by Sudhir Kakar
Even in the early years, besides apostates like Jung, there were the so-called revisionist, neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm and Karen Horney who tried to bridge the gulf between analysis and religion. To them the convergence between the two, the common agenda of both psychoanalysis and religion, lay in the healing of man’s soul. After all, as Bruno Bettelheim has demonstrated, Freud’s writings in their original German, though excised in English translation, are full of references and matters pertaining to the soul—its nature and structure, its development and attributes, and the way the soul reveals itself in all we do and dream.11 Freud’s own text is full of rich ambiguities, his terminology often open-ended and allusive, his tone personal and conversational. In the translation such qualities are played down for the sake of an abstract, medicalized ‘scientific language’ using ancient Greek and Latin words. As a Seelenartzt, not a doctor of the mind or of the Nerven, what the analyst clearly does is minister to the soul. Of course, the Freudian analyst, first and foremost a psychologist of love, conceives of the soul in a particular, erotic way that is akin to the. mythic psyche of the Greeks, a butterfly eternally pursued by an indefatigable Cupid.
For Fromm, who was part of a stubborn nonmedical tradition within psychoanalysis which persists to this day, though perhaps less in the United States than in other countries, what a successful and effective analysis achieved above all was to awaken the patient’s sense of wondering and questioning. Ideally, it brought to life a capacity for being genuinely bewildered, called forth an engagement with what the theologian Paul Tillich called ‘ultimate concern.’ The neurotic, in the view of both Horney and Fromm, passionately concerned with the fulfilment of his own desires, always aimed at the absolute, the unlimited, and the infinite. In this he was the antithesis of the truly religious man for whom everything is possible only for God. As Horney put it, ‘The neurotic is the Faust who is not satisfied with knowing a great deal, but has to know everything.’12 He is at the opposite pole from the well-functioning man—religious and psychoanalytic—who has a vision of possibilities while at the same time he realizes the limitation of necessities, and of the concrete.
The convergence of the psychoanalytic and the religious man requires, of course, a particular vision of religion (and of psychoanalysis) which Fromm called ‘humanist religion.’13 He professed to see it pervading early Buddhism, Taoism, and Jewish and Christian mysticism. In contrast to what he termed ‘authoritarian’ religion, the aim of humanist religion is fullest self-realization and the achievement of greatest inner strength. Authoritarian religion, on the other hand, wanted man to submit and surrender to a transcendent power. It extolled obedience, reverence, and worship of a higher entity. In advancing the ideals of knowledge, brotherly love, reduction of suffering, independence, and responsibility, Freud articulates the ethical core of humanist religion. Jung, on the other hand, according to Fromm, though apparently a greater friend of religion, emphasized man’s helplessness and seizure by powers higher than himself and is thus at best a spokesman for authoritarian religion.
The distinction between two kinds of religion, the one a mature faith with which psychoanalysis has no quarrel and whose aims it even shares, and the second a system of infantile belief and neurotic ritual, continued to be made in essentially similar terms by a few writers on the psychology of religion. Abraham Kaplan’s contrasting of infantile religion with a mature version which emphasizes responsibility rather than dependency, anxiety, and guilt, Harry Guntrip’s description of mature religiosity based on the experience of meaningful human relationships, and Peter Homans’ opposition between ‘transference God’ and a nonpathological religion of transcendence, all are some examples.14 In the same vein, Ricouer has contrasted infantile and idolatrous consolation with a consolation ‘according to spirit’ which, evoking shades of Horney, is free of all narcissism and self-seeking.15 Though in no way providing a refuge from the harshness of existence, the consolation according to spirit is acquired in extreme obedience to reality—the psychoanalytic God—and can only emerge from the ashes of the first consolation.
Starting from the late 1950s, there have been voices within the mainstream of Freudian psychoanalysis which too have attempted to articulate a new approach to religion. Instead of harping on the resemblance between unconscious id impulses and elements of religious myths and ritual, these analysts sought to elaborate on the ways religion strengthens and supports the ego and thus serves adaptive rather than defensive purposes in human maturation. Sympathetic to or associated with the American school of ego psychology, which emphasizes adaptation and not only conflict, their approach was closer to that of anthropology where in spite of a few reports that describe anxiety-generating aspects of ritual or the dysphoric impact of religious participation, the leitmotif within the field has been the psychologically integrative function of religion. The ego psychologists interested in religious phenomena, Jacob Arlow and Erik Erikson being perhaps the foremost, recognized that religious knowledge incorporated in myths provided the ego opportunities for mastery through a healing identification with the central figures of the myth.16 Rituals were viewed as communal experience of special import, ‘ceremonial dreams of great recuperative value’ as Erikson called them,17 which support the ego in its struggle against id impulses.
The influence of the ego psychologists, however, has remained confined to the United States, and here too it has made itself felt more in scholarly disciplines outside psychoanalysis. Freud’s legacy, which holds that gods, both in the inner world of the individual and in the cultural universe of communities, have clay feet and that psychoanalysis, if it is to remain psychoanalysis, must of necessity be iconoclastic in its encounter with religion, has remained much too strong to be modified in any significant way.
