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CHAPTER 1
Psychoanalysis and Religion
Still relatively unknown and living in a strongly Catholic city, Freud dared take on belief in God at a meeting in early March 1907 of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society. He presented a paper with the title "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices." Most of the observations were clinical; a brilliant physician was fitting instances from his practice into a narrative presentation meant to convey a theoretical point of view. But at the end, when Freud mentioned "the sphere of religious life," a morally argumentative strain began to appear. "Complete backslidings into Sin are more common among pious people than among neurotics" was an incautious generalization even then (despite the inhibitions Freud had noticed among "his" neurotics) and a quaintly unsupportable one now.
When Freud discusses "religious practices," he is intelligent and helpful to the kind of scholar who is interested not in debunking but rather in understanding man's churchgoing history. The "petty ceremonials" of a given religion can, he points out, become tyrannical; they manage to "push aside the underlying thoughts." He suggests that historically various religious "re-forms" have been intended to redress "the original balance" — rescue beliefs from arid pietism. But in his concluding paragraphs Freud again makes a sweeping generalization, tries to join an analysis of psychopathology to social criticism: "One might venture to regard obsessional neurosis as a pathological formation of a religion, and to describe that neurosis as an individual religiosity and religion as a universal obsessional neurosis."
This is the kind of naive and gratuitous reductionism we have seen relentlessly pursued these days in the name of psychoanalysis. Freud himself was often more careful. In the well-known essay "Dostoievski and Patricide" he acknowledged the futility of a psychoanalytic "explanation" of a writer's talent, as opposed to any psychological difficulties the writer may happen to share with millions of other human beings. When he risked social and political speculation (in the exchange of letters with Einstein or in The New Introductory Lectures), he could be guarded about using his ideas to interpret culture. Sometimes, even when writing about religious matters, as in Totem and Taboo or Moses and Monotheism, he was frank about being conjectural. His first draft, completed in 1934, of a book on the origins of monotheism was titled The Man Moses: A Historical Novel.
But religion clearly excited him to truculence, nowhere more evidently than in The Future of an Illusion (1927). He starts out warning himself to be objective, to summon a long-range historical view, to be modest, restrained. Yet he quickly connects religious ideas to man's obvious helplessness in the face of life's mysteries. He then connects that condition to the child's predicament — "an infantile prototype." After pointing out that there is no conclusive "proof," in the word's modern scientific sense, of God's existence, he refers to "the fairy tales of religion" and indicates with a rising vehemence that religion is a mere illusion, "derived from human wishes." His tone here is distinctly different from that of his other sociological writing. He contrasts his line of argument ("correct thinking") to another ("lame excuse"). "Ignorance is ignorance," he reminds us, and adds immediately that we have "no right to believe anything can be derived from it." And then: "In other matters [than religion] no sensible person will behave so irresponsibly or rest content with such feeble grounds for his opinions." He declares that "the effect of religious thinking may be likened to that of a narcotic," and that religion, "like the obsessional neurosis" he had described so vividly years earlier, arises "out of the Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father."
To his credit, he then pulls back and acknowledges that "the pathology of the individual" does not provide a fully accurate analogy to the nature of religious faith, but he is soon referring to faith as "the consolation of religious illusion" and expressing the hope that at some future time, when human beings have been "sensibly brought up," they will not have this "neurosis," will "need no intoxicant to deaden it." Then, at the end, he embraces "our God, Logos," insists yet again that "religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis," and makes an invidious distinction between his stoic adherence to science and the faith of the religious in God: "My illusions are not, like religious ones, incapable of correction. They have not the character of delusion."
Philip Rieff, whose essays and books have been among the most learned and suggestive responses to Freud's writings, has been harsh about The Future of an Illusion and the kindred writing that preceded it. Rieff refers to Freud's "genetic disparagements of the religious spirit" and finds his reasoning tautological: "He will admit as religious only feelings of submission and dependence; others are dismissed as intellectual delusions or displacements of the primary infantile sentiment." It is, Rieff says, "scientific name-calling," though in the service of a sincerely held modern rationalism.
