RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY AND THE STERILE SELF
Kotre, John N.
RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY ANn THE 'STERILE SELF JOHN N. KOTRE Current psychotherapies dampen the instinct to begot .For all its faults, the encylical Human~ Vitae expressed a truth with which we are...
...To comment on this psychology, then, is to comment on the socio-economic niche in which it resides-a niche, by the way, into which increasing numbers of American Catholics are moving...
...Historian Christopher Lasch writes that the dominant mood of the 1970s is therapeutic, not religious...
...Lasch writes, "To encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause or tradition outside himself . . strike[s] the therapeutic sensibility as intolerably oppressive, offensive to common sense and injurious to personal health and well-being...
...By fertility I do not mean principally the bearing and nurturing of children~the passing on of physical life...
...it can be unlearned...
...Children spring from her, derive nourishment from her, and ultimately return to her...
...3. Pruning...
...The New Man "recognizes that he will be living his transient life mostly in temporary relationships and that he must be able to establish closeness quickly...
...It was part of the atmosphere...
...In no case of which I am aware do popular models of psychic health have any interest in progeny...
...The disciples are commissioned to "go out and bear fruit, fruit that will last...
...but it was not, at least not to me, who could walk unannounced into half the houses or apartments on the street, oppressive...
...As I stepped from that environment to the one I now inhabit--the mobile, secular, co-figurative world of the psychologized affluent--I could not help but feel, somewhere in my bones, the loss of something of value...
...The prospect of death, a death that will extend I I Symbols of spiritual parenthood are of great importance during a time when it is imperative to restrict population growth while nourishing feelings of fertility...
...it is to be acted upon and controlled for the betterment of mankind...
...American Catholicism consists not only of symbols like these but also of experiences that may appear merely incidental...
...She meant that influence no longer flowed from elders to the young, that the shape (the figura) of our culture was no longer set by the past...
...Today, the god-like impulse of fertility, a source of so much ambivalence, will have to be nurtured, controlled, redirected, its proper place in sex asserted...
...It is not the existence of therapy that alarms me, for competent therapy is a blessing, but the conception many therapists have of a "fully-functioning" or "selfactualizing" human being...
...To choose celibacy is to place a limit on oneself so that one can care for more human beings...
...The self that is "into ,behavior rood" shops in the supermarket of human traits for whatever it needs (and is featured) this year: better sexual performance, less anxiety, less weight, more assertiveness, whatever...
...Consequently, fights to self-fulfillment are tempered by duties to predecessors and successors...
...Third, they set as an ideal a limitless, fluid self with ever expanding consciousness...
...Behaviorism, a distinctly American school of psychology, always has stressed that at birth man is a tabula rasa, a blank slate unmarked by the impress of past generations, capable of bearing whatever inscriptions the environment makes...
...Though client-centered therapy is neither quick therapy nor group therapy, its philosophy and techniques--and, indeed, its originator--have been easily absorbed into the group movement...
...RELIGION, PSYCHOLOGY ANn THE 'STERILE SELF JOHN N. KOTRE Current psychotherapies dampen the instinct to begot .For all its faults, the encylical Human~ Vitae expressed a truth with which we are losing touch: procreation is essential to sex...
...Liberated" from the past, he is "turned on" by interpersonal experience, by mediation, by drugs---by the present...
...Whether psychology will ever do so is another matter altogether...
...children confined in the darkness between them push them apart and see the light of day for the first time...
...Human beings who regard themselves as stewards take a far different stance toward their own life than the New Man of recent psychology...
...I. Popular psychology has a curious hold on many affluent Americans...
...Rogers was the first to relinquish the role of elder in therapy, the first to be "non-directive...
...The human imagination has always closely associated divinity and fertility...
...The Catholic Church has long been .the home of "fathers" and "mothers" who are celibate and childless...
...It was a secure, limited, rooted environment...
