Annual Meeting Papers

pdf version

Freud, Jung, and Pastoral Psychotherapy: Uneasy Bedfellows
(or: “What’s a Nice Freudian like You
Doing in a Counseling Modality Like This?”)

Pamela Cooper-White, Columbia Theological Seminary

Draft only: please do not cite without permission.

Abstract

The integration of psychology and religion/spirituality may seem obvious in pastoral counseling circles.  As Jonte-Pace, Parsons, Jones, McDargh, and others have cautioned, the spiritual and the psychological cannot be conflated uncritically.

 The year 2009 marks the 100th anniversary of the visit of Freud and Jung to Clark University, and the subsequent infusion of psychoanalytic ideas into pastoral care and psychology.  On this anniversary, it seems appropriate to explore how, a century later, we “stand in the spaces” between theology and psychoanalytic thought.

The paper will deconstruct both an uncritical rejection of Freud’s writings, and a naïve appropriation of Jung’s apparently more spiritual psychology.  Using further comparison with object relations and relational theory, I will argue that it is on methodological grounds we may find the most traction for pastoral psychotherapy.  By standing in this tension, we discover a messier but fruitful realm of relationality and flux--congruent with our postmodern time.

---

I enter a doctor’s consulting room to arrange for my surgery.  I am dismayed when he tells me that this will be a very long procedure.  The anesthesiologist has said that I will have to be under for a very long time.

This was my “initial dream”1 when I entered analysis in 1991 with a Jungian analyst who incorporated a rich blend of Jungian and British object relations theory and technique.2  I had recently made the decision to re-enter ordained ministry after a period of disengagement (coinciding with exploration of other unfinished vocational avenues).  I had engaged in a number of years of solid, ego-psychology oriented pastoral counseling.  But the dream was clear: to get further on this journey of psychological and spiritual discernment, it was necessary to “go under” (at least, as I thought of it then—I have since critiqued the metaphor of “depth” in favor of a postmodern relational understanding of the unconscious as spatially dispersed, not simply an archaeological dig “downward.”3).  Nothing less and nothing easier would do.  So I came to the work of pastoral psychotherapy, both as patient and later as therapist, with the assumption that psychological growth and spiritual formation—the dimension that distinguishes pastoral psychology from all other secular psychologies—belong together.

Pastoral counseling and psychotherapy are identified with this assumption—in fact it is precisely this “integration” that historically distinguished pastoral counseling from the “secular” therapeutic professions, (although this distinction has recently been challenged by a new interest among social workers, psychologists, and even some psychoanalysts in spirituality as a social-scientific category).

Such integration of psychology and religion, or spirituality, may seem obvious in pastoral counseling circles.  There is much denial, however, and some amount of fancy footwork, necessary in maintaining this belief, particularly among those of us who claim a psychoanalytic theoretical orientation.  I have never found it so easy to reconcile psychology with theology or religious belief.  Once one moves beyond the general practice of pastoral counseling and the often comfortable, supportive realm of parish pastoral care toward a psychoanalytic/psychodynamic approach, specific schools of psychoanalytic theory begin to compete and conflict both with a Christian identity and with each other.  As Jonte-Pace, Parsons, Jones, McDargh, and others have cautioned for over a decade, the spiritual and the psychological cannot be conflated quite so easily or uncritically.4

The most obvious contradiction would seem to lie between Freud’s seemingly resolute atheism, still espoused by many classical analysts today, and any religious or spiritual perspective.  Many pastoral counselors, wishing for a more spiritual approach, gravitate toward C.G. Jung because of his apparently more spiritual perspective.   But the task of integrating a Christian identity with “depth” psychology is not really so simple as to trade in a more supposedly atheistic Freudian point of view for a Jungian one in the interests of incorporating the spiritual dimension into psychotherapy.

