Psychoanalysis and Religion:

Are they compatible?

Gary E. Myers, Ph.D., M.Div.Executive Director, Grace Counseling CenterMadison, NJ

Professor Emeritus, Medical Humanities and PsychiatrySouthern Illinois University School of Medicine

Significance of The Question

• Theoretical

– What kind of truth-claims can psychoanalytic investigations make about the contents of consciousness or cultural phenomena, such as art, religion, and literature?

• God does not exist?

• Religion is an instance of psychopathology?

Significance of The Question

• Cultural

– How are individual psychodynamics, religion, and culture related?

• Clinical

– The compatibility question has implications for

• How analysts will understand and respond to their patients religious beliefs

• What religious patients can expect from their analysts

Appearances and Compatibility

• Our initial encounter with Freud and psychoanalysis would likely lead us to conclude that psychoanalysis and religion are incompatible.

• Eavesdropping on a conversation between Freud and philosopher/theologian C.S. Lewis

Compatibility?

• If we are going to find common ground between psychoanalysis, we are going to have to take a bit of a journey through the labyrinth of Freud’s thinking on religion.

• We are going to need a map to find our ways

From Incompatibility to Compatibility?Religion as illusion—projecting wishes for protection that must be outgrown

Religion as a universal obsessional neurosis that represses guilt and anxiety related to past trauma. Also must be out grown.

Religion as psychosis or mass delusion which enables humanity to contain aggression, which may not be able to be outgrown

Object relations identifies that the capacity to relate to others as persons rather than impersonal objects to be possessed or destroyed depends on the containment of aggression. Symbolic systems such as religion can support this developmental process.

Is religion a neurotic symptom that should be surpassed by increasing health and maturity or is it rooted in fundamental human need and capacity? Window of compatibility

Atheism and The Validity of Psychoanalysis

• Freud never thought of psychoanalysis as a proof for the non-existence of God or the falsity of religious belief.– . . . the fact that [the acceptance of] a theory is

psychologically determined does not in the least invalidate its scientific truth. (SE 1913, 13: 179)1

– "All I have done - and this is the only thing that is new in my exposition - is to add some psychological foundation to the [evidential] criticisms of my great predecessors" (SE 1927,21: 35).

Freud’s Atheism

• Freud is clearly an atheist

• But what kind of atheist is important

– Freud’s atheism relied on a rationalist argument, which he had accepted as a student in the gymnasium. His psychoanalytic investigations were not the source of his atheism

– His personal ambivalence towards religion may also have contributed

Driving Question of Freud’s Inquiry

• Not, is there or a God or are religious beliefs false?

• But given that all the evidence is stacked against religious belief, why does it persist?

• His hypothesis was that the persistence of religious belief results from its psychological function. It must meet some unconscious need.

Psychological Origins of Religion

• Freud’s theory of religion changed as his theory of mind (metapsychology) changed.

– The Future of an Illusion

• Freud theorizes that religion is the result of infantile wishes for protection being projected into external reality. Religious beliefs are self-protective illusions that are accepted as reality in order to control the angst of a frail creature facing a fundamentally indifferent and uncontrollable reality.

• Religion is the product of a primitive projective defense.

• Infantile coping skills will eventually be replaced.

• Clinical example

Psychological Origins of Religion

• Freud’s theory of religion as psychotic-like (Civilization and Its Discontents)

– Freud broadens his analysis of religion to an analysis of culture

– As he integrates his concept of the death instinct into his analysis, he discovers that religion is not a childish illusion to be outgrown, but may be root in needs that cannot be outgrown.

– Culture, fortified by religious beliefs, serves to repress the fundamental aggressiveness of humanity.

Psychological Origins of Religion

• Freud’s theory of religion as psychotic-like (Civilization and Its Discontents)– Religion and culture are less like an obsessional

neurosis that represses anxiety or sexuality

– It is more like a shared psychosis in which the world is psychically remade into a world where it makes sense to believe and act on notions like “love your neighbor as yourself”

– We live in a world constructed by a wish because the world would otherwise be unbearable.

Kernberg’ Reflections on Freud and Religion

• Like Freud, Kernberg sees that containment of aggression as the fundamental problem for the psyche and society.

• Normal development creates the possibility for self-love and love as a means of containing and transforming aggression.

• Universal ethical systems parallel, support, and stabilize this developmental achievement.

Kernberg’ Reflections on Freud and Religion

• Kernberg accepts Freud’s notion that there are two basic and opposed instincts or drives that propel us through life, the death instinct and life instinct or libido.

• We can roughly equate these instincts to what Melanie Klein referred to as the two basic emotions of the infant, aggression and elation.

• When frustrated the infant directs aggression against itself and eventually, as an act of self-preservation, directs aggression against external reality—to what it perceives to be the source of its frustration—the frustrating object.

Kernberg’ Reflections on Freud and Religion

• Transforming the death instinct occurs by integrating it with libido—the desire for attachment and love is a primary developmental task

• Along with internalizing the demands and prohibitions of the parents (superego)

• If a stable integration occurs an individual can experience frustration without hating and needing to destroy the frustrating objects

Religion as Narration of The Healthy Superego

• Healthy superego consists of the internalization of the demands and prohibitions that are the price that we pay for love and protection.

• Religion integrates the psyche into a narrative world where hatred and violence are restricted for the sake of love and creativity

• This constructed world or as Freud might say, this mass delusion, mirrors the inner world of a person who is able to limit unattenuated expressions of aggression for the sake of love.

• Religion as an anchor or parental holding environment.

Case

• 27-yearold Japanese woman referred for treatment resistant depression

• Experiencing exhaustion, sleeping problems, lethargy, lack of interest, crying spells, and guilt

• She is a conservative Protestant Christian, her husband is a theological student, her father is a minister and the leader of her denomination in Japan

Case

• Mother died when the patient was 17

• She did not cry at her mother’s death because her church believed that one should feel joy when a loved dies

• They have gone to a better place

• To grieve and to cry would show a lack of faith in God’s promise that her mother would go to heaven

Case

• I initially thought this belief to be a defense that protected her from her grief and that sadness was like associated with unacceptable angry, envious, or completive feelings.

• Thinking here of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, failure to grieve related to ambivalent feelings for the deceased.

• Her associations supported my hypothesis

Case

• My thinking was much like Freud’s—religion was serving as a defense against unwanted realities and that when the psychological origins of the defense were made conscious the need for it would abate.

• This did not occur. The interpretations existed side-by-side with the belief that she should not cry

Case

• Considered the possibility that her beliefs were not accessible to interpretation, they existed an operated with a certain autonomy from her psychological conflicts.

• Ask her if she knew the biblical passage, “Jesus wept”

• She did and things began to change

• Jesus wept provided a new symbol that gave her access to something new in her belief system.