On the God Concepts Even Atheists Have

It's been a lot of fun this semester to explore with my students something of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Christian faith.

We began with a brief exploration of Future of an Illusion, where all modern psychological and psychiatric suspicion of faith and belief seems to find its origins. This book marked Freud out as one of the three “masters of suspicion,” so called by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur: the other two being Marx and Nietzsche. All of them are thought to be enemies of something called “religion,” even though nobody can agree on what “religion” is.

But it falls to Freud to launch the modern suspicion of prayer, faith, and belief in God. For Freud the idea that you can pray to some being called God and get him to change the weather, or help you pass an exam, or heal Uncle Joe from cancer, or spring Grandma from purgatory, is what he called an illusion, that is a fantasy you entertain that may or may not be true or come true. But what an illusion really seeks to do is to give you a sense that your wishes, your hopes, your dreams, may well come true thanks to the great Father Protector in the Sky you feel you need based on your experience as a helpless infant in a chaotic and destructive world.

We know some of the problems with this claim--it's highly philosophically flabby and lazy, for one thing, and makes generalizations so sweeping that their refutation is child's play.

But there is another set of problems, perhaps the most fatal, with Freud's claim: its lack of clinical and empirical grounding. Freud, especially in his writings from 1920 to the end of his life in 1939, often blurred the boundaries between his work as an individual clinician, seeing individuals in his consulting room at Bergasse 19 in Vienna, and making universal generalizations about all of humanity at all times and in every place and culture. As a clinician he treated perhaps a couple hundred people over his lifetime of practicing psychoanalysis. As a theoretician and cultural critic, he claimed to speak for billions past and present. This is a major weakness in his writings.

But his criticism of “religion” as an infantile illusion was widely accepted by the mainstream of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis until very recently. It was never a serious, much less substantiated, criticism, but simply a professional prejudice. Clinicians have their prejudices and blind spots, their ideological hobby horses and fetishes, just like the rest of us. After 1927 began a widespread period of perceived opposition between psychology and theology.

Christians reciprocated by often dismissing Freud and psychology as a whole, disdaining their efforts as godless and dangerous nonsense and denying the need for any sort of therapy, sometimes saying that going to confession and praying more were all that was needed—a dangerous species of magical thinking which fails to help, and often actively harms, those who are suffering. I criticized that here.

But shortly after Freud’s death, a pediatrician and psychoanalyst in England, D.W. Winnicott, begins treating mothers and children suffering from effects of WWII. Many parents in and around London and the bigger cities made the decision to send their children to boarding schools or to live with others in the countryside (or overseas to Canada), to save them from being bombed in the cities. Mothers were often wracked with guilt over this, fearing they had done great harm to their children.

In response, when reunited after the war, some mothers went overboard, overcompensating for their absence out of a sense of guilt. Winnicott discovered, working with such kids and their mothers, that the ideal balance was between total neglect and an overzealous mother seeking to be perfect, to leave no need unmet, no desire unfulfilled on the part of her child. Such perfectionism, Winnicott realized, is actually quite harmful. The child needs the experience of feeling frustrated sometimes, of not always having every need/desire met immediately. Such experiences help the child with his/her reality-testing.

To mothers, Winnicott offered the famous counsel of being “good enough”—not neglecting the needs of their children, but not seeking to fulfill all of them every time. The best mother is the good enough mother—not neglectful, certainly, but not over-anxious to be and do every single thing, either. Frustration, after all, has its purposes, some of them positive.

In the child’s reality testing, Winnicott also famously realized, s/he makes use of objects to negotiate exploration of self and other. Some objects help the child understand him/herself and others around him. Some frustrate this purpose and end up as bad objects. But whether good or bad, these Winnicott called “transitional objects.” They facilitate the transition from the enclosed world of the infantile self to the outer world where others exist independent of the self.

These are transitional objects, and they are often very simple but very powerful. How many of you had—or still have!—a favored blanket or teddy bear or something similar? In Winnicott’s experience this was almost universal.

Winnicott, unlike Freud and a lot of early analysts, was neither Jewish nor atheist. He grew up Methodist and then became Anglican. For him belief in God posed no problem at all. (In turn, Winnicott's thought is a useful adjunct for Catholic theology, as I tried to show a little bit here.) In fact, his extensive clinical research led him to realize that Freud was wrong in seeing religious faith as an illusion or pathology. For Winnicott healthy development of infants included the development of illusions, which were then tested against reality to see which were true, which false.

