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The Influence of Modern Psychiatry on Christianity
R . S . LEE The attempt to deal with my topic has brought back an experience I often had as a boy in the Australian bush, when I would come upon a field where a lot of rabbits were feeding or frolicking. Startled by my advent, they would run in every direction, each seeking its burrow. I, or the dog that was usually with me, would not know which one to chase and would end up by getting none. So with the impact of psychiatry upon theology today. Rabbits are starting up all over the field, and I cannot help feeling that it would be a pity to chase only one of them. What I hope to do is to point out to you the ones I think are the biggest and fattest, so that we can note which burrows they run to and dig them out at our leisure. I want to offer a perspective, not solutions, with perhaps the suggestion of a pattern in the running of our rabbits, so that it is not as random as at first it may appear. I must make it clear from the beginning that what I have to say about psychiatry refers only to the part of it designated psychotherapy, or psychological medicine, treatment by psychological methods. In recent times considerable advances have been made in chemotherapy for mental disorders and these, added to successes achieved by electroconvulsion treatment, have led some to speculate whether in the end it may prove that all disorders of the mind have physiological causes, and not merely those known as organic, whose causes are known already to be due to deterioration, injury, or poisoning of the nervous system. For the present it must remain merely speculation whether the functional neuroses are also bodily in origin. I certainly do. not have the knowledge to give an authoritative judgment, but it seems to me that the evidence A paper read to the Anglo-Scandinavian Conference in Cambridge, England, 2967, whose general topic was Christianity and Its ContemporarySetting.
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points strongly toward the presence--though not the exclusive presence--of operative psychological factors in some, at least, of the common neuroses and psychoses. Where these are accompanied by disturbances of bodily functioning there is no a priori reason for us to assume that the physical factor is primary. The evidence suggests that 9in some cases disturbance of mental functioning is followed by disturbance of physical functioning, whereas in other cases the converse is true. What we are justified in maintaining is that man is a psychosomatic being and that all his behavior has both a mental and a physical aspect, and that sometimes the mind, sometimes the body, initiates action or change of state. This psychosomatic character of man has considerable importance for theology. Here perhaps is the first rabbit we glimpse. Man is always an embodied creature, never pure spirit, and his body, being integral to him, is of as much importance to understanding him as is his .mind or spirit. He can communicate with his fellows only by means of his body (except possibly for un-understood phenomena like telepathy). It may also be that he can communicate with God, and receive communications from God, only by the medium of his body. That is something to bear in mind for further examination. It is too big a question to be taken up now, for it raises questions about the nature of inspiration and revelation. But we have to take seriously the psychosomatic nature of man as established by psychotherapy. Let me turn instead to the more specific points of impact of'psychotherapy upon religion and theology. Modern psychological medicine begins with Freud, who devised psychoanalysis. Variations, modifications, and developments of his system and theories have been put forward, but his basic ideas still dominate the field of psychotherapy. It would take us too far afield to enter into a discussion of the merits of the rival theories, and it is not necessary to do so. But it will simplify our approach to the problems if I say at the outset that I am adopting the Freudian or psychoanalytic concepts and will attempt to define the problems in the light of them.
What is psychoanalysis? It began as a method of healing, for the treatment of psychoneuroses, especially hysterias, phobias, compulsions, and perversions, and that is what it still is. It is taught mainly in the medical schooIs as one section of psychiatry, but it also enters into some of the general schools of psychology in the form of its theories. In the last
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eighty years, an enormous amount of case material has been accumulated, fragments of which are made available in published articles and books, and it is upon this mass of material that the theories are based. Theory and practice have, of course, developed together, but it is fairly correct to say that, so far as medicine is concerned, the theories are secondary. But they have proved of enormous importance in opening up fields of investigation beyond medicine proper, in religion, art, sociology, and culture generally. Psychoanalysis is based on two fundamental principles: that the mind is dynamic, and that it is developmental in character. The driving forces that supply the dynamism of the mind are the instincts, of which the main ones are the instincts of sex (understood in a special way--not as in common usage) and aggression. These supply all the energies of the mind, even that of reasoning. The instincts in man are not so fixedly or so extensively prepatterned as they are in the lower animals. This gives them a greater plasticity, so that they develop in an infinite variety of forms, according to the experience of the particular individual. The form they take depends upon experience. In place of the prepatterning of the lower animal world, man has the ability of reason by which he can use experience stored in memory to obtain more effective satisfaction of his instinctive desires by adaptation to or modification of the objective world of reality in which he is placed. Books and other mechanical means of storing common experience are simply extensions of this function. Perception and reason, memory and imagination are, then, instruments used by man in the service of his instinctive needs. These needs, as I have said, develop through his experience, and one of the ways of development is in the construction of a more or less unified personality; in the end reason is placed in the service of the whole personality, in the shaping of which it has played a considerable part as the individual grows. In its simplest form, we can look on reason as a tool developed by evolution to deal with the world. A peculiar situation arises when, as often happens, the use of reason becomes an end in itself, when we enjoy thinking for its own sake and not for its usefulness. Crossword puzzles, chess, pure mathematics, philosophy, theology are perhaps instances of this. It is not clear whether addiction to them should not be considered a disease! Secondly, the mind is developmental. We begin life with the raw materials of personality. Our minds are not fully formed, but take shape through growth, conditioned by our experience, and it is several years before we attain what we normally consider