...Judging from the parables of the Good Steward and the Talents in the New Testament, each generation is not merely to preserve God's state but also to improve it...
...Indeed, when TA speaks of parent and child ego-states (roughly equivalent to Freud's superego and id), it recognizes the importance of "scripts" that a person carries from the past to the present...
...Sensitivity training, however, did not become a cultural force until the late sixties, some two decades after its official birthdate...
...It also has facilitated the escape of individuals from those pasts that deserve abandonment and helped them cope with the resultant fluidity...
...The Gospel account of the Last Supper begins with Jesus's realization that his hour has come...
...He told a graduating class at Sonoma State College of a New Man emerging from "encounter groups, sensitivity training, so-called T-Groups...
...Its resources are to be husbanded but not exhausted, passed on in better condition than they were received...
...People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling--even if it is only a momentary illusion---of personal well-being, health, and psychic security...
...Carl Rogers often has preached the hope offered by these new therapeutic techniques to the affluent, politically leftish, well-educated middle class...
...The years required for a psychoanalysis have become the weekend required for a marathon...
...His culture is a "cocoon" from which he struggles to break free...
...Second, they view the past as a prison and seek, with great success, to liberate individuals from it...
...It requires instead that they be cut and limited, sometimes extensively, so that they bring forth an abundant harvest...
...Generativity refers to "a concern for establishing and guiding the next generation," a desire to pass on to children, students, or successors the skills, customs and interpretations of life that define one's people...
...The past has no holding power...
...Creativity, on the other hand, refers to the ability to produce novel yet appropriate solutions to problems, to discover and express original yet insightful perspectives...
...Used by permission o] the publisher...
...The world is not to be left in its natural state...
...Humanae Vitae faltered, however, as do those who hope to excise procreation from sex, by defining procreation in its narrowest sense, as the physical begetting of offspring...
...A new ritual expressed i.n the language of science that enables broken roots and severed connections to regenerate quickly...
...All the earth's cosmogonies, all those mythical accounts that tell the nature of things by narrating their origins, are stories of the generation of life...
...In a different vein, Margaret Mead spoke of a cultural shift in the United States from "post-figuration" to "co-figuration...
...Hot is there recognition of the fact that expansion can only take place by way of self~imposed frontiers that both hold a person in and give him something to go beyond...
...Reverence does not demand that the trees be allowed to grow untrammeled...
...The objective is no longer to alter durable and resistant inner structures but to modify a segment of outer behavior, to eliminate "games" the patient is playing...
...Having outlined some attitudes of recent psychology toward human fertility, I would now like to bring a specific question to religion...
...Having lost a sense of historical continuity, he is incapable of identifying with predecessors or posterity and is left with the goal of psychic self-improvement...
...Instead, the young, cut off by a generation gap, modeled their behavior on that of their peers and were influenced by the present...
...First, they encourage "open," transient relationships in place of bounded, durable ones...
...California Indians say the world was made by a turtle who dove to the bottom of the sea for a speck of dirt and by a dove who found a single grain of meal...
...Back notes that sensitivity and encounter group centers took hold in recipient areas of internal migration in the United States, particularly in suburbs and in California...
...In its books and workshops and therapies it does more than enlighten or help with personal problems...
...An opportunity to develop one's ability to adapt to any new situation, to become intimate in a hurry...
...It is an act of pruning that remains an enigma to those expanding their consciousness in all directions...
...One of those mutations was the Gestalt r of the late Fritz Perls...
...Every branch in me that bears no fruit he cuts away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes to make it bear even more...
...But there is a curious similarity between the era.nspersonal humanistic psychology of the East and the assertive humanistic psychology of the West...
...Though I have not observed firsthand the church's examination of its tradition of celibacy, I wonder how much emphasis is being given to spiritual fatherhood and motherhood in emerging rationales...
...In The Secular City theologian Harvey Cox described the anonymity and mobility of the modern metropolis and insisted it was a blessing, for it delivered us from the Law and gave us choice in personal relationships, ideas and values...