Winnicott's use of object-relations and illusions, including those surrounding God, opened the door for Ana-Maria Rizzuto (some of whose thought was discussed previously in more details here). She was born and raised Catholic in Argentina, where she was a catechist in her early years, and taught a course on psychology and theology to seminarians before moving to Boston in 1965 and completing medical school and then psychoanalytic training.

That training and her early research led her to begin asking: so even if we accept Freud’s thesis that faith in and prayer to God is an infantile illusion, shouldn’t we as clinicians still investigate our patients’ beliefs about, and hopes and desires directed at, God? Aren’t we supposed to be interested in everything our patients hope for, desire, fear, love, are curious or anxious about? Why rule God out from the start—except out of professional prejudice? How helpful are we to be to people we are charged with helping if we tell almost all of them that any notion they have of God is off the table from the beginning? If you are supposed to be free to talk safely and openly to your therapist about anything, why are we saying you can talk about anything but if you talk about God we will call you crazy and clap you in a straight-jacket?

Her worldview, shaped by Catholic theology and Freudian as well as object-relations psychology, has five key components:

i) Object-related world in which we are never alone
ii) Symbolic understanding of reality
iii) Self-examination of hidden motives and agendas
iv) Transformational power of confessing my sins/struggles
v) Need to confront oneself and reality honestly: nothing can escape the ‘reality principle’ as Freud called it, or ‘God’ as Christians call Him.

She begins research projects (turning them into her first book) at Boston hospitals with patients, including psychotic and neurotic patients, to just listen to their God objects and ideas, tape-recording and then analyzing these discussions later. What she finds is that everybody has some kind of God object in mind, some kind of concept, some ideas about who or what God is or is not. These have developed very early on, and in ways that are often little understood and very undertheorized. As she puts it, “no child arrives at the ‘house of God’ without his pet God under his arm.”

And as she further showed, almost nobody develops without a God image, a God object, in mind. Even those who later as adults come to claim for themselves the status of “atheist” always have a particular God image or God object in mind that they hate or reject. Freud is the most famous example of this: he was a Jewish atheist. There are Catholic atheists, Protestant atheists, Orthodox atheists, Muslim atheists. As she puts it categorically, “there is no such thing as a person without a God representation.”

Everyone “believes” in a God object to a greater or lesser degree. This is not just a matter of intellectual reason but also of the heart, involving love and hate. But it is erroneous to think that these God representations are singularly paternal or maternal. They can and do vary from person to person.

The challenge for religious traditions then becomes: to put an “official” theology face-to-face with the child’s theology and work from there.

Both children and adult patients, in her experience, were divided into four types:

1) Believers: Those who believed in God without much problem
2) Agnostics: those wondering whether God exists, and whether to believe in Him
3) Those angry/dismayed that others believe in a God who does not interest them
4) Those struggling to get rid of objects and images of a harsh, demanding God of wrath and judgment

For Rizzuto, in sum, Freud is valuable in challenging us to examine what false illusions we might have about God while seeking to understand ourselves more deeply so that we may know whether the images, ideas, illusions, objects, representations we have about God are true and helpful, healthful, useful, or destructive and idolatrous.

Finally, and more recently, her work has been confirmed by the Catholic psychiatrist Robert Coles in The Spiritual Life of Children, about whom and whose work more another time. Suffice it to say that is an invaluable book of deep and fascinating insights.

Psychopathology and Religion

Since at least 1913 and Freud's essay "Totem and Taboo," and then especially since 1927 and his jejune polemic against "religion," Future of an Illusion (which he almost instantly began distancing himself from, telling more than one friend in his letters that it was "my worst book--the book of an old man!"), there has often been an assumed hostility between modern psychology (especially in its classical Freudian psychoanalytic variants) and that ill-defined beast called "religion." But as many people have shown--not least William Meissner and Ana-Maria Rizzuto--the idea that religious practice, especially that of Judaism and Christianity, is ipso facto proof of mental disorder is a silly baseless bit of adolescent posturing and bigotry unworthy of serious scholars and clinicians alike. Today many clinicians are not only genuinely open to religious and spiritual practices, but even see in them some potential allies to assist in various therapeutic tasks.

That said, a blanket excuse of religious practice is just as undeserved as a blanket condemnation. Pathology can and often does come wreathed about in the stale smoke of religious practices and their abuse. People can and often do have profoundly unhealthy projective identifications with God which end up doing them enormous harm. For this reason, as Paul Ricoeur rightly said, Christians should welcome Freud's critique as an important, necessary, and healthful form of "iconoclasm," attacking false images of God so that in their place the real and living God can appear.

