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. 

Orthodox Revolutions and Lesser Transitions

I am not by nature the sort of person who easily or regularly finds himself attending political rallies, marches, and protests. But I have not forgotten standing in the freezing ice storm in December 2004 on Parliament Hill in Ottawa as the Orange Revolution was unfolding in Ukraine, where I had taught English just three years before that. A goodly number of Ukrainian-Canadians turned out for that rally to show support to those fighting for a new government in Ukraine. 

That was one of several "colour" revolutions in the former Soviet Union. What role did the Orthodox and Catholic churches play in them? In the case of Ukraine, the answer has to be: a very considerable one. But in other countries? That is the question asked and answered in forthcoming book set for release at year's end: Orthodox Christianity and the Politics of Transition: Ukraine, Serbia, and Georgia. by Tornike Metreveli (Routledge, Dec. 2020), 200pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This book discusses in detail how Orthodox Christianity was involved in and influenced political transition in Ukraine, Serbia and Georgia after the collapse of communism. Based on original research, including extensive interviews with clergy and parishioners as well as historical, legal and policy analysis, the book argues that the nature of the involvement of churches in post-communist politics depended on whether the interests of the church (for example, in education, the legal system or economic activity) were accommodated or threatened: if accommodated, churches confined themselves to the sacred domain; if threatened they engaged in daily politics. If churches competed with each other for organizational interests, they evoked the support of nationalism while remaining within the religious domain.

Politically Coerced Orthodoxies

I met Cyril Hovorun in Chicago in 2012 at the AAR, but have only been reading him seriously for about 3 years now--and in that time he's produced a trilogy of very important books (starting with Meta-Ecclesiology) in ecclesiology. Happily, we have a habit of getting to the same conferences, so I saw him in Vienna in 2016, in San Felice del Benaco in 2017, and will see him (D.v.) in January 2019 in Romania.

With his two latest books especially, he has rocketed up to the top of my list of "must-read" Orthodox authors, for he always talks such good sense about controverted issues, calmly and unflappably laying out a compelling case for things that too many Catholic and Orthodox Christians are otherwise emotionally over-invested in and thus incapable of seeing clearly.

Thus, e.g., his Scaffolds of the Church  (about which I interviewed him here) looked at the question of hierarchy in a way that freed it of the self-aggrandizing nonsense sometimes talked about it by popes, patriarchs, and bishops of both East and perhaps especially West.

And now, in his newest book, Political Orthodoxies: the Unorthodoxies of the Church Coerced (Fortress, 2018, 210pp.) he has emerged at precisely the right time to shed needed light on some of the underlying issues in the on-going Constantinople-Kyiv-Moscow conflict over Ukrainian Orthodoxy (whose history is so well told in Nick Denysenko's book; interview here).

Part of my interest in Political Orthodoxies comes from its focus (albeit too briefly) on the role of coercion in Christian history. It's a theme I'm addressing in the paper I'm giving in Romania while focusing on the problem of papal primatial powers. (It's also a theme Ashley Purpura has very helpfully addressed in her book for which I interviewed her here.)

Hovorun gets right to his point in the introduction to Political Orthodoxies, picking up where Scaffolds left off by noting how much of Christian understanding and practice of ecclesial offices and authorities, and both with their coercive powers, were "imported to Christianity in late antiquity from the Roman political world" (3). While he thinks in some cases this was an understandable move, he also notes how quickly it developed into problems, not least "hierarchism and stratification" (4). Moreover, the Church continued, under and after Constantine, to suffer more and more from "coercion," which Hovorun calls  "one of the chronic infections the Church contracted from the state" (8).

As Christianity develops, especially in the East, these once-imperial structures and coercive practices get adopted by local churches who seem to think that such practices are some kind of package-deal, little realizing--as Hovorun shows in his second chapter--that civil religion and political religion are quite different from Christian faith. This failure to make necessary distinctions means that too often in Orthodoxy certain political ideologies are adopted "under the guise of Christianity" (75). This chapter surveys such unhealthy and unhelpful transformations in Greece, Romania, and Russia, which are presented as case-studies. There are some staggering details here, and lengthy and damning quotations from various Greek, Romanian, and especially Russian churchmen sucking up to politicians or justifying various immoral activities. Clearly the metropolitan of Odessa does not specialize in subtle sycophancy.

The case-study method is used again towards the end of the book as Hovorun looks at the problems of anti-Semitism in Orthodoxy as well as nationalism. In all these cases--civil religion, political religion, anti-Semitism, and nationalism--Hovorun argues that some or all of them often get bound up with Orthodox theology and church life, to the latter's detriment. Indeed, he goes farther and says that too many Christians are "unable to discern between the norms of the gospel and the simulacra offered by political Orthodoxies" (185), leading, e.g., to their inability or unwillingness to speak out against "wars between Orthodox peoples," not least in Ukraine.

In his conclusion, Hovorun returns briefly and more explicitly to the issue of coercion again, noting once more that a return to "apostolic non-coercive ethos" (199) of the foundations of Christianity remains very much a desideratum today in the Orthodox world. The same, I would add, could be said of the Catholic Church, too, but that is a thought for another day.

