Hearing Voices or Hearing God?

Historically of course when psychology, psychiatry, or psychoanalysis has turned to something called "religion" (a definition of which is not at all an agreed-upon thing), it is very often done so in reductionist and simplistic ways at best; at worst it has pathologized "religion" as the province of neurotic people.

More recently, however, some clinicians and others have attempted to move beyond such an approach, trying to understand "religious" practices and beliefs on their own terms, and even realizing that some of them are practiced by perfectly healthy people. I have shown some examples of this on this blog and elsewhere.

Now we have a new book that will add to and enrich this discussion. I'm looking forward to reading Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us About Religions by Robert N. McCauley and George Graham (Oxford University Press, 2020), 280pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

A man with schizophrenia believes that God is instructing him through the public address system in a bus station. A nun falls into a decades-long depression because she believes that God refuses to answer her prayers. A neighborhood parishioner is bedeviled with anxiety because he believes that a certain religious ritual must be repeated, repeated, and repeated lest God punish him. To what extent are such manifestations of religious thinking analogous to mental disorder? Does mental dysfunction bring an individual closer to religious experience or thought? Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences explores these questions using the tools of the cognitive science of religion and the philosophy of psychopathology.

Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained as the cultural activation of our natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Those systems produce responses to cultural stimuli that may mimic features of cognition and conduct associated with mental disorders, but which are sometimes coded as "religious" depending on the context.

The authors examine hallucinations of the voice of God and of other supernatural agents, spiritual depression often described as a "dark night of the soul," religious scrupulosity and compulsiveness, and challenges to theistic cognition that Autistic Spectrum Disorder poses. Their approach promises to shed light on both mental abnormalities and religiosity.

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.

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.”

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. 

Early Modern Theology

As I have often noted on here, we are living in a happy period when major publishers of "handbooks of" or "companions to" or other comparable anthologies treating some Christian theme, period, or topic, can no longer blithely overlook the East. Today inclusion of chapters treating Eastern Christianity are de rigueur, and rightly so.

This is true of another such collection released a few months ago: The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600-1800, eds.Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller, and A.G. Roeber (Oxford UP, 2016), 688pp.

One of the editors, A.G. Roeber, is himself Orthodox and was interviewed on here several years ago. He contributes one of several chapters treating the East or themes closely connected to the East, as here:

30) Western Theologies and Judaism in the Early Modern World - Stephen G. Burnett
31) Western Theologies and Islam in the Early Modern World - Emanuele Colombo
32) The Churches of the East and the Enlightenment - Dimitrios Moschos
33) Orthodox Influences on Early Modern Western Theologies - A.G. Roeber

About this book the publisher further tells us:

The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600-1800 offers a comprehensive and reliable introduction to Christian theological literature originating in Western Europe from, roughly, the end of the French Wars of Religion (1598) to the Congress of Vienna (1815). 

Using a variety of approaches, the contributors examine theology spanning from Bossuet to Jonathan Edwards. They review the major forms of early modern theology, such as Cartesian scholasticism, Enlightenment, and early Romanticism; sketch the teachings of major theological concepts, along with important historical developments; introduce the principal practitioners of each kind of theology and delineate their particular theological contributions and stresses; and depict the engagement by early modern theologians with other religions or churches, such Judaism, Islam, and the eastern Church. 

Combining contributions from top scholars in the field, this will be an invaluable resource for understanding a complex and varied body of research

Theology as a Way of Life

Last fall, in teaching a course on sacraments, I had my students read, inter alia, Hans Boersma, Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry, one chapter of which argues that the very study of theology itself can be a sacramental practice if undertaken properly, that is, if undertaken as more than a mere academic exercise.

Boersma's book came back to mind in reading of a recent release that furthers the same theme: The Practice of the Presence of God: Theology as a Way of Life, eds. Martin Laird, Sheelah Trefle Hidden (Routledge, 2016),168 pp. This book features such senior scholars of the Christian East as Sebastian Brock and Andrew Louth, along with others familiar with the East such as Rowan Williams.

About this book we are told:

Exploring the unity of the practice of prayer and the practice of theology, this book draws together insights from world-class theologians including Rowan Williams, Andrew Louth, Frances Young, Luigi Gioia, Margaret R. Miles, Enzo Bianchi, Sebastian Brock, and Nicholaï Sakharov. Offering glimpses of the prayer-life and witness that undergirds theological endeavour, some authors approach the topic in a deeply personal way while others express the unity of prayer and the theologian in a traditionally scholarly manner. No matter what the denomination of the Christian theologian - Greek or Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist - authors demonstrate that the discipline of theology cannot properly be practiced apart from the prayer life of the theologian. The prayer of the theologian shapes her or his approach to theology. Whether it be preaching, teaching, writing or research, the deep soundings of prayer informs and embraces all.

