Psychoanalysis as a Spiritual Discipline

In Dialogue with Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel

Paul Marcus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367754006
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000377941
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy
• Index: Psychology

The great existential psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger famously pointed out to Freud that therapeutic failure could "only be understood as the result of something which could be called a deficiency of spirit." Binswanger was surprised when Freud agreed, asserting, "Yes, spirit is everything." However, spirit and the spiritual realm have largely been dropped from mainstream psychoanalytic theory and practice.

This book seeks to help revitalize a culturally aging psychoanalysis that is in conceptual and clinical disarray in the marketplace of ideas and is viewed as a "theory in crisis" no longer regarded as the primary therapy for those who are suffering. The author argues that psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy can be reinvigorated as a discipline if it is animated by the powerfully evocative spiritual, moral, and ethical insights of two dialogical personalist religious philosophers—Martin Buber, a Jew, and Gabriel Marcel, a Catholic—who both initiated a "Copernican revolution" in human thought.

In chapters that focus on love, work, faith, suffering, and clinical practice, Paul Marcus shows how the spiritual optic of Buber and Marcel can help revive and refresh psychoanalysis, and bring it back into the light by communicating its inherent vitality, power, and relevance to the mental health community and to those who seek psychoanalytic treatment.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Psychoanalysis as a spiritual discipline

Contemporary “mainstream” psychoanalysis has been described by sympathetic scholars as in crisis.¹ As Marshall Edelson reflects, psychoanalysis is a “theory in crisis” characterized by “profound malaise” (1988, p. xiv), while Nathan G. Hale describes the psychoanalytic crisis as “a crisis of clashing theories, competing modes of therapy, and uncertainties of professional identity” (1995, p. 360). Twenty-three years after Hale’s comment, the editors of the impressive anthology Psychoanalytic Trends in Theory and Practice: The Second Century of the Talking Cure (Etezady, Blon, & Davis, 2018) made a similar assertion: “Psychoanalysis has become a very diverse field with multiple schools of thought, each of which has its own theory and praxis (ibid., p. 476) … [there is no] unified theory of psychoanalysis” (ibid., p. 478). The great W. R. Bion appears to have been aware of the aforementioned when he ironically quipped in 1990, “In the practice of psycho-analysis it is difficult to stick to the rules. For one thing, I do not know what the rules of psychoanalysis are” (1990, p. 139).²

Not only does psychoanalysis lack what Thomas Kuhn called a disciplinary matrix for its activities as a science, it “is too fragmented to be constituted as a unitary discipline” (Weinstein, 1990, p. 26),³ but it has not been hospitable to heretical and dissident thinkers, thus “sucking the life” out of the psychoanalytic institute training experience (including some authoritarianism that has penetrated and blunted creativity (Kernberg, 1996)). As the great psychoanalytic theorizer of narcissism and borderline conditions, Otto Kernberg, recently noted in an interview, psychotherapy training in the United States is in serious decline (www.psychotherapy.net/interview/otto-kernberg, retrieved 5/12/19).⁴ Psychoanalysis is hardly represented in the university training programs of psychiatrists and doctoral-level clinical psychology psychologists; it has instead been marginalized to institutes.⁵ The average age of a trained American psychoanalyst is 66, which suggests cultural aging (four years ago it was 62), and the number of daily analytically oriented patients is 2.75 (i.e., at least three times a week) compared to 8 to 10 in the psychoanalytic glory days of the 1950s and 1960s (Leonard, 2015).

This book attempts to improve the dismal landscape of contemporary psychoanalysis by suggesting that a psychoanalysis that is animated by the powerfully evocative spiritual (and moral/ethical) insights of two great contemporary, deeply religious existential philosophers, Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel,⁶ can help reinvigorate a discipline and profession that is in a dire state, both in the “marketplace of ideas” and in terms of clinical practice. Indeed, Buber was a “believing” Jew (though not a religiously practicing one), and Marcel a “believing” Christian (a practicing one of a sort),⁷ who were both trying to reach “believers” and “non-believers” in their writings. Their dialogical personalist philosophies provide a mighty intellectual and moral/ethical resource that can move psychoanalysis from its aspirational objectives to inspirational ones (Van Deurzen, 2012, p. 181). By claiming that human existence is fundamentally dialogue, I mean that it is “address and response, claim and counter-claim, pledge and promise.” That is, the human person “is the only being who can address another, who can make promises, who is united with other men in bonds of covenant” (Pfuetze, 1967, p. 530).⁸

