This Incredible Need to Believe

Julia Kristeva

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780231519953
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

"A sprawling analysis of religion in major psychological and philosophical literature, fiction and in private life...compelling and remarkable."— Publishers Weekly "Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism." So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need to believe"—the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides. Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics, " one that restores the integrity of the human community. "A helpful commentary and introduction to Kristeva's major work over the last two decades."— Choice

THIS INCREDIBLE NEED TO BELIEVE

(INTERVIEW WITH CARMINE DONZELLI)

I am not thinking of a substitute for religion: this need must be sublimated.
SIGMUND FREUD, LETTER TO JUNG, FEBRUARY 13, 1910

Can one speak of the “need to believe” from a secular point of view? For the analysis of this basic phenomenon of human life, I’d like us to begin, not with specifically religious arguments, but with considerations that are more in the domain of anthropology or psychoanalysis.

What a great deal you ask of me! Vast undertaking, to try and come to terms with a need to believe that I call prereligious and which brings us up against neither more nor less than the history of humanity: the speaking being is a believing being. We must take the history of religions into account and take some side trips into anthropology and psychoanalysis … a tall order! Furthermore, you invite me to embark on this adventure before this Italian audience, which embodies two thousand years of history, without accounting for what came before that, under the gaze of a Europe that is the bearer of both hope and peril. Fine, I’ve attached my seatbelt: ready for takeoff! “I travel myself,” says Stéphanie Delacourt, the heroine of my metaphysical detective story Murder in Byzantium.¹

Your question makes an appeal to the humanities, today more than ever confronted—beyond their “regional” problems concerning the meaning of discourses—with the challenge of different kinds of fundamentalism and the wars of religion, a challenge that I choose to define, in a somewhat peremptory manner, as a pressing need to radically reform humanism.

I count myself in effect among those who think that in the great crises the West has undergone—particularly during the Renaissance but also in the eighteenth century and, in another way, today—men and women have managed to elucidate and recompose this need to believe with which they were confronted, to one side of and differently from the way religions do. Did the mystics not, right from the outset, attempt such an experiment, in a kind of internal exclusion from the “canon”? More directly, your question reminds me of the humanists of the Renaissance who, beginning with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ficin, and Pica de la Mirandola, by way of Erasmus, Montaigne, Thomas More, and even Nicolas de Cues, to mention just a few, no more abolished the need to believe than they confused it with that of the established religions. The French Enlightenment and the Encyclopedists—Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, right up to and including the scandalous Marquis de Sade—thoroughly studied and radicalized this path, going from deism to atheism.

The “God of the philosophers,” need we repeat, gets reduced to the “a priori proof,” which rests only on “the fact that something is possible” (Kant). From Parmenides to Leibniz and Heidegger, the “divine” gives way to being (“being is, nonbeing is not”; “why is there something rather than nothing”) and the subject thinking in it (in the being; Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”). “White theology” or “apple juice”? The juicy expression is Freud’s who, for his part, was to seek another way.

An outgrowth of the dissolution of ontotheology, the humanities in turn have not hesitated to grapple with variations on the religious and the sacred. As early as the end of the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim examined the elementary forms of religious life, while Marcel Mauss analyzed prayer, the gift, and the sacrifice; closer to our own time the works of Lévi-Strauss have examined myth, those of Mary Douglas impurity … on the horizon of these kinds of thinking, is the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and the founding of psychoanalysis that still guides my thought, which I should like briefly to recall as we begin our conversation.

To believe … This is not the “I believe” in which I often hear an “I suppose,” as in the sentence: “Reading these e-mails, I don’t believe he loves me; hearing his voice, I believe he loves me.” The “believe” that concerns us today is that of Montaigne, for example, when he writes: “For Christians recounting something incredible is an opportunity to believe” (Essays); or the “believe” of Pascal: “The mind believes naturally, and the will loves naturally; so that, lacking real objects, they have to cling to false ones” (Pensées, 2.81); or again that of Voltaire: “My interest in believing in something is not a proof of this thing’s existence” (Twenty-fifth Letter on the Thoughts of Monsieur Pascal). Whether I belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say “I believe,” I mean “I hold as true.”

