The Society of Jesus and Saint Sigmund of Vienna

At the august journal of the Society of Jesus, America, you can read my thoughts on four Jesuit psychoanalysts of considerable achievement and many publications. All of them showed, in writing, in practice, and in their lives, that opposition between Freud and Christianity is overblown and frequently hysterical nonsense.

Here I will just expand somewhat on the books that were mentioned there in passing.

The Dominican theologian Victor White spent rather a lot of time engaged in writing to and about Jung, including in his book God and the Unconscious. He seems to have had more patience for engaging Jung that I have ever had. I confess that until I recently re-read Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I was still operating under an old prejudice about him from my youth.

Peter J.R. Dempsey was an Irish Franciscan and author of a still useful little book Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Catholicism. It has aged better than I would have thought for a book published in the mid-1950s.

The first major Jesuit I focus on in my article is the late Belgian analyst André Godin, author of many works, not all of them in English. One that is: Psychological Dynamics of Religious Experience.

I mentioned Godin's contemporary, Nina Coltart, who died the same year he did. I was an undergraduate student in psychology in 1992 and read a review (in the Globe and Mail) of Coltart's book Slouching Towards Bethlehem right after it came out. I immediately went and ordered the book, and fell in love with it. (In fact, her chapter on discerning the suitability of analysis for some patients convinced me to seek out Dr Louise Carignan, on whose couch I spent rather a lot of time.) I have read it again more times than I can count and often recommended it. Her other books are equally worth your time.

Peter Rudnytsky (whom I didn't mention in the article, but who is always worth reading) has written a very appreciative chapter devoted to Coltart in his Rescuing Psychoanalysis from Freud and Other Essays in Re-Vision. He also organized and edited a Festschrift for her which is very interesting indeed.

The second Jesuit analyst I discussed was the Irishman Edward Boyd Barrett. Here is one book of his that has been reprinted, but most of his other ones are harder to come by outside specialized libraries. Details about him and his fascinating life are found in Robert Kugelmann's invaluable recent study, Psychology and Catholicism: Contested Boundaries. See also Paula Kane's chapter in the recent collection, Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814-2014.

I briefly mentioned Ernest Jones, and his recording of what Freud thought of America. That quote shows up in several places, including in this rather enjoyable study of Jones.

I noted that Barrett's downplaying of Freud's uniqueness was evocative of certain practices of Evagrius, who, for my money, was the Christian world's first "analyst." When I teach him, I find Robert Sinkewich's Evagrius of Pontus: the Greek Ascetic Corpus utterly invaluable, both for its translation of primary texts but also for his essays and in particular footnotes about Evagrius.

William Meissner was very prolific as I noted in my essay. Of his books, I focused on two, and would reiterate here the value of both Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience and Freud and Psychoanalysis. 

Meissner was a friend and colleague of Ana-Maria Rizzuto, about whom I wrote several pieces, starting here. Rizzuto's work has come in for some overdue scholarly attention, as I wrote about here in some detail.

Robert Galatzer-Levy (whose Does Psychoanalysis Work? is extremely valuable) authored a moving tribute to Meissner in The Therapist in Mourning.

The final Jesuit analyst I look at is the contemporary Spaniard Carlos Dominguez-Morano, whom I have discussed on here many times, including here. His latest book Belief After Freud is a stunning work deserving a very wide audience.

Along the way I briefly mentioned several others, including Michael Eigen, one of whose books I discussed here; and Oskar Pfister, briefly discussed here.

Finally I drew attention to Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen's fascinating study, The Abuse of Casuistry, a book now almost thirty years old but very useful in trying to understand Pope Francis, including, as I argued here, the controverted Amoris Laetitia. 

The Aphoristic Flirt Adam Phillips

If you randomly started reading Adam Phillips and knew nothing of his background, I have to think it would soon become apparent that he is a psychoanalyst, which conclusion you would arrive at--tentatively, of course--after seeing how his style is circuitous, diffuse, self-questioning, suggestive and assertive in about equal measure, and very reminiscent of the wide-ranging meanderings of the mind. If--apart from, perhaps, his study of D.W. Winnicott--you read virtually any of his many books, you will find that one way to characterize them is as collections of aphorisms surrounded by acres of prose. Because they bear remembering and quoting, I wanted to write some of them down here in no particular order. I gravitate towards the ones I think rich with theological promise as well as those of what seems to me acute clinical insight and applicability.

