Psychoanalysis and Religion

by GREGORY ZILBOORG, M.D.

1

SOME fifty years ago, when Freud’s views on human psychology were first made known, they were given a rather hostile and contemptuous welcome by all professions, sacred and profane. The label of pansexualism was quickly pasted on psychoanalysis, to designate the alleged partisan one-sidedness of Freud’s findings. Even the manifestations of the unconscious, which the most severe critics of Freud were hard put to deny, were trealed as if they were inventions rather than scientific discoveries; and people still speak frequently not of “slips of the tongue” but of “Freudian slips” - as if these were Freud’s own creations and were smuggled into our daily life by the proselytes of psy choanaly sis.

Fifty years of psychoanalytic research seem to have conquered a number of the earlier prejudices, but the atmosphere of contentiousness still surrounds psychoanalysisdespite the fact that psychoanalysis has been gaining ever increasing professional and academic recognition. The spirit of contentiousness with which the uninitiated con tinue to approach psychoanalysis concerns the major issues of moralil y and religious faith. Freud’s discovery of the role winch sexual factors play in our normal lives and in the formation of neuroses aroused the suspicion of the moralist, for one of the latter’s missions since lime immemorial had been to combat the egotistic and hedonistic nature of our sexual impulses.

When Freud finally (in 1927) issued his Future of an Illusion in which he termed religious faith an illusion, its practices a form of compulsion neurotic ceremonial, and religion as a whole a manifestation of a neurosis — the suspicious attitude of the moralist became a conviction, for from then on he could quote Freud himself to prove that psychoanalysis is antagonistic to religion and to the morality which religion preaches and demands.

The line of battle was drawn almost spontaneously. On one side were the psychoanalysts who felt that the acceptance of Freud’s clinical findings and his method of treating neuroses imposed upon them the need to accept his philosophical excursions as well. On the other side there were those who fell that since they found it necessary to reject Freud’s psveho-philosophical excursions into the held of religion, they also had to reject everything that Freud had ever discovered about the human mind: the dynamic power of the unconscious, the psychoanalytic method of treating neuroses, any “Freudian” clinical finding or procedure.

This conflict has not been resolved with the years. If anything it has become more intense and as is always the case with any conflict in which reason and emotion, experiment and faith, are confused and intermingled — a great deal of passion and misunderstanding has been generated, so that problems have accumulated upon problems, but solutions (lasting solutions at any rate) have not been forthcoming.

Before World War II the problem of psychoanalysis versus religion seemed to be — to put it in psychoanalytic terminology - repressed or partially repressed. There appeared to be peace but it was an armed one, with all participants alerted. The psychoanalysts went on with their tasks in a spirit of official unconcern but occasional rationalist antagonism against religion; and the religious teacher, the minister of the Gospel, and the priest adopted similar attitudes toward psychoanalysis.

It must be said that neither the indifference nor the antagonisms seem to have been based on any clearly defined principles The Catholic antagonist would reject psychoanalysis because of Freud’s alleged pansexual immorality, while the Frenchman René Guyon objected to psychoanalysis because it allegedly imposed upon the patient a preconceived code of sexual ethics instead of allowing him full sexual freedom. The Marxists would reject psychoanalysis because they considered Freud a metaphysician and an idealist, contradicting the Marxian philosophy of materialistic determinism; the Christian philosopher rejected psychoanalysis because he considered Freud a materialistic determinist, devoid of moral ideals and denying the free will of man.

The objectors could not all be right, since they objected to mutually contradictory presumptive characteristics of psychoanalysis. Evidently there was some emotional undertone that united them, but once they embarked upon their respective tasks, each chose his own customary and preferred set of objections.

However, there were some among the clergy, mostly Protestant, who found themselves in little conflict with Freud’s basic findings. The Swiss Protestant clergyman Oscar Pfister was among the earliest adherents of Freud, and through the years he neither lost nor abandoned his faith or his pastoral duties. The Dean of the Episcopal Cathedral iti Atlanta, Georgia, the Reverend Raimundo tie Ovies, has found himself at home with a great many tenets of Freudian theory and practice, yet his psychoanalytic interests and sympathies do not appear to have disturbed his faith or the exercise of his pastoral vocation.