My book is a small contribution to the “revitalization” of psychoanalysis from its cultural aging, bringing it back into the light by communicating its vitality and power when viewed as a spiritual discipline. Buber and Marcel have a spiritual sensibility that is in many ways in sync with a psychoanalytic outlook: it can empower people to quest for truth actively, mindfully, and thoroughly through the challenging experience of critically reflecting on their own existential “situated-ness” in the world and the untapped, unrealized possibilities of their everyday lives (Van Deurzen, 2012, p. 181). Similar to philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and technique have not yet adequately assimilated the profundity of Buber and Marcel’s insights into the ontological structure of human experience,⁹ for example, the nature of relation/encounter and the act of distancing/detachment. Buber and Marcel’s contribution to the I-Thou and I-It realms,¹⁰ and to other central human experiences like love, hope, fidelity, and faith, has been regarded as so significant that it has been recently described as a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy (Sweetman, 2008, p. 135).

Why use Buber and Marcel to enhance psychoanalysis?

As the philosopher/psychoanalyst (and member of a convent for 17 years in a previous life) Donna Orange, who highlights Buber in a short appreciative chapter, noted, “dialogic philosophy is a better resource than ‘postmodernism’ for our clinical practice” (2010, p. 12). Michael Eigen, a prolific analytic writer who approvingly cites Buber, also noted, “Clinically postmodernism hasn’t added all that much for me” (1998, p. 184). Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with Orange that Buber’s (and even more so Marcel’s) contribution “has gone largely unnoticed in the psychoanalytic world” (2010, p. 12).¹¹ This is especially noteworthy when we call to mind that Freud commented that the psychoanalyst can be described as a “secular pastoral worker” (Hoffman, 1998, p. 5).

Buber’s notion of “healing through meeting” (Agassi, 1999 p. 17)¹² (aka, “dialogical psychotherapy” or some such variant, which has very low visibility as of late)¹³ and related issues pertinent to clinical practice have been extensively written about, for example, by Leslie Farber (1956, 1966, 1967) and Maurice Friedman (1985, 1998),¹⁴ and I have written the only book on Marcel that discusses psychoanalysis and the sacred (Marcus, 2013a; 2018). Yet no one has used these two religious existentialists in conversation with contemporary psychoanalysis or with each other, on such vitally important psychological themes to psychoanalysis as love, work, faith, and suffering, especially to the analyst/analysand interchange, as contained in this book. While there is much about which Buber and Marcel agree (there is a “spiritual convergence,” says Marcel (1967, p. 41)), they differ too, as they are lodged in different intellectual traditions (unlike Marcel, Buber came from the Germanic intellectual atmosphere) and religions, and such a juxtaposition of outlooks makes for lively debate about summoning personal issues relevant to psychoanalysis.¹⁵ These similarities and differences as they pertain to “the ontology of being human,” as Buber called it (Mendes-Flohr, 2019, p. 50), or the “mystery of being” (the irreducible mystery of singularity, of the relation to the Thou), as Marcel called it, that is, the “interhuman” or “intersubjective” respectively, are common concerns of both of these path-breaking religious existentialists.¹⁶ In addition, Buber and Marcel agreed on “the distinction between I-Thou and I-It relation, the inadequacy of conceptual knowledge to describe human experience in its fullness, and the identification of the transcendent dimension of human existence” (Sweetman, 2011, p. 132). Wood noted that “there is a remarkable parallelism” between Buber and Marcel on the “basic direction” of their thought, mainly because they were both “deeply religious thinkers” (1999, pp. 83, 94). Levinas concurs that “there is a remarkable commonality in the essential views of” Marcel and Buber (1994, p. 21), while most recently Treanor noted that “Buber remains philosophically close to Marcel” (2006, pp. 189–190).

For Buber, the “interhuman” is “the interactive region between persons in a genuine relationship [like the analyst/analysand], it is the spirit of ‘the between,’ through which a person can glimpse the unsayable ground, the ‘eternal Thou,’” Buber’s term for God (Kramer & Gawlick, 2003, p. 203). The “between” refers to “the immediate presence of unreserved, spontaneous mutuality common to each person yet beyond the sphere of either [as in the psychoanalytic interchange at its best]. Impossible to objectify, ‘the between’ is the most real reality of human existence, of being wholly and uniquely ‘human’ with humans” (ibid., p. 202). “Intersubjectivity” is defined by Marcel as “opening ourselves to others and the capacity to welcome them without being effaced by them” (Marcel, 1973, p. 39); as in a “loving heart,” it is the starting point of his philosophy and my version of psychoanalysis (just as Freud advocated, Marcus, 2019). Intersubjectivity can be further described as “the infrastructure of spiritual life, an original human solidarity preceding the emergence of the ego and the conditions for its possibility” (Schmitz, 1984, p. 164). “We are not alone,” says Marcel, and “that whatever we do we are responsible for what happens to others” (Marcel, 1973, p. 234). In fact, Marcel defined the human person as “homo viator,” an “itinerant being” or “spritutal wanderer” on a “winding journey” in search for “something more,” “something higher,” and “something better” (Gallagher, 1962, p. 11). Marcel’s preferred term for God was the “Absolute Thou.”

