Can Religion & PsyA Share Space?

Credo? Religion and Psychoanalysis, by Patrick Casement, Aeon Books Ltd, London, 2020, 84 pages.

Disclosure: A pamphlet, written by a psychoanalyst who early in life studied for the priesthood is being reviewed by another analyst who spent his early life studying Rabbinics. One might well query: What tragedy, pray tell, has arisen in the traditionally atheistic World of psychoanalysis to allow this confluence of oddities?

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The antipathy between Psychoanalysis and Religion is ever-so-present in Freud’s writings. With a nod to Romaine Rolland at the very beginning of “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud, 1930, p. 64), Freud does take a roughly agnostic position in just barely not denying the existence of oceanic or transcendental feelings among his collocutors:

“One of these exceptional few calls himself my friend in his letters to me. I had sent him my small book that treats religion as an illusion, and he answered that he … was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments. This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were, ‘oceanic’. … The views expressed by the friend whom I so much honour, …? caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings.”

Never having experienced even these forecourts of transcendental experience, Freud leaves little doubt — here and in the Future of an Illusion (Freud, 1927) — that his belief was that man created God in mankind’s image in order to serve the defensive needs to deny infantile and childhood helplessness and adult fears. It has furthermore been widely reported (e.g., Gay, 1987, p. 153) that Freud’s disdain for religion was similarly infused into his personal life. Immediately upon marrying Martha Bernays (who had grown up in an orthodox Jewish home), for instance, Freud forbade his wife from lighting Sabbath Candles; notably,? the first Friday following his death, she did just that. My own analyst once opined, some many years after our work was completed, that he had been pleased by the results of our efforts but maintained a concern that I might someday “fall into the bowels of religiosity.” And I remember in 1980 leading a seminar on Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis and being surprised that the candidates exclusively spoke of religious people who were emotionally ill. They seemed shocked, indeed, when I commented that the previous no-longer-living analyst who introduced and taught that course for many years had been religious. Just how many analysts, we may ask, akin to the Conversos of Portugal and Spain centuries ago, are hiding their religious beliefs and practices remains unknown!

Religion and Psychoanalysis: Mortal Enemies …? maybe? maybe not.?

Casement’s imminently readable offering is a collection of mostly very personal and brief essays — some going back to his days studying for the priesthood in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s and some from his contemporary thinking.? What a pleasure it was to read these insightful pieces. They constitute, in no small measure, a memoir of his thinking about skepticism about god in religions and about the need for healthy skepticism of our theories in psychoanalysis. While contemplating retirement in a paper some fifteen years ago (Casement, 2002), he decided that self disclosure in his writings was necessary if each generation of analysts was going to communicate how their individual theories and life situations inform each other and intercalate. Here, for instance, he recounts his experience seeking-out emotional help within his Franciscan religious community after a romantic break-up. Things were going well until Brother P. (pp 4-6) “tried to grope me” and Father T. refused to give him absolution “unless I told him that I had committed the sin of fornication.” It was at this moment that the young Patrick,? who was eventually to choose psychoanalysis over becoming a member of the clergy, opined in response:

“I have considered all this very carefully … You can stuff your so-called absolution up your own backside. I am turning my back on all this superficial nonsense, maybe forever. Goodbye.”

My own joy in reading Patrick Casement’s works over the years has, in no small part, related to my appreciation of his directness in language. Casement refers to similar cavalier miscarriages in the psychoanalytic world, where candidates were gratuitously analyzed by institute training committees without significant concern for their well-being in a process that he described in another earlier paper (Casement, 2005) as “wild analysis in committee.” In general, in this work, he is concerned that dogma may take the place of being with the patient, just as the man-made precepts of the church may take the place of both decency and devotion. One has the sense, throughout these essays, of an analyst who sees his sacred task in the capacity to follow his patients without a locked-in theoretical pre-ordaining of what the process may discover.

As early as 100 years ago, Ferenczi was touting a skeptical view for Psychoanalytic practice, too (Ferenczi, 1924, p. 69):

The difference between this (our conclusions) and ... ordinary suggestion simply consists in this, that we do not deem the interpretations we offer to be irrefutable utterances, but regard their validity to be dependent on whether they can be verified by material brought forward from memory or by means of repetition of earlier situations .... Another difference between us and the omnipotent suggestionists is that we ourselves retain a grain of suspicion about our own interpretations and must be ever ready to modify them or withdraw them completely, even when the patient has begun to accept our mistaken or our incomplete interpretations.”

