Christianity & Psychoanalysis

A New Conversation

Earl D. Bland, Brad D. Strawn, Earl D. Bland, Brad D. Strawn

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780830895885
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Unsurprisingly, given Sigmund Freud's understanding of religion, the conversation between Christianity and psychoanalysis has long been marked by mutual suspicion. Psychoanalysis originated within a naturalist, post-Enlightenment context and sought to understand human functioning and pathology--focusing on phenomena such as the unconscious and object representation--on a strictly empirical basis. Given certain accounts of divine agency and human uniqueness, psychoanalytic work was often seen as competitive with a Christian understanding of the human person.The contributors to Christianity and Psychoanalysis seek to start a new conversation. Aided by the turn to relationality in theology, as well as by a noncompetitive conception of God?s transcendence and agency, this book presents a fresh integration of Christian thought and psychoanalytic theory. The immanent processes identified by psychoanalysis need not compete with Christian theology but can instead be the very means by which God is involved in human existence. The Christian study of psychoanalysis can thus serve the flourishing of God?s kingdom.Christian Association for Psychological Studies (CAPS) Books explore how Christianity relates to mental health and behavioral sciences including psychology, counseling, social work, and marriage and family therapy in order to equip Christian clinicians to support the well-being of their clients.

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A New Conversation

Earl D. Bland and Brad D. Strawn

Any contemporary book on psychoanalysis and Christianity must acknowledge the mutual suspicion often characteristic of previous conversations between these two paradigms. Comparatively speaking, psychoanalysis is new to the game. When viewed from the perspective of historical knowledge, psychoanalysis reflects an understanding of humans that emerged in the later years of the modern era. Developing in a unique intellectual and cultural climate, Freud’s theories can trace their advent to a succession of movements both in philosophy and science (Gay, 1988; Burston & Frie, 2006; Orange, 2010b). Leaving an indelible imprint on our contemporary understanding of human psychological functioning, the provocative and enduring significance of psychoanalysis is difficult to measure.

Predictably, then, as psychoanalytic thinking encroached on traditional religio-cultural understandings of human functioning, contention with existing plausibility structures ensued. The comprehensive and appealing nature of psychoanalytic ideas not only infringed on traditional Christian anthropology but actively challenged long-held assumptions regarding the purpose and causes of human behavior. Provoking numerous responses from Christian critics, some of the dialogue has been accommodating and even favorable, while some has been dismissive or vitriolic (e.g., Bingaman, 2003; Küng, 1979; Lewis, 1952; Vitz, 1993). Both explanatory frameworks try to map the human psyche or soul, but differences have arisen over fundamental questions about the essential nature and motivation of human behavior, acceptable sources of knowledge, the purpose and meaning of human life, the causes of psychological problems and what it takes to cure these problems.

This book reexamines the interlocution of psychoanalysis and Christianity in light of contemporary movements in psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice and Christian theology. Our effort to engage in a new conversation is partially stimulated by major shifts in how human science is understood and the proliferation of theoretical, clinical and theological material related to the analytic treatment that has developed over the past forty years. To accomplish our task we hope to braid three strands of discourse that reflect (1) modern psychoanalytic thinking and practice, (2) relational notions of Christian theology and (3) an integrative strategy that emerges from particular Christian traditions. This book is about theory, faith and clinical practice. We begin with justifying a deep engagement between Christianity and psychoanalysis (chap. 1), followed by an argument to particularize integration efforts within unique theological and theoretical traditions (chap. 2). The remainder of the book calls on various contributors, all clinicians who are both Christian and psychoanalytically oriented, to enact these ideas by outlining how different psychoanalytic models engage their Christian tradition. At the end of this chapter we have also provided a clinical case, which is used by each author (except in chaps. 2 and 9) to highlight practical understandings that emerge from the nexus of theory, theology and clinical reality. To address the diversity of psychoanalytic thought we have also included chapters that address couples work (chap. 9) and brief models of treatment (chap. 10).

Science, Psychoanalysis and Religion: A Brief History

The tension between psychoanalysis and Christianity was in part fueled by Freud’s (1927/1961) avowed atheism and his somewhat provocative interpretation of religious experience as so much wish fulfillment. He identified science as the primary vehicle through which humanity would achieve its betterment and was put off by what he saw as the incorrigible nature of religious expression (Gay, 1987). Although recent scholarship has traced the religious and familial influences that may have subtended Freud’s theories (Hoffman, 2011; Rizzuto, 1998; Vitz, 1993), it seems clear that Freud, although not hostile to religion, dismissed its legitimacy from within a psychoanalytic frame. Curiously Freud would sustain an active lifelong engagement with religion in the face of his public aversion. However, those who have used Freud’s own psychoanalytic method as a means of understanding his paradoxical interest point to complex familial dynamics and a complicated cultural dance with his own Jewishness as unconscious contributors to Freud’s religious abjuration (Meissner, 1984; Rizzuto, 1998). Notwithstanding these more intimate aspects of Freud’s dialogue with religion, the fact remains that Freud’s embracing of a secularist frame was sustained by an unflagging confidence in Enlightenment science. He was merely providing an “education to reality” in his assertion about the illusory nature of religious experience (Freud, 1927/1961, p. 49). MacIntyre (1964) highlights this leading-edge interpretation of Freud’s unpretentious atheism:

His [Freud’s] atheism was of the simplest kind. He did not think that psychoanalysis was needed for the provision of new arguments to show that belief in God was false, but that, since belief in God was false, psychoanalytic theory might help to explain why men nonetheless believed. (par. 3)

Demonstrating the modern sensibility of Freud’s thinking, MacIntyre’s comment highlights the tension between Christianity and psychoanalysis as reflective of a broader cultural context that was questioning traditional religious interpretations of human experience, purpose and value.

A growing secularism was pervasive in the intellectual and cultural influences of the late nineteenth century as movements in science, philosophy, art and politics increasingly conceptualized human experience separate from the divine. Absent God, teleological shifts emerged as people began to see how life could be lived without explicit allegiance to creeds and institutional doctrine. As Taylor (2007) describes it, many became “interested in nature, in the life around them ‘for their own sakes,’ and not just in reference to God” (p. 90). Echoing the empirical stance of his time, Freud (1927/1961) argued that psychoanalysis was largely neutral and could be used either to refute or support religious sentiment. Psychoanalysis, in his view, was a value-free scientific methodology for the understanding of human functioning and pathology. Yet, like so many of his day, he believed religion had lost its ability to provide a compelling explanatory framework in light of the advances of science (which included psychoanalysis) and the evidences of human destruction so clearly seen during his lifetime. Psychoanalysis—like the Darwinian theory of origins, the advances in physics and biology, and philosophical deconstructions of theism—pointed to a robust naturalism, which precluded mystical and religious explanations of the world.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Freud was simply joining the modern chorus of religious critics because of religion’s failure to tame human aggression or account for modern discoveries in science. Freud was primarily interested in explaining the unconscious meaning of religious yearning so pervasive in human communities. As Jones (1996) persuasively argues, Freud’s psychological explanation of religious desire hinges on a primarily Western conceptualization of a patriarchal divinity, a Father God sought after as an extension of primitive totemism, “a longing for the father” (Freud, 1913/1950, p. 183). Further, as an extension of his own theory of psychosexual development and its apex, the Oedipal drama, Freud’s emphasis on patriarchal dominance, the concomitant childhood guilt and yearning for the father, unconsciously scaffolds conscious longings for closeness and communion with God. Jones (1996) extends his position by stating Freud’s critique of religion requires

a specific image of God. The patriarchal God of law and conscience is the only religion Freud will consider. If he were to give up that paternal representation of God as normative, his argument would lose much of its force. (p. 17)

The important implication of Jones’s argument is that as theology shifts, such as the contemporary view of relationality within the Trinity as a template for human-divine engagement (Grenz, 2001; Holmes, 2012; Shults, 2003), Freud’s construction of the psychoanalytic meaning of religious experience based on an exalted paternal figure declines in its explanatory value.

By the time of Freud’s writings, science had a fairly robust methodology for seeking knowledge and explaining its findings. With the diminishment of God and theological knowledge as essential for comprehending the natural world and human development, movements in science looked for universal certainties that would allow for confident predictability of the natural order (Murphy, 1997; Toulmin, 1990). Through methods of inquiry that searched for regularities in sensory data and material proofs, science built its knowledge edifice founded on empirical observations that presumed either naturalism or at least a value-free metaphysic. With the development of representative language that differentiated fact from value, scientific knowledge attempted to divorce itself from traditional knowledge that had for so long set the agenda for discovery and understanding. As Toulmin (1990) states, “one aim of 17th century philosophers was to frame all their questions in terms that rendered them independent of context” (p. 21). Metaphysical assumptions presumed the supremacy of the material realm and focused on explanations that could be reduced to understanding the world through the different properties of physics, chemistry, biology, physiology or other natural processes. This ill-fated, pervasive reductionism was perhaps most rabid in the logical positivists, who sought to base all knowledge on physics. From this reductive intellectual bent, values, ethics, culture and religion were not unimportant but became unverifiable domains of knowledge and thereby of little consequence to science. Also, given that science was investigating only natural phenomena, no value or ethical tradition could be extracted from its processes. Science was neutral, a technology useful for the advancement of human society.