Even while acknowledging iconoclasm as the specific contribution of psychoanalysis to the study of cultural phenomena, one is puzzled by the inconsistencies in its application. For instance, again following Freud, the respect accorded to art and the combination of benevolence and admiration with which the artist is regarded in psychoanalytic writings, even while his deeper motivations are being scrutinized, is strikingly absent from studies of religion and the homo religiosi. Creativity is granted to the writer and the painter while all psychoanalytic virtue is denied to the mystic.
The harshness of the psychoanalytic discourse toward religion, especially in the early years of its establishment as a clinical method and intellectual discipline, has two roots. The first goes back to the person of the founder of psychoanalysis and the second to the intellectual compulsions and ideologies of the historical era in which psychoanalysis was bom and struggled to establish itself as a profession. Freud has taught us that an individual’s passionately held ideas and convictions are not autonomous from his unconscious needs and conflicts, and analysts have not hesitated to apply this lesson to Freud’s own views and complex relationship with religion. Gregory Zilboorg, for instance, comes to the conclusion that Freud struggled with unresolved religious conflict and that his vehement denouncements revealed repressed, deeply religious convictions.18 Others too have discerned in Freud a deep ambivalence toward religion which might lead some to conclude that Freud was more a closet than a godless Jew.
Freud himself was too much of an analyst to ignore the possibilitiy of the existence of a relationship between his conception of religion and his deeper motivations, though he chose to pass over the possible connections without conducting a searching public examination. Thus in a letter to Pfister he writes, ‘Of course it is very possible that I might be mistaken on all three points, the independence of my theories from my disposition, the validity of my arguments on their behalf, and their content. You know that the more magnificent the prospect the lesser the certainty and the greater the passion—in which we do not wish to be involved—with which men take sides.’19
The focal unconscious conflict which some students of Freud believe to have identified is his ambivalence toward the mother of the ea
rliest years of his life and the persistence of preoedipal influences and residues in his inner world.20 These are also reflected in the directions taken by his work. Till well into the mid-1930s, Freud’s writings did not take the infant’s early experience of its mother fully into account, though toward the end his recognition of the impact of the mother on mental life was coming closer to conscious toleration. The ambivalence toward the maternal feminine began to ease as he was inexorably pulled into the embrace of the ewigweibliche, the eternal feminine. Irving Harrison relates Freud’s pivotal conflict to the first three years of his life when he lived with his parents in a one-room house.21 Here, in cramped quarters, following Sigmund’s birth, two siblings were conceived and born, and one died. The exposure to the intense stimulation of the first three years, not only in the repeated excitement at being a witness to the primal scene but also through the contagious effect of strong emotions experienced by the parents, including the grief at the death of a child, moulded Freud’s particular area of psychic vulnerability.
On the one hand, this psychic space is filled with the diffuse, yet abiding and beckoning, presence of the adoring mother who bequeaths to her favourite son what Nabokov in his memoirs called ‘unreal estate,’ the special pleasures of childhood, the minutiae of utterly precise sensations, especially piquant and intense because they are as yet uncategorized, without the conceptual order that levels novelty into predictability. ‘A child’s emotional impulses,’ Freud was to write, ‘are intensely and inexhaustibly deep to a degree quite other than those of an adult; only religious ecstasy can bring them back.’22 Yet perhaps for Freud the emotions associated with the preoedipal mother to be brought back to awareness also meant the rising to the surface of the ‘horror of abandonment, the awareness of siblings as occupying his mother and contributing to that abandonment and the raging wish that all sources of such terror cease to be.’23
In some of his writings on religion, for example, in Moses and Monotheism, it has been suggested that Freud’s focal conflict is reflected in his stubbornly held notion of an archaic heritage of primeval parricide which obscures and bypasses the maternal aspects of monotheistic religions.24 And if religious feeling begins with the wonder, magic, and maternal awe of the child’s early years, to ripen into the mature faith of adulthood that can engage with ‘ultimate concern,’ then Freud’s private religion remained at an archaic level. A fascination with the occult, with mysterious psychical phenomena and a tendency toward what is called superstition, accompanied him through a major part of his life. In his biography, Ernst Jones noted that Freud once wrote but then forgot and later denied: ‘If I had my life to live over again I shoud devote myself to psychical research rather than psychoanalysis.’25 We also know that despite his dismissal of mysticism, Freud was strongly attracted toward men with a mystical bent—Jung, Rolland, and even Flies with his numerological theories—extending to them a reverence he normally reserved for creative artists. Harrison links Freud’s personal conflict, his treatment of religion, and the birth of psychoanalysis even more intimately when he observes, ‘How tempting to any man harbouring such latent potential for terrors and rages must be the mystical vision of regaining total bliss—of the ocean as a womb! And psychoanalysis, for all its selective inattention to that theme, may have been born of Freud’s resolute determination to resist just that temptation.’26
I have attributed the second reason for the analytic antagonism toward religion to the historical origins of psychoanalysis. Its pioneers were steeped in a European culture where the sense of the sacred was fast disappearing and disenchantment, as Max Weber called the loss, had spread far and wide in the wake of capitalism and the industrial revolution. In fact, Peter Homans has directly linked the very origins of psychoanalysis to the creative response of Freud and other early analysts to this loss, to their ability to mourn the withering away of traditional forms of community life and long-cherished values, including, after the carnage of the First World War, the values of German liberalism.27
In any event, the birth of psychoanalysis took place ‘under a planetary constellation’ (an astrologically inclined Hindu would say) when rationalism was the preeminent current of the intellectual climate and the ideology of positivism reigned unchallenged in the sciences. Though religion and psychoanalysis may have looked at a similar universe, the former, according to Freud, was a mythological view of the world while the psychoanalytic Weltanschauung was modern and scientific. Freud was hopeful of replacing religious knowledge by the psychological science he was in the process of forging.