...It is bestowed upon humanity "for all generations" and strict limits are placed upon its use...
...But both, explicitly or not, preach the virtues of a fluid self, without limits, incapable of choice, in:apable of loyalty .to something outside itself...
...The earth is owned by God...
...The generative and creative people I know, religious or not, are individuals who maintain a 12 May 1978:298 strong sense of connection with their origins and do not hesitate to draw on them...
...Behaviorism ignores the self...
...Polynesians describe the beginni.ngs as Heaven and Earth in intercourse...
...There is no identity, no internal struoture around which it scribes an ego-boundary, saying I am this way, I am not that way, for life...
...Psychology grounds a particular attitude toward life by saying it is "healthy," religion by saying it accords with the way things "really" are...
...And Alvin Toffler predicted in Future Shock that "people of the future" would know how to plug only part of their personality into any new relationship and would become adept at breaking off old ones...
...In this task, there is much in the spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and moral resources of American Catholicism to draw upon--in the riches of the Judaeo-Christian symbol structure, in our concrete experiences of family, church and neighborhood...
...A phobia, for example, does not lie in some durable internal stru=ture...
...The client's inner self is thought of as fluid, constantly changing, constantly emerging...
...it is not symptomatic of a deeper disease...
...What resources does religion have--in particular, what resources does the Judaeo-Christian symbol system have--to generate those moods and motivations that nourish such fertility...
...Indians from the Pacific Northwest speak of a woman turning into the earth, her hair becoming the trees and grass, her flesh the clay, her bones the rozks, her blood the springs of water...
...Commonweal: 299 the fidelity of Yahweh, heightens his concern for posterity...
...May I suggest only a few...
...Indeed, Berne's original intent was to shorten the process of psychotherapy, to eliminate harmful "games" rather than to rework a 0 entire personality...
...others in the group join as therapists or become the target person's "alter ego...
...In both, the frame of the relationship is indispensable...
...The boundless, infinitely changeable self of humanThe sell that is "into behavior rood" shops in the supermarket o] human traits ]or whatever it needs this year: better sexual per]ormance, less anxiety, less weight, etc...
...To live in a world with plants and animals that reproduce themselves, and to be fertile oneself, these creation stories say, is to be favored by the forces of the universe...
...I.t seems incredible that a church concerned with the spiritual life of its members would fail to appreciate the phenomenon of spiritual procreation and so lose sight of religion's capacity to nourish that very phenomenon...
...This fidelity is not the "unconditional positive regard" of client-centered therapy, for it is a fidelity that sets conditions, makes demands, and insists on a certain closedness in relationships...
...12 May 1978:300...
...In contrast to the position taken in Hutmmae Vitae, stewards regard their reproductive processes as part of a heritage that is to be acted upon and controlled for the well-being of posterity...
...The kind of psychology developed for and by the mobile, educated segment of our population is a reflection of the strains, ambiguities and aspirations it feels...
...Later, he likens himself to a vine, his disciples to the branches, his Father to the vinedresser...
...The person i~ a GestaSt group's "hot seat" is forbidden to bring up his personal history...
...To be fertile one cannot grow without limitation...
...It reaffirms that one is a steward, not an owner, of one's life...
...it draws little or nothing from its theoretical parent, classical psychoanalysis...
...In a simple gesture of sharing bread and wine, he passes his life on to others...
...In current psychological jargon, "bou.ndaries" are firmly established...
...To Rogers's way of thinking, the therapist's only task is to empathize with his client and "reflect" his feelings in a.n atmosphere of caring and warmth...
...Yet the covenant-the "frame" or "ground rules" of the relationship---is returned to and ratified again and again...
...Peris wrote, "Sir, if you wanted to go crazy, commit suicide, improve, get turned on, or get an experience that would change your life, that is up to you...
