Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience
Kurtz, Stephen A.
The waning couple PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE W.W. Meissner, S.J., M.D. Yale University, $25, 254 pp. Stephen A. Kurtz THE PHRASE "between the Scylla of x and the Charybdis of y"...
...But in no Commonweal: 26 major way does this achievement result from intellectual persuasion, which comes after the graceful event...
...Meissner takes another tack: he discusses no one...
...Freud addressed the psychology of religion, then, with the limitations of contemporary historical knowledge...
...The answer turns on the place of Freud in the orthodox institutions of psychoanalysis, and especially its training programs...
...The result is a book whose abstract tone is unmitigated from beginning to end...
...There is one exception...
...Because he is so unremittingly intellectual, Meissner loses the fact that, exponentially, religion and psychoanalysis are not so disparate...
...If some people exemplify faith in their lives, does it matter what they claim to believe...
...When the bullets fly, each new argument for ceasing fire provokes a counter-argument for not...
...From a pietistic point of view, the heretic can be a better Christian than the orthodox believer...
...If, on the other hand, there is a hell, and God saw fit to put them there, then they are debating still...
...When Freud said, "Wo Es war, soil Ich werden" (where id was ego shall be), surely he didn't have this flat result in mind...
...The outcome was an inability to conceive of religious experience in any but reductionistic terms...
...The rational discourse of reconciliation keeps the battle alive...
...He faced them as well with those of current psychoanalytic theory and, since that theory was his invention, its limitations inevitably reflected his own...
...But here the purpose is not to illuminate a religious life through psychoanalytic insight...
...Perhaps I should be kinder to one whose mission is to sail for dear life between a man-eating monster and a whirlpool...
...If the capacity for a higher level, conscious faith is a developmental achievement, as Meissner suggests, then, if all goes well, such faith will be achieved...
...The only person whose life and thought are reviewed at length — for over half the book in fact — is Freud...
...The influence of academic psychoanalytic training (and of Jesuit training...
...What warring couple, after all, was ever helped by rational exhortation...
...Freud had no religious life — at least none he could identify as such...
...If there is a heaven and God saw fit to put them there, then Pfister and Freud, two old and civilized men, are sitting peacefully in some cloud-borne caf\'e delighting in God's presence and in one another's company...
...There was no need to get from "here" to "there," I realized...
...As an analyst, of course, he may wish to maintain anonymity, designed to safeguard his patients' transferences...
...at worst they elevate resistance...
...Meissner does not discuss the relevance of Jung, or of subsequent work by Bion and Lacan, whose concepts have important bearing on the psychology of faith...
...That is the level on which religion and psychoanalysis get reconciled: not through ideology but through experience and, perhaps, a well attuned interpretation...
...Without muttering words or even thinking of God, to be in the analytic situation is to be at prayer and to be a conduit for grace...
...The temperate route he steers between them has not been without its cost: this book is devoid of passion...
...The absence of his own voice is thoroughgoing...
...at its most stultifying pervades the rest of the book as well...
...But Meissner's attempts to bring religion and psychoanalysis together only drive them further apart...
...Here was already there...
...Oskar Pfister, the Lutheran pastoral counselor who through years of correspondence was Freud's admiring antagonist, knew this from Freud's work, and I feel sure that Meissner knows it from his own...
...If all goes poorly, it will not...
...Such problems face anyone attempting to interpret a still fluid fact-base, and the basis of historical interpretation is inherently fluid...
...Although well intended and quite possibly true, such statements (like premature interpretation) are ill-advised...
...Stephen A. Kurtz THE PHRASE "between the Scylla of x and the Charybdis of y" occurs twice in this labored text, and I take the repetition to be meaningful...
...Why, then, discuss Freud so thoroughly, only to conclude he has so little of value to say...
...As a consequence, what the founder of psychoanalysis had to say about this subject was not particularly interesting.Freud's views on the development of monotheism, for example, depended on misinformation only corrected by later scholarship...
...But other analysts, beginning with Freud, have gotten around this by attributing their experiences to others...
...If Jung's thought is included in the realm of psychoanalysis, the system was already enriched in Freud's lifetime...
...I heard them as an epiphany...
...At best they bounce off...
...William W. Meissner, who is both a Jesuit priest and a classically trained psychoanalyst, has divided himself between two historically embattled shores...
...Words to that effect were said to me at a moment when I felt the need to "reconcile" the two...
...When Meissner begins to discuss these contributors (if only in the most schematic terms), he launches the book itself...
...Many of Meissner's views are offered as quotations from the writings of others or, if given as his own, are immediately backed by references...
...Why would an author treat the two most central themes of his life — ones whose conflicts he hopes to reconcile — without a single reference to himself...
...Because of his position as Master, no later disciple has felt able to say something new without first paying his respects — acknowledging Freud's authority (and that of the institutions which inherit it) even in the course of contradicting him...
...But if Pfister scored any points at all he did so through his loyalty and care much more than through his arguments...
...The gentle and loving Pfister argued to Freud's face that Freud was "much better and deeper than your disbelief...
...The elaboration by later generations of an ego psychology, an objectrelations theory, and a self psychology enriched the original conceptual system in ways that can genuinely illuminate religious life...
Vol. 112 • January 1985 • No. 1