In a mirror of this process, psychoanalysis adopted a systematic methodology for seeking knowledge and understanding of the human mind and behavior. Careful theoretical proofs were proposed using the case study method and concepts of human nature based on drive instincts, which flowed from the original Freudian understandings of Darwinian evolutionary theory, Lamarckian principles, and nineteenth-century progress in biology and neurology. Freud was an empiricist and conceived psychoanalysis within an organic causal frame wherein psychological processes were reduced to instinctual drives. While some have argued that standard English translations of Freud portray a rabid scientism that is not evident in his original writings (Bettelheim, 1982), others point out that overly structuralized images of Freud’s concepts such as id, ego and superego take away from Freud’s more flexible, immediate and personal style that is meant to portray varying degrees of complexity and open-endedness to his concepts (Ornston, 1982, 1985).1 Nonetheless, despite the psychological/relational nature of psychoanalytic technique, Freud never abandoned his convictions regarding the biological foundations of his metatheory (Sulloway, 1979). Freud’s ambition to explain complex psychological and relational dynamics via reductionist biological categories was in step with the scientific zeitgeist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although his singularity put him at odds with some of his contemporaries, in its early years Freud’s psychoanalysis flourished, especially in postwar America, where psychoanalytic constructs infused the modern cultural imagination.

After Modernity: Contemporary Changes in Science, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

Assuming that all psychological theory is embedded in cultural contexts and reflects temporal philosophical and scientific assumptions, any contemporary critique of psychoanalysis must acknowledge the considerable intellectual shifts that have developed in the post-Freudian era. The well-known turn from what has been called modern to postmodern or postcritical thought has arrested much of the objective certitude modernity promised. While the hard sciences of physics, chemistry and to some extent biology continue to thrive with a largely reductive methodology, the human sciences of psychology, sociology and anthropology have found reductionist principles to be as constraining as they were enlightening. Thankfully new language has emerged to help scaffold our understanding in ways that are not antithetical to processes of reductionism, foundationalism and universality. While there is certainly room for the scientific discovery of universals and regularities, the value-neutral position of science has been soundly refuted. Naturalism and its scientific methodology are not value-neutral (Polanyi, 1958; Jones, 1994), tend to reflect a pervasive utilitarian ethic (Taylor, 2007) and reveal a context-dependent social knowledge that pursues particular goals emanating from background assumptions that are not always articulated (Longino, 1990). In other words, psychoanalytic knowledge, or knowledge of any type, is unavoidably shaped by forces of constructivism and hermeneutics. All therapeutic knowledge reveals a particular narrative structure that situates the clinical exchange as meaningful within a given relational matrix, culture, intellectual tradition and religious or ethical configuration. Knowledge is not detachable from the knower. It matters where one is from, one’s gender and race, the economic pressures faced, one’s cultural and religious traditions, the familial structure present during development, and the presence or absence of unique or traumatic life events. As these factors conspire with given biological and genetic potentials, human life at once becomes universal and particular. Our full understanding of a person is not complete until we have told the story of this life as understood not just in the distant categories of empirical classification but also in the intimate narratives of self-in-relationship, and with any story it matters who is telling the story and who is listening (McAdams, 2001, 2011).

With strong implications for the practice of psychoanalysis, theorists began to see how psychological experience was irreducibly embedded in a relational matrix, including the treatment relationship (Aron, 1996; Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988; Wachtel, 2008). Further, as science in general has moved to a place more comfortable with the ways that its truths are situated within certain value structures and tell the story of a particular culture or tradition, we are able to reevaluate the reductionist inclination regarding causal relationships. If explanations of human behavior cannot be reduced to biology and physics alone, how does one make sense of human functioning that accounts for nuanced and complex relationships between multiple levels of explanation? The critical nature of this question becomes evident in our current discussion because as soon as we attempt to explain human functioning in psychoanalytic or theological frames we move toward abstract, complex categories that may not link directly to physical or material substance. The ante goes up further when we attempt to develop a meaningful conversation between these two forms of dialogue. No longer are we looking for language of justification, trying to get each discipline to consider the truth claims of the other. Rather, the muting of the modern objectivist frame invites a new rapprochement between psychoanalysis and Christian theology. Distinct theological and psychoanalytic explanations of human behavior and functioning can share constructive explanatory space, operating within a framework that does not contend fundamental evidence from other domains of knowledge, most particular for our purposes, biology and neuroscience. At the same time we recognize that theological and psychoanalytic explanatory concepts are capturing particular qualities or domains of human functioning that are not fully explainable using the language of biology and neuroscience.