From On Flirtation: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Uncommitted Life, a book written in part to offer "psychoanalysis with a light touch," to allow analyst and analysand--and general readers--to realize that analysis should be about pleasure and enjoying ourselves (with a reference to Nina Coltart's singular and splendid book Slouching Towards Bethlehem).

On Idolatry:

"It is one of the advantages of flirtation that it can protect us from idolatry....Flirtation keeps things in play."

"All idols, by disarming pertinent forms of criticism, distracted their worshippers from more problematic but interesting desires."

"Psychoanalysis has always been a religion in which you are not allowed to believe in God."

"Dreams are accidents of desire."

"It is a fundamentally useful Freudian insight that we are never coincident with--the same as--the images we have of ourselves."

For the "Theology of the Body" Crowd:

"We have made a fetish of sexual difference....Our categories are themselves ghosts or ghost-writers and not the reassuring commodities which we...pretend they are."

"There is an erotics of uncertainty so the fear of relinquishing the idea of difference may be the fear of the death of desire."

"Thinking of the sexes as making each other whole is grounds for murder."

"Our theoretical habits, like our erotic habits, are the revenge of the past upon the future."

On the Virtues and Nature of Forgetting:

"People come for psychoanalytic treatment because they are remembering in a way that does not free them to forget."

"It has been the value of forgetting that psychoanalysis after Freud has most often repressed."

"It is only when two people forget themselves in each other's presence that they can recognize each other."

On D.W. Winnicott, British Psychoanalysis, and Narrative Theology/Philosophy:

"In Winnicott's work, it could be argued, psychoanalysis was incorporated into a Christian empiricist tradition.....Psychoanalysis becomes a new theology of mothering."

"Freud...put the implied narratives of a life, sanctioned by a Christian cosmology, in question."

"A successful psychoanalysis...makes memory possible but with a specific end in view--the patient's recovery."

"The patient has to refuse himself the conventional satisfactions of narrative....Psychoanalysis enables the patient to tolerate anti-narrative."

"Psychoanalysis as a theory and a therapy unavoidably promotes and institutionalizes the idea of an exemplary life." 

"Psychoanalysis is a professionalized social practice." (Would Alasdair MacIntyre agree?)

"Psychoanalytic practice is always hearsay."

On Psychoanalytic Methods and Results:

"Free association itself is the psychic act of relinquishing, as far as possible, one's slavish devotion to internal censors."

Quoting Sandor Ferenczi, "'The patient is not cured by free-associating: he is cured when he can free associate'."

"The radical nature of Freud's project is clear if one imagines what it would be like to live in a world in which everyone was able--had the capacity--to free-associate, to say whatever happened to come into their mind at any given moment."

"If a person ends up speaking psychoanalysis then the treatment has failed and must be called indoctrination."

"Psychoanalysis has always been about what it means to get bogged down in traditions."

"Psychoanalysis has, fortunately, had all its boundaries blurred...and it has now spilled into all sorts of other areas--religion, history, philosophy, politics, anthropology among others--with which it has much in common."

"Guilt...is a fundamental obstacle to psychoanalytic cure; the patient desperately needs his symptoms as a punishment."

"In psychoanalytic treatment it takes two to make a life-story."

"It would be particularly interesting for those who love psychoanalysis to tell us their misgivings about it all." (This is something I shall certainly do at some point!)

"It is not clear why so many of our notions of accountability--and often intelligibility--depend so exclusively on a capacity for blame."

"In our repetitions we seem to be staying away from the future, keeping it at bay."

"The best and worst of psychoanalytic theory always verges on the mystical."

"A good life entails the tolerance and enjoyment of inner complexity....There is no final resolution here" (commenting on Christopher Bollas' Being a Character).