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a human mind. Its structure is developed as we grow. The urge to grow is innate, part of our native constitution; but it may be hindered by the circumstances of our environment as we grow. Insofar as this happens, we fail to attain to maturity or the full development of personality. Development has to be considered under two main aspects: the nature of the inner ends of growth, and the effect of the impact of the world upon the individual. Under the first of these we see that there are three processes working. The experiences undergone by the infant have to be integrated. They have to be stored, collated, ordered, brought into recognizable patterns, until in the end they become a representation of the world, including the self in the world, and an instrument for dealing with that world. Secondly, the activities of the self, in the shape of its desires, its knowledge, its experience, have also to be integrated to form a unitary self in which priorities of value have been established and means of controlling conflicting impulses set up. This is the task of forming a personality. Thirdly, the self must be clearly distinguished from the world, and the mind must learn to accept what is hard matter of fact, so that fantasy is not mistaken for reality, and must learn to adjust to reality or to change it for the fulfillment of desire, and not indulge in wishful thinking to get what it wants. The attainment of these three ends of development has to be traced in the impact of the world upon the growing child. Under this aspect we see a number of stages and substages of development: first in infancy when the family constitutes the chief environment of the infant, then in childhood, followed by adolescence, and later, adulthood, in which, normally, maturity of development is reached. Of these stages, infancy is the most important because the greater plasticity of the infant renders him more susceptible to the effects of the environment upon him in shaping his satisfactions and needs and in supplying him with the raw material or the forms of his thinking. In this period he is building up the tools of his thinking, and the lines of expression of his instinctive energies are hardening. If all goes well, he emerges from it with the structure of his personality formed. It is a complex one, technically described as consisting of the interacting functions of id, ego, and superego. The self is the combination of these. The id is the seat of the instincts, the source of all desire; the ego is the seat of consciousness and perception, the means of dealing with the world to procure the satisfaction of the needs created by the energizing of the id; and the superego is the modification of the ego in which controlling standards of
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conduct are set, the seat of conscience, modeled on the image of the parents by the young child. Failure to achieve this development fully leads to breakdown of development, one form of which, the extreme form, is mental disorder. Briefly this involves an inadequate unification of the personality in the first five years of life, rendering it unable to accept and deal with the world, as in the psychoses, or, in the neuroses, shutting off part of the self as too dangerous to the rest, psychologically dangerous, though at first the threat may have been seen as a real danger. This creates the dynamic unconscious, which, being active and calling for repression by the other part of the self, distorts the whole functioning of the self, including perception and reasoning. I cannot now go further into the details of these processes, important as their bearing on theology may be. And I must simply add, in the baldest terms, that the healing effect of psychoanalysis lies in taking the patient back through the failures of development, a painful and laborious task, that he may grow again and accept and integrate into his whole self those parts that were cut off.
The impact upon theology Let me turn now to the impact of psychoanalysis upon Christianity and theology, both in the form of what has happened and what I think ought to happen, or must happen. I select five rabbits to observe. z. Pastoral counseling. There has been an extensive development of what is called pastoral counseling. This is most extensive in the United States, where it is becoming almost obligatory for an ordinand to undergo training for it; but it is being developed in many other countries as well, including Scandinavia and Britain. Pastoral counseling, based on the techniques of psychotherapy, is the attempt to deal with those many pastoral problems that seem to resemble, in a less acute form, the disorders of mind that come under the care of the psychiatrist. Pastoral counseling is based on the assumption, proved sound in psychotherapy, that personal problems are emotional, not intellectual; that behind them lies unconscious mental conflict, which can be got rid of only by the methods, or an adaptation of the methods, that have been found successful in psychotherapy. Briefly these are that the counselor accepts his client as he is, is completely nonjudgmental toward him, passing no strictures on him for anything he has done or feels impelled to do, and does not seek to take
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charge of his life by directing him to a better mode of behavior--deemed better, that is, by the counselor. His function is to listen, and listen, to enter by empathy into the client and understand what he is feeling and thinking, and help to darify this to the client. He becomes a kind of mirror in which the latter sees himself objectively, and because the counselor accepts him, he is enabled to discover himself, his hidden motives, and also accept them. When he has done this he is able to deal with them instead of running away from them, or trying to live as if they did not exist. The counselor is creating an environment of love and understanding in which the client is enabled to complete the growth arrested at an earlier stage. Pastoral counseling has proved of enormous value where it has been used by properly trained persons; but a number of difficulties have emerged as the result of the effort to use it. The first of these need not concern us deeply. It is that the amount of training required to make a good counselor has been underestimated. In the United States it is now recognized that the program of training has been ineffective, has misled many clergy into attempting work far beyond their ability, and has confused them about the deeper meaning of pastoral work. Counseling has sometimes tended to become a "gimmick" to replace true pastoral care, an instrument by which to manipulate people and not, as it should be, a mode of living in involvement with them. The good pastoral counselor needs a far more thoroughgoing training than is envisaged in most of the schemes now in operation. But this success on the one hand, and failure on the other, draw attention to a point that is of deep concern to us. The good counselor does not help his client by teaching him about God. The attempt to do that, except by way of explanation in answer to questions, hinders rather than helps the healing. What the counselor does, so far as he is able, is to live out the love and understanding of God toward his client. If he is able to do that, he brings the client into touch with God, even if God is not mentioned. This raises another problem that many ministers have felt deeply. In other aspects of their work, many ministers feel that they are in a position of authority; they have to teach the truth about God as divinely revealed, they have to prodaim the acts of God in history, and insist on the holiness and absoluteness of God in the present, with the demand for obedience. If such people undertake counseling, they have to put aside their authoritarianism, for authoritarianism has proved the defeat of success in counseling. Some find it impossible to do this. In any case it presents the client-parishioner with a double image of his pastor that he is unable to reconcile, and
