complex ways it should and does become unavailable to consciousness” (cited in Davis & Wallbridge, 1981, p. 33).” Elsewhere he wrote, “With ‘the care that it receives from its mother’ each infant is able to have a personal existence, and so begins to build up what might be called a continuity of being. On the basis of this continuity of being the inherited potential gradually develops into an individual infant” (Winnicott, 1960/1965), p. 54).
Among the concepts Winnicott develops to account for the developmental forms of relationships are the self-with-”environmental provision” “(1963/1965a); the self with the “object subjectively perceived” in transition to the self with the “object objectively perceived” (1963/1965b); the self engaged in “object relating” in transition to the self engaged in “object use” (1969/1971; 1989); the self with “transitional object” (1953/1971).
Tacit or explicit in many Western philosophical and psychological theories of self is the assumption that self is somehow in the body—“the ghost in the machine”—or coextensive with the body—“the integumentive theory, which asserts that a person ends at his or her skin” (Goldberg, 1990, p. 116). These ideas are features of a Cartesian-Newtonian-Kantian legacy, distinguishing self and not-self as subject and object and, correlatively, internal and external, inside and outside
“Self” is a term we use, then, to refer to that which is “going-on-being,” or better, is the going-on-being (1963/1965a). What Winnicott called “impingements” disrupt or interrupt going-on-being, in experiences of what he termed “primitive agonies.” Winnicott illustrated this point: “a return to an unintegrated state; falling for ever; loss of a sense of the real; loss of capacity to relate to objects” (1989, pp. 89–90). Through these ideas, Winnicott brought to the fore the phenomenologic truth that the physical self may go-on-being, may continue to live, but the psychic self may experience interruptions of going-on-being, and in a very real sense, cease to exist—that is, die.
The motives for searching for connection with something permanent or “eternal” are likely numerous. A.-M. Rizzuto speculates, in response to these comments, that it may have to do with “the human awareness of death,” “the terror of annihilation,” “the need to find an object that is not imperfect… limited, frustrating” (personal communication, A.-M. Rizzuto, September 14, 2004).
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Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank Tricia Hughes, Leonard Hummel, William W. Meissner, S.J., and Ana-Maria Rizzuto, for critical responses to an earlier draft of this article.
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Schlauch, C.R. Deeper Affinities: Fundamental Resonances Between Psychoanalysis and Religion. Pastoral Psychol 55, 61–80 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-006-0032-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-006-0032-3