Freud

On one hand, Freud is not quite as pure an antagonist—or at least, a more ambivalent one toward religion or spirituality than is popularly thought.5  Regarding Freud only as an antagonist is a fundamentalist approach to Freud.  It takes too literally certain statements in his writings, such as his scorn for any inherently human “oceanic religious feeling” apart from infantile wish fulfillment,6 or his analysis of Moses as a father-figure in an oedipal struggle writ large in Hebrew history.7  As Bettelheim and others have pointed out, 8 Freud himself embodied a split between the scientific materialist, (the aspect evident in most of his writing, which was for a scientific audience9), vs. the nineteenth century romantic with a strong interest in culture10 and in the paranormal11—the  Freud more subtly revealed in his actual work as a therapist,12 in biographies, 13 and in correspondence, for example, Freud’s respectful, even admiring 30-year correspondence with the Swiss pastor Oskar Pfister.14

A strong ethic, albeit a rather somber, pessimistic one emphasizing the virtue of renunciation, and shorn of any religious origins, is discernible in Freud’s writings, as well as a Jewish regard for reciprocity and respect for the dignity of others.15  As Phillip Rieff famously put it, the atheist Freud had the “mind of a moralist.”16  Freud’s Judaism could also be seen as a palimpsest in both his hermeneutical method—the seeking out of latent meanings in manifest material, revealed through linguistic techniques and open to alternative interpretations17—as well as many of the philosophical and religious assumptions particularly in his cultural writings.18  Edward Said points to the “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character” of the post-exilic Jewish community as a source for Freud’s own resistance toward easy palliatives, whether political or religious.19 Freud’s ethic derived, rather, from a sense of human solidarity founded in a tragic realism regarding human fallibility, desire, and identity complexity.

Freud’s critiques of religion tended to caricature some of the worst of Judaeo-Christianity’s authoritarianism, its denigration of the body—particularly sexuality, and its disregard for insights from psychology and science.20  Freud objected to religion as an institutionalization of the oedipal conflict and a paternalistic demand on the part of religious authority for infantile, blind obedience to an irrationally moralistic superego rather than a means of rational moral decision-making21—an “ethical realism” which Reinhold Niebuhr later affirmed (although as a Christian theologian Niebuhr retained the religious language of sin and redemption which Freud had rejected). 22

Freud was interested in the feeling of the “uncanny” (das Unheimlich), identifying it linguistically as the opposite of the familiar, the “homelike” (heimlich).23  The uncanny arouses dread, and in Freud’s discussion seems especially to tread in a region in which the distinction between the living and the dead becomes blurred.  Freud describes a paradox, that the uncanny, the unhomelike, is always dimly perceived as secretly familiar, because it represents a return of repressed infantile fears, and the magical thinking that accompanied them.  Thus ghosts and spirits are re-projected onto current reality, as Freud wrote in his essay “The Uncanny,” when infantile dread is re-evoked by “silence, solitude, and darkness…elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free.”24  “The distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes.”25  Freud similarly rejected a tendency he found in religious believers to concretize religious symbols and metaphors as fixed realities, and further characterized religion as an immature delusion of consolation and gratification of infantile wishes, rather than a mature renunciation of the pleasure principle.26

Many of the same critiques have been vigorously prosecuted (though not necessarily using Freud’s theoretical language) by theologians and religious leaders within organized religion, and not only in the modern era.   As Kirk Bingaman recently suggested, persons of faith can persist in belief, “living in the tension” between religious faith and the psychoanalytic disposition to question:27

…[B]elievers, unlike the helpless child who must ultimately capitulate to the stronger oedipal father, have the capacity to imagine something better.  We can either settle for an unreflective and insular religious faith of the first naïveté [citing Ricoeur], or we can choose to expose our faith to a hermeneutics of suspicion, which invariably opens the door to a postcritical religious faith of the ‘second naïveté.’  This…corresponds to…the supreme choice facing every person of faith, namely, whether or not to update and transform our psychical image of God.