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it is certain to throw him back into the divisions within himself that were the cause of the trouble that brought him to seek help. The question for us is this: is counseling an optional mode of pastoral work, to be adopted by those who are temperamentally fitted for it, or do we have to revise our conception of the ministerial vocation to take authoritarianism out of it? For myself, I can only agree with Dr. Habgood that we have to find a new meaning to authoritarianism. Out of the practice of counseling, two other points emerge, but I want to bring them up in relation to my third and fourth rabbits. So I pass on to a. The psychology of religion. With the advent of psychoanalysis, this has taken a profounder twist, though, to be fair to William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience was a brilliant beginning to the new ideas. Religious experience is part of human behavior and must therefore be explicable in psychological terms. Perhaps we should say describable rather than explicable. But it means that religious phenomena are part of the connected stream of mental events, not alien elements somehow intruding into it. Freud, in his Future of an IIIusion, made a devastating attack upon religion, characterizing it as a "universal obsessional neurosis," shaped by pure wish-fulfillment. It is undoubtedly true that much in religion corresponds to Freud's analysis of it. What we learn from psychoanalysis is that a man's religion corresponds to the state of his personality. If he is neurotic, his religion will be neurotic. A bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit. What, then, is the nature of healthy religion? We cannot determine it simply because it calls on the name of God or clings to the accepted formulas of faith and morals. How are we to arrive at criteria by which to determine? There is no easy answer to this question. In matters of general mental health, psychoanalysis provides some guide by the information it gives us about the stages of development through which the individual passes on his way to maturity and certain empirical standards of healthy behavior have been set out. What is normal and healthy in a child may be unhealthy in an adult, the sign of maldeveloprnent. Unconscious fixations may prevent the attainment of maturity and distort personal and interpersonal conduct. These can only be discovered empirically. Ought we not, then, to adopt an empirical approach to religion and examine it in the light of the stages of growth revealed by psychoanalysis? What elements in it are infantile? Are not our prayers the cry of the infant who cannot adapt himself to the realities of the world? Is God simply, as Freud argued, a projection onto the universe of the infantile image
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of the father, a projection made necessary because of unwillingness or inability to face the hardships and effort demanded as the price of living in the world? 3. The idea of God. That brings us to the third rabbit, the idea of God. How do we form our ideas of God and on what are they based? On this we now have a lot of information, derived from the behaviorist studies of Piaget and many others and from the psychoanalytic studies of children and the family, such as those carried out by Fliigel, Klein, and Winnicott, as well as from the analysis of adults. When the young child first hears mention of "God" he can interpret it only by what material he has in his own mind, drawn from his limited experience. He cannot perceive God, so inevitably he gives a meaning to the word derived from his infantile images of his parents, particularly of his father, and this of course is furthered by the Christian habit of calling God "our Father in Heaven." He must use images since, as Goldman has shown, 1 children are not capable of abstract religious thought until the age of ten or eleven. Development in his thinking about God up to this age comes from the addition or association of other images to the primary ones. He cannot help thinking of God concretely as another person existing somewhere, and it is natural and proper that he should do so. God to him is someone like a perfect father who protects us, supplies us with what we need, tells us what to do, rewards us for our goodness, punishes us for our badness. We must obey Him, but we can also cajole Him, perhaps even bargain with Him. This is the infantile understanding of God. As the individual grows through childhood and adolescence toward adulthood, it should be continually developing with the extension of experience and with the increased range of the mind. But many of the infantile attitudes persist, sometimes with little change. The characteristics attributed to God--omniscience, omnipotence, etc.--are those the young child ascribed to his father. And the habit of thinking of God as another person somewhere in the universe or "beyond" (which is a spatial concept and implidtly brings Him within it) is deep seated. God's transcendence can only be logical, not spatial, for both "within" and "beyond" are only metaphors. To think of God as another person, another being, is to reduce Him to the creaturely level. This is not adequate as a concept for mature adults, but is a metaphorical device. To argue about the existence of God is misleading, for the being of God must be of an ~. Goldman, R., Religion from Childhood to Adolescence. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 5964.
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order different from our being and beyond our capacity to formulate in meaningful concepts. Hence God cannot be a causal factor in the processes of the universe, intervening from outside to alter what has gone wrong. He is the over-plus of meaning, and our understanding of Him is an interpretative idea by which we unify our understanding of the events that constitute the universe of our experience. I do not put forward these suggestions simply on philosophical grounds. They become necessary if we are to grow up in religion as in other areas of experience; if we are to escape from bondage to infantile images, attitudes, and values. Unless we grow up we shall be enmeshed in the magic of the omnipotence of thought characteristic of young children before they have learned to distinguish dearly between fantasy and reality, and according to which wishes fulfill themselves if they are wished hard enough or in the right way. That much that passes for religion retains its infantile forms is shown dearly in the pictures of heaven we draw, as a place where there is no more pain to be borne, no more toil to be undertaken, where, in effect, further growth ceases. This is a refusal to face the challenges of life, the effort, suffering, and responsibility that it brings, and is a form of the fantasy of a return to the womb. It is not the way of God or the way to God. Pastoral counseling, as well as psychotherapy, has shown that the flight from reality is not the way to mental and spiritual health. The counselor relies on the inner urge to health that is active in everyone, and his work is aimed to set it free in his client and thus give him the strength and insight to face and overcome his problems. He has to have faith that in helping the client to find and become his full sell he is bringing him to what is good. He has to see this as the operation of God in him. Insofar as he achieves new life in the client, he is the agent of God and God is actualized in the client. God does not appear as a third party in the relationship, but is its inner meaning. He is in the client as he grows in healing, and He is in the counselor as he ministers the love and understanding needed to help the client find his healing. This makes God a very present reality. It is the faith on which a pastoral counselor has to work. The transition from the infantile to the adult understanding of God is a long and complex process depending for its success on the adequate development and integration of various functions and structures of the personality. There is no time now to go into the details of this growth and integration and into the ways in which they may be obstructed. What I am concerned to stress is that through an