Among the Catholic clergy or laymen there were fewer adherents of psychoanalysis, for the tradition of Catholic scholarship has always been that of patient and at times almost exasperatingly slow examination, contemplation, re-examination, and testing. The revolutionary views of Freud required careful evaluation; the new facts about the human mind were so ext raordinary and even shocking that they could not be easily tested, and Catholic thought seemed at best lo be patient, at worst indifferent in a challenging way. The current reverberations of the conflict between Christianity and psychoanalysis have come mostly from Catholic sources, and the most recent publicity on the subject from certain pulpits and microphones might give the impression that Catholicism is irrevocably opposed to Freudian psychoanalysis, that it stands ready to combat it with all the spiritual might and moral authority at its disposal.

This general impression is erroneous. First of all, the rather violent intolerance regarding psychoanalysis, the various and loud incriminations which are heard from certain quarters, seem to be limited to a small group. As recently as last May, the American Psychiatric Association devoted a part of its annual meeting in Washington, D.C., to the problem of Psychopathology and Faith. One full afternoon and one full evening were given to free, dispassionate, interested, and interesting discussion of the problem. A rabbi, a Dominican priest, and an Anglican priest of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd led the discussion. The Roman Catholic representative was far from antagonistic or combative, and he viewed the basic issues raised by psychoanalysis with sympathy and discernment.

The rabbinical views expressed by Rabbi Cronbach and the late Rabbi Liebman showed no quarrel with psychoanalysis; on the other hand, their support of psychoanalysis seemed to be based on purely utilitarian, philanthropic grounds. They supported psychoanalysis for the good it can do to help religion to produce the peace of mind which every one of us is supposed to be seeking. The problem of religion versus psychoanalysis cannot be solved by way of this pragmatic approach, and, as was suggested in the course of the Washington discussion, the ideal if peace of mind scorns to be a reverberation of the ancient Oriental tradition. The Moslem religious tradition is more concerned with the relationship of man to his fellow man, to his God, and to himself a complex set of problems to which Western Christianity has devoted all its energy from the very birth of the Church.

It is natural perhaps to find that the Mosaic tradition should prove less sensitive to the innovations made by psychoanalysis. Both the Anglican and the Catholic priests, who as far as positive dogma is concerned have no quarrel, found it therefore necessary to face squarely the principal issue: Is the body of psychoanalytic knowledge fundamentally anti-religious, and is the Christian doctrine fundamentally at absolute variance with any of the findings and tends of psychoanalysis? it may come as a surprise to many to learn that at the Washington meeting neither the Anglican nor the Catholic priest was opposed to psychoanalysis, nor does either consider psychoanalysis a threat to his faith or pastoral vocation.

2

THE psychoanalyst has learned a great deal about the development and the workings of the human mind; he has learned a great deal about the psychological mechanics of thinking and feeling, and of worshiping God and of religious ecstasy. This knowledge does not of course provide him with any new rational, experimental, scientific tool to disprove the existence of God. He cannot disprove the existence of God scientifically, any more than the physicist can. Good astronomer that he was, Laplace stated with an overtone of rationalist superiority that God is a hypothesis which cannot be proved. But Robert Boyle was as good a scientist as Laplace, and he was unable to observe a single natural phenomenon, to discover a single chemical or physical law, without seeing in every one or them the work of God. Boyle’s theology is as lofty and passionate as his science is cool and objective. And there is no reason to believe that psychoanalysis, with or without Freud, has discovered a single new fact or any new method which would enable it to refute, verify, corroborate, or otherwise assess the existence or the nonexistence ol God by purely psychoanalytic means.

Yet many psychoanalysts, like the majority of serious scientists, are subject to a fundamental error: they really believe that greater intellectual understanding of life and living will make people better. They would exclude moral values and similar considerations from the field of their interest because they believe inherently that to understand means to be good. They do not state their belief in such a blunt and almost naïve way, but they do express the belief just the same.