Along comes a new book from a Polish academic and therapist to take a fresh look at all these questions. I have just started it and will say more about it later, but for now wanted to draw your attention to Damian Janus, Psychopathology and Religion: Structural Convergences Between Mental Disorders and Religion (Lexington Books, 2019), 239pp.

About this book we are told

In this book, Damian Janus examines the connections between psychopathological phenomena and religion. Janus contends that there are certain factors—fear of death, desire for power and longevity, and need for predictability of life and longing for care—which reside within the framework of religion and mental disorders. These factors shapethe psychopathological image and contribute to the genesis of religiosity. He explores this contention in his analysis of various mental disorders (neuroses, personality disorders, dissociative disorders, psychoses, eating disorders) and symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, self-destructive behaviors), as well as more common psychological phenomena.This book is recommended for scholars of psychology, religion, and philosophy as well as psychotherapists.

Neuropsychiatry, Philosophy, and Theology Meet in a Bar...

In my book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, I discuss one of Paul Ricoeur's major books, Freud and Philosophy. That book, which originated as the Terry Lectures at Yale almost half a century ago, stands as one of the most perceptive and important engagements of Freud by any Christian thinker in the last century. Ricoeur saw with more piercing insight than most that Freud, far from being an enemy of Christian faith, is one of its most important allies in the battle against illusion and idolatry (a point Adam Phillips has also recognized).

I'm also working on a long essay in which I draw on one of Ricoeur's last works, Memory, History, Forgetting. Though dense, this and all his books are always worth working your way through, not least for his ranging far and wide, and without apology, across disciplinary frontiers, including psychology, history, philosophy, and theology. Though ostensibly a Protestant, he ranges across Catholic theology very easily, and has often been discussed by Catholic theologians and mentioned even in recent papal encyclicals. Anyone dealing with modern hermeneutics will have come across Ricoeur and the need to grapple with his many books.

It is with interest, then, that I came across notice of a recent publication by M.T.H. Wong, a neuropsychiatrist: Ricoeur and the Third Discourse of the Person: From Philosophy and Neuroscience to Psychiatry and Theology (Lexington Books, 2018), 215pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book is about the so called “4S” challenge – how does or can or should someone say something to someone about something? This challenge is getting more intense day by day in our contemporary globalized world, increasingly connected by science and technology through telecommunication and all sorts of social media, where people are acutely aware of the diverse views on culture, politics, economics, religion, ethics, education, physical health and mental wellbeing, which are very often in conflicts with each other.

This book arises from the reading of the dialogue between two internationally renowned and respected French scholars, Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes Us Think? A Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and the Brain, which explores where science and philosophy meet, and whether there is a place for religion in the 21st century. This book develops on the ideas Ricoeur raised in the dialogue about the need for “digging deeper” and a “third discourse” as a way forward to improve dialogues between competing worldviews and ideologies. It attempts to formulate a “third discourse” (as distinct from ordinary language as “first discourse” and various scientific or professional/specialist languages as “second discourse”) to address the burning issue of fragmentation of the person through overcoming the alienations between established discourses of philosophy, science and theology, without doing injustice to the unique and indispensable contributions of each of these discourses. It argues that such a “third discourse” has to go beyond dualism and reductionism. To achieve that, this new way of talking about the lived experience of the person is going to take the form of a non-reductive correlative multilayered discourse that has the capacity to, as expressed in the language of the hermeneutics of Ricoeur, “explain more in order to understand better.”

Idolizing Popes While Ignoring the Abuse of Nuns

It just so happened earlier this week that, ten minutes after reading Sylvia Poggioli's story on the NPR website about the clerical sexual abuse of nuns, I was being interviewed on the local NPR affiliate for nearly an hour about my book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. I'll post a link to the on-air piece and the longer interview on their website when it airs next week.

When I began the book last summer, these stories had not really begun to emerge--they really are that recent. If I were writing the book now, I'd include a chapter on nuns and abuse; but in fact what I do say in the book about power applies equally here as well. The book's arguments about the need for local structures of accountability, about abolishing episcopal-papal monopolies on power, and about dethroning false ideas of "obedience" all equally apply to religious/monastic communities as much as to parishes and dioceses. If bishops must now be held to local account, and if their near-absolute monopoly on power must be removed, so too must superiors-general of all the religious orders (I suggest starting with the Basilians) be stripped of their monopolies of power and their ability to manipulate and destroy people in the name of "obedience" and "God's will" and "avoiding scandal" and "the good of the Church" and all the other self-justifying lies these people tell.