Freud also advocated that the best preparation for becoming a psychoanalyst was a broad, interdisciplinary background not only in science and psychology, but in the humanities, literature, history, and the arts.28 Freud repudiated the trappings and language of religion and spirituality, perhaps as some have suggested due to his own early object relations and unconscious associations to religion, the oceanic, and a fear of the maternal,29 but he did, in fact, value much of what contemporary pastoral theologians and therapists would consider to be pertinent to the spiritual domain.

Jung

On the other hand, Jung offers no easy panacea for a pastoral psychotherapist.30  Jung has sometimes been appropriated by theologians, pastoral counselors, and spiritual directors as a bridge figure between psychoanalysis and religion.31  “Transpersonal psychology,” an outgrowth of Jungian analytic psychology and the human potential movement (e.g., Abraham Maslow’s “self-actualization”32), is particularly appealing to some because of its focus on Jung’s idea that the edges of consciousness open out toward universal human consciousness and the transcendent.  Quoting from the web site of the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California:33

Transpersonal Psychology is a psychology of health and human potential. While recognising and addressing human psychopathology, transpersonal psychology does not derive its model of the human psyche from the ill or diseased. Transpersonal psychology looks to saints, prophets, great artists, heroes, and heroines for models of full human development and of the growth-oriented nature of the normal human psyche… Another way of putting this is that the personality is, by design, the vessel or vehicle which enables the soul and spirit to navigate through the world. Thus, the proper role of the personality is to be a translucent window, a servant to divinity within.

However, Jung’s attitude toward organized religion per se, particularly the constricted moralistic Christianity of his own Protestant upbringing as a Swiss minister’s son, was conflicted at best.34  This bias reflects both Jung’s longing for personal authenticity over against blind obedience to external authorities, and his frustration in particular with western Christian institutions.  It has, however, filtered into some contemporary Jungian practice as a (sometimes quite unconscious) privileging, and often romanticization, of Eastern spiritual practices and symbols, and a reverence for ancient pre-Christian mythology, while de-valuing, ignoring or even denigrating western Judeo-Christian images and stories.  This may be overcome as an individual practitioner, by choosing elements of Jung’s writings that are compatible, re-mythologizing Judeo-Christian symbols,35 as in the earlier writings of Victor Turner (a Dominican priest who initially corresponded collaboratively with Jung much as Oscar Pfister corresponded admiringly with Freud)36, and the work of Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst John Sanford.37

However, there remains a significant conflict between Jung’s thought and mainstream Christian doctrine, originating in Jung’s own critique of Christianity.  For example, there is a profound dissonance between Jung’s concept of the archetype of Wholeness vs. Christianity’s moral emphasis on purity and goodness.  Jung conceived of the process of maturation, which he called “individuation,”38 as a journey toward wholeness.  It requires the bringing to consciousness and embracing of the “Shadow”39—aspects of the Self (often imaged in Jungian psychology as the dark, the primitive, the ugly) that are disavowed, disowned, displaced.  Even God, Jung posited in Answer to Job, must have a Shadow if God is to be whole.40  This is perhaps nowhere better exemplified in Jung’s writings than in the famous fantasy image he recorded from his own childhood:

I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come.  I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky.  God sits on His golden throne, high above the world - and from under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.41

In his struggle to free himself from the constraints of his father’s rigid Protestantism, Jung faced a terrifying possibility: even God shits.  God for the boy Jung was a maddening paradox: “God alone was real—an annihilating fire and an indescribable grace.”42  This ambiguous view of God’s nature flew in the face of his father’s rigid Christian convictions that God was omnipotent, pure goodness, and that the goal of Christian living was purity and obedience.