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understanding of the principles of modern psychotherapy we see the need to grow in our ideas of God and the main lines which that growth should follow. 4. Conscience and morals. The fourth point of impact between psychoanalysis and religion is in the sphere of morals. We saw that the counselor or psychotherapist must be nonjudgmental toward his client. He must not condemn him for what he has done, however "sinful" it may appear to be. If he is to succeed in helping his dient, he must accept him as he is, love him as he is, and when he brings even more shameful things out of his unconscious, accept those too without blame. If he condemns his client he sets himself up in a position of judgment and implies that he is superior in knowledge and virtue, which makes impossible the relationship of sharing, of identity and equality, on which successful counseling depends. In other words, he sees the client's "sins" as symptoms of his sickness, as moral disease, the acts of a man incapable of anything else and needing not blame but help. They are like the rash that breaks out on a man with smallpox. If, as I suggested a little earlier, the counselor is ministering God to his client, then God too must not see "sins" as reprehensible wickedness. What He sees is a person in need of help and love. God is not concerned to punish wickedness. He "desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness, and live." This simple empirical line of thinking could be developed much further, but I turn from it to consider the light thrown on the nature of conscience by psychoanalysis and the study of the development of the structure of the mind. Conscience is seated in the superego. This is developed in the boy as a means of resolving emotional conflicts produced in him by his relations with his parents, commonly called the Oedipus complex, which come to a crisis during the third to fifth years of life. The superego becomes necessary as means of self-control, to escape an imagined danger situation. When it is formed it takes into itself earlier elements of self-control. Its genesis does not spring from a sense of right and wrong. That is the consequence, not the cause, of forming a superego. Before its formation, the sanctions of behavior are social. The behavior thought to be desired by the parents is followed to secure their love or avoid punishment. The child is really amoral or premoral. The superego brings with it the inward principle of judgment according to whatever principles are adopted with it, and a sense of obligation to conform, irrespective of reward or punishment. Only then does he become moral in the ethical sense of the term.
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This means that conscience is an acquired faculty, not an inborn one. Religious teaching in the past has usually acknowledged that conscience has to be educated, that we have to learn what particular lines of action are right or wrong; but it has accepted that conscience itself, the sense of unconditional obligation, is innate. This latter assumption has now been shown to be false. At the same time light has been thrown on the reasons why conscience can range from the almost nonexistent (in psychopaths) to the sternest sense of duty. The superego gains its strength from the earlier emotional conflicts, particularly those involving aggressive impulses, so we may have the paradoxical situation in which a man may have a stern conscience because as an infant he suffered frustrations that stimulated his aggressiveness and drove him to form a dominating superego. In other words, a strong conscience is no reliable guide to discrimination between good and bad. A further complication is that, since girls do not experience the Oedipus complex in the same way as boys, they emerge from this period in a different way. The moral sense they acquire is likewise subject to the vicissitudes of infancy, but it functions so differently from the masculine form that men sometimes are tempted to accuse women of having no conscience. There is much more to be said about the nature of conscience and morals, but I will add only one thing: that psychoanalysis has found at the basis of every severe neurosis, probably as its cause, a strong sense of guilt, mostly unconscious. Clearly, this is a rabbit worth chasing further, but I must turn to the fifth and last to which I wish to draw your attention. 5. Ego-religion. In the development of the complex threefold structure of the personality--id, ego, and superego--it is the ego that plays the leading part. Its function is to lead the desires rising from the id to the completest satisfaction possible. This can be obtained only from the world of reality, and only the ego deals with reality. It has to persuade the id to give up desires that are impossible of attainment and accept compromises or substitutes that are possible. These, indeed, if the ego does its work well, may lead to fuller satisfactions than the relinquished desire could have done. In its battle to control and direct the id, the ego has to develop the superego as an ally; but if the superego is relatively too strong, the ego is weakened and the superego takes charge, forming an unholy alliance with the id to cheat the ego of realistic satisfactions. The whole effort of psychoanalysis and of counseling is directed to strengthening the ego as the way to recover health. Health lies in a proper balance between the three functions, a balance in which the
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ego, which alone has contact with the world, is the dominant factor, even while it serves the others. If the others predominate, the result is regression to infantile modes of thinking and feeling, arrested development. If, therefore, Christianity brings a release of life, an increase and enhancement of it, as we must believe, it must be a function of the ego. Yet too much of our theology tries to make religion a superego function, imposing obligations of belief and conduct, a matter of authoritarian standards, requiring obedience to a heavenly Father in whose name we claim to speak with certainty, asserting duty and obligation to be absolute. Yet if God is in any sense real, we can only hope to find Him in and through our experiences of the world, and our approach to the world must always be an empirical one, the activity of the ego. This does not mean that there is no place for abstract thinking in faith and morals. It means that every formulation of moral, philosophical, or dogmatic theology must be treated as hypothesis, a guide to further thinking and the gathering of further experience, as it is in science and history. And our discovery of God in and through our experience of the world does not depend on special experiences, such as mystic visions and so on, but on the whole range of the knowledge we gain of the world, including in knowledge not merely cognition and ideation, but the full gamut of our experiences of it. This brings God from the remote fastnesses, where authoritarian theology would put Him, down into everyday living.
To sum up I said I would try to indicate a pattern. The pattern has two themes. One is that of becoming. We are continually moving forward to become what we are in potentiality. Our life is growth. The second theme is that of personality, by which we absorb the world of things and persons into ourselves and unify them in our own being so that each of us becomes the focus of the universe and of God. Both themes are incomplete at any time. We cannot know what we shall be. But one thing seems to stand out dearly: the weaving of the pattern of life displays an ever increasing out-reach of love, increasing in intensity and in richness of form. In demonstrating this, psychoanalysis supports what I believe is the essential message of Christianity, but it gives new directions to our understanding of it.
