The Jesuits and the Psychoanalysts

I've been neglectful in not pointing out to you a book and author interview I did at the other blog I maintain. It is a book that overlaps with the focus of this blog, focusing as much of it does on Jesuit theology and psychology in Latin America in the postwar period, which is then so wonderfully linked back to the first generation of psychoanalysts around Freud. 

That book is Daniel José Gaztambide's A People's History of Psychoanalysis: from Freud to Liberation Psychology, and it is really superb. 

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. 

Jesuits and the Christian East

I recently and modestly paid some attention to Jesuit historians who have been and are important for the Christian East, including the best known of them, Robert Taft.

And I have a piece forthcoming in America, the Jesuit periodical, on Jesuit psychoanalysts. So I note with great interest a new book that looks at the diverse roles and contexts of Jesuit ministry around the world over the last 500 years, including in the Orthodox world as well as in modern psychology: The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (Oxford UP, 2019), 1152pp.  

About this very hefty collection the publisher tells us this:

Through its missionary, pedagogical, and scientific accomplishments, the Society of Jesus-known as the Jesuits-became one of the first institutions with a truly "global" reach, in practice and intention. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits offers a critical assessment of the Order, helping to chart new directions for research at a time when there is renewed interest in Jesuit studies. In particular, the Handbook examines their resilient dynamism and innovative spirit, grounded in Catholic theology and Christian spirituality, but also profoundly rooted in society and cultural institutions. It also explores Jesuit contributions to education, the arts, politics, and theology, among others.

The volume is organized in seven major sections, totaling forty articles, on the Order's foundation and administration, the theological underpinnings of its activities, the Jesuit involvement with secular culture, missiology, the Order's contributions to the arts and sciences, the suppression the Order endured in the 18th century, and finally, the restoration. The volume also looks at the way the Jesuit Order is changing, including becoming more non-European and ethnically diverse, with its members increasingly interested in engaging society in addition to traditional pastoral duties.

Robert Murray's Eternally Memorable Syriac Scholarship

John Flannery of Heythrop College in the University of London e-mailed me to let me know of Robert Murray's death. A brief obituary from the Society of Jesus in the United Kingdom is here.

He was one of those pioneering and incredibly talented Jesuit scholars who did so much work to advance our understanding of the Christian East. He was an early pioneer especially of the revival of studies into Syriac Christianity, which now has a number of prominent young scholars, some of the noted and interviewed on here over the years.

Perhaps his best known book, which I have long had on my shelves, is Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. 

An earlier work, published in 1992 and reprinted more recently by the invaluable Gorgias Press, has language that all those of us involved with the World Council of Churches in the 1990s will immediately recognize:  The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace, and the Integrity of Creation. 

His funeral Mass was to have been today in the Jesuit church in Farm Street in London (which I have fond memories of visiting very briefly in 1997). Eternal memory!

Jesuits and Casuists: A Note on Understanding Amoris Laetitia

I was on a panel last spring with Matthew Ashley of Notre Dame talking about Francis's methods as pope, and alluded in passing to a book that very much bears mentioning now in light of this endlessly jejune furor in the Catholic Church over Amoris Laetitia. It is a book I read twenty years ago now in a graduate class on the history of ethics, and has remained with me both as a wonderfully written and deeply fascinating work of history, but also as a clear reminder of the importance of treating cases on their own terms, something which the Catholic tradition used to pride itself on doing. I went back to it for my lecture last spring, and found that it described, in often uncanny ways, the approach of Pope Francis to moral questions in the aforementioned exhortation and elsewhere.

Published in 1990 by the University of California Press, this book remains very timely in the Catholic Church today. I submit you cannot understand how and why Pope Francis operates as he does until you read Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen in The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.

Equally I submit you cannot understand why his opponents (including authors of that "filial correction") are driven to apoplexy by the man until you realize, thanks again to Jonsen and Toulmin, that this pope is not content with abstract denunciations or universal declarations that fail to discern their particular applications in the context of individual lives. As the authors note of the early Jesuit leaders, "they prepared their charges to meet problems of conscience with 'discernment'--a favourite Jesuit word." Anyone who has read and listened to Pope Francis knows that 'discernment' remains if not his favourite word then certainly one of his most frequently uttered. He is a Jesuit casuist of the old school. Understand that and you understand something fundamental about the man.

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars

The Jesuits' history is certainly a colorful one, and their encounters with the Christian East in the early period cannot be unequivocally accounted good, as I noted recently with regards to what happened in Ethiopia. Jesuit activities in Russia are perhaps even more controverted, and a book forthcoming later this year will shed further light on this period that did so much to rouse and maintain Russian Orthodox suspicions of Roman Catholic activities and orders:

Nikolaos A. Chrissidis, An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2015), 384pp.

About this book we are told:

The first formally organized educational institution in Russia was established in 1685 by two Greek hieromonks, Ioannikios and Sophronios Leichoudes. Like many of their Greek contemporaries in the seventeenth century, the brothers acquired part of their schooling in colleges of post-Renaissance Italy under a precise copy of the Jesuit curriculum. When they created a school in Moscow, known as the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy, they emulated the structural characteristics, pedagogical methods, and program of studies of Jesuit prototypes.

In this original work, Nikolaos A. Chrissidis analyzes the academy’s impact on Russian educational practice and situates it in the contexts of Russian-Greek cultural relations and increased contact between Russia and Western Europe in the seventeenth century. Chrissidis demonstrates that Greek academic and cultural influences on Russia in the second half of the seventeenth century were Western in character, though Orthodox in doctrinal terms. He also shows that Russian and Greek educational enterprises were part of the larger European pattern of Jesuit academic activities that impacted Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox educational establishments and curricular choices.

An Academy at the Court of the Tsars is the first study of the Slavo-Greco-Latin Academy in English and the only one based on primary sources in Russian, Church Slavonic, Greek, and Latin. It will interest scholars and students of early modern Russian and Greek history, of early modern European intellectual history and the history of science, of Jesuit education, and of Eastern Orthodox history and culture.