BELIEF-CREDIT [CROYANCE-CRÉANCE]

What kind of truth are we talking about? Not a kind that may be logically demonstrated, that may be scientifically proved, that may be calculated. It is a matter of a truth “we stumble upon,” to which I cannot not adhere, that totally, fatally subjugates me, that I hold for vital, absolute, indisputable: credo quia absurdum. A truth that keeps me, makes me exist. Rather than being an idea, a thing, a situation, might it be an experience?

If this need “to hold true” is not satisfied, my apprenticeships, convictions, loves, and acts just don’t hold up. But what “holds it up,” this need to “hold true,” this “need to believe”? Is it inevitable that it be religious?

Credo—from the Sanskrit kredh-dh/srad-dhā—means “to give one’s heart, one’s vital force, in the expectation of a reward” and designates an “act of confidence, implying restitution,” the act of “confiding something with the certainty of getting it back,” religiously (to believe) and economically (credit). Emile Benveniste, in his Indo-European Language and Society, insists upon the correspondence between belief [croyance] and credit [créance]: Vedic man puts his desire, his magic force (more than his heart) in the gods; he puts his confidence in them and counts on getting something back: Indra is the god of help, Sraddhā is the goddess of the offering. Saint Augustine is one of the first to invite us “to read the Scripture with the eyes of the heart fixed upon our heart” (De Doctrina Christiana, 4, 5.7). Paradoxically, necessarily, it is a Jewish atheist, Sigmund Freud who, trying plumb the depths of the unconscious, made of the “need to believe” an object of knowledge.

A superficial reading of The Future of an Illusion (1927) allows us to think that Freud reduced belief to an illusion. An illusion that human beings have a great deal of trouble ridding themselves of, so greatly are they given to swaddling themselves in pleasant fantasies rather than yielding to reason. This line of thought, present in Freud, but whose brief sketch is forever being exceeded by contemporary psychoanalysis, moves in tandem in Freud’s own work with multiple advances we are still exploring: from Totem and Taboo, the exchanges with Jung, Romain Rolland, or Pastor Pfister, right up to Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) and The Man Moses (1939).

Furthermore, analytic experience itself is not foreign to “belief” in the broadest sense of this term: does not the transference/countertransference establish, at the heart of the analytical cure, the conviction both affective and logical that the interpretation is well-founded? Add to this the fact that the analyst begins by “believing” in the psychic reality of his analysands: it doesn’t matter if the analysand himself entrusts me with inept phantasms, I begin by believing in these beliefs, in these apparent absurdities, before we manage in the long run to dissolve them or at least endlessly and inconclusively elucidate them. In this overview of belief, I take another step: I integrate the tales, myths, and theories of the analysands in my interpretation, which, from the subjective, purifies itself into something objective; and, in validating them as states constituent of the psychic life, I return them to the fields of knowledge and of therapy.

This closeness of psychoanalysis to belief was greatly reproached him: I’d say even today, in the era of rough sex and its double, Puritanism, resistance to psychoanalysis is less a matter of the fear of the “sexual”—which is more and more spectacular and banal—than of this Freudian incursion into the field of belief. Psychoanalysts have not failed to notice this, as you can imagine, and several of my French colleagues (among them especially Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor) have already devoted colloquia and publications both remarkable and erudite to the similarities/dissimilarities between psychoanalysis and faith as well as to the various aspects of the “return of the religious,” be it in the guise of the need to believe, of sects, or of the clashes between religions.