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R . S . LEE The attempt to deal with my topic has brought back an experience I often had as a boy in the Australian bush, when I would come upon a field where a lot of rabbits were feeding or frolicking. Startled by my advent, they would run in every direction, each seeking its burrow. I, or the dog that was usually with me, would not know which one to chase and would end up by getting none. So with the impact of psychiatry upon theology today. Rabbits are starting up all over the field, and I cannot help feeling that it would be a pity to chase only one of them. What I hope to do is to point out to you the ones I think are the biggest and fattest, so that we can note which burrows they run to and dig them out at our leisure. I want to offer a perspective, not solutions, with perhaps the suggestion of a pattern in the running of our rabbits, so that it is not as random as at first it may appear. I must make it clear from the beginning that what I have to say about psychiatry refers only to the part of it designated psychotherapy, or psychological medicine, treatment by psychological methods. In recent times considerable advances have been made in chemotherapy for mental disorders and these, added to successes achieved by electroconvulsion treatment, have led some to speculate whether in the end it may prove that all disorders of the mind have physiological causes, and not merely those known as organic, whose causes are known already to be due to deterioration, injury, or poisoning of the nervous system. For the present it must remain merely speculation whether the functional neuroses are also bodily in origin. I certainly do. not have the knowledge to give an authoritative judgment, but it seems to me that the evidence A paper read to the Anglo-Scandinavian Conference in Cambridge, England, 2967, whose general topic was Christianity and Its ContemporarySetting.
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points strongly toward the presence--though not the exclusive presence--of operative psychological factors in some, at least, of the common neuroses and psychoses. Where these are accompanied by disturbances of bodily functioning there is no a priori reason for us to assume that the physical factor is primary. The evidence suggests that 9in some cases disturbance of mental functioning is followed by disturbance of physical functioning, whereas in other cases the converse is true. What we are justified in maintaining is that man is a psychosomatic being and that all his behavior has both a mental and a physical aspect, and that sometimes the mind, sometimes the body, initiates action or change of state. This psychosomatic character of man has considerable importance for theology. Here perhaps is the first rabbit we glimpse. Man is always an embodied creature, never pure spirit, and his body, being integral to him, is of as much importance to understanding him as is his .mind or spirit. He can communicate with his fellows only by means of his body (except possibly for un-understood phenomena like telepathy). It may also be that he can communicate with God, and receive communications from God, only by the medium of his body. That is something to bear in mind for further examination. It is too big a question to be taken up now, for it raises questions about the nature of inspiration and revelation. But we have to take seriously the psychosomatic nature of man as established by psychotherapy. Let me turn instead to the more specific points of impact of'psychotherapy upon religion and theology. Modern psychological medicine begins with Freud, who devised psychoanalysis. Variations, modifications, and developments of his system and theories have been put forward, but his basic ideas still dominate the field of psychotherapy. It would take us too far afield to enter into a discussion of the merits of the rival theories, and it is not necessary to do so. But it will simplify our approach to the problems if I say at the outset that I am adopting the Freudian or psychoanalytic concepts and will attempt to define the problems in the light of them.
What is psychoanalysis? It began as a method of healing, for the treatment of psychoneuroses, especially hysterias, phobias, compulsions, and perversions, and that is what it still is. It is taught mainly in the medical schooIs as one section of psychiatry, but it also enters into some of the general schools of psychology in the form of its theories. In the last
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eighty years, an enormous amount of case material has been accumulated, fragments of which are made available in published articles and books, and it is upon this mass of material that the theories are based. Theory and practice have, of course, developed together, but it is fairly correct to say that, so far as medicine is concerned, the theories are secondary. But they have proved of enormous importance in opening up fields of investigation beyond medicine proper, in religion, art, sociology, and culture generally. Psychoanalysis is based on two fundamental principles: that the mind is dynamic, and that it is developmental in character. The driving forces that supply the dynamism of the mind are the instincts, of which the main ones are the instincts of sex (understood in a special way--not as in common usage) and aggression. These supply all the energies of the mind, even that of reasoning. The instincts in man are not so fixedly or so extensively prepatterned as they are in the lower animals. This gives them a greater plasticity, so that they develop in an infinite variety of forms, according to the experience of the particular individual. The form they take depends upon experience. In place of the prepatterning of the lower animal world, man has the ability of reason by which he can use experience stored in memory to obtain more effective satisfaction of his instinctive desires by adaptation to or modification of the objective world of reality in which he is placed. Books and other mechanical means of storing common experience are simply extensions of this function. Perception and reason, memory and imagination are, then, instruments used by man in the service of his instinctive needs. These needs, as I have said, develop through his experience, and one of the ways of development is in the construction of a more or less unified personality; in the end reason is placed in the service of the whole personality, in the shaping of which it has played a considerable part as the individual grows. In its simplest form, we can look on reason as a tool developed by evolution to deal with the world. A peculiar situation arises when, as often happens, the use of reason becomes an end in itself, when we enjoy thinking for its own sake and not for its usefulness. Crossword puzzles, chess, pure mathematics, philosophy, theology are perhaps instances of this. It is not clear whether addiction to them should not be considered a disease! Secondly, the mind is developmental. We begin life with the raw materials of personality. Our minds are not fully formed, but take shape through growth, conditioned by our experience, and it is several years before we attain what we normally consider