For Casement, though, skepticism not only is a release from rigidity in the skeptic but connects to the space thereby created for another to enter into meaningful discourse with the skeptic. Indeed, there is a tradition in Jewish mysticism that attempts to answer the question of how an omni-present and omniscient God could create — where, that is, would S/He have room for the creations thus created. The mystics suggested that, indeed, God had to retract from omniscience and omni-presence to do so. They called this process Tzimtzum (Schneur-Zalman, 1983). Maybe so, too, for psychoanalysts!

Still, as Casement repeatedly notes and from a variety of purviews within the psychoanalytic enterprise, rather than a skeptical view dominating psychoanalytic discourse, we have a history of dogmatic disagreement followed by fragmentation (into competing and separate subgroups) which he compares to the wars between competing Christian factions in the Middle Ages. The differences, he notes, between these belicose religious groups were not putatively about God but about those images that adherents have created in their own images.

Casement notes before arriving at his conclusion that “I have therefore come to believe there is still a place for bowing before mystery,” (p. 50) that:

“It is, after all, the human dimension that divides each faith from the others, each claiming its own version of the truth to be the only one for the world. It is this human determination …. to claim ownership that creates the definitions that divide us. Just possibly there is something that lies entirely beyond us that will always defy definition, which cannot be grasped or owned. “

Throughout this pamphlet, Casement dances between this need for non-certainty, as he calls it, in religion and a similar need for non-certainty in psychoanalysis. He arrives, thereby, in his thinking at what Sextus Empiricus (160-220 C.E.) eons ago predicted was the goal and the endpoint of a skeptical purview, namely ataraxia (?ταραξ?α) or quietude.

Let me go back for a moment, before closing, and offer a singular alternative wish for the manner in which the volume was titled and then written. As I noted in my opening comments, I, too, was thinking quite seriously of entering the clergy and, instead, spent the large majority of my adult years studying and practicing psychoanalysis and was, thereby, drawn to this reading. My maternal line was rabbinic going back many hundreds of years and it seemed likely that I would follow in kind. All this is to say that when I excitedly opened the pamphlet, titled Credo: Religion and Psychoanalysis, I anticipated a broader view of religion than Christianity … one that might feel more inviting to a non-Christian.? I do see no logical advantage in restricting the arguments of the work to Christianity, except, of course, that Casement could thereby speak personally about his religious practice and that some of the essays have to do with the Good Friday to Easter, Death to Resurrection paradigm of rebirth.? I suspect some readers will agree that a more generic take on religion would have been preferred and that this alternative track would have been more consistent with the ecumenical and egalitarian view of psychoanalysis for which the work argues.

That having been said, Patrick Casement, now in his mid-80’s, has been, in his variegated writings and contributions, a gift to the world of psychoanalysis and this pamphlet only adds to that much appreciated oeuvre that has brought much life and depth to the psychoanalytic dialogue.? Furthermore, Casement’s willingness to address theory, religion and God from a very personal view may be an opening for other senior analysts to write accounts of how their ethos — religious or otherwise —interpenetrated, during their careers, with their psychoanalytic thinking and work … and vice versa. Could it be that the availability of such retrospectives might provide Psychoanalytic candidates coming into analytic training a path towards respecting — even if not embracing — the variety of psychoanalytic experiences that are the many faces of our psychoanalytic enterprise.

References

Casement, P. (2002). Learning from Life. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 22(4): 519 .

Casement, P. (2005) The Emperor’s Clothes: Some serious problems in psychoanalytic training. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86(4):1143.

Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and Its Discontents. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI: p. 64.

Freud, S. (1927). “The Future of an Illusion.”? Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXI: p3.

Ferenczi, S. (1924). “On Forced Phantasies.” (orig.) Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse X.? In? Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psychoanalysis (trans. by John Rickman). Brunner/Mazel, NY.

Gay, P.? (1987).? A Godless Jew, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Schneur-Zalman of Liadi (1983). Shaar Hayichud Vehaemunah (Edited by Yosef Wineberg). Kehot Publication Society, NY/Jerusalem.

Howard Covitz, PhD, ABPP, NCPsyA

Elkins Park, PA, USA

E-mail: [email protected]