"Psychoanalysis does not have to be an omnivorous interpreting machine, or another colonial adventure. At its best, it is a way of keeping the questions of childhood alive."

Will My Viennese Couch Fit in Your Egyptian Cell?

I know some Eastern Christians who are unduly suspicious, and occasionally contemptuous, of psychology. Some of that suspicion is justified, but some is not. Reading Nina Coltart's wonderful book Slouching Towards Bethlehem: And Further Psychoanalytic Explorations would be especially helpful here in many ways. Psychoanalytic therapy, especially in its classically Freudian variants, has of course been notoriously hostile to "religion" but Coltart, who was director of the London Clinic of Psychoanalysis and vice-president of the British Psychoanalytical Society, was a wonderful exception, openly drawing convincing links between faith (she abandoned the Anglicanism of her childhood to become a Buddhist, but without ignoring or disdaining the benefits and wisdom of a Christian upbringing) and psychoanalytic practice.

Some have attempted to integrate psychology and theology in a Western context but attempts to do that in the Christian East remain few--until now, with the advent of two important works: Stephen Muse, When Hearts Become Flame: An Eastern Orthodox Approach to the dia-Logos of Pastoral Counseling (Orthodox Research Institute, 2011).

Muse, himself a clinician, is editor of an earlier collection on healing in Orthodoxy. 

About this book, which carries a slew of laudatory reviews, the publisher tells us:

When Hearts Become Flame takes its point of departure and return from reflection on the question, "What Makes Counseling Pastoral?" to show that it involves participation of all three aspects of our human nature in dialogue with others in such a way that as in Emmaus, Christ, the Logos, appears 'between' us. It is not enough to be emotionally warm or conceptually accurate or physically energetic. The human person is an integrated presence of all three turned toward trialogue with God, self and others. Taking my cues from Jesus' formulation of the heart of the law, it is clear that an Orthodox approach to pastoral care and counseling cannot be focused solely on the intrapsychic and individual person. Nor can social justice proceed cut off from the wellspring of contemplative life in Christ, as Thomas Merton observed, without burning out or becoming the evil that we fight against. There is both a private inner discernment and ascetical struggle in dialogue with God and an existential and communal outward dimension which involves fellowship in confronting justice issues in society that contribute to the sickness and wellbeing of people. These two domains must be considered together as mutually influencing one another in a circular causality. Given the burgeoning field of counseling and psychotherapy and the growing interest in its spiritual dimensions, the time is ripe for interdisciplinary Orthodox dialogue between priests and practitioners, monastics, theologians and scientists as well as with mental health professionals outside Orthodoxy. The field of pastoral counseling has been largely Protestants and Roman Catholics, who, since the founding of AAPC, have contributed half a century's worth of valuable reflections on the integration of theology and psychology in service to suff ering persons. There is a great deal we can share with one another to know Christ more fully and learn how to serve better and celebrate human potential when it is in co-creative partnership with God to help alleviate human suffering.

The second work, which Peeters has recently drawn to my attention, is Alexis Trader, Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Becks Cognitive Therapy: A Meeting of Minds (Peeters, 2011), 370pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy details a colorful journey deep into two seemingly disparate worlds united by a common insight into the way our thinking influences our emotions, behaviors, and ultimately our lives. In this innovative study about mental and spiritual health, readers are not only provided with a thorough introduction to the elegant theory and practical techniques of cognitive therapy, they are also initiated into the perennial teachings of ascetics and monks in the Greek-speaking East and Latin-speaking West whose powerful writings not only anticipated many contemporary findings, but also suggest unexplored pathways and breathtaking vistas for human growth and development. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary volume in the art of pastoral counseling, patristic studies, and the interface between psychology and theology will be a coveted addition to the working libraries of pastors and psychologists alike. In addition, it is ideal as a textbook for seminary classes in pastoral theology and pastoral counseling, as well as for graduate courses in psychology dealing with the relationship between psychological models and religious worldviews.

Further details, including the table of contents, are available here.

I look forward to seeing both of these reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.