We are also given the table of contents:

Introduction:Oracles, Prophets, and Dwellers in Silence James Alison

Part 1. Foundational Soundings
1 Theology as a Way of Life Rowan Williams
2 Undergoing Something from Nothing Brian D. Robinette
3 The Trinity as our Ascetic Programme Nicholaï Sakharov

Part 2. Personal Accounts of a Theological Life
4 Ecumenical Confessions of an Unconventional Protestant Frances Young
5 Augustine on Practicing the Presence of God Margaret R. Miles

Part 3. Theological and Liturgical Retrievals
6 The Liturgy, Icons and the Prayer of the Heart Andrew Louth
7 To Feel so as to Understand: Hadewijch of Brabant and the Legacy of St. Anselm Rachel Smith
8 Etching the Ineffable in Words: The Return of Contemplation to Theology Martin Laird
9 The Guidance of St. Ephrem: a Vision to Live by Sebastian Brock
10 The Threat of Death as a Test for Theological Authenticity Luigi Gioia

How Did the Fathers Talk about God?

It is a striking sign of the times when I receive in my mail this week the most recent catalogue from one of the leading evangelical publishers in the anglophone world, and it comes with Byzantine iconography splashed all over the cover. Evangelicals have been "discovering" the East, and the Fathers, for the better part of three decades now. Set for release early in January of next year is a new book by Mark Sheridan, Language for God in Patristic Tradition: Wrestling with Biblical Anthropomorphism (IVP, 2015), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Criticism of myth in the Bible is not a modern problem. Its roots go back to the earliest Christian theologians, and before them, to ancient Greek and Jewish thinkers. The dilemma posed by texts that ascribe human characteristics and emotions to the divine is a perennial problem, and we have much to learn from the ancient attempts to address it. Mark Sheridan provides a theological and historical analysis of the patristic interpretation of Scripture’s anthropomorphic and anthropopathic language for God. Rather than reject the Bible as mere stories, ancient Jewish and Christian theologians read these texts allegorically or theologically in order to discover the truth contained within them. They recognized that an edifying and appropriate interpretation of these stories required that one start from the understanding that "God is not a human being" (Num 23:19). Sheridan brings the patristic tradition into conversation with modern interpreters to show the abiding significance of its theological interpretation for today. Language for God in Patristic Tradition is a landmark resource for students of ancient Christian theology. Wide-ranging in scope and accessible in its analysis, it demonstrates that those engaged in theological interpretation of Scripture have much to gain from studying their forebears in the faith.

Theology in History, Theology of History, or History of Theology?

It has been said that too much of what passes for theology today, especially among those dealing in patristics, is in fact just history or intellectual geneology: God is an afterthought or, in some cases, an embarrassment to be set aside while we look for the "hidden" world of Christians, or what they "really" believed, only to be found in the "gnostic gospels," etc. What is really sought is to show how, say, Gregory of Nyssa influenced Aquinas and Palamas, and how those two, through a convoluted development, ultimately played a role in shaping the intellectual worldview of, say, a Florovsky or a Bulgakov or a Barth.

A recently released book appears to buck this trend, trying to keep history and theology together: Frances Young, God's Presence: A Contemporary Recapitulation of Early Christianity (Cambridge UP, 2013), 472pp. 

About this book we are told:

In 2011, Frances Young delivered the Bampton Lectures in Oxford to great acclaim. She offered a systematic theology with contemporary coherence, by engaging in conversation with the fathers of the church - those who laid down the parameters of Christian theology and enshrined key concepts in the creeds - and exploring how their teachings can be applied today, despite the differences in our intellectual and ecclesial environments. This book results from a thorough rewriting of those lectures in which Young explores the key topics of Christian doctrine in a way that is neither simply dogmatic nor simply historical. She addresses the congruence of head and heart, through academic and spiritual engagement with God's gracious accommodation to human limitations. Christianity and biblical interpretation are discussed in depth, and the book covers key topics including Creation, anthropology, Christology, soteriology, spirituality, ecclesiology and Mariology, making it invaluable to those studying historical and constructive theology.

Young, as you may recall, is the author of the recently updated and acclaimed handbook From Nicaea to Chalcedon: A Guide to the Literature and Its Background, which helps put much of the conciliar and patristic literature in the fourth and fifth centuries into a helpful and wide-ranging context.

Higher Education (2012)

As the academic year begins, now is the time to consider anew what it is that Christians of all traditions are doing when they participate in, and themselves establish and run, universities and colleges. A recent publication of Mike Higton, A Theology of Higher Education (Oxford UP, 2012, 336pp.) may help us consider these questions.

About this book the publisher tells us that it offers

A clear affirmation of the public worth of higher education

A Christian theological account of secular and religiously plural universities

Detailed engagement with the history of the Western university

Interactions with British and American literature on Christianity and higher education

Practical examples and policy recommendations

In this book, Mike Higton provides a constructive critique of Higher Education policy and practice in the UK, the US and beyond, from the standpoint of Christian theology. He focuses on the role universities can and should play in forming students and staff in intellectual virtue, in sustaining vibrant communities of inquiry, and in serving the public good. He argues both that modern secular universities can be a proper context for Christians to pursue their calling as disciples to learn and to teach, and that Christians can contribute to the flourishing of such universities as institutions devoted to learning for the common good. In the process he sets out a vision of the good university as secular and religiously plural, as socially inclusive, and as deeply and productively entangled with the surrounding society. Along the way, he engages with a range of historical examples (the medieval University of Paris, the University of Berlin in the nineteenth century, and John Henry Newman's work in Oxford and Dublin) and with a range of contemporary writers on Higher Education from George Marsden to Stanley Hauerwas and from David Ford to Rowan Williams.