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a human mind. Its structure is developed as we grow. The urge to grow is innate, part of our native constitution; but it may be hindered by the circumstances of our environment as we grow. Insofar as this happens, we fail to attain to maturity or the full development of personality. Development has to be considered under two main aspects: the nature of the inner ends of growth, and the effect of the impact of the world upon the individual. Under the first of these we see that there are three processes working. The experiences undergone by the infant have to be integrated. They have to be stored, collated, ordered, brought into recognizable patterns, until in the end they become a representation of the world, including the self in the world, and an instrument for dealing with that world. Secondly, the activities of the self, in the shape of its desires, its knowledge, its experience, have also to be integrated to form a unitary self in which priorities of value have been established and means of controlling conflicting impulses set up. This is the task of forming a personality. Thirdly, the self must be clearly distinguished from the world, and the mind must learn to accept what is hard matter of fact, so that fantasy is not mistaken for reality, and must learn to adjust to reality or to change it for the fulfillment of desire, and not indulge in wishful thinking to get what it wants. The attainment of these three ends of development has to be traced in the impact of the world upon the growing child. Under this aspect we see a number of stages and substages of development: first in infancy when the family constitutes the chief environment of the infant, then in childhood, followed by adolescence, and later, adulthood, in which, normally, maturity of development is reached. Of these stages, infancy is the most important because the greater plasticity of the infant renders him more susceptible to the effects of the environment upon him in shaping his satisfactions and needs and in supplying him with the raw material or the forms of his thinking. In this period he is building up the tools of his thinking, and the lines of expression of his instinctive energies are hardening. If all goes well, he emerges from it with the structure of his personality formed. It is a complex one, technically described as consisting of the interacting functions of id, ego, and superego. The self is the combination of these. The id is the seat of the instincts, the source of all desire; the ego is the seat of consciousness and perception, the means of dealing with the world to procure the satisfaction of the needs created by the energizing of the id; and the superego is the modification of the ego in which controlling standards of
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conduct are set, the seat of conscience, modeled on the image of the parents by the young child. Failure to achieve this development fully leads to breakdown of development, one form of which, the extreme form, is mental disorder. Briefly this involves an inadequate unification of the personality in the first five years of life, rendering it unable to accept and deal with the world, as in the psychoses, or, in the neuroses, shutting off part of the self as too dangerous to the rest, psychologically dangerous, though at first the threat may have been seen as a real danger. This creates the dynamic unconscious, which, being active and calling for repression by the other part of the self, distorts the whole functioning of the self, including perception and reasoning. I cannot now go further into the details of these processes, important as their bearing on theology may be. And I must simply add, in the baldest terms, that the healing effect of psychoanalysis lies in taking the patient back through the failures of development, a painful and laborious task, that he may grow again and accept and integrate into his whole self those parts that were cut off.
The impact upon theology Let me turn now to the impact of psychoanalysis upon Christianity and theology, both in the form of what has happened and what I think ought to happen, or must happen. I select five rabbits to observe. z. Pastoral counseling. There has been an extensive development of what is called pastoral counseling. This is most extensive in the United States, where it is becoming almost obligatory for an ordinand to undergo training for it; but it is being developed in many other countries as well, including Scandinavia and Britain. Pastoral counseling, based on the techniques of psychotherapy, is the attempt to deal with those many pastoral problems that seem to resemble, in a less acute form, the disorders of mind that come under the care of the psychiatrist. Pastoral counseling is based on the assumption, proved sound in psychotherapy, that personal problems are emotional, not intellectual; that behind them lies unconscious mental conflict, which can be got rid of only by the methods, or an adaptation of the methods, that have been found successful in psychotherapy. Briefly these are that the counselor accepts his client as he is, is completely nonjudgmental toward him, passing no strictures on him for anything he has done or feels impelled to do, and does not seek to take
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charge of his life by directing him to a better mode of behavior--deemed better, that is, by the counselor. His function is to listen, and listen, to enter by empathy into the client and understand what he is feeling and thinking, and help to darify this to the client. He becomes a kind of mirror in which the latter sees himself objectively, and because the counselor accepts him, he is enabled to discover himself, his hidden motives, and also accept them. When he has done this he is able to deal with them instead of running away from them, or trying to live as if they did not exist. The counselor is creating an environment of love and understanding in which the client is enabled to complete the growth arrested at an earlier stage. Pastoral counseling has proved of enormous value where it has been used by properly trained persons; but a number of difficulties have emerged as the result of the effort to use it. The first of these need not concern us deeply. It is that the amount of training required to make a good counselor has been underestimated. In the United States it is now recognized that the program of training has been ineffective, has misled many clergy into attempting work far beyond their ability, and has confused them about the deeper meaning of pastoral work. Counseling has sometimes tended to become a "gimmick" to replace true pastoral care, an instrument by which to manipulate people and not, as it should be, a mode of living in involvement with them. The good pastoral counselor needs a far more thoroughgoing training than is envisaged in most of the schemes now in operation. But this success on the one hand, and failure on the other, draw attention to a point that is of deep concern to us. The good counselor does not help his client by teaching him about God. The attempt to do that, except by way of explanation in answer to questions, hinders rather than helps the healing. What the counselor does, so far as he is able, is to live out the love and understanding of God toward his client. If he is able to do that, he brings the client into touch with God, even if God is not mentioned. This raises another problem that many ministers have felt deeply. In other aspects of their work, many ministers feel that they are in a position of authority; they have to teach the truth about God as divinely revealed, they have to prodaim the acts of God in history, and insist on the holiness and absoluteness of God in the present, with the demand for obedience. If such people undertake counseling, they have to put aside their authoritarianism, for authoritarianism has proved the defeat of success in counseling. Some find it impossible to do this. In any case it presents the client-parishioner with a double image of his pastor that he is unable to reconcile, and