...A tree that fails to produce good fruit will be put to the axe and .thrown into the fire...
...To take the relationship between Yahweh and his people as the prototype of human relationships is to assert that what is essential to intimacy is the assurance of fidelity, the conviction that the other will always be there and on your side...
...In the Eucharist Christ is symbolically transmitted from generation to generation, so that for millennia his followers have been able to return to the beginnings, participate in their own creation, and nourish themselves on the person of their founder...
...Perls was very much an elder---a tyrant, some say--in the groups he directed...
...One need not be in total agreement with these analyses to recognize that the psychotherapies propagated in the 1960s and 1970s treat their clients on a temporary basis and focus on the present...
...the two concepts are not that distinct: though creative products appear to emerge ex nihilo, they contain far more of the work of previous generations than even their creators may realize...
...4. Spiritual Parenthood...
...You came here of your own free will...
...In my work I have often been forced to confront contemporary feelings toward human fertility...
...Political scientist Patrick Dobel, writing in the Christian Century last October, has taken issue with ecologists who claim that the command in Genesis to dominate nature has led to Western man's exploitation of the world's resources...
...He has a distrust of marriage as an institution, religion as an institution, education as an institution...
...Humanistic psychology talks incessantly about the self, telling us either to lose it or expand it...
...The experience of renewing contact with roots, of being cleansed by living in the idealized time of the ancestors, is indeed a fertile one...
...From one-to-one contact with an "elder" interested in a patient's past, therapy has moved to groups of peers who refuse to consider anything but the present...
...A chance to find iden12 May 1978:296 tity, to become aware of how one "comes off," .even with a group of strangers...
...I lived in a "post-figurative" culture-rigid, to be sure, and incapable of change...
...Despite the constricted understanding of fertility found in documents like Human~ Vitae, there are symbols within their parent tradition that are capable of supporting fertility in the fullest sense of the word...
...2. Humanity's Stewardship...
...5. The Eucharist...
...Reconstructions and interpretations of the past are studiously avoided: what matters is the feeling the client articulates and the therapist clarifie~ in the present moment...
...Several years ago I began to involve myself in the study of human fertility...
...It is hardly "open...
...Gurus from the East tell him that lines between himself and everything else are illusory, that his self is to become immersed in a cosmic consciousnss...
...1. The Demanding Fidelity o] Yahweh...
...And though he speaks of mankind's unlimited potential, the .truth is that his unbounded self is so dissipated, so blurred that it cannot harness the energy to create...
...In the Old Testament God is a king who punishes violations of the boundaries...
...the dirt and the meal are combined and grow into an earth covered with seeds and fruit...
...yet his therapy is predominantly co-figurative...
...Because of the location of the university where I teach, I see its influence specifically on the children and grand.children of immigrant Catholics...
...The two agree that the self has no limits...
...Current psychotherapies---and the seminars and training sessions into which their vie~ of life spills-dampen the instinct to beget in at least three ways...
...I.t is simply an overt behavior that can be disposed of...
...It is most significant that the catchword of the sensitiwity/enconnter movement is here-and-now, and that the title of the popular magazine reporting on its rapid mutations is Psychology Today...
...Demands and promises are made...
...According to Kurt Back, the growth of the movement was intertwined, both as cause and effect, with the social unrest of the sixties...
...we were, as a result, freer, more tolerant, more open to change...
...Direct, aggress, ive intervention is used to get to a person's problems as quickly as possible, to get him to act them out, to make him dramatically aware of the spilts and the missing parts in his personality, and, hopefully, to enable him to construct a better whole (Gestalt) than he previously possessed...
...Not only is the New Man of popular psychology skilled at temporary relationships, not only is he "liberated" from the past, he also believes he carries unlimited human potential...
...Tradition was disintegrating, he said, long-term acquaintanceships declining, impersonality on the upswing...
