Ten Lectures on Psychotherapy and Spirituality

Nathan Field, Trudy Harvey, Belinda Sharp, Nathan Field, Trudy Harvey, Belinda Sharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429919923
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This volume is a much-needed exploration of contemporary theories on psychotherapy and spirituality, moving away from the more traditional, non-spiritual aspects of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The book consists of a dialogue between the opposing sides; most of the papers have responses from the "other" side. This dialogue mirrors the early communication between Freud and Jung regarding spirituality, and opens up doors for continuing collaboration between psychoanalysis as a pure science and the spiritual and religious dimensions within. This inspiring collection of papers grew from the lectures held in 2002 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy. In the time of increased interest in more scientific schools of psychoanalysis such as neuropsycho-analysis, there is also a surge of interest in spirituality within psychoanalysis, as demonstrated by the great interest in these lectures.

Introduction

The lectures that comprise this book were delivered at monthly intervals in 2002 at the London Centre for Psychotherapy. Within a few weeks of their announcement nearly every seat was sold for the whole year. No doubt the audience were attracted by the reputation of the speakers on the programme; but even more interesting was the degree of interest that the linking of psychotherapy and spirituality aroused in the counselling and psychotherapy community.

When Freud discovered (or invented) psychoanalysis just over a century ago, any association with the notion of spirituality was virtually unthinkable. Some years earlier, on taking up his position as a researcher in neuroscience at the Helmholtz Institute of Vienna, Freud had been required to “swear an oath to be true to the tenets of Science” (see Gordon, this volume). It must be remembered that Science and Religion had been enemies since the seventeenth century. In his paper, David Black describes how Galileo, whom he calls “the originator of the scientific mind”, was threatened with torture, and possibly death, by the Inquisition for his heretical ideas. In spite of humbly disavowing his epoch-making ideas and discoveries, they still cost him his liberty, and almost his life.

But, over the next three centuries, Science decisively prevailed. Freud, as a dedicated scientist and determined to protect his fledgeling psychoanalysis from the criticism that it did not qualify as a science, aimed to base his theories on firm biological foundations. Religion he regarded as a collective obsessional neurosis, God he reduced to an idealized projection of the father, and spirituality, in the form of mystical experience such as the “oceanic” feeling, he understood to be “the restoration of limitless narcissism”. This reductionist view prevailed amongst Freud’s disciples throughout most of the twentieth century. A characteristic example was Franz Alexander’s brilliant paper entitled “Buddistic training as an artificial catatonia” (1931), by which he implied that intensive meditation induced neo-psychotic states of mind.

But from within the psychoanalytic movement itself there had been, from early on, dissenting voices which questioned Freud’s insistence on the primacy of the sexual drive. Alfred Adler tried to replace the sex drive with the drive to power. Adler’s attempt failed: he fell into Freud’s disfavour, defected from the psychoanalytic movement, and is now rarely mentioned.

The most serious challenge to Freud’s reductionist approach came from Jung, originally groomed as Freud’s successor. While accepting that dysfunctions of the personality are massively affected by childhood experience, Jung insisted that not everything that forms the personality can be attributed to the past. Confronted by symptoms we need to ask not only: “What caused this?” but also “What can this be for?” Jung’s search for both causes and meanings led him to explore the spiritual potential in human nature and its possible link with psychopathology. Thus he could declare: “The gods have become diseases”. Such a pronouncement carries the intriguing implication that some sorts of mental illness may harbour the seeds of growth and creativity.

Freud himself, always an acute observer, could not help but note that “It is a very remarkable thing that the Ucs of one human being can react upon that of another, without passing through the Cs”. And, in another paper, that “the scales weigh in favour of thought-transference”. Yet, not much later he beseeched Jung to resist sinking into “the black tide of the occult”. But it was already too late. The conceptual rift which opened up between these two very gifted men, who had once been deeply involved with each other, was one major cause that led to Jung’s excommunication from mainstream psychoanalysis. Jung went on to develop his own approach, which he called analytical psychology. This has its distinctive theory and practice, but incorporates, particularly here in England, substantial amounts of psychoanalytic thinking and terminology. This is a tribute, as Hester Solomon points out in her response to Ron Britton, that psychoanalysis has largely neglected to return. In spite of spasmodic attempts to initiate a dialogue between Freudians, Kleinians, and Jungians, the original rift has more or less persisted to the present day.

With Jung’s departure, psychoanalysis continued to evolve. In the UK, thanks to Fairbairn’s critique of Freudian drive theory, the pioneering studies of Melanie Klein and Winnicott into infancy, Bowlby’s researches into early attachment, and Balint’s into the therapeutic aspects of regression, psychoanalysis was obliged to accommodate object relations theory. This, in turn, led to the rediscovery, by a different route and using a different terminology, a number of crucial concepts that Jung had arrived at earlier, most particularly the notion of a self as distinct from the ego. With growing understanding of the counter-transference and borderline states, contemporary psychoanalysis has been obliged to acknowledge the puzzling manifestations of intersubjectivity, or what Josephine Klein calls in her paper the “intersect”. More recently, thanks to the late work of the most radical of the post-Kleinian analysts, W. R. Bion, psychoanalysts are presented with the prospect that, by following the true path of psychoanalysis, they will come closer to the mystical knowledge of God.