The overlooked factor here is indeed power and the structures by which it is maintained. Some people have not mastered that lesson yet. As I noted here, I first wrote about this crisis more than twenty-five years ago, and these stories no longer surprise anybody. But, alas, these stories have now hardened into a narrative that certain Catholics cling to, excluding any and all epistemic humility by which they might realize that the crisis is not just one of  "clericalism" or "homosexuals in the priesthood." The insistence by which such simplistic and mono-causal narratives are still defended is depressing to behold.

So too is the apparent inability of certain Catholics to walk and chew gum at the same time. If some fetishize one "cause," other Catholics think there is only one "solution." These types obsessively focus on one aspect and insist we can talk about no other. Why can people not recognize that this crisis is about sex, about power, about clericalism, about the structures by which clerics maintain and abuse their power, about misogynistic violence towards women, and about abuse of boys and men by other men? As Christopher Altieri argued last summer, we need to get out of the ideological blind-spots to look at the whole crisis without sparing anyone's blushes. My book does not get caught up in such useless intra-Catholic battles, but says: what can we do, going forward, to build a stronger, more accountable Church?

In point of fact, as the title of the book makes clear, this is a crisis of sex and power--and whether the victims are young or old, male or female, school children or nuns, makes no difference at all: they are all victims and that is the first, and only, thing we need to know about them. Exploiting some victims while ignoring others to advance some pet theory about "lavender mafias" or to push for the ordination of women or some other cause is appalling. The only "cause" we should be consumed with is the one that works to get all the stories out, all the abusers named and removed from power, all the filth purified from the Church.

As we now are seeing in these new stories about the abuse of nuns, it is clear they do not fit into the hardened ideas, ideological stereotypes, and blindly held notions of the Vatican as one giant closet of gays and nothing else. Some people pop up tediously to quote some statistic or other about "80% of victims are male," which claim they brandish to slay any stories about, e.g., the abuse of women (a "distraction" as one man said in reference to the NPR story, apparently with a straight face but clearly not a conscience).

To counter this all-too-human propensity to falling into ideological if not idolatrous thinking, most of which happens outside our conscious awareness, I began the book, and spent the first chapter, drawing in particular on the Jesuit psychoanalyst Carlos Dominguez-Morano to help us bring to the surface the ideologies and idols that so often govern, bind, blind, and limit our thinking as Catholics through myriad distortions. His book Belief After Freud is invaluable in this respect and many others.

I also returned to Paul Ricoeur, who, more than forty years ago now rightly argued that the Freudian project is useful in one key respect: showing us the human propensity for idolatry, and helping us to outwit that. (Adam Phillips has said that Freud was a “man whose project was the destruction of idolatry.")

And Catholics are especially stupid and blind if they think they/we are exempt from the dangers of idolatry--as Carl Olson rightly argued. The Catechism itself says that "Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc." (s.2113). For too long we have not merely revered but idolized clergy, the pope above all. That must end. The whole cult around him, the fawning, the interviews, the endless talking and writing by him and his courtiers: the whole weary roadshow must end.

Let us return to the days when the name of the pope, or any of his ideas, are about as well known as the name or ideas of the secretary-general of, say, the UN or the World Health Organization. We have to Google those people up to find the first thing about them--the pope should expect no more. He's not some oracle or idol, and we must get that through our thick skulls.

Schmemann and Ricoeur

I'm delighted to see a paperback version of Brian Butcher's book appearing in February: Liturgical Theology after Schmemann: An Orthodox Reading of Paul Ricoeur (Fordham University Press, 2018), 360pp. Brian and I started in the doctoral program together at the Sheptytsky Institute when it was then (2002) based at Saint Paul University in Ottawa (prior to its move to the University of Toronto last summer).

About this book, which was Brian's doctoral dissertation, the publisher tells us the following:

While only rarely reflecting explicitly on liturgy, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) gave sustained attention to several themes pertinent to the interpretation of worship, including metaphor, narrative, subjectivity, and memory. Inspired by his well-known aphorism, “The symbol gives rise to thought,” Liturgical Theology after Schmemann offers an original exploration of the symbolic world of the Byzantine Rite, culminating in a Ricoeurian analysis of its Theophany “Great Blessing of Water.” 

The book examines two fundamental questions: 1) what are the implications of the philosopher’s oeuvre for liturgical theology at large? and (2) how does the adoption of a Ricoeurian hermeneutic shape the study of a particular rite? Taking the seminal legacy of Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) as its point of departure, Butcher contributes to the renewal of contemporary Eastern Christian thought and ritual practice by engaging a spectrum of current theological and philosophical conversations.