Most Freudian psychologists have not challenged Freud's views. But in 1979 Ana-Maria Rizzuto, who teaches at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, published a major study of the relation between psychiatry and faith, The Birth of the Living God. "The cultural stance of contemporary psychoanalysis," she begins, "is that of Freud: religion is a neurosis based on wishes. Freud has been quoted over and over again without considering his statements in a critical light." Examining her own experience as a psychoanalyst, she finds herself rejecting Freud's assertion that "God really is the father"; she also rejects his insistence that religion is a kind of oedipal offshoot — a "sublimation," a means by which erotic and aggressive feelings toward a particular man, the father, are given expression. Such an explanation, she argues, takes an extremely complicated and continuing emotional and intellectual process and "reduces it to a representational fossil, freezing it at one exclusive level of development." And such sublimation, incidentally, denies mothers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters any substantial involvement in the emotional events that affect religious belief. Extremely preoccupied with "the father-son relationship" in his analysis of the psychology of religion, "Freud does not concern himself with religion or God in women."
The British psychoanalysts D. W. Winnicott, Charles Rycroft, and Harry Guntrip have obviously influenced the American Rizzuto. Like them, she puts strong emphasis on the texture of "object relations," seeing the mind as constantly responding to and reflecting involvements with a range of human beings, rather than as a battlefield in which certain "agencies" fight things out. She seems especially influenced by Winnicott's revisions of Freud as a result of his work as a pediatrician and child psychoanalyst. He emphasized the significance of early months and years, when babies begin to distinguish themselves — the mother is there, and I am here — and begin to show the distinctively human characteristic of symbolization. The first instance of that lifelong habit is known to most parents — the adoption of those "transitional objects" that mean so much to young children: a part of a blanket, a teddy bear, a doll, a spoon, an article of clothing, and, later on, a song or story or scene. To be sure, even in the nursery, history, culture, and class determine what "materials" are available; but Winnicott's work casts a new light on infants' mental complexity and variability. Anywhere, anytime, infants discover their very own world of word and thought, symbol and memory.
Winnicott did not find that adult ideas or inclinations were similar to a baby's mental stratagems. His point is that, early on, all children learn to carry with themselves ideas and feelings connected to persons, places, and things, and that these mental "representations" attest to nothing less or more than powerful human capacities. It would be foolish to equate a baby's attachment to a part of a blanket with a poet's use of synecdoche or a supplicant's attachment to rosary beads, but there is a connection, like the connection between incipient and full-fledged humanity rather than between early and later psychopathology. What such analysts as Winnicott and Rizzuto aim to document is a beginning effort at self-definition through our thoughts and interests, likes and dislikes, fantasies and dreams, affections and involvements.
Dr. Rizzuto calls one of these efforts "God representation," referring to the notion about God that most of us in the West acquire early in life from what we hear at home, at school, in church, in the neighborhood. Even agnostics and atheists, she finds, have had ideas about God, given Him some private form — a mental picture, some words, a sound. In the lives of children God joins company with kings, superheroes, witches, monsters, friends, brothers and sisters, parents, teachers, police, firefighters, and on and on. Dr. Rizzuto offers histories of His presence in the minds of people who firmly call themselves nonbelievers. She points out that God may be rejected, denied, or ridiculed as well as embraced or relied upon, and that each of those psychological attitudes can be connected to the constraints and opportunities (and good luck and bad luck) of a given life. Rather than making categorical judgments and looking for psychopathology, she is writing as a phenomenological psychologist, someone who wants to describe and understand the world.
Freud continually returned to the idea of God; he wrote about His origin in the minds of others, devoted numerous articles and three books to Him. Why? Like Winnicott, Rizzuto sees religious ideas as part of our cultural life, like music, art, literature, or, for that matter, formal intellectual reasoning and scientific speculation. They are all instrumental in helping us to place ourselves in space and time, to figure out where we come from and what we are and where we're going. In a touching statement at the end of her book Rizzuto arrives at the point where her "departure from Freud is inevitable":
Freud considers God and religion a wishful childish illusion. He wrote asking mankind to renounce it. I must disagree. Reality and illusion are not contradictory terms. Psychic reality — whose depth Freud so brilliantly unveiled — cannot occur without that specifically human transitional space for play and illusion ... Asking a mature, functioning individual to renounce his God would be like asking Freud to renounce his own creation, psychoanalysis, and the "illusory" promise of what scientific knowledge can do. This is, in fact, the point. Men cannot be men without illusions. The type of illusion we select — science, religion, or something else — reveals our personal history — the transitional space each of us has created between his objects and himself to find a "resting place" to live in.