       This Christian drive toward purity and perfection is peculiar when one considers the gore and anguish of human existence actually depicted in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and is not very compatible with the gospel narratives of Jesus’ own life and grisly death.  But a Platonic mind-body split emerges in the Bible in Paul’s Greek writings, and it pervaded patristic and medieval Christianity.43  It comes down to us again in the pietistic fervor of some of the reformers, not only in the 16th century, but later in the passionate evangelical desire for “perfection,” expounded, for example, by Wesley and Edwards.44  Can one remain a Christian, with all that Christianity has come to mean historically, and still embrace the terrifying ambiguities of the God of Scripture?  This was at the heart of Jung’s personal quest in childhood: what kind of God could be vast enough to contain even the worst imperfections of creation, and still bring forth good?

       Jung’s attitude toward the question of God’s existence represented a departure from Freud’s defensive atheism.  Jung was agnostic about the question of God’s objective existence, but remained open to the traces of the divine in the subjective experience of psychic life.45  For Jung, the image of God was an archetypal symbol,46 stemming from the collective unconscious (for Jung, the “deepest” layer or deposit of shared human images throughout history, accessible to every individual via the outer edges of the personal unconscious).  The God archetype was closely related to the archetype of Wholeness and its related form, the archetype of the Self.47  He defined the Self as much larger than the conscious ego48 (derived from Freud), which is really only a small part of the total person.  In this schema, the ego performs an important executive function, but tends to regard itself as more central than it actually is.  The outer boundaries of the Self are transpersonal, contiguous with all other persons, and across generations, even centuries.  The Self contains aspects of the ‘collective unconscious,”49 the accumulated deposit of knowledge, wisdom, and patterning of experience shared among all humanity.  At its outer edges, Jung believed, the Self flows into the divine.

       Jung viewed Christ as an archetypal symbol for the Self50 (as was the Buddha,51 and other non-personal religious symbols such as the Mandala52), bridging the individual and the divine.  This was related for Jung to the call of the Self for “individuation,” which Jung further perceived to be represented by the symbols of transformation in the Christian Eucharist.53  Individuation thus incorporated a relational, moral quality.  Jung believed that by bringing the unconscious to awareness, and owning the Shadow dimension of oneself, one could withdraw the projections of evil that one had assigned unconsciously to the external world, thereby refraining from demonizing others.54  (This process psychologically is not unlike the movement described in Kleinian theory from the infantile splitting of the “paranoid schizoid position”55 (in which negative psychic contents are projected onto or even into other persons), to the “depressive position” (in which one is able to psychically hold good and bad together, acknowledging one’s own hunger and aggression and mourning one’s omnipotent fantasies of perfect goodness and omnivorous control).

The reality of God was, for Jung, a psychic reality, founded in collective human experience, and therefore beyond any sort of empirically grounded debate.56  The divine was psychological phenemonon, as manifested in the personal experience of individuals over centuries and across cultures.  Jung claimed his own personal acquaintance with “the numinous or divine,”57 while demurring both from the abstract philosophical question of God’s “physical existence,” and from the question of personal faith or personal belief.  For Jung, God was a matter of subjective knowledge through personal, psychological experience.  It was in this sense that Jung said in a radio interview in 1955, “All that I have learned has led me step by step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God.  I only believe what I know.  And that eliminates believing.  Therefore I do not take his existence on belief—I know that He exists.”58  It is likely that the long-awaited publication next month of The Red Book,59 Jung’s personal record of his experiments in “active imagination,” which appear to have tested the boundaries between brilliance and madness, will reveal more of Jung’s most personal reflections and experiences of both the divine and the demonic.
The subjective nature of Jung’s construction of the divine has prompted a further critique, particularly from theologians.  In Jung’s own time, Martin Buber stated that Jung’s “new psychology protest that is ‘no world-view but a science,’ [and yet] it no longer contents itself with the role of an interpreter of religion.  It proclaims the new religion, the only one which can still be true, the religion of pure psychic immanence.” 60  Buber objected to a psychological reductionism he found in Jung’s writing, a kind of Gnosticism in which transcendence and faith was sacrificed to “knowledge.”61

Our colleagues Don Browning and Terry Cooper, among others, are also critical of a close parallel between analytical psychology and the human potential movement—the optimism inherent in both, that the human being is naturally being drawn toward growth, including moral development.  Browning and Cooper have written:62

Jung failed to understand the deeper levels of anxiety and inordinate self-concern and how these facts of human nature invalidate all uncomplicated harmonistic metaphysics and the philosophical ethical egoisms that follow from them… [I]n the thought of Jung, both the moral selectivity of the individuation process and the redemption of the transcendent function give rise to an image of self-fulfillment that does not go beyond the ethical-egoist actualization of one’s own unique potentials.