In other words, for both Marcel and Buber, intersubjectivity and the interhuman, the bailiwick of all versions of psychoanalysis, are the opposite of self-centeredness and selfishness (i.e., inordinate narcissism and egocentricity, as analyst’s would call such a way of being-in-the-world). Rather, they point to transcendence, to a “beyond,” though not a literal supra-terrestrial, “not some other place, but an unknown and higher dimension of reality, attainable in and through human experience and existence” (Cain, 1979, p. 115). Transcendence is mainly a subjective sacred experience, where one apprehends what lies beyond creation and infinitely transcends it.¹⁷ To “master otherness”—or at least become empathically attuned to animate and inanimate others, to the unseen and unevidenced God, and to the unconscious in oneself, “in a lived unity” as Buber noted (Mendes-Flohr, 2019, p. 188)—required fashioning a way of being-in-the-world that is other-directed, other-regarding, and other-serving, this being one of the key animating values in Marcel and Buber’s oeuvres.¹⁸ Indeed, Levinas thought that Marcel and Buber’s “essential discovery” consisted of “affirming that human spirituality—or religiosity—lies in the fact of the proximity of persons, neither lost in the mass nor abandoned to their solitude” (1994, p. 21).

The fact that Buber and Marcel are deeply religious thinkers who are also steeped in secular philosophical thought is exactly why I chose them as my two intellectual touchstones to critically evaluate psychoanalysis, and ultimately to expand and enhance it as a spiritually animated discipline.¹⁹ Both thinkers point to the possibility of transcendence, whether as a “believer” or a secularist, via critically reflecting on experience, rising above it and making it intelligible (Van Deurzen, 2012, p. 176). They do so by judiciously embracing a set of transformative valuative attachments and correlated actions that bring out the best in human relatedness. It should be noted that while Buber gave a set of lectures at the Washington School of Psychiatry and had a dialogue with Carl Rogers in 1957, he “was not a friend of psychoanalysis” (Friedman, 2013, p. 14). In fact, Friedman describes Buber as having a “distaste for Freudian theory,” and claims that Buber confided to him that “most psychoanalysts, knowing me to be an ‘adversary,’ will deny having learned anything from me” (ibid., p. 88). Marcel respectfully mentioned Freud and psychoanalysis in passing (usually when talking about his own psychic pain as a child), but never in any depth or systematically as it pertains to his philosophical reflections.

By describing Buber and Marcel as religious, I do not mean I am advocating a return to formalized religion and the moralizing that is associated with the worst of institutionalized religion. Rather, by religiosity I mean to point to a form of faith, what Marcel calls “creative attestation,” an act of creative witnessing to Beauty, Truth, and Goodness.²⁰ This mainly involves being ready, receptive, responsive, and responsible for and to the other, whether the other is a person, animal, thing, or the otherness of oneself (e.g., the other of internal dialogue, or the unconscious, the ground of being). Such faith is any act of putting oneself “at the disposal of something,” “of giving oneself to, rallying to” (Marcel, 1964, p. 134) an act to which “I pledge myself fundamentally.” That is, faith always has an “existential index,” as it fully engrosses a person’s power of being (Marcel, 2001, pp. 77–78). Faith thus involves a person’s real-life, here-and-now promise to give oneself to and, says Marcel, “to follow” someone or something that one cherishes. Such opening up to, giving oneself, and following can be in the service of Beauty, as in the artist’s courage to create; Truth, as in the whistleblower’s courage to speak out against authority; Goodness, as in the soldier’s courage to throw himself on a hand grenade to save his comrades; and in countless other less dramaticall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction: Psychoanalysis as a spiritual discipline
• Chapter 2 The spirit of love
• Chapter 3 The spirit of work
• Chapter 4 The spirit of faith
• Chapter 5 The spirit of suffering
• Chapter 6 Towards a spiritualized psychoanalysis
• Index