The Psychoanalysis of the Living God (II)

In my last installment I noted some recent thoughts on past and possibly future links between psychoanalysis and theology, especially about the controverted question of the existence of God, a discussion that has been advanced very considerably by the contributions, since 1979, of Ana-Maria Rizzuto in her landmark book The Birth of the Living God. That book, as I noted in the previous installment, has recently been the subject of an appreciative study to which I'll return presently.

In the meantime, let me draw attention to Rizzuto's second major book of note: Why Did Freud Reject God? (Yale University Press, 1998).

It is a rather unusual book, and not at all what I thought it would be--until, that is, the second half of the book. It starts off very much remotely, considering Freud's well-known passion for collecting antiquities, some of which he was able to bring with him to London when he fled there in the spring of 1938 to "die in freedom" as he said. Some were left behind; the rest were sold to raise funds to bribe the Nazis to grant the requisite forms permitting the Freud family and a few associates to flee to the British capital. Rizzuto wonders about Freud's relationships to these antiquities, some of which were clearly totems for pagan religions. She sees his massive and endless collecting of them as evidence of an unconscious obsession with very oblique theological questions.

From here she spends a very great deal of time on a detailed examination of the Philippson Bible, an illustrated and annotated Hebrew-German version which Freud's father Jakob gave his son, and which his son clearly read with great attention. This gives rise to a consideration of the religious faith and practice--or lack thereof, as the case may be--of Freud's parents and grandparents.

To read Freud, especially his correspondence, is to be confronted with copious evidence of his scriptural literacy: biblical quotations, that is, verses from and references to the Hebrew scriptures, and occasionally to the Talmud, show up on a regular basis-- and not in a clumsy fashion, either, suggesting deep and easy familiarity with the texts.

Rizzuto also takes great care to examine the other area where Freud's familiarity with the God of Judaism and Christianity emerges very early in his life: through his relationship to his beloved Czech Catholic nanny, who took him to church very early on (up to the age of 2 or thereabouts), as a result of which he apparently developed a habit, his mother said, of coming home and "preaching" to the household.

Having, over eleven chapters, laid out all this material for judicious consideration, and never once with a kind of "gotcha" attitude, Rizzuto comes, only in her twelfth and final chapter, to stitch everything together very graciously in answer to the question of her book's title. At no point does one feel like she is forcing the question, or forcing Freud into preconceived answers or subjecting him to a facile analysis on a couch of his own making. She applies psychoanalytic principles and practices to the man who pioneered them, and does so in a sober, restrained way leading to very well-supported conclusions. I have to think that Freud would, perhaps grudgingly, admire the case she has built.

Her conclusions are that Freud, as stoic a man as it is possible to imagine (he lived in constant pain from 1923, when cancer of the jaw was first diagnosed, leading to an endless series of sometimes brutal surgical interventions and to the wearing ever after of an ill-fitting prosthesis), grew early in life to hate feeling dependent on anyone and to hate feeling helpless or muddled (which is why he refused drugs to deal with his pain until the last few days of his life in September 1939 when he finally asked his physician for enough morphine to be injected to allow his life to move peacefully to its close). Freud associated "religion" with an infantile sense of helpless dependency on a paternal figure onto whom we project hopes for protection and eternal solicitude. Given, Rizzuto documents, an unreliable father in Jakob who left Freud feeling helpless at two crucial periods in his life, he seems to have rejected God because of his belief that God is simply unreliable and untrustworthy, just as his father was.

In the next installment we will turn to the new edited collection, Ana-María Rizzuto and the Psychoanalysis of Religion: The Road to the Living God, which does to Rizzuto and her book what she just finished doing to Freud and the Future of an Illusion. 

Continues. 

David Bentley Hart on God

David Bentley Hart occupies a rather unique place in North American Orthodox thought. I always enjoy reading him for the simple reason that he's usually too smart to indulge in any romanticism or triumphalism, and usually frank enough to allow for Orthodox self-criticism. His latest book was just published: The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale University Press, 2013), 376pp.

