Psychoanalysis and Christianity

Prologue:

A tedious bit of autobiography: since 1990, when I was in gr. 12 first reading Freud and Jung and trying to decide, first, what I was to study at university the following year (psychology? theology? history?) and, second, whether to pursue clinical and then analytic training in Montréal, or priestly ordination into the Anglican Church of Canada, I have lived my life at the intersection of theology and psychoanalysis. When I went on sabbatical in 2018, my project was to finally write the book I had been carrying around in my head for nearly thirty years at that point, then tentatively titled "Theology After Freud." (Events intervened and I turned my sabbatical project to writing Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, where Freud features very prominently and unapologetically throughout). 

I may yet write that book, though increasingly with a much different focus. Some of its materials have in the last decade worked their way into lectures on the relationship between theology (especially Orthodox and Catholic theology) and psychoanalysis that I have gladly given before academic and ecclesial audiences in England and Wales, Canada, and in several places across these United States. A version of that lecture is available here as a podcast.

The other development in 2018 that swayed me against writing my book on psychoanalysis was the appearance of the most powerful theological engagement of Freud I have ever read. The Spanish psychotherapist and Jesuit Carlos Dominguez-Morano (who has published many books in his native tongue, few, alas, having been translated into English) published Belief After Freud: Religious Faith Through the Crucible of Psychoanalysis. That book is, and remains, a stunning work of far-reaching criticism of the most prominent manifestations of the massive psychopathology at the heart of Catholic Christianity. I could only salute the author's penetrating insights and great courage in writing a much more forceful book than I would have attempted. If you read nothing else on this list, read, mark, and inwardly digest this book. The Catholic Church would be a far less objectively disordered and sadomasochistic institution if Dominguez-Morano's proposals were taken at all seriously, which they won't be. (I wrote a bit about him for the Jesuit periodical America, and in more detail at an old blog.) 

If you read Morano and then want to read more in this area, I have, over the last three decades, read as many books about religion and psychoanalysis as I can lay my hands on--with many more to read! What follows are a few notes on disastrous books to avoid, a few that are "good enough," and a rare few that our outstanding. 

Books Fit for Burning:

Previously I noted on here one book that, had it been edited and published properly, would have been a handy collection to have. But it was so shoddily produced it's not fit for reading and the publisher should be ashamed to have foisted such slop on us. 

The other book is one I can only think of as psychotic: by that I mean Bion's theory of psychosis as the severance of all meaning-making links and possibilities for rationality and reality-testing. I cannot in all honesty discern any sort of rational purpose to the book as it staggers around vomiting out incoherent statements unconnected to any sort of discernible purpose--or to each other. The Freud who features here, and the "arguments" made, bear no relationship to reality. There is of course no end of attacks on Freud, and almost all of them are at least generally coherent (see, e.g., Frederick Crews), but this book could not even manage to rise to the level of childish diatribe. 

Mediocre Treatments:

Beyond such egregious examples, there are plenty of books in which others might quite rightly find value but I found to be very thin gruel indeed. Most of them were written in too general a way, and often very poorly edited. Under this heading I include Christianity & Psychoanalysis: A New Conversation, eds. Earl D. Bland and Brad D. Strawn; and Marie Hoffman's sprawling Toward Mutual Recognition: Relational Psychoanalysis and the Christian Narrative. Her premise and methods were good but the execution very poor. Other books along these lines could be mentioned but need not detain us further. 

Good General Treatments:

If you are new to the area, then a 30,000-foot overview provided by one of the great scholar-clinicians and social critics of the last century, Erich Fromm, is a good place to start: Psychoanalysis and Religion was originally delivered as part of the Terry Lectures at Yale. Like all Fromm's books, it is written at a very general and accessible level. (I discuss Fromm in a bit more detail here but keep meaning to get back to him at some point.) 

A more advanced but still general treatment may be found in William Meissner, the Jesuit psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I wrote about in my America piece, who authored several decent books, including Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience.

Two other collections merit mention: Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, eds. Charles Spezzano and Gerald Gargiulo is decent. Even better is Psychoanalysis and Religion in the 21st Century: Competitors or Collaborators? ed. David M. Black.

Ana-Maria Rizzuto's Works:

The Argentine-born but American-educated Catholic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst remains too little known, in my view, but deserves to be for her first book in 1979, The Birth of the Living God, which was based on fascinating and highly original research with psychiatric inpatients and their internalized God objects. 

Then her 1998 book Why Did Freud Reject God?, published by Yale, is the most careful and respectful such treatment yet published of a topic that almost always sees authors descend to the level of puerile polemics and "pseudo-mentalizing" (to borrow a phrase from Fonagy). 

Only recently has Rizzuto come in for some attention in this decent collection: Ana-María Rizzuto and the Psychoanalysis of Religion: The Road to the Living God, eds. Martha J. Reineke and David M. Goodman.

Winnicott and Religion:

Back when I taught undergraduates theology, I came across the works of the scholar and Jungian clinician Ann Ulanov, author of such books as Finding Space: Winnicott, God, and Psychic Reality as well as Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (which my students loved). 

Stephen Parker has written an unexpectedly excellent monograph (I say "unexpectedly" because works like this are often ploddingly dull, having all the vices of a doctoral dissertation and none of its virtues), Winnicott and Religion, which is very much worth your time if you love Winnicott half as much as I do. Winnicott, as always, has a lovely and useful phrase to describe his own relationship to the Methodism and Anglicanism in which he was reared: traditions to "grow up out of." That phrase admits of wider application today if much research (e.g., Stephen Bullivant's important new book Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America is to be believed on declining practices. 

Highly Specialized Scholarly Monographs:

Under this heading I put two dense but worthwhile works: Peter Tyler's The Pursuit of the Soul: Psychoanalysis, Soul-making and the Christian Tradition; and then Marcus Pound's Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma. Pound's book has the virtue of making some of Lacan accessible--a figure whom I otherwise find needlessly and vexatiously obscure so much of the time (though I did find something useful in him as I argued here). 

One of the best books I have read is Pia Sophia Chaudhari's Dynamis of Healing: Patristic Theology and the Psyche. I discussed its virtues and interviewed her about it here. 

Let me end with a new book I forgot to mention in a recent post on On Bare Attention: it is a book by Paul Marcus entitled Psychoanalysis as a Spiritual Discipline: In Dialogue with Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel. The book is a bit choppy in execution, but it draws out useful material from its two named interlocutors. I read some of Marcel and Bueber in writing my M.A. in moral philosophy at the end of the 1990s (when I read rather a lot more of Alasdair MacIntyre and Emmanuel Levinas, whose "ethics of the face" and critique of abstraction I still teach to my students). 

Marcus seems to suggest in this book that for people who both find themselves "ecclesially homeless" (to use a phrase of Stanley Hauerwas) or "deconstructing" their faith, or otherwise alienated from religious institutions, and are clinicians or interested in psychoanalysis, then the analytic tradition offers both insights and "disciplines" similar to ascetical practices found in Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. This allows him to say that "psychoanalysis can reasonably be conceptualized as a spiritual/moral venture." As such, it has practices of "communion" (to borrow a term from Marcel) or what Marcus calls "the five essential elements of psychotherapeutic support--presence, holding, caring, challenging, and confirming."