...Religion generates convictions about su:h things as birth, death, intimacy and nature by saying that to believe in this, or to act in this way, is to live in harmony with a fundamental reality...
...The group .trainer, therefore, steers the participants .to a consideration of their own transactions and construes as escapes references to past and futures outside the group...
...David Bakan has argued that the insights of psychoanalysis came to Sigmund Freud at a time in his life when he felt rejected by the Gentile world of science and so returned home, psychologically, to a Jewish mystical culture...
...In practice, JOHN N. KOTItE is associate pro]essor o] psychology at the University ot Michigan, Dearborn and the author of a forthcoming biography o] Andrew M. Greeley (Nelson-Hall...
...To its credit, psychology has devoted considerable energy to children and continually strives to identify the kinds of climate in which they flourish...
...Behavior therapy, having different roots than either the client-cerrtered, sensitivity, or Gestalt approaches, nevertheless shares their concentration on the present...
...All things seem possible now that he has ,left the "cocoon" of tradition, the confines of durable intimate relationships...
...it defines existence, as religion once did...
...Yet in practice transactional analysis is a close cousin of ~ncounter-group therapy, Gestalt therapy, and even behavior therapy...
...I knew my place...
...Sensitivity training originated in the same decade as client-centered therapy and was based on Kurt Lewin's field theory, another psychology of the present...
...The steward treats nature the way a farmer treats his orchard...
...I argue now for bounded relationships, for connection with the past, for selves with limits, for fertility, because doing so, in a way, recaptures my own, admittedly idealized, beginnings...
...Donald Goergen's The Sexual Celibate said next to nothing of these archetypal Catholic symbols...
...There were numerom people, numerous "fathers" and "mothers" and "sisters" whom I pleased and displeased, but on whose word I always counted...
...And what have they offered to people "on the move...
...They are "co-figurative...
...For me, the experience was one of growing up in a family and an urban neighborhood where most everyone shared the same world-view...
...Commonweah 297 istic psychology is actually a relative of behaviorism's empty, unknowable self, even though humanistic psychology considers itself distinct from behaviorism...
...The client-centered approach of Carl Rogers, conceived in the 1940s, was an important precursor of these co-figurative therapies...
...faculty, I see the influence of their thinking daily...
...Responsibility for the future, for what happens to someone after therapy, is disclaimed...
...If life is something received, it is something .that ultimately has to be passed on...
...in the New Testament He is a Father who mercifully welcomes prodigals who stray beyond them...
...But the behavior modification techniques that spread rapidly in the sixties and seventies carry Locke's dictum a step further: adults, thirty or forty years old, are now slates, if ,not blank, then at least erasable...
...The core ritual of Christianity is a guarantee of continuity and generativity through time...
...Jews and Christians tell of a God who fills an eternal void with the simple power of his word and commands his creatures to be fruitful, multiply and fill his earth...
...Rather, my focus is on spiritual generation, that is, on certain qualities psychoanalyst Erik Erikson has labeled "generosity" and on others we ordinarily think of as creativity...
...The relationship that Yahweh insists on between himself and his people is one of permanence, exclusivity and loyalty...
...Copyright (c) 1978 by The Seabury Press, Inc...
...Consciousness, of course, is never expanded in the dire=tion of recovering early experience, for the past must be fled at all costs...
...Metaphors of fruitfulness appear frequently in the Gospels and barrenness is treated with impatience...
...Dobel believes an exegesis of the Old Testament would show .that man is not to be the absolute lord of nature but its trustee...
...The kingdom of God will .be taken from the chief priests and the scribes and given to a people who will produce its fruit...
...As a member of a psychology Commonweal: 295 From one.to-one contact with an "elder' interested in a patient's past, therapy has moved to groups oJ peers who reJuse to consider anything but the present...
...Such symbols of spiritual parenthood are of great importance during a time when it is imperative to restrict population growth while nourishing feelings of fertility...
...He must .be able to leave these close relationships behind, without excessive conflict or mourning...