To know a great deal, and to be non-neurotic, does not mean that one is possessed of or endowed with moral values by virtue ol this knowledge and lack of neurosis. It is not Einstein’s mathematical genius that makes him such a noble person and devout representative of modern humanism. It was not Freud’s great intellectual sagacity and scientific boldness that made him an almost heroic figure of tolerance, his detractors to the contrary notwithstanding. Neither Göring nor Goebbels lacked great intellectual powers, but these powers did not make them good.

That science and moral values do not always coincide, that most frequently they are far from one another and are phenomena of dilierent orders, can be easily seen in the problems faced by so manynuclear physicists who, when they became atomic bomb scientists, were horrified by the use to which their new scientific discoveries could be put.

Psychoanalysis, a new and young and revolutionary science, found itself able to go along officially without moral values not because it rejected these values but because it carried them implicitly and inherently as everything human carries them. But psychoanalysis prefers to insist that the good and the just for which it strives are but rational goals rationalistieallv arrived at. It is a chronic, enviable, and very noble blindness, this belief that our striving for the general good and our altruism and self-sacrificing struggle for the betterment of man and mankind are a purely dispassionate rational thing, merely because we know the psychological, erotic roots of love of one’s neighbor, and the masochistic roots of our readiness to die for a cause or for our country.

It is this blindness ‘come a little aggressive that contributed a great deal to the conflict of psychoanalysis with religion. Yet it should not be forgotten that among the members of the American Psychoanalytic Association there are God-fearing Protestants and devout Catholics, who are also Freudian psychoanalysts. These psychoanalysts have not found it necessary to follow Freud in his amateur theology, or to follow the bigot in his amateur psychology.

Self-righteousness, even the self-righteousness of a scientist, breeds ignorance. The ignorance of what traditional religious doctrine represents did not help the psychoanalyst to create a rapprochement between the newest psychology and religion; for, despite his seemingly cool, objective, rational and rationalistic divorcement from religion, the psychoanalyst stood with passionate inspiration ready to defend his own new knowledge at whatever cost.

Passion, even noble passion, provokes one at times to great extremes. It was such a passion that led William Lloyd Garrison to proclaim the Constitution of the United States “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" and to burn it in public. When the passion of a libertarian is aroused, lie will fight even liberty in the name of liberation; a Fisher Ames will exclaim that “our country is too big for Union, too sordid for patriotism and too democratic lor liberty. What some psychoanalysts have said about religion as a human function and what certain religions leaders have said about psychoanaly sis would make as much sense as these passionate exclamations of Ames and Garrison, if they were taken literally.

The criticisms leveled against psychoanalysts are many, and it is not necessary to cite and to test them all. Only a few will be mentioned. The neurotic suffers from an unconscious sense of guilt which is not justified by reality; this sense of guilt must be removed before the neurotic can get well so says the psychoanalyst. To this the aroused, uninitiated priest or bigot responds: How could one live without a sense of guilt ? Psychoanalysis is immoral and sinful, because it teaches us not to feel guilty.”

Psychoanalysis does teach us “ not to feel guilty,” but the sentence is unfinished, and is false through passionate intent or ignorance if it is presented as a finished sentence. For the finished sentence would mention the fact stated above: that psychoanalysts relieve their patients of the unconscious sense of guilt which is not founded on reality. In other words, psychoanalysts relieve their patients from feeling guilty about things of which they really are not guifiy, and leave them with the sense ol guilt about things of which they really are guilty. Psychoanalysis insists that those who commit crimes and apparently feel no guilt or lepentance are in fact mentally sick people who should be treated and cured of this queer perversion or anesthesia of conscience.

Well, insists the zealous religious opponent of psychoanalysis, all this may he true, but psychoanalysts are too loose in their moral views, and many of them are bad. The fact that there are bad and unconscionable lawyers and doctors and priests certainly does not make jurisprudence, medicine, and religion bad and unacceptable to a morally sensitive person.

3

IN anti-analytical passion a great many silly things have been said by a great many intelligent people, and one of those things, often repeated from platform and from pulpit, is that psychoanalysis wants to do away with confession and make itself a substitute for the Sacrament of Penance. In my practice and professional contacts as a psychoanalyst, I have heard of only one occasion when a psychoanalyst believed (and I must submit quite erroneously) that confession would interfere with the prospective patient’s psychoanalysis. The patient refused even to start with the prospective analyst, and he went to another with no harm to psychoanalysis or to his faith. Neither officially nor unofficially does psychoanalysis interfere with confession.