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it is certain to throw him back into the divisions within himself that were the cause of the trouble that brought him to seek help. The question for us is this: is counseling an optional mode of pastoral work, to be adopted by those who are temperamentally fitted for it, or do we have to revise our conception of the ministerial vocation to take authoritarianism out of it? For myself, I can only agree with Dr. Habgood that we have to find a new meaning to authoritarianism. Out of the practice of counseling, two other points emerge, but I want to bring them up in relation to my third and fourth rabbits. So I pass on to a. The psychology of religion. With the advent of psychoanalysis, this has taken a profounder twist, though, to be fair to William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience was a brilliant beginning to the new ideas. Religious experience is part of human behavior and must therefore be explicable in psychological terms. Perhaps we should say describable rather than explicable. But it means that religious phenomena are part of the connected stream of mental events, not alien elements somehow intruding into it. Freud, in his Future of an IIIusion, made a devastating attack upon religion, characterizing it as a "universal obsessional neurosis," shaped by pure wish-fulfillment. It is undoubtedly true that much in religion corresponds to Freud's analysis of it. What we learn from psychoanalysis is that a man's religion corresponds to the state of his personality. If he is neurotic, his religion will be neurotic. A bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit. What, then, is the nature of healthy religion? We cannot determine it simply because it calls on the name of God or clings to the accepted formulas of faith and morals. How are we to arrive at criteria by which to determine? There is no easy answer to this question. In matters of general mental health, psychoanalysis provides some guide by the information it gives us about the stages of development through which the individual passes on his way to maturity and certain empirical standards of healthy behavior have been set out. What is normal and healthy in a child may be unhealthy in an adult, the sign of maldeveloprnent. Unconscious fixations may prevent the attainment of maturity and distort personal and interpersonal conduct. These can only be discovered empirically. Ought we not, then, to adopt an empirical approach to religion and examine it in the light of the stages of growth revealed by psychoanalysis? What elements in it are infantile? Are not our prayers the cry of the infant who cannot adapt himself to the realities of the world? Is God simply, as Freud argued, a projection onto the universe of the infantile image
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of the father, a projection made necessary because of unwillingness or inability to face the hardships and effort demanded as the price of living in the world? 3. The idea of God. That brings us to the third rabbit, the idea of God. How do we form our ideas of God and on what are they based? On this we now have a lot of information, derived from the behaviorist studies of Piaget and many others and from the psychoanalytic studies of children and the family, such as those carried out by Fliigel, Klein, and Winnicott, as well as from the analysis of adults. When the young child first hears mention of "God" he can interpret it only by what material he has in his own mind, drawn from his limited experience. He cannot perceive God, so inevitably he gives a meaning to the word derived from his infantile images of his parents, particularly of his father, and this of course is furthered by the Christian habit of calling God "our Father in Heaven." He must use images since, as Goldman has shown, 1 children are not capable of abstract religious thought until the age of ten or eleven. Development in his thinking about God up to this age comes from the addition or association of other images to the primary ones. He cannot help thinking of God concretely as another person existing somewhere, and it is natural and proper that he should do so. God to him is someone like a perfect father who protects us, supplies us with what we need, tells us what to do, rewards us for our goodness, punishes us for our badness. We must obey Him, but we can also cajole Him, perhaps even bargain with Him. This is the infantile understanding of God. As the individual grows through childhood and adolescence toward adulthood, it should be continually developing with the extension of experience and with the increased range of the mind. But many of the infantile attitudes persist, sometimes with little change. The characteristics attributed to God--omniscience, omnipotence, etc.--are those the young child ascribed to his father. And the habit of thinking of God as another person somewhere in the universe or "beyond" (which is a spatial concept and implidtly brings Him within it) is deep seated. God's transcendence can only be logical, not spatial, for both "within" and "beyond" are only metaphors. To think of God as another person, another being, is to reduce Him to the creaturely level. This is not adequate as a concept for mature adults, but is a metaphorical device. To argue about the existence of God is misleading, for the being of God must be of an ~. Goldman, R., Religion from Childhood to Adolescence. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 5964.
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order different from our being and beyond our capacity to formulate in meaningful concepts. Hence God cannot be a causal factor in the processes of the universe, intervening from outside to alter what has gone wrong. He is the over-plus of meaning, and our understanding of Him is an interpretative idea by which we unify our understanding of the events that constitute the universe of our experience. I do not put forward these suggestions simply on philosophical grounds. They become necessary if we are to grow up in religion as in other areas of experience; if we are to escape from bondage to infantile images, attitudes, and values. Unless we grow up we shall be enmeshed in the magic of the omnipotence of thought characteristic of young children before they have learned to distinguish dearly between fantasy and reality, and according to which wishes fulfill themselves if they are wished hard enough or in the right way. That much that passes for religion retains its infantile forms is shown dearly in the pictures of heaven we draw, as a place where there is no more pain to be borne, no more toil to be undertaken, where, in effect, further growth ceases. This is a refusal to face the challenges of life, the effort, suffering, and responsibility that it brings, and is a form of the fantasy of a return to the womb. It is not the way of God or the way to God. Pastoral counseling, as well as psychotherapy, has shown that the flight from reality is not the way to mental and spiritual health. The counselor relies on the inner urge to health that is active in everyone, and his work is aimed to set it free in his client and thus give him the strength and insight to face and overcome his problems. He has to have faith that in helping the client to find and become his full sell he is bringing him to what is good. He has to see this as the operation of God in him. Insofar as he achieves new life in the client, he is the agent of God and God is actualized in the client. God does not appear as a third party in the relationship, but is its inner meaning. He is in the client as he grows in healing, and He is in the counselor as he ministers the love and understanding needed to help the client find his healing. This makes God a very present reality. It is the faith on which a pastoral counselor has to work. The transition from the infantile to the adult understanding of God is a long and complex process depending for its success on the adequate development and integration of various functions and structures of the personality. There is no time now to go into the details of this growth and integration and into the ways in which they may be obstructed. What I am concerned to stress is that through an
