How Religion—Yes, Religion—Can Save Psychoanalysis

It is a privilege to introduce this op ed piece by Robert Langs whose major volumes on the technique of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, with their clear explication of the function of the ‘frame’ in treatment, have guided many clinicians on the journeys they take. In this piece, Lang takes on a different kind of travel using the Bible as a guide.

Jane S. Hall, op editor

[Note: Langs’ latest book, Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis, may be ordered through our Book Mart – click here.]

———–

How Religion—Yes, Religion—Can Save Psychoanalysis
Robert Langs, M.D.

The separation between psychoanalysis and religion has been as wide and as inviolate as that between church and state. As we know, Freud saw the belief in a transcendental God as a reflection of a wish for an omnipotent father and given his inner-need centered theory of the mind, after seeing religion as the quest for an illusion, his study of Moses not withstanding, he was more or less finished with the subject. As a result, despite the prevalence of religious beliefs, he failed to respond to Thomas Hobbes’ long standing 17th century call for the study of ‘man’s religious nature’ and thus did not engage in a thorough psychoanalytic investigation of religious beliefs and the Bible. In contrast, Jung offered psychoanalytic investigations of various aspects of religion, especially the stories of Job and Christ, and he argued that we must turn to the Bible for fresh insights into psychology and contrariwise, that only psychology can freshly illuminate the Bible.

I have offered support for both of Jung’s contentions in my recent book: Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis. But given that there is so much more to this story, I shall offer some fresh reasons why psychoanalysts should study spiritual writings, especially the Bible, and that they should do so on a two-way street in which analytic explorations freshly illuminate the implications and unconscious meanings of Biblical tales and Biblical tales are allowed to illuminate, and revise as needed, the basic postulates of psychoanalysis.

The call to turn to religion is based in part on the contention that in respect to the turmoil in the world today, centered as it is on intertwined issues that pertain to religion and violence, psychoanalysis has become marginalized. One way to change this situation is for psychoanalysts to develop meaningful in-depth studies of the unconscious aspects of religion and the sources of human violence. As the only available in-depth psychology of the mind, psychoanalysis has the sole capacity to carry out these studies so for once its potential contributions can outweigh those available through cognitive psychologies and the like. It follows, then, that by allowing psychoanalysts to make a significant contribution to its psychology, religion can help to reclaim psychoanalysis from its descent towards oblivion.

Another reason to study the Bible is that there is much that psychoanalysts can learn from Biblical and other religious texts. The bible is not only the documentation of humankind’s earliest relationship with God and a higher authority, it also describes humankind’s first efforts to deal with the most fundamental problem in life—the reality of death and the death anxieties it evokes in all humans. These are among the many issues, long neglected by mainstream analysts, that the Bible calls on us to explore and illuminate.

To illustrate, consider the opening chapters of Genesis. God creates the overarching universe before He creates living beings and the first sub-universe, Eden, in which they can dwell in peace and harmony with each other. Creation is grounded in boundary-formations — e.g., separating night from day, land from sea, earth from the heavens, and humans from other living creatures. The main implication of this archetypal message is that a stable environment and clear boundary conditions must be created before living beings can survive, interact, and flourish. Moving this archetype into the psychoanalytic situation, it speaks for the need for well defined, stable ground rules and boundaries as the basis for a viable therapeutic experience for both patient and analyst.

Oddly enough, clinical studies from the adaptive vantage-point show that the conscious mind often prefers to go against this archetype and thus against our best interests. This counter-trend arises largely because of the entrapping qualities of secured frames which thereby evoke much-dreaded existential death anxieties in both parties to treatment. On the other hand, the deep unconscious mind is not only highly frame-sensitive as is the Bible, but also unswervingly validates through encoded narratives like dreams and daydreams the need for solidly secured frames. The Bible and deep unconscious mind are in sync and they alone appear to be the locale of our most basic emotion-related archetypes—let adherents to conscious thinking beware and be wary.

The initial drama of human life involves the interaction between the Lord God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent. I shall highlight three prominent features of this story, each puzzling in its own way and yet of monumental importance to us as psychoanalysts. The first is the Lord God’s injunction addressed to Adam—and thus to all humans—that forbade him, under the penalty of death, to gain knowledge of good and evil—essentially, to possess divine wisdom. The second feature is the serpent’s contradiction of the Lord God in assuring Eve that she will not die if she eats the fruit of the forbidden tree. The third and final feature is the couples’ awareness after eating the forbidden fruit that they are naked and their punishments by the Lord God which include expulsion from the paradise of Eden and the Lord God’s blocking their way to the tree of eternal life.

There are a host of insights implied in these happenings which are not part of mainstream psychoanalytic thinking. Perhaps the most fundamental implication is that the first challenge for humankind—and for psychoanalysts and their patients—lies with the kind of wisdom they will recruit for coping with life’s emotionally charged traumas and the neuroses that they engender. This is the problem of knowledge acquisition and the key question centers on whether it will be divine or mundane in nature. In the adaptive approach, mundane wisdom is the knowledge-base of the conscious system of the emotion-processing mind and it is beset with denial and thus inadequate and often misleading when it comes to emotion-related adaptations. On the other hand, divine wisdom is the knowledge-base of the deep unconscious system and this wisdom is conveyed in the encoded messages found in narrative communications; it is extremely wise adaptively and highly reliable as well.

The next lesson to be learned from this tale is that while the human acquisition of divine wisdom brings with a measure of sexual awareness, its main consequence is the awareness of one’s personal mortality. Eden is a land in which benign forms of denial of death prevail (while dwelling there Adam and Eve have no interest in the tree of eternal life), but acquiring divine wisdom brings an end to this denial and a definitive sense of the human vulnerability to death. Both God and the serpent speak the truth—Adam and Eve do not actually die after they eat the forbidden fruit, but they do become aware that they will die some day in the future. It is for this reason that the Lord God compassionately tried at first to dissuade them from taking this step and then punished them by blocking their path to immortality after they had done so. The link between the serpent and evil, a common belief, lies mainly with the connection between the explicit awareness of death which activates needs to deny death by violating rule, laws, and boundaries—the exception to a ground rule is deluded into believing that he or she is an exception to the existential rule that death follows life.

While there is much more to be harvested on both sides through the psychoanalytic study of religion, I shall conclude for the moment by citing a major question raised by the Bible that also has not been addressed by those in our field. Freud took the Oedipus myth and the incestuous wish as a reflection of the basic, archetypal emotion-related challenge faced by humankind. In his wake, other similarly postulated need-centered challenges have been proposed as pivotal for human life. But the study of Genesis raises a vital question: Is Freud’s position valid or should the story of the first humans, Adam and Eve, be taken instead to embody the basic archetypal challenges we all must face as humans?

Without trying to answer this question in any detail, suffice it to say that there are strong reasons to believe that the Bible is right and Freud is wrong. But that said, the adaptive reinterpretation of the Oedipus myth, which see the search for one’s true identity and problems of knowledge acquisition, divine wisdom, violence, and death as more central than incest—which is barely an issue in the Bible—the reinterpretation is such that it renders the two stories a lot closer than one would naively think. Thanks to the Bible, we are reminded that there is much yet to be explored in this area.

All in all, the Bible can help psychoanalysis grow, expand, and become pertinent to world issues and matters of life and death. In can do so by attracting analytic investigation and by being a source of a kind of revisionistic divine wisdom as yet lacking in psychoanalytic thinking. Religion can bring enormous vitality back into psychoanalytic thinking and practice.

I am, in conclusion, reminded of yet another fundamental archetype, one in which yesterday’s enemies are transformed into today’s allies.