The fear existing in some religious circles that the very fact of being psychoanalyzed and therefore “telling all" prevents the faithful from going to confession is not founded on any reality. There can be no more authoritative pronouncement on the subject than that of Jacques Maritain, who is among the leaders in Catholic philosophy and who is an opponent of nianx a psychoanalytic principle. In his Quatre Essais sur l’Esprit Humain dans Sa Condition Charnelle, there is an essay on Freud and psychoanalysis. In this essay Maritain says:-

One hears occasionally that psychoanalysis supplants or is an ersatz of confession. This seems quite incorrect. On the one hand it would be an illusion to believe that confession has the power of curing neuroses and psychoses. The object of confession and its ultimate goal are in no way psychotherapeutic. Furthermore, the memories presented at confession are conscious, or preconscious. and they are brought out by voluntary effort. If the penitent at confession tends to push his will further into the sphere of the unconscious, he runs the risk of suffering from pathological scruples. . . . When a neurotic or a more severely mentally sick person comes to confession, fie does not uncover the roots of his neurosis or his delusions. Instead, he burdens his confessor with the abnormal) constructions created by his neurosis or his delusions.

On the other hand, confession is in itself an act of our rational life, an act of reason and will. . . . The penitent surrenders the secret of his heart to the confessor as to an agent of God, and the confessor withdraws his individual personality to stand before the penitent only as a minister-judge.

This statement of Jacques Maritain, in addition to being authoritative and exact, should put an end to irresponsible and unfounded confusion about the psychoanalyst’s wishing to steal and steal into the Sacrament of Penance, in the manner of a conventional Satan in modern dress. One may also call attention to Victor White’s “The Analyst and the Confessor,” which the Catholic weekly, The Commonweal, published in its issue of July 22, 1948.

Modem Catholic thought has been showing of late both a great interest in and a groat understanding of psychoanalysis and its positive relation to religion. This new trend has not yet become properly noticeable in America, but in Europe, particularly among the French-speaking people, it has become rather pronounced both in psychoanalytic and Catholic circles.

We find more and more attempts made to consider psychoanalysis as a source of information and better understanding of man’s functioning in this our world. Thus Etienne do Greef, in Louvain, has little if any quarrel with Freud’s views on human instincts. Also in La Vie Spirituelle, Vol. 75 (1946), there is a thoughtful appraisal of Freud’s views by Dr. Nodot, in the article “Psychismo et Spiritualité.” And in Mélange Théologiques (1946) Yves de Monlcheuil writes on “Froudisme et Psychoanalyse devnnt la Morale Chrétienne,”in which among other valuable things we find an excellent explanation of why confession and psychoanalysis are and remain different, and why they do not interfere with one another.

It is regrettable that the promising trend toward coöperation between Catholic theologians and psychiatrists has not yet established itself in this country, where mutual intolerance between psychoanalysis and the Catholic Church is pretiv much the rule. When a few vears ago a well-known psychoanalyst was asked to give a series of lectures on psychoanalysis in a Catholic university, a rabblerousing publication accused the analyst of “turning over ” psychoanalysis to the Catholic Church to be devoured. On the other hand, some free-lance and professional proselytes are sufficiently misguided to turn away from many real sources of evil in this world and denounce psychoanalysis as one of the major enemies of mankind.

As a healing art, psychoanalysis is by its very nature the opposite of the enemy of mankind. As a mass of factual dala about human beings and their behavior, it can serve both God and man, for farts do no harm unless they are perverted by prejudice

and then they are no longer facts. As a philosophy, psychoanalysis does not exist. It is a systematized, scientific, working hypothesis about human behavior, and as such it has stood the test of half a century. It threatens religion no more than the heliocent ric theory of Newtonian physics threatened religion. Man’s faith and man’s need for moral values are not overthrown by scientific discoveries, although they may be destroyed by wars and concentration camps.