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understanding of the principles of modern psychotherapy we see the need to grow in our ideas of God and the main lines which that growth should follow. 4. Conscience and morals. The fourth point of impact between psychoanalysis and religion is in the sphere of morals. We saw that the counselor or psychotherapist must be nonjudgmental toward his client. He must not condemn him for what he has done, however "sinful" it may appear to be. If he is to succeed in helping his dient, he must accept him as he is, love him as he is, and when he brings even more shameful things out of his unconscious, accept those too without blame. If he condemns his client he sets himself up in a position of judgment and implies that he is superior in knowledge and virtue, which makes impossible the relationship of sharing, of identity and equality, on which successful counseling depends. In other words, he sees the client's "sins" as symptoms of his sickness, as moral disease, the acts of a man incapable of anything else and needing not blame but help. They are like the rash that breaks out on a man with smallpox. If, as I suggested a little earlier, the counselor is ministering God to his client, then God too must not see "sins" as reprehensible wickedness. What He sees is a person in need of help and love. God is not concerned to punish wickedness. He "desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness, and live." This simple empirical line of thinking could be developed much further, but I turn from it to consider the light thrown on the nature of conscience by psychoanalysis and the study of the development of the structure of the mind. Conscience is seated in the superego. This is developed in the boy as a means of resolving emotional conflicts produced in him by his relations with his parents, commonly called the Oedipus complex, which come to a crisis during the third to fifth years of life. The superego becomes necessary as means of self-control, to escape an imagined danger situation. When it is formed it takes into itself earlier elements of self-control. Its genesis does not spring from a sense of right and wrong. That is the consequence, not the cause, of forming a superego. Before its formation, the sanctions of behavior are social. The behavior thought to be desired by the parents is followed to secure their love or avoid punishment. The child is really amoral or premoral. The superego brings with it the inward principle of judgment according to whatever principles are adopted with it, and a sense of obligation to conform, irrespective of reward or punishment. Only then does he become moral in the ethical sense of the term.
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This means that conscience is an acquired faculty, not an inborn one. Religious teaching in the past has usually acknowledged that conscience has to be educated, that we have to learn what particular lines of action are right or wrong; but it has accepted that conscience itself, the sense of unconditional obligation, is innate. This latter assumption has now been shown to be false. At the same time light has been thrown on the reasons why conscience can range from the almost nonexistent (in psychopaths) to the sternest sense of duty. The superego gains its strength from the earlier emotional conflicts, particularly those involving aggressive impulses, so we may have the paradoxical situation in which a man may have a stern conscience because as an infant he suffered frustrations that stimulated his aggressiveness and drove him to form a dominating superego. In other words, a strong conscience is no reliable guide to discrimination between good and bad. A further complication is that, since girls do not experience the Oedipus complex in the same way as boys, they emerge from this period in a different way. The moral sense they acquire is likewise subject to the vicissitudes of infancy, but it functions so differently from the masculine form that men sometimes are tempted to accuse women of having no conscience. There is much more to be said about the nature of conscience and morals, but I will add only one thing: that psychoanalysis has found at the basis of every severe neurosis, probably as its cause, a strong sense of guilt, mostly unconscious. Clearly, this is a rabbit worth chasing further, but I must turn to the fifth and last to which I wish to draw your attention. 5. Ego-religion. In the development of the complex threefold structure of the personality--id, ego, and superego--it is the ego that plays the leading part. Its function is to lead the desires rising from the id to the completest satisfaction possible. This can be obtained only from the world of reality, and only the ego deals with reality. It has to persuade the id to give up desires that are impossible of attainment and accept compromises or substitutes that are possible. These, indeed, if the ego does its work well, may lead to fuller satisfactions than the relinquished desire could have done. In its battle to control and direct the id, the ego has to develop the superego as an ally; but if the superego is relatively too strong, the ego is weakened and the superego takes charge, forming an unholy alliance with the id to cheat the ego of realistic satisfactions. The whole effort of psychoanalysis and of counseling is directed to strengthening the ego as the way to recover health. Health lies in a proper balance between the three functions, a balance in which the
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ego, which alone has contact with the world, is the dominant factor, even while it serves the others. If the others predominate, the result is regression to infantile modes of thinking and feeling, arrested development. If, therefore, Christianity brings a release of life, an increase and enhancement of it, as we must believe, it must be a function of the ego. Yet too much of our theology tries to make religion a superego function, imposing obligations of belief and conduct, a matter of authoritarian standards, requiring obedience to a heavenly Father in whose name we claim to speak with certainty, asserting duty and obligation to be absolute. Yet if God is in any sense real, we can only hope to find Him in and through our experiences of the world, and our approach to the world must always be an empirical one, the activity of the ego. This does not mean that there is no place for abstract thinking in faith and morals. It means that every formulation of moral, philosophical, or dogmatic theology must be treated as hypothesis, a guide to further thinking and the gathering of further experience, as it is in science and history. And our discovery of God in and through our experience of the world does not depend on special experiences, such as mystic visions and so on, but on the whole range of the knowledge we gain of the world, including in knowledge not merely cognition and ideation, but the full gamut of our experiences of it. This brings God from the remote fastnesses, where authoritarian theology would put Him, down into everyday living.
To sum up I said I would try to indicate a pattern. The pattern has two themes. One is that of becoming. We are continually moving forward to become what we are in potentiality. Our life is growth. The second theme is that of personality, by which we absorb the world of things and persons into ourselves and unify them in our own being so that each of us becomes the focus of the universe and of God. Both themes are incomplete at any time. We cannot know what we shall be. But one thing seems to stand out dearly: the weaving of the pattern of life displays an ever increasing out-reach of love, increasing in intensity and in richness of form. In demonstrating this, psychoanalysis supports what I believe is the essential message of Christianity, but it gives new directions to our understanding of it.