To clarify our point, science has attempted to explain complex phenomena, like human biological or psychological functioning using reductive methods, by looking for the smallest units of causation—­explaining the whole by understanding its component parts. In psychology this has taken various forms, most popular being behavioral learning theories and psychoanalytic drive theory. While some important gains were achieved via this reductive model, almost from the beginning there have been voices complaining about how complex dynamic systems such as human behavior and mental processes cannot be fully reduced to component parts. In the last fifty years or so these voices have risen to a crescendo, claiming loudly that human psychological functioning is more complex and dynamic than the component parts can explain (Nagel, 2012; Plantinga, 2011; Searle, 2008). The rise of systems theory and the linking of causal factors within complex systemic interactions have greatly increased our understanding of human psychological and relational functioning.

In addition to systems theorists who see relationship and individual psychological development contextualized within concentric levels of influence (Barton & Haslett, 2007; Stanton & Welsh, 2012), others see individual psychological development as firmly embedded within dynamic relational systems (e.g., the child-caretaker dyad) that mutually influence and regulate developmental processes (Beebe & Lachman, 1988, 1998; Siegel, 2012). In their seminal work on development from a nonlinear dynamic systems perspective, Thelen and Smith (1994) argue that human perception, cognition and motor systems develop within a self-organizing system. Knowledge and action emerge from a continuous dynamic exchange of sensory input, action and categorization of experience. In other words, psychological capacities such as thought, emotion, memory and self-reflective functioning, to name a few, emerge from biologically rooted and embodied developmental processes that continually organize and interact with perceptual and sensory input in a mutually regulating dynamic system. Complex human capacities are relationally derived and not reducible to their component parts. Reductive explanatory frameworks simply fail to account for many complex psychological phenomena.

Arising in this discussion is the concept of emergence, which can be defined as the tendency for complex systems to operate in a manner that produces higher-order properties, organization or ways of being that cannot be sufficiently predicted or explained by an analysis of their component parts (Brown, Murphy & Malony, 1998; Clayton & Davies, 2006; Peacocke, 2007). Because theology and psychoanalysis operate with immaterial concepts and hypothesize the existence of structures, functions and processes (e.g., self, soul, relationality) that exert causal influence that cannot be reduced to their biological or neurochemical correlates, we think of these constructs as verifiable emergent phenomena. For example, one of the most self-evident emergent phenomena is consciousness (Koch, 2004; Pinker, 1997). Because the exact neurobiological process of consciousness cannot be accounted for by neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, we can refer to consciousness as an emergent property of a sufficiently ordered human brain. Consciousness is not an epi­phenomenon; it emerges from neurophysiological processes and also exerts a causal influence on these neurophysiological processes. The bidirectional nature of causal influence is, of course, not equal; one must have a brain to have consciousness, but there are aspects of consciousness that influence the structure and nature of neurophysiological processes, what Peacocke (2007) has called “whole-part influence” (p. 27).

Similarly, psychoanalytic and theological concepts involve higher-order (meaning more complex and inclusive) levels of explanation that emerge from our correctly functioning neuroanatomical structures. One possible way of avoiding a layered model of reality is to think of what Silberstein (2006) called “systemic causation” (p. 204), where mental properties exert a causal influence on neurochemical operations because both are bounded within a human system. Silberstein elaborates:

The universe is not ordered as a hierarchy of closed autonomous levels such as atoms, molecules, cells, and the like. Rather, the universe is intrinsically nested and entangled. The so-called physical, chemical, biological, mental, and social domains of existence are in fact mutually embedded and inextricably interconnected. (p. 204)

Moreover, although each discipline’s conceptual language is an attempt to capture core human experiences in grammatical or verbal form so as to increase understanding, important psychoanalytic and theological concepts are not merely metaphors used to explain human behavioral tendencies, psychological processes or spiritual forces. We argue that many psychoanalytic and theological concepts can be considered ontologically real in that they have causal efficacy. This is considered to be a strong emergent position, which makes it possible to conceptualize emergent processes as having some causal impact on physical or biological substances (Gregersen, 2006). For example, one might consider relational or self-processes as influencing one’s biological or neurochemical functioning in a real way. At the same time we recognize “an antecedent bottom-up influence from the constituent physico-chemical level which has led to the emergence of biological, psychological, and social levels of organization” (p. 285). Psychoanalytic phenomena such as the unconscious, self, object representation and relational schemas involve real neurochemical traces and patterns that have their root in the natural system of neurophysiology. Parallel to nonreductive physicalist notions of soul (Brown et al., 1998) many psychoanalytic processes (e.g., object relations, transference reactions, enactments, identifications, attachment states) are complex emergent phenomena directly tied to affective motivations emanating from neurobiologically rooted need states evoked and shaped by developmental contexts (Lichtenberg, Lachman & Fosshage, 2011; Schore, 2009; Fosha, Siegel & Solomo...