Freud and Augustine in Dialogue

Psychoanalysis, Mysticism, and the Culture of Modern Spirituality

William B. Parsons

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813934808
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

"It is arguably the case, " writes William Parsons, "that no two figures have had more influence on the course of Western introspective thought than Freud and Augustine." Yet it is commonly assumed that Freud and Augustine would have nothing to say to each other with regard to spirituality or mysticism, given the former's alleged antipathy to religion and the latter's not usually being considered a mystic.

Adopting an interdisciplinary, dialogical, and transformational framework for interpreting Augustine's spiritual journey in his Confessions, Parsons places a "mystical theology" at the heart of Augustine's narrative and argues that his mysticism has been misunderstood partly because of the limited nature of the psychological models applied to it. At the same time, he expands Freud's therapeutic legacy to incorporate the contemporary findings of physiology and neuroscience that have been influenced in part by modern spirituality.

Parsons develops a new psychological hermeneutic to account for Augustine's mysticism that will capture the imagination of contemporary readers who are both psychologically informed and interested in spirituality. The author intends this interpretive model not only to engage modern introspective concerns about developmental conflict and the power of the unconscious but also to reach a more nuanced level of insight into the origins and the nature of the self.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. See, for example, William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

2. See Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (New York: Crossroad, 1991); John Peter Kenney, The Mysticism of St. Augustine (New York: Routledge, 2005).

3. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from the Confessions are taken from The Confessions of St Augustine, trans. Rex Warner (New York: Mentor, 1963). All emphases in the texts from the Confessions are also from this edition.

4. See McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, 232.

5. See Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Henri Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: Éditions de Boccard, 1949); Robert O’Donnell, St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Odyssey of Soul (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

6. See Weintraub, Value of the Individual, 39–40.

7. While the literature championing this perspective is vast, a recent paradigmatic example lies in the work of Kenney, The Mysticism of St. Augustine.

8. For an overview of the definitional problems and associated debates surrounding the term “mysticism,” see William B. Parsons, ed., Teaching Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

9. See Karl Weintraub, “St. Augustine’s Confessions: The Search for a Christian Self,” in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine, ed. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes, Monograph Series 8 (West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990), 12.

10. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); Krister Stendahl, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 199–215.

11. I use Outler’s language as cited by James E. Dittes in his essay “Continuities between the Life and Thought of Augustine,” in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine, ed. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes, Monograph Series 8 (West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990), 120.

12. See Donald Capps, “Augustine as Narcissist: Of Grandiosity and Shame,” in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine, ed. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes, Monograph Series 8 (West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990); Margaret Miles, “Infancy, Parenting and Nourishment in Augustine’s Confessions,” in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine, ed. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes, Monograph Series 8 (West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990).

13. Eugene TeSelle, “Augustine as Client and as Theorist,” in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine, ed. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes, Monograph Series 8 (West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990), 215.

14. See The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. Warner, 10.14, 30, 32.

15. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1929); E. R. Dodds, “Augustine’s Confessions: A Study of Spiritual Maladjustment,” in The Hunger of the Heart: Reflections on the Confessions of Augustine, ed. Donald Capps and James E. Dittes, Monograph Series 8 (West Lafayette, IN: Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1990); Bernhard Legewie, Augustinus: Eine Psychographie (Bonn: A. Markus & E. Webers Verlag, 1925).

16. While this study does not utilize narrative theory, Mark Freeman’s reading of Augustine, particularly with respect to the varying notions of development, comes close to that developed in this book. See his Rewriting the Self (New York: Routledge, 1993).

17. See Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper, 1966).

18. As Freud put it, psychoanalysis is “a profession of lay curers of souls who need not be doctors and should not be priests.” Sigmund Freud and Oskar Pfister, Psychoanalysis and Faith: Dialogues with the Reverend Oskar Pfister, ed. Heinrich Meng and Ernst L. Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 125–26.

19. See Diane Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons, eds., Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain (New York: Routledge, 2001).

20. I take the term “modern spirituality” from Mary MacDonald (see her essay “Spirituality,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Lindsay Jones [New York: Macmillan, 2005]). She distinguishes it from “classic spirituality,” the latter being essentially churched.

21. See, for example, Robert Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); G. William Barnard, “Diving into the Depths: Reflections on Psychology as a Religion,” in Religion and Psychology: Mapping the Terrain, ed. Diane Jonte-Pace and William B. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001); William B. Parsons, “Psychologia Perennis and the Academic Study of Mysticism,” in Mourning Religion, ed. William B. Parsons, Diane Jonte-Pace, and Susan E. Henking (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

22. For evidence that this is so, see Michael Eigen, “One Reality,” in The Couch...