In Rizzuto's view, it is in the nature of human beings, from early childhood until the last breath, to sift and sort, and to play, first with toys and games and teddy bears and animals, then with ideas and words and images and sounds and notions. We never stop trying to settle upon some satisfying idea of who and what we ourselves are, to build a world that is ours — with blocks or bricks or iron, with money and signatures of ownership, with acts of affirmation and loyalty and affiliation, with outbursts of meanness and rancor, with mental images, and, not least, with theories about how the life we live should go. One wonders, though, how we ought to evaluate the different "illusions" Dr. Rizzuto refers to. The history of science is in large part the demonstration of illusion; and if "reality and illusion are not contradictory terms," they are not identical, either.
In trying to demonstrate the universality of an element of mental function, Dr. Rizzuto claimed perhaps too much of a link between "reality" and "illusion." It seems to me that she did so, actually, because Freud had repeatedly thrown down that either/or gauntlet — emphasized the polarity between the two — to his readers and followers. What she means she states better when she refers to a "capacity" each of us has "to symbolize, fantasize and create super-human beings"; or when she describes the role that fantasy has in people's lives: a means by which they (meaning, again, every single one of us) "moderate their longings for objects, their fears, their poignant disappointment with their limitations." A baby uses its eyes with the "longings" Dr. Rizzuto mentions, and we adults, babes in the woods of a universe whose enormity and mystery and frustrations are only too obvious, do likewise. The word "theory" is derived from [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] which refers to the act of looking and seeing — what the spectator does at a religious ceremony, or the augur in examining portents, or the soothsayer scanning the sky to figure out what will happen next. Theorists assemble facts to help us look with a little less anguish at enigmas often enough impenetrable: "The objects we so indispensably need are never themselves alone, they combine the mystery of their reality and our fantasy."
What does Dr. Rizzuto mean by that crucial statement? Facts may be stated independently, as in a chemical equation, a physics formula, a finding by a psychologist about rat behavior in a maze, an observation by a psychoanalyst that people who do X have had, to a significant degree, a Y kind of childhood — but the matter cannot be left to rest there. B. F. Skinner takes his behaviorist laboratory findings and uses them to construct stories, to make recommendations on childrearing, to imagine Utopias — to suggest how we should live our lives. And Steven Weinberg, in a lovely book, The First Three Minutes, uses his work in theoretical physics to give us "a modern view of the origin of the universe." Wonderfully, he starts with an old Norse myth about that origin, yet ends up with his own candid surmise, his own effort to deal with the "uncertainties" he keeps on mentioning. "It is almost irresistible," he tells us, "for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes." A little later on he observes that "the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."
Dr. Rizzuto knows, from her work with children, that they, too, struggle with just such a sense of things, and can be heard saying so again and again. Witches emerge from children's desire to understand life's cruel arbitrariness. It is not necessarily "neurotic" for a child to talk of witches, nor is it necessarily "immature" or, again, "neurotic" for a religious grownup to summon Satan or for Freud to talk of a "primal horde" or a "totem" or of Thanatos — examples of his move from fact-finding to the kind of rumination Dr. Rizzuto refers to: an exploratory play of the mind characteristic of all of us, though of course it varies in symbolic complexity and content, and in clarity or pretentiousness. From Plato's Timaeus to Professor Weinberg's essay, from Egyptian stories to the modern-day notion of black holes, our cosmological yearnings have found in various facts, or in ancient geometry or contemporary physics, a means for — what? Not illusion, maybe, strictly defined, but a little help in knowing what this life is about. The issue is not, though, a "regressive" tendency; the issue is the nature of our predicament as human beings, young or old — and the way our minds deal with that predicament, from the earliest years to the final breath.
That is why it is particularly ironic and dismaying to find both Freudian and Marxist thought so arrogantly abusive when the subject of religion comes up. True, religious thought, like everything else, has lent itself to tyranny and exploitation of people. But so has Marxist thought, Freudian thought. The writings of Marx the economist and historian, for all their original clarity, become the futurist "fantasies" of a supposedly (one day) "withering" entity called "the dictatorship of the proletariat." The writings of Freud the clinician and historian of lives turn into the "movement" called psychoanalysis, with a few anointed ones, with sectarian argument, with "schools" and splits and expulsions, with references by analysts themselves to "punitive orthodoxy." A century that has seen Lenin's mausoleum, pictures of Karl Marx waved before the leaders of the Gulag, Freud fainting in the arms of Jung and postponing for years a trip to Rome, even as he immersed himself in accounts of Hannibal's life and turned heatedly on one colleague after another, cannot be oblivious to what Dr. Rizzuto has described: among the most brilliant and decent of individuals, those most determined to explore "reality," one or another fantasy, even illusion, will take deep root.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Spiritual Life of Children"
by .
Copyright © 1990 Robert Coles.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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