During the same historical period the physicists were exploring the structure of the universe and the atom. To make sense of their discoveries, Einstein formulated Relativity and the four dimensional space-time continuum; Heisenberg arrived at the Uncertainty Principle; Bohm proposed that the material universe is the “explicate” manifestion of some immaterial “implicate order”. All the old scientific certainties of materialism, determinism, reductionism, causality, and objectivity, to which Freud had sworn allegiance, began to dissolve. As Rosemary Gordon’s paper describes, the time-honoured boundaries between mind and matter became ever more elusive and paradoxical.

The foregoing developments, now widely discussed in the psychoanalytic literature, influenced my approach in organizing these lectures. If, within the bastions of “hard” science, inner experience has become a legitimate topic of discussion; if even the major figures in the world of physics—Einstein, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Bohm—could publicly acknowledge a spiritual perspective, perhaps the time was ripe to attempt a modest resumption of the aborted collaboration between Freud and Jung?

With the cooperation of Belinda Sharp, then chair of the LCP Professional Activities Section, I invited a more or less equal number of prominent psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists to offer their thoughts on the links between psychotherapy and spirituality.

To facilitate the possibility of a Jungian-Freudian dialogue, I tried, but did not always succeed, in matching each lecturer with a respondent from the other side. Moreover, the respondents’ task was much trickier than I had imagined: they were expected to show an informed appreciation of the lecturer’s contribution, but to present a dynamic challenge to their leading ideas. Inevitably, some pairings have proved more dynamic than others, and two of the respondents declined to appear in print.

My own task in this Introduction, which I felt required me to take an overview of the whole series, has also proved more difficult than I expected. The range of topics and approaches presented appear very diverse. Some contributions are theoretical, some historical, some personal. The majority of contributors find the links between psychotherapy and spirituality helpful and natural; others find them thoroughly incompatible. Some of these divergences rest on matters of definition: what is psychotherapy? And, far more problematic: what is spirituality? Does it really exist? And if so, does it belong in the consulting room?

There is a further divergence among those who do find it possible to reconcile psychotherapy and spirituality: one that seems to reflect the theological gulf between God and the Godhead; that is, between the deity who manifests his existence to mankind, and the One who is Unknowable. Among the former, Kenneth Wright found divinity in Nature, Donald Meltzer in the miracle of the child who can produce a ‘well-formed stool’, Jo Klein in the mystery of the ‘intersect’, and Andrew Samuels in a spectrum of human activities that ranges from social responsibility to joyous sex. Yet, in spite of all these divergences, I hope the reader shares with me the sense that there is some ingredient, perhaps impossible to name, that all these psychotherapy practitioners share. It seemed fitting to end the book with a contribution from Karen Armstrong, who is not a psychotherapist, but a distinguished historian of religion.

Nathan Field
Editor

Lecture One

The strange case of the missing spirit

Rosemary Gordon

“One makes a path by walking”. This was written to me by James Roose-Evans on the fly-sheet of his book Ritual Today, and it seems to me helpful to all of us who seek to think, to reflect, and, with luck, to achieve some comprehension and, possibly, some experience, of spirit.

When I try to say what I mean by spirit the best definition that comes to mind is the word Kwoth; a term used by the Nuer—a simple Nilotic people in East Africa (Evans Pritchard, 1940). It is an onomatopoeic word, suggesting wind or breath. But it is what the Nuer say about Kwoth that I find so very impressive. They say of Kwoth that it is invisible and ubiquitous, like wind or air; it has no fixed abode, no material or sensuous quality, and therefore it cannot be experienced directly by the senses, and they say that therefore they do not know what Kwoth is “like”. They say that they are “merely simple people” and cannot be expected to know about such matters, or to understand the mysteries of life and death. For spirit is such a mystery; it has no earthly form, is entirely indeterminate, and has no sanctuary. It cannot be thought of at all, and can only be contrasted with the material world that we know through the senses. What the Nuer say about Kwoth is quite astonishingly close to how Michael Eigen has tried to describe Bion’s “O” in his book The Psychoanalytic Mystic: “‘O’” is inaccessible, yet nothing is more accessible, since ‘O’ is everywhere and everything. One cannot know ‘O’, but what else can one know?” (Eigen, 1998)

It was when I read about and studied some of the African religions that I discovered that all of them seem to have the same basic schema; a supreme being who lives in the sky, who has made the world, who is responsible for life and death, who is all-powerful, but is so far removed that he is not worshipped, nor has he a sanctuary, nor a specialized priesthood. But he sends out his sons or messengers, pieces of himself, and through these pieces, these little gods that are pieces of the Great God, he can communicate with us.