To rapidly sum up the originality of the analytical position, as it appears one hundred and fifty years after the birth of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), let me mention merely a few of the proposals, which have found precise and substantial clinical and theoretical development in Freud’s successors, Melanie Klein, Lacan, or Winnicott. Thus Freud permits himself to speak ironically about the God of the philosophers: for him this is all “apple juice”—as I said—“containing a minuscule percentage of alcohol, or maybe no alcohol at all, but people get drunk on it all the same” (letter to Marie Bonaparte, March 19, 1928). One more reason to acknowledge the psychic reality of religious experience, which Freud perceives as a “regressive archaism” that can be “approached by means of mythology and the development of language” (letter to Jung, February 2, 1910). Although he recognizes the fragility of his “young” science, Freud is persuaded that it is illusory to “receive from elsewhere” what this science cannot give and affirms that he is resolutely enrolled under the banner of “God Logos” in his prospecting of the sacred intoxication; “Our God Logos is perhaps not all-powerful, he may perhaps accomplish but a small part of what his predecessors promised” (The Future of an Illusion, 1927).

“OUR GOD LOGOS”

Might this Freudian “god” called Logos be a reminiscence of the Church Fathers? In effect, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, readers of Plato—who seem to inspire Pope Benedict XVI even today and who steal in under the skeptical pen of our Viennese Jew—profess that the world is organized by God in a rational manner, the believer participates rationally in this world and receives the biblical revelation as well in a rational way. Faith and reason are reabsorbed into “divine reason,” a sort of Logos. Tertullian, good Aristotelian that he is, goes so far as to validate improbability since, as Freud would say, the “inept” itself contains a “kernel of truth”: credibile est ineptum, therefore credo quia absurdum? Closer no doubt to Diderot (the only French philosopher he cites), and to his “See God everywhere he is or say that he is not” (Philosophical Thoughts 26) or to Spinoza in his Deus sive Natura, Freud was persuaded that our “psychic apparatus” (which transforms the libido into images and thoughts) “is itself a constituent part of the world that we must explore and which readily allows such exploration” (The Future of an Illusion). This certainty led him to subscribe to the possibility of knowing … “our God Logos” himself. It is a matter of scientific knowledge, to be sure, which will nonetheless be a mixture of the imaginary, belief, of the absurd even: “Only sages are ethical solely for the pleasure of reason; others need eternally true myth” (letter to Jung, November 11, 1910). Do you know of any sages without myths? As for the absurdity of beliefs, let us recall the irony of James Joyce who, when asked why he preferred Catholicism to Protestantism, replied: “Why should I renounce a coherent absurdity for an incoherent one?”

THE OCEANIC FEELING …

Two mental experiences, corresponding to stages constituent of our “animistic” or “psychic” apparatus, confront the clinician with the need to believe. Let me sketch them.

The first goes back to what Freud, in response to a question from Romain Rolland, describes, not without reticence—he feels “uneasy” “disserting on such imponderables”—as the “oceanic feeling” (Civilization and Its Discontents). This would relate to the intimate union of the ego with the surrounding world, felt as an absolute certainty of satisfaction, security, as well as the loss of our self to what surrounds and contains us, to a container, and that goes back to the experience of the infant who has not yet established borders between the ego and the maternal body. Indisputable and unsharable, given only to “a few” whose “regression goes sufficiently far back,” and nonetheless authenticated by Freud as an original experience of the ego, this prelinguistic or translinguistic experience, dominated by sensations, supports belief. Belief, not in the sense of a supposition, but in the strong sense of an unshakable certainty, sensory plenitude, and ultimate truth the subject experiences as an exorbitant kind of more-than-life [sur-vie], indistinctly sensory and mental, strictly speaking ek-static. Certain works of art bear witness to this: I have noticed it particularly in Proust. The narrator speaks of dreams without images (“the dream of the second apartment”), woven with pleasures and/or pains that “one” “believes” (he states) unnameable, that mobilize the extreme intensity of the five senses and that only a cascade of metaphors can attempt to “translate”: the telling of these dreams may be interpreted as a triumph over the endogenous autism that inhabits the unconscious depths of each of us, according to the psychoanalyst Frances Tustin. Might the writer succeed where the autistic fail? I mean, very precisely, the one who succeeds in naming this boundless immersion of the ego in the world, which, being correctly named, ceases to be a catastrophic abolition of the self, but is felt as an “oceanic feeling,” as a jubilant osmosis of the subject in the common flesh of a “not-yet oneself” swallowed up in a “not-yet world.” The autistic person, however, does not manage to extract himself from this absence of differentiation between his flesh and the flesh of the world because he cannot represent them. On the other hand, the capturing in language of this belonging of the ego to a container gives rise to a feeling of omnipotence and truth, which is a source of certainty and elation. “A kind of bliss,” a friend, who associates artistic inspiration with mystical exaltation, used to say. The need to believe—with the power of its dazzling certainty, its sensory joy, and the dispossession of oneself—might perhaps commemorate this archaic experience and its pleasures and risks.