About this book we are told:

Despite the recent ferocious public debate about belief, the concept most central to the discussion—God—frequently remains vaguely and obscurely described. Are those engaged in these arguments even talking about the same thing? In a wide-ranging response to this confusion, esteemed scholar David Bentley Hart pursues a clarification of how the word “God” functions in the world’s great theistic faiths.

Ranging broadly across Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, Hart explores how these great intellectual traditions treat humanity’s knowledge of the divine mysteries. Constructing his argument around three principal metaphysical “moments”—being, consciousness, and bliss—the author demonstrates an essential continuity between our fundamental experience of reality and the ultimate reality to which that experience inevitably points.

Thoroughly dismissing such blatant misconceptions as the deists' concept of God, as well as the fundamentalist view of the Bible as an objective historical record, Hart provides a welcome antidote to simplistic manifestoes. In doing so, he plumbs the depths of humanity’s experience of the world as powerful evidence for the reality of God and captures the beauty and poetry of traditional reflection upon the divine.

God, Sex, and Gender

Adrian Thatcher's new book, God, Sex, and Gender: An Introduction (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), xii+271pp.
came to me in a hardcover textbook format. And that, indeed, is how it is written, as he makes clear in the introduction: for use as a textbook in an introductory or undergraduate survey course in theology or religious studies.  It is written with admirable clarity by an author who clearly takes almost nothing for granted--as one cannot do today with students, even those claiming to have grown up in a Christian home. Knowledge of Christian history, of doctrinal tradition, even of basic catechesis can no longer be assumed, alas. So students starting out with Thatcher's book will find it helpfully explains terminology and assumes little or no previous knowledge.

The book is, therefore, to be commended for its clarity and accessibility, at least as far as its prose goes. But students and others will find their knowledge of orthodox Christian doctrine--both East and West--darkened by the author's relentless agenda in pursuit of what he at least honestly calls "progressive or revisionist themes" (x) from his own Anglican background. If you were to re-title this book "An Apologia for Anglicanism's Sexual Heterodoxy" you would not be amiss.

Nevertheless, the author helpfully raises a number of important and useful questions about how Christians understand sex and gender. E.g., he rightly notes that "modern theological views of gender are essentialist" (19), and that raises all kinds of problems, as many others have noted over the years. He raises some interesting questions about what it means for Jesus Christ to be male and these questions have the salutary effect of at least disturbing people out of their mild, polite bourgeois notions of Jesus as this anodyne, perhaps even vaguely androgynous figure. At one point he discusses briefly and vaguely artistic representations of Jesus, but does not pay any attention to many important books treating icons of Christ, some of which often raise curious questions about "gender."

Thatcher helpfully--but too briefly--avers to the essay of Miroslav Volf in Gospel and Gender: A Trintarian Engagment with Being Male and Female in Christ. There, Volf argues that we cannot deny sexual difference between men and women, but ultimately we should look for its meaning not in cultural conventions, or extra-biblical, very modern, and, frankly, poorly argued theories of "complementarity." Rather, we should try to find "the significance of difference within God" (152). That is very true, but very much remains a desideratum in almost all such theological reflection today that I have seen.

Eastern Christian traditions are generally ignored unless they can be made to fit with Thacher's agenda. Section 3.1.1, "The Churches and the Sources" inexplicably and totally ignores the entire East, and instead concentrates on Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Methodists--with a brief note about Southern Baptists preceding it. In general, one cannot rely on him to explain adequately or well traditional and o/Orthodox doctrine. In one place he writes, confusingly, "blessings are not marriages (even though the Orthodox Churches regard the blessing of the marrying couple as the priestly act that makes them married)" (179). It is not clear what that sentence is supposed to mean, but it seems that only a Western Christian could have written it. Western Christians, especially from the scholastic period onward, seem fascinated with (bothered by? obsessed over? guilty of fetishizing?) which "act" or "moment" is the one when the sacrament "really" happens. (To be fair, some Orthodox Christians, especially converts from Western traditions, are just as obsessive about, e.g., an "epiclesis.")

In sum, then, this book raises a few helpful questions, and offers some decent bibliographies at the end of each chapter for people wanting to read further. But it is, as noted above, very limited for all the reasons mentioned.