Russian and Other Nationalisms

We live in an era that has suddenly rediscovered the problems of nationalism it seems. For those of us in the Christian East, this has been a problem since at least the beginning of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. It has never gone away, but here too seems to be undergoing an unwelcome and unhelpful revival. As a result, more and more scholarly attention is being paid to it in a variety of contexts, as the following brand new books indicate.

With the ongoing war Russia has launched against Ukraine (and before it Georgia let us not forget) and is recently ratcheting up, it is no wonder that more and more attention is being paid to Russian nationalism, though what we are seeing in Ukraine and elsewhere is more properly a re-emergence of neo-imperialism. Nevertheless, a new book by Marlene Laruelle may help us understand this picture more clearly: Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields (Routledge, 2018), 256pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

This book, by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, explores the complex nature of Russian nationalism. It examines nationalism as a multilayered and multifaceted repertoire displayed by a myriad of actors. It considers nationalism as various concepts and ideas emphasizing Russia’s distinctive national character, based on the country’s geography, history, Orthodoxy, and Soviet technological advances. It analyzes the ideologies of Russia’s ultra-nationalist and far-right groups, explores the use of nationalism in the conflict with Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, and discusses how Putin’s political opponents, including Alexei Navalny, make use of nationalism. Overall the book provides a rich analysis of a key force which is profoundly affecting political and societal developments both inside Russia and beyond.

Nationalism is not just a political phenomenon, of course, but often has deep psychodynamics at play, many if not most of them illusions in the strict Freudian sense, and sometimes pathologically so. Two new books examine some of those fascinating dynamics: first and more broadly is Patrick Colm Hogan, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity (Ohio State University Press, 2018), 408pp.

About this book the publisher gives us the following information:

From the rise of Nazism to the conflict in Kashmir in 2008, nationalism has been one of the most potent forces in modern history. Yet the motivational power of nationalism is still not well understood. In Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity, Patrick Colm Hogan begins with empirical research on the cognitive psychology of group relations to isolate varieties of identification, arguing that other treatments of nationalism confuse distinct types of identity formation. Synthesizing different strands of this research, Hogan articulates a motivational groundwork for nationalist thought and action.

Understanding Nationalism goes on to elaborate a cognitive poetics of national imagination, most importantly, narrative structure. Hogan focuses particularly on three complex narrative prototypes that are prominent in human thought and action cross-culturally and trans-historically. He argues that our ideas and feelings about what nations are and what they should be are fundamentally organized and oriented by these prototypes. He develops this hypothesis through detailed analyses of national writings from Whitman to George W. Bush, from Hitler to Gandhi.

Hogan’s book alters and expands our comprehension of nationalism generally—its cognitive structures, its emotional operations. It deepens our understanding of the particular, important works he analyzes. Finally, it extends our conception of the cognitive scope and political consequence of narrative.

The second book takes us into some of the dynamics of the on-going assault by Russia on Ukraine, including a chapter on the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in the conflict: Neighbourhood Perceptions of the Ukraine Crisis: From the Soviet Union into Eurasia? eds. Gerhard Besier and Katarzyna Stoklosa (Routledge, 2018), 282pp.

About this book we are told the following:

Recent events in Ukraine and Russia and the subsequent incorporation of Crimea into the Russian state, with the support of some circles of inhabitants of the peninsula, have shown that the desire of people to belong to the Western part of Europe should not automatically be assumed. Discussing different perceptions of the Ukrainian-Russian war in neighbouring countries, this book offers an analysis of the conflicts and issues connected with the shifting of the border regions of Russia and Ukraine to show how ’material’ and ’psychological’ borders are never completely stable ideas. The contributors – historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists from across Europe – use an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to explore the different national and transnational perceptions of a possible future role for Russia.

As I mentioned at the outset, the role of Christianity within nationalism--whether Russian, Romanian, Greek, Serbian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, or any other--is of course well known. But a new book takes a wider look at the role of Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective by J. Christopher Soper and Joel S. Fetzer (Cambridge UP, 2018), 304pp.

This book contains chapters on countries with substantial Eastern Christian presence, including Israel, India, and Greece. We are further told the following about this book:

It is difficult to imagine forces in the modern world as potent as nationalism and religion. Both provide people with a source of meaning, each has motivated individuals to carry out extraordinary acts of heroism and cruelty, and both serve as the foundation for communal and personal identity. While the subject has received both scholarly and popular attention, this distinctive book is the first comparative study to examine the origins and development of three distinct models: religious nationalism, secular nationalism, and civil-religious nationalism. Using multiple methods, the authors develop a new theoretical framework that can be applied across diverse countries and religious traditions to understand the emergence, development, and stability of different church-state arrangements over time. The work combines public opinion, constitutional, and content analysis of the United States, Israel, India, Greece, Uruguay, and Malaysia, weaving together historical and contemporary illustrations.