It seems to me that this is a point that is unfamiliar except to specialists: we don’t know much about how Freudian thought, such as you evoke it here, deals with borderline mental states and their management by religion or, in another way, by writing.

True, and Freud himself goes in this direction very cautiously, against his better judgment even. Only modern clinicians have refined our observations about the early dependency of mothers and babies and the impact of this upon the adult psyche, particularly in aesthetic and religious experience. The founder of psychoanalysis declared himself (to Romain Rolland, July 20, 1929) “closed” to mysticism, as to music, but also to Nietzsche’s kind of thinking; while avowing, without further precision, the “specifically Jewish nature of his mysticism” (to Jung, 1909). Why this relative “closure”? Might it be to protect himself from the maternal feminine? So we suppose, on the part of a nonetheless very courageous explorer into the “black continent” of femininity who, until his final years (“Femininity,” 1933, The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, 1938)—and the death of his own mother—put off going more boldly in the direction of this “minoemycenian civilization,” predating classical Greece, to which he compares the early relations of the little girl with her mother: stormy seas if ever there were any! And that transform women into ardent seekers of faith, into believers often more fervent than men. But also into radical rebels, disappointed beyond consolation, and even into impenitent atheists when they succeed in casting off this hypnosis of the “archaic maternal,” to which Irresistible Mister Baby seems more easily to succumb.

… AND THE PRIMARY IDENTIFICATION: DIRECT AND IMMEDIATE.

Far from exhausting the complexity of the need to believe, this Freudian plunge into the certainty of me-world, of the ego mingled with the flesh of the world, goes hand in hand with a no less fleeting and suggestive illumination of another element of the need to believe: “I” am only if a beloved authority acknowledges me. That psychoanalysis be based upon the amorous experience reiterated, decomposed, and recomposed in transference/countertransference is something I upheld in my book Tales of Love (1987). Within the broad spectrum of love bonds, Freud (Totem and Taboo) emphasizes “desire (Sehnsucht) for the father”: the “murder of the father of the primitive horde,” far from extinguishing this desire, only stimulates it, fans the flames, and leads to the establishment of an absolute ideal, which, according to Freud, underwrites the religious feeling. Moreover, and as if to designate the need to believe as the central kernel of a vaster religious feeling, in The Ego and the Id (1923) Freud posits a “primitive identification” with the “Father of individual prehistory.” “Direct and immediate” (direkte und unmittelbare), this identification anterior to any objective relation of desire is not destined for the oedipal father but for a … loving father, who would have … the “attributes of both parents.” The oedipal father, on his part, object of love-hate, only comes along later to incite revolt and murder as the condition for the appearance of an autonomous and thinking subject.

At the dawn of individuation a life raft thus appears on the horizon of the “oceanic feeling”: the loving father. An imaginary Surface who, though his loving authority, takes me from the engulfing container: he is the guarantor my being. This unwonted celebration of the loving Father...