Chapter 1
Introduction
Charting a path toward mutual recognition
Mandy first came to see me late in the summer of 1994. I was not at all prepared for her story—a gruesome saga of abuse, murder, and mutilation that made national headlines—though from my present vantage point in her 15-year treatment, I recognize that I was being readied to help her for quite some time.
For me, my husband, Lowell, our 2-year-old son, Bob, and our soon-to-be-born daughter, Karissa, life together in 1978 was holding great promise. Raised in fundamentalist Christian churches and meeting at a conservative Christian college, Lowell and I had moved to eastern Pennsylvania in order for him to pursue seminary training. Little by little, a deep hunger arose for a more relational and authentic experience of Christianity. In an act of faith, we journeyed to Switzerland to study with a theologian/philosopher whose books had given us hope that such an experience was possible. Our fall of 1978 was spent preparing for a sojourn in Switzerland that would be life-altering and culminate in our decision to become psychologists.
Only a few miles from our residence and totally unknown to us, a little girl suffered a very different sort of fall in 1978. In the spring, 6-year-old Mandy watched her mother and almost full-term brother die at the hands of her father. That was the last scene that her right eye would ever document, for her crazed father would attack her face with a screwdriver, leaving lacerations that would necessitate over 150 stitches. Her father would be committed for life to a state mental hospital. Humiliated by her injuries and almost unrecognizable to herself, Mandy returned to school that fall as an orphaned and handicapped survivor of a domestic violence so gruesome that it reverberated across the national media. She would become a custodial minor in her maternal grandparents’ chaotic household. As my husband and I were wrestling with the impact of our fundamentalist upbringing in a distant Swiss alpine village, Mandy would be settling into a fundamentalist church and school that would come to serve as her extended family.
That summer of 1979, the Hoffman family grew to four and returned to Pennsylvania. We embarked on our psychology training, inspired by a revitalized Christian faith, but cognizant of its dangers when it devolves from the faith of Christianity to the dogma of “Christianism.”1 We started our psychology practice in 1988, and in 1994 my heart and mind were ready to embrace Mandy.
In our attempt to reflect an authentic Christianity in our vocation, we have come to believe that relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy closely parallels the Judaic and Christian covenantal call to truth and love. I utilize the nomenclature “relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy” in its broadest sense, encompassing a number of contemporary psychoanalytic approaches that hold to a view of relationship as the epicenter of change. We see the relational emphasis as marked by humility. From initial interactions with a patient to final parting, the relational analyst attunes to the mystery and wonder of each person and each journey. Discovery proceeds through an incarnational or lived interaction with the patient, made possible through the development of a safe and authentic alliance. This is facilitated by a psychoanalytic psychotherapist’s extensive training, supervision, and self-understanding through requisite personal psychotherapy, an echo of the sacred call to self-examination and surrender. Ongoing treatment attends not simply to words, but to relational interactions between therapist and patient that yield meaning and context to the words, and carry the treatment through disruptions, or crucifixions, to an experience of a new beginning, a resurrection. In a relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy,2 patients and therapists come to deeply know one another, mutual recognition lying at the heart of this orientation. From a Christian perspective, patients are not only recognized in their complexities and struggles, but they are also recognized as bearing God’s indelible image within them (Carter & Narramore, 1979; Jones, 1991; Olthuis, 2001; Sorenson, 2004) and having a meaningful destiny before them, a destiny in which the therapist has a role to play.
As I studied relational psychoanalysis, the concept of mutual recognition captured my attention. Jessica Benjamin had introduced G. W. F. Hegel’s writings into her work, and through study of his theological and philosophical contributions on incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, a confluence soon emerged for me between Christianity and psychoanalysis. In this book I will share my study of Hegel’s Christian narrative of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection, and present it as an analogue to themes in relational psychoanalytic theory. Utilizing Hegel’s paradigm as the framework, I will build the central project of this book: to explore the influence of the Christian narrative on the theories, clinical practices, and history of psychoanalysis.
I believe the force that propels movement from incarnation to resurrection facilitated the weaving of the threads of Mandy’s life into a tapestry of redemption. For Mandy, this book is a monument of remembrance, bearing testimony to a resurrection in her life. Thus she offers her story in support of my endeavor to recognize the spiritual force described in the sacred narratives that have become assimilated into psychoanalytic theory and practice, and which, I believe, has operated in the very development of psychoanalysis itself.
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGION
God’s defenders are not necessarily closer to God than God’s accusers. … In the Psalms, protest and jubilation ring out in the same voice. Wherever in history the combination ceased to work, the theologians would learn as much about God from atheists as the atheists could perhaps learn from the theologians.
—Moltmann (Bloch, 1971, p. 28)
Many Christians sadly accede to a popular notion that psychoanalysis is as atheistic as its progenitor Sigmund Freud claimed to be. My initial task is to transform this perspective by offering a historical context for the antipathy of psychoanalysis toward religion. I posit that a prophetic and relationally oriented, redemptive Jewish tradition—cloaked in secular garb, and muted by logical positivism—forms an indelible subtext to psychoanalysis, a subtext that drew Christians to the discipline.