Finally, this book caught my interest because of the role of music, not least in two Orthodox-majority countries it covers, viz., Serbia and Bulgaria:  Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe eds. Krisztina Lajosi and Andreas Stynen (Brill, 2018), 285pp.

About this book we are told this:

This wide-ranging contribution to the study of nationalism and the social history of music examines the relationship between choral societies and national mobilization in the nineteenth century. From Norway to the Basque country and from Wales to Bulgaria, this pioneering study explores and compares the ways choral societies influenced and reflected the development of national awareness under differing political and social circumstances. By the second half of the nineteenth century, organized communal singing became a primary leisure activity that attracted all layers of society. Though strongly patriotic in tone, choral societies borrowed from each other and relied heavily on prominent German or French models. This volume is the first to address both the national and transnational significance.

Meaning and Melancholia

Christopher Bollas is a prolific writer and one of the most important psychoanalytic theorists alive today. I have previously mentioned a number of his books, and recently received and read his newest: Meaning and Melancholia: Life in an Age of Bewilderment (Routledge, 2018), 174pp. I had high hopes for this book, but they were only partially met.

The title, of course, instantly calls to mind one of Freud's wartime essays, "Mourning and Melancholia" (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV: 237-258). (This Penguin edition gives you that essay and a number of related works.)
I have been thinking about that essay and drawing on its important insights for some time in a number of lectures I gave on the underlying psychology of ISIS propaganda about Eastern Christianity and the Crusades.

Like many of Bollas' books, and not unlike the analytic process itself, Meaning and Melancholia is written in a diffuse style loosely stitching together a number of themes under an overarching narrative. As the publisher tells us: 

Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment sees Christopher Bollas apply his creative and innovative psychoanalytic thinking to various contemporary social, cultural and political themes.

This book offers an incisive exploration of powerful trends within, and between, nations in the West over the past two hundred years. The author traces shifts in psychological forces and ‘frames of mind’, that have resulted in a crucial ‘intellectual climate change’. He contends that recent decades have seen rapid and significant transformations in how we define our ‘selves’, as a new emphasis on instant connectedness has come to replace reflectiveness and introspection.

Bollas argues that this trend has culminated in the current rise of psychophobia; a fear of the mind and a rejection of depth psychologies that has paved the way for what he sees as hate based solutions to world problems, such as the victory of Trump in America and Brexit in the United Kingdom. He maintains that, if we are to counter the threat to democracy posed by these changes and refind a more balanced concept of the self within society, we must put psychological insight at the heart of a new kind of analysis of culture and society.

This remarkable, thought-provoking book will appeal to anyone interested in politics, social policy and cultural studies, and in the gaining of insight into the ongoing challenges faced by the Western democracies and the global community.

In this short book, Bollas imitates Freud in some ways insofar as he engages in broad cultural analysis of many themes of our time, especially certain developments in both technology and politics. But this is no mere restating or updating of Freud but instead clearly a book of our time. The impetus for it, he tells us, comes largely from the election of Trump in the US, the rise of Marie Le Pen in France, and the Brexit vote and ongoing discontent in the United Kingdom. But this is not a partisan book that discusses policies so much as it looks at the history of the past century to detect certain underlying psychological themes, including, he begins by claiming, unfinished mourning from the Great War, which introduced a massive splitting into the Western psyche from which it has not recovered.

The book spends more time than I wanted on the causes and effects of current American politics, and not enough time on the changes wrought by technology. But what links the two, Bollas says in a number of ways, is a preference for simplicity, homogeneity, and the deliberate destruction of complexity: "in the age of bewilderment, there was peace to be found in ridding the mind of unwanted complexity" (77). Such eliminations are widespread: today's politics preys on that anti-complexity; today's globalized capitalism demands it; and even today's therapists and psychologists go along with it, offering almost instant ready-made courses of action to "fix" one's life rather than (as a psychoanalyst would) encouraging one to reflect on it at length in all its messiness, perhaps coming later to a new course of action--or perhaps not bothering to do so but instead, as Adam Phillips might say, coming to be content not to know without being thereby frustrated.

When he does focus on technological change--especially what it means to live our life tethered to phones and tablets, and broadcasting bits and pieces of that fragmented, homogenized life on social media--Bollas provides this very apt summary of the problems of social media, as anyone who ever bothers to read the comments on any website about any topic soon realizes: "Aspects of the way we communicate and think in the twenty-first century can be seen as forms of psychic flight from the overwhelming weight of inheriting a world shattered by dumb thoughtlessness."

In the end, Bollas says that the chaos and unmourned losses unleashed by the Great War have fed into an age of bewilderment which is only getting worse, and we have not recognized or admitted this--to our peril:

With the loss of a sense of meaning--the feeling that our lives can make a contribution--mourning has turned into melancholia. When we are melancholic we are angry over the losses we have suffered, and we unconsciously blame that which has apparently left us. We now feel abandoned by the humanist predicates of Western culture and the network of belief systems that seemed to offer a progressive vision of humanity, and we have turned our rage against social efficacy itself (127).