At first I thought that this cosmological schema was characteristic of African notions only. But when I looked at the writings of Mircea Eliade (1960) I found that in fact he recognized this schema to be world-wide. Is this not, in fact, the basic schema of Christianity: are we not familiar with it through the Christian beliefs in God and his son Jesus? Eliade observes that very often there could be the further complication that one of these sons, or messengers, or minor gods, becomes identified with, or mistaken for, the Great God, rather than being recognized as just a little god. It is the confusion of a piece of God with the Great God that tends to become the basis of the theistic religions. This has led to competition, rivalry, even wars between them, often between different followers of the same little god. Any one of these religions, or factions, is liable to claim that it has been granted a unique revelation, and that it alone has the one real and valid truth.

But there is also a positive side to this deintegrative process: the religious institutions, in their attempt to make spirit sensuous, perceptible, and, as it were, “embodied”, have engaged in a great deal of art-making in and around their religious centres. This, in its turn, has led men and women to develop creativity, aesthetic sensitivity, and the capacity to somehow marry matter and spirit. Artwork, primarily in painting, sculpture, architecture, and music, seeks to express that which it is meant to serve. The very notion of God, the qualities and functions, dogmas, stories, images, metamorphoses, of a given religion are, in fact, attempts to make spirit more accessible to mankind; accessible, that is, to their more limited capacity to relate to, understand or to experience what is abstract; and above all what is ineffable.

The Nuer of Africa seem to have conceived religious concepts that are acutely sensitive, refined, and highly complex. This is in contrast to some of the “closed systems” adopted by many of the “higher religions”, which have so often remained concretistic, opposed to change, to insight, and to experience from the inner world. Instead, the major world religions have facilitated splitting, projection, and differentiation into hostile camps, each being seduced by the illusion of certitude, omniscience, and narcissistic self-righteousness.

In other words Spirit, being essentially abstract and ineffable, deintegrates into smaller or simpler pieces of Itself. These then tend towards concretization and personification to form the major religious institutions, with their dogmas, ritual practices, and verbalizations. And together with the religions go their priesthoods and their works of art. Spirit is made nameable, conscious, even concrete, in a variety of ways: through ritualization, verbalization, music, architecture, and an elaborate priesthood.

The transformation of the spirit into religious institutions was required in order to meet some of mankind’s basic psychological needs, such as the craving for certainty, the tangible, the nameable, the personal. Behind these needs lie deep human fears of pain, death, and oblivion. Humankind has the driving need to find some meaning in our brief passage from birth to death. As the Nuer express it so movingly, “We are simple people and cannot be expected to understand Kwoth, the Spirit, or life, or death.” We too, each of us, in the face of the mystery of existence, are simple people. Yet we all find ourselves driven to confront, to search for, to listen for, to invent answers. We are all driven to do battle with the dread and joy our world offers us. We are all available to experience awe and wonderment, all potentially susceptible to the numinous, which signals the presence of “The Other”, or “O”—a term coined by Bion, who has written about it in such an insightful way.

Bion, a much-bemedalled “hero” of the First World War, was in many respects a nineteenth-century man: yet he was also a charismatic analyst–psychiatrist, part-mystic, part-shaman. His notion of the “Other”, or “O”, is as indescribable a concept as that held by a Zen Master, or a Meister Eckhardt, or the Om of the Sanskrit mantra Om mani padme hum, meaning “in the heart of the lotus is a jewel”. Yet elusive or not, “O” formed the centre-piece of Bion’s highly effective therapy, especially when accompanied by his silences, which could be agonizingly prolonged (Bion, 1970).

In a sense Bion was “O”, and the half-mystical world that he inhabited was conceptually light-years away from that of Freud, who regarded mysticism in a strictly reductive way as the “restoration of limitless narcissism”. Freud’s view was characteristic of nineteenth-century science, which passed out in a final spasm of over-rational thought typified by the Helmholtz Institute of Vienna, whose staff, including the young Sigmund Freud, had to swear an oath to be true to the tenets of science. This science was bound by the iron rule that the observer remained the observer, and the observed remained the observed. Both observer and observed were separated by a conceptual and methodological chasm so deep as to be impassable.

This neat division was completely upset by the arrival of the quantum physics of Bohr and Heisenberg. In this new, sub-atomic microcosm, scientific truth ceased to be exact and was instead transmuted into an approximation. Helmholtz was confounded. It was the triumph of the new relativity where the observer always affected the observed. The only question was—to what degree? The new quantum-physical age would have been more familiar to the cavemen artists of the palaeolithic era than it was to the vast majority of nineteenth-century scientists. For the cavemen artists rocks and stones were as animate and connected a part of their world as the bison and mammoths that they drew and hunted, and the stone axes that they used.

One of the men who swam in this strange new quantum milieu was the brilliant mathematician and physicist, Wolfgang Pauli. It was Pauli who collaborated with Jung in the elaboration of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• INDEX