In spite of Freud’s directives to the contrary, one cannot think of psychoanalysis apart from its Jewish heritage. By extension one cannot understand the repudiation of religion in psychoanalysis unless it is contextualized in Jewish history. By locating Freud’s repudiation of religion within the broader struggles of European Jewry, I hope to deconstruct the tragic reasons that the Judaic subtext of psychoanalysis became cloaked.
ToDr. Freud, with deep regret
Dear Dr. Freud,
It is with a degree of justifiable temerity that we write you: Our correspondence has been far too long delayed. Permit us to explain.
Far too easy. Yes, it has been far too easy to denounce you for the repudiation of religion that your psychoanalysis at times has blatantly espoused: religion as “universal obsession,” religion as primitive relic, and, in agreement with Feuerbach, religion as projection of the human psyche. For these profane pronouncements, we have facilely declared your guilt, neglecting to recognize our utterly despicable culpability.
Forgive us for forgetting the long history that preceded your choice to hide the intrinsic Judaic character of your craft. It has been advantageous for us to ignore the centuries in which Christianity as empire decimated your Jewish brothers and sisters. We failed to acknowledge the history texts that attested to the pogroms, the prohibitions, and the ridicule that power structures bearing the convenient imprimatur of religion wielded against the children of Israel.
We, in your terms, projected our own guilt onto you and failed to see the wounds we caused, the shame that was ours to bear, the denial of God in ourselves that we located in you. We have handily dissociated ourselves from those imposters who bore the name of Christian and tormented you and your family. Thus, we read your texts through eyes of arrogance, rather than through mists of tears.
We want to revisit psychoanalysis, approaching it with the veil of atheism lifted, with your Judaic subtext in high relief. We wish to contemplate that perhaps, in the mystery of a Jewish and Christian Providence, your works were yet another prophetic clarion call to truth, yet another redemptive outworking of God’s irrevocable covenant with Jew and Gentile.
With deep regret,
A contrite Christian Church
The Judaic narrative
Prior to a pervasive colonization of Jewish culture by a secular narrative, Jews had maintained, to greater or lesser extents, an ethnic differentiation or transcendence that included a faith in the covenantal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Being ethnically Jewish meant, de rigueur, that one was observant of Jewish faith. Radiating through the haze of Freud’s atheism are the twin beacons of his ancestral Jewish faith: an emphasis on truth3— that is, the focused interpretation and reinterpretation of sacred texts (mitzvoth/halakhah) that revealed God’s desires for His people, interpretations that presupposed hidden and obscured meanings—and an emphasis on loving relationship. The underlying covenantal relationship with God and therefore with one’s neighbor was the loving reason the divine gift of mitzvah/halakhah was transmitted. “Judaism was not concerned only with obedience to the authority of the halakhah. It above all strove to make the halakhah expressive of the covenantal relationship with God” (Hartman, 1997, p. 200). The extension of the emphasis on loving relationship was the covenantal promise that Israel would influence the world for good through its roles as teacher, model, and co-worker for redemption (Greenberg, 2004; Samuels, 2001).
This emphasis on truth for the purpose of undergirding covenantal relationship with God and neighbor birthed the centuries of prophets who addressed deficiencies either in the understanding or application of God’s laws. Truth and its covenantal application were never to be severed, and when they were, the prophets would rise up. Greed, violence, oppression of the poor, injustice, idolatry, lack of mercy, and immorality were cried against, a cry that became echoed in Jesus’ later prophetic invectives against hypocrisy and his promoting of loving relationship.
With the secularization of Jewish culture, ethnicity and faith became separated. I wish to chronicle some factors that contributed to this divide, and consider some ways in which an imperial Christianity was complicit in this colonization.
Anti-Semitism: The Jewish experience in Europe
Anti-Semitism was pervasive in Europe for centuries prior to Freud’s birth. From at least the fourth century on when Christianity became coupled with the state, the Christian church as empire (LaMothe, 2008) would impinge upon the freedoms of Jews. The list of restrictions against Jews ranged from refusal of employment to sequestering in their homes during Passion Week; from confinement to particular areas of a city or ghettoes that served to segregate Jewish people from the larger culture, to mandated dress or wearing of badges.
Jewish populations were targeted for violence as well. The Jewish Talmud and other Jewish writings were burned; expulsions en masse occurred repeatedly from countries (England in 1291, France in 1394, Spain in 1492) (Brustein, 2003); and pogroms, or incited riots, would murder thousands of Jews over the course of centuries.
Assimilation
Fortuitously, the more humanistic Enlightenment brought about the enactment of laws that emancipated Jews from previous discriminatory treatment. This welcome development led, for some in the Jewish population, to a modification or elimination of participation in Jewish customs such as dress, kosher dietary rules, and even the speaking of Hebrew. In response to a more humanistic cultural s...
