Reading Ahmed Fayek’s “The Crisis in Psychoanalysis”, I was arrested by his comment that psychoanalysis and religion have in common that both are based on an insight. His comment is well taken: it’s just that I had never made quite that unique connection before. For sure, many might reflexively object to Fayek’s statement, if only because his idea seems to imply a kind of equivalency of status between religion and psychoanalysis that they would reject. In my experience, most people, especially in the psychoanalytic community, seem to regard religion as something incompatible, if not altogether in conflict, with religion. While it is not my intention here to reconcile psychoanalysis and religion, I do want to say something about the purported opposition between psychoanalysis and religion and, secondly, to suggest that there may, in fact, be more here than meets the eye.
My impression is that the ostensible conflict between psychoanalysis and religion is usually based on the assumption that the two fields of thought are of unequal status, in the same way that physics and alchemy, or astronomy and astrology, are usually seen as being of unequal status. It is commonly accepted that one is based on scientific observation, the other is based on speculation or superstition; one is real, the other is imaginary; one is true, the other is unfounded.
This contrast, though, is based on a misunderstanding. The scientific method, per se, is founded on the kind of reasoning which seeks factual, measurable knowledge, knowledge having to do with our material world. The goal is to explain what makes things what they are, and how they work.
On the other hand, both psychoanalysis and religion (as Fayek observes) are based on that kind of thinking which searches for fundamental insights or inferences. A religion is usually put forward as representing or speaking for something which has allegedly been revealed. Likewise, a psychoanalytic insight is usually experienced as something which has been revealed. Thus, many of Freud’s “discoveries” which he reported to his friend Fliess were insights derived from moments in his work in which he had an “Aha!!” experience.
To put it another way, the scientific method leads to facts, as it were, (though some may even relativize this), while an insight tends to occasions apprehension, meaning. However, I do not want to push too hard on this distinction. The philosophical distinction between scientific knowledge and religious insight may appear conceptually clear, but in practice the border between to the two can become pretty fuzzy. Whether one is pursuing scientific knowledge or religious or psychoanalytic insight, there is always an element of subjectivity which will have its way, come what may.
Instead, I want to take up another thread. But first: a colleague of mine, after reading the first draft of this log, remarked that I had said nothing about God. I suspect that, given the title of this blog, he felt that that was the least that he could expect. So as not to disappoint my friend, then, let me say a word about God.
I have always cherished a saying which a professor of mine attributed to the theologian, Paul Tillich. “God,” Tillich wrote, the theologian reported, “is the wholly other.” This to me is both the best and the most one can meaningfully say about God. This is because, having taken to heart the book of Job, I am very aware of how altogether completely ill-equipped I am to speak about God. But it is also most certainly because I suspect that, to the extent that I presume to speak about God, I am implicitly representing a claim to some kind of knowledge that places me on at least the same level of God. Thus, as soon as I open my mouth to say something about God, I advance myself at the expense of God. Speaking of God, then, I believe, is at best rather ambitious, and at worst bordering on delusional presumption.
But to think about God as “the wholly other” is another matter. It has the function and effect of helping to keep things in proper perspective, and, to my mind most importantly, it helps me to think about myself in a way that to a certain degree keeps my narcissism under control and at the same time acceptable, even understandable. Also, as I hope will in due course become apparent to the reader, I believe that the unknowableness of God, the “wholly other,” is an essential component to man’s potential to know himself. After all, there was a time when theology was seen as “the queen of the sciences,” the ultimate measure or the sine qua non of all knowledge.
Which leads me to my last point, i.e., that the denigration of religion, whether in the field of psychoanalysis or philosophy, represents a potentially great loss, a loss which in my view risks a deep distortion of our understanding of ourselves as human beings who are, after all, part and parcel of the natural world; that is, as humans who sometimes are only all too human, though sometimes too seeming only a little less than the angels.
In his “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis” Freud remarked how, following Copernicus and Darwin, psychoanalysis had dealt a third blow to the narcissism of mankind by revealing the power of the instincts and the operation of the unconscious. Thus, man was not only not the center of the universe, or superior to the creatures with which he shares the world, he was not even the master of his own house. Thus, perhaps unintentionally, Freud thereby added weight to the debate about the status of psychoanalysis versus religion. Since Copernicus’ idea about the structure of our universe, and Darwin’s idea about evolution, had been foci of intense debate about the authority of religion, Freud’s apparent equation of “man’s narcissism” with the religious side of these debates could not help but muddy the picture.
But while I am sympathetic to the charge that these debates about the authority of religion versus reason were occasioned by man’s narcissism, thereby functioning as a resistance to psychoanalysis, I would suggest that Freud, perhaps unintentionally, misrepresented something about religion. It seems to me that from the beginning to the present day, on some deep level, humanity, in spite of itself, harbors an awareness of how small and weak it is in the face of the enormity and power of the natural world, let alone the greater universe of which that world is a most minuscule part.
That being said, how is it possible not to ponder how we came to be here, what we are to do here, how we are to be? What is the meaning of it all? Just as the nursing infant gazes upwards towards the face of its mother–scanning, seeking, exploring–so we search outwards, upwards, looking to discover something which will enable us better to find and know ourselves and our place in this immense and unknowable surround.
Psychoanalysis helps us conceptualize how we develop and operate in our daily lives, but religion expresses our profound need to understand WHY. Freud’s view may be that religion represents a kind of defense, a defense of our narcissism if you will, our means of denying our dependency and helplessness. I suggest, contra Freud, that, ironically, religion is the ultimate expression of our heart-felt and deep-seated need for meaning and purpose in the face of our limitedness and vulnerability.
–Dr. Thomas Twyman, MSSW, Cert. Psya.