In point of fact I believe that a large part of the mythological view of the world which extends a long way into most modern religions is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition [the endopsychic perception] of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology.28
The respectability and recognition as a positivistic science which psychoanalysis claimed for itself was not to be won so easily in spite of the analogies and metaphors from the physical sciences that peppered Freud’s writings. Its practice, the healing of Seelenstorungen—disturbances of the soul—was too near that of the numerous occultists and faith healers who operated at the fringes of the established churches. For intellectuals, scholars, and men of science, psychoanalysis was not so far removed from the animal magnetism of another Viennese healer with an international reputation, Franz Anton Mesmer, or from the endeavours of various spiritualists—phrenologists, Christian Scientists, and others—who sought to cloak religious concerns in scientific trappings. As late as 1932, Stefan Zweig, a great admirer of Freud, apologetically wrote in the introduction to his book On Mental Healers (Die Heilung Durch Den Geist) that he hopes he won’t be ‘accused of being a Mesmerist or a Christian Scientist or a devotee of psychoanalysis.’29
There were other, more concrete manifestations in the practice of psychoanalysis which appeared to be directly derived from religious practices. For instance, the setting of psychoanalysis, with the analyst sitting outside the visual field of the patient, was uncomfortably similar to that of the priest hearing confession. The importance of the doctor establishing a good rapport with the patient had been earlier stressed by St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the order of the Jesuits, as vital for the work of an effective spiritual director.
A traditional Hindu or Buddhist, on the other hand, would point out even more parallels. In the practice of psychoanalysis he would see a modern form of the master-disciple relationship which has the personal transformation of the disciple as its goal. In its method of free association he would discern a rational meditation, with goals different from its religious counterpart and striking only insofar as the meditation is more joint than solitary. He may even go so far as to characterize psychoanalysis as ‘a secular Western counterpart to tantra.’ He may also acknowledge that psychoanalysis has developed a specific and a most elaborate theory of karma—the influence of the past on the present—which has no rival in his own traditional canons either in subtlety or in sophistication.
Coming back to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the method of psychoanalysis, an introspective free association, was too close to older techniques of introspection and self-interrogation which drew their sustenance from religion and which were in the process of withering away. Many scientists and other educated men would have agreed with George Steiner’s comment that ‘It [psychoanalysis] provides a secular, though heavily mythological surrogate for an entire range of introspective and elucidatory disciplines extending from private meditation to the metaprivacies of the confessional.’30 It then becomes understandable that psychoanalysis would seek to sharply demarcate its boundaries and differentiate i
ts methods from comparable religious techniques which antedate it so vastly in the history of human consciousness. It also becomes understandable that there may have been lingering fears of psychoanalysis being taken over by religion. Of his book The Future of an Illusion, Freud would write that in this work he wished to protect psychoanalysis from the priests and entrust it ‘to a profession that doesn’t yet exist, a profession of secular ministers of soul who don’t have to be physicians and must not be priests.’31
Today, in the last decade of the 20th century, the compulsions I have described and which shaped the relationship of psychoanalysis to religion have largely disappeared. First, there is no longer the same concern with establishing psychoanalysis as a science in the positivist sense. There is an acceptance among analysts, of all persuasions, that psychoanalytic theory cannot be proven by experimental means and that research methods which take psychoanalysis out of its natural context cannot but distort its essence. There is growing consensus that accurate predictions about a multidetermined human behaviour cannot be made. Like the quantum universe of physics and unlike its Newtonian predecessor, the universe of psychoanalysis is of the interconnection between the subjectivities of the analyst and the analysand, and it is precisely the analyst’s participation which makes it impossible to speak of either the absolute subjectivity or the absolute objectivity of the discipline. Whereas Freud, forced by the prevailing view of science which made a sharp demarcation between subject and object, felt compelled to distinguish between fantasy and reality, between Dichtung and Wahrheit, we no longer need to make this distinction quite so sharply and in fact, as we shall see, must not even formulate the question in the same way.