The Psychoanalysis of the Living God (I)

One of the most famous case studies Freud ever wrote was about the so-called Wolf Man. It featured, so we later learned, a Russian man who had grown up in an Orthodox household. (Freud's Russian connections are well documented in a book I noted here.) This patient's case was one of the early places where Freud wrote about "religion" and did so without any of the hostility he was later accused of, not least after the 1927 publication of Future of an Illusion.

That book has been wildly misunderstood, largely by Christians who were handed an over-easy excuse ever after to ignore or malign Freud, or worse still to malign him based on their ignorance of what he actually wrote. That book has also cemented the strong perception that all subsequent psychoanalytic thought and psychoanalysts themselves are hostile to Christianity.

In a lecture I gave this week in Iowa to the Mercy College of Health Sciences, and in a forthcoming short essay for the Catholic Herald of London, I have attempted to show not only that there is really nothing in Freud that is hostile to faith, but that there is a very great deal to be welcomed by Christians, not least, as Paul Ricoeur noted, in Freudian "iconoclasm" which purifies faith of false and neurotic idols so that we can have a fighting chance of seeing and believing in God as He really is.

Another figure in France who has also grasped this is Elisabeth Roudinesco, author of the short but important book Why Psychoanalysis (2001) where she notes, inter alia, that Freud, as the "father of doubt," should be welcomed by all those who are suspicious, as Christians ought to be, of the homogenizing and commodifying tendencies today of globalized capitalism with its many hidden illusions and idols.

In my lecture and forthcoming article, I noted a half-dozen analysts who were themselves Christian, including the Jesuit psychiatrist and analyst William Meissner, author of a number of very substantial clinical and spiritual works including, inter alia, Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience as well as To the Greater Glory: A Psychological Study of Ignatian Spirituality.

The "Anglo-Catholic" (Episcopalian) Stanley Leavy wrote a short and very moderately useful book, In the Image of God: A Psychoanalyst's View.

Karl Stern, whose life has been recently told in a good new biography by Daniel Burston, which I reviewed here, is almost totally forgotten now but was in the 1950s and 1960s the most important person to link Catholicism and Freudian thought in critical and helpful ways. Stern took a no-nonsense approach to Freud and God, dismissing Freud's atheism as a "tragic historical accident" and his attempts as philosophizing about God as "amateurish and contradictory." All this, and a great deal more, is discussed by Burston in great detail in his welcome study, A Forgotten Freudian: The Passion of Karl Stern.

A few years after Stern's death in 1975, Ana-Maria Rizzuto published her landmark work The Birth of the Living God: a Psychoanalytic Study in 1979. Rizzuto, who taught in Catholic parishes in Argentina after an upbringing there in a traditional Catholic family, came to Boston to complete medical and analytic training, where she has practiced ever since. Her research as a young clinician was with patients and their concepts of God, which she describes with great sensitivity in this book, drawing in particular of the insights of D.W. Winnicott to show, pace Freud, that "God" was not an infantile illusion born of a neurotic search for a protective paternal figure but, rather, a "transitional object" necessary to the mind as it is trying to understand the world and its relationship to the world beyond itself.

In 1998, Rizzuto published another very significant book, Why Did Freud Reject God?: A Psychodynamic Interpretation which treated Freud very respectfully and did not at all try to catch him out or subject him to an amateurish "turning of the tables" (or, perhaps better, of the couch) as she answered the question in her title.

Rizzuto's work has been only this year getting some overdue engagement in a new book the publisher sent me last week: Ana-María Rizzuto and the Psychoanalysis of Religion: The Road to the Living God, eds. Martha J. Reineke and David M. Goodman (Lexington Books, 2017), xix+207pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Ana-María Rizzuto’s groundbreaking explorations of the formation of God representations in early childhood and their elaboration throughout the life cycle have made their mark, enriching the practice of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, as well as scholarship within the psychoanalytic study of religion. Accompanied by illuminating commentaries by Rizzuto, the authors of this edited collectione essays in this volume underscore Rizzuto’s most important contribution to clinical practice: rather than assert that psychoanalysis is incompatible with religious beliefs and practices or with spiritual concerns that patients may bring to a therapeutic context, Rizzuto makes room for the coexistence of psychoanalysis and religion in the therapeutic setting. Demonstrating how Rizzuto’s work has enhanced connections within and among psychoanalytic theories of religion, established pathways for new developments in psychotherapy, and facilitated interdisciplinary conversations, this volume showcases the compelling power of Rizzuto’s work and its ongoing influence.

I'm about half-way through it, and it is a welcome and lucid study about which I shall have more to say in subsequent installments.

Continues.