...They believe that their life is owned not by themselves but by God...
...Though Slater admits in The Temporary Society that it is difficult "to imagine ways of integrating the rearing of children with temporary systems," psychologists at large fail to notice that its New Man is a spiritual eunuch...
...Such a self unknowingly assumes it has no permanence, no physiological substratum .that affects its traits, no early experiences that stamp indelible marks...
...It finally took hold in the United States, as it failed to in Europe, because of our postwar affluence (~ve had the time for T-groupsr and the money to pay for them), because Of se:utarization (the decline of traditional religion created a void in people's lives), and especially because of mobility...
...I am suggesting that the security of such confines sets the stage for true intimacy and, later, for generativity...
...What capacity does i.t .have to underwrite convictions about human life that stand in contrast to those of psychology's New Man...
...Religion, too, has always incorporated in its ritual the experience of returning to "the beginnings," to the sa:red time and place of creation...
...No one talked about religion but everyone did religion...
...The popularity of transactional analysis, I am suggesting, like the popularity of the other new therapies, is due to its compatibility with a configurative clientele, cut off from the past, centered on the present, more and more transient...
...Jesus curses a fig tree with nothing but leaves, even though it is not the season for figs, and the tree withers and dies...
...An apparent exception to these therapies of the present is transactional analysis, originated by Erich Berne and popularized in Games People Play, I'm OK --You're OK, and Born to Win...
...All three characteristics dovetail in an interpretation of life that rules out concern for posterity...
...I have noted the neglect and even disparagement of it by several influential strands of current psychology, and I have reflected on the ways it may be sustained by resources within the Judaeo-Christian and American Catholic traditions...
...To do so they must remain in contact with the vine and they must be cut back...
...According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, religion is a set of symbols that creates long-lasting moods and motivations in men by providing interpretations of life that seem to them uniquely realistic...
...Gurus from the West insist on the opposite: his self is to be asserted, expanded, and fulfilled--in Fritz Perls's words, "You do your .thing and I'll do my thing...
...a covenant is struck...
...You are pruned already...
...He cannot be tied down long enough to a single place, be it spiritual or physical, to be a parent--again, spiritually or physically...
...To render sex infertile, to deny Eros a future, is to render sex trivial and, ultimately, to enervate it...
...This article is ]rom Toward Vatican III: The Work That Needs To Be Done: Dovid Tracy, Hans Kung, $o'hann B. Metz, Editors...
...What an example of generativity is offered by someone like Mother Teresa of India...
...The orientation of which Lasch speaks develpped in the 1960s, a time when social commentators began to see and welcome the increasing translency of human relationships...
...Psychologists Warren Bennis and Philip Slater were less euphoric than Cox about the increase in "quick" relationships, but in The Temporary Society they made one thing clear: the tide would not tuna, so we had better learn to move--to be' flexible, to "get love, to love and to lose love...
...it creates the trust that allows love to develop...
...That culture regarded human beings religiously the way Freud "discovered" them to be in a se:ular context...
...Therefore, says one, let it actively taste of every experience, let it become now this impulse now that, let it "expand" and "raise" its consciousness...
...For these models the "healthy" individual cultivates, or at least acquiesces 'in, spiritual sterility...
...Such a setting was neither uniquely Catholic nor uniquely American, but it happens to be the one that shaped the lives of many American Catholics of my generation...
...As the divorce rate continued to climb, Nena and George O'Neill spoke of the benefits of "open marriage...
...On Sinai, God tells the Hebrews, "I am Yahweh your God . . . you shall have no gods except me...
...As the Old and New Testaments unfold, the promises are not always kept, the boundaries not always observed...
...I would hope, however, that it will begin to teach other "skills"--permanence, loyalty, fidelity, and duty--and that it will begin to see that limited, contained, rooted selves are the only kind capable of creativity and generativity...
Vol. 105 • May 1978 • No. 10