       This critique has a particularly American, Protestant ring to it, as it focuses on the 20th century problem of individuation as rampant individualism, and targets the human potential movement as tending toward a “culture of narcissism.”  In my view, Jung was not so much hampered by what to our 20th century American eyes looks like subjectivism (although this caution is warranted), as by his own 19th century cultural and philosophical context—the pre-World War European confidence in progress (including the individual).  Both Freud and Jung viewed psychoanalysis/analytic psychology as liberative tools freeing human beings from the grip of unconscious motivations.

Just as Freud was embedded in a modernist paradigm, continually striving to prove his credibility as a scientific rationalist, Jung was embedded in a premodern Platonic paradigm of ideal dichotomous forms (Anima/Animus, Self/Shadow, etc.) eternally being manifested in partial, dichotomous, earthly representations.  Like Freud, Jung was also striving along heroic lines to promote enlightenment and a form of rationalism that, while departing from Freud’s own orthodoxy, nevertheless was grounded in a desire to confront unthinking obedience to authorities, whether religious, philosophical, or scientific.  Jung shared Freud’s confidence in the freedom, including moral freedom, that could be bestowed by recognizing, plumbing, and exploring the depths of the unconscious. 

It would be an injustice to accuse either Freud or Jung of simplistic thinking—reading their original works reveals tremendous breadth, complexity, and also social concern.   Freud, his daughter Anna, and others of their circle viewed psychoanalysis as a means toward promoting social justice,63 and Jung saw the raising of the unconscious to consciousness, and the withdrawing of projections onto the other as evil, as a way toward world peace.64 Yet, it is useful from a postmodern vantage point to deconstruct a certain historically bound and culture-constrained naïveté—or at least, perhaps, unfounded optimism—wedded to the heroic, self-confident colonialism that inheres in both men’s theories.  And there is something naively troubling about Jung’s departure from Freud’s insistence on attention to life lived in the body, with all its struggles and inherent moral conflicts, and the basic motivational drives of sex and aggression.  Jung, therefore, cannot be uncritically adapted or appropriated by pastoral psychotherapists as an easy antidote to Freud. 

I would argue, regarding Freud and Jung taken together, that it is on methodological grounds we may find the most traction for pastoral psychotherapy.  As I have argued elsewhere,65 I am proposing that we maintain—and maintain the tension between—both Freud’s hermeneutic of suspicion, and Jung’s sensing of the numinous.  Freud’s skepticism, and Jung’s openness to unexplained phenomena and the spiritual realm, are most helpful to a 21st century pastoral theologian and psychotherapist if taken together.  Their theories of religion, its origins, meaning, and function, and their reflections on human constructions of the divine, deserve continued attention.  Both theoretical traditions are entwined in our psychological inheritance, including the sub-discipline of the psychology of religion.  Both offer useful deconstructive (analytic) methods (even when we do not agree with their conclusions) that search beyond the surfaces of things, and stand in opposition to the easy answers, superficial consolations, and demonizing of the “other” that may arise from uncritical religious belief.  Both also engage in exploration of human experiences of the uncanny, the mysterious, and (at least for Jung) the divine.

The tension between Freud and Jung, and their very personal oedipal conflict, is a relational tension.  It is in such a relational space, even as an arena of conflict, I would argue, and not in coming down firmly on one side of their debate or the other, that our own wrestling with the tension between religion and psychology, theology and psychology, can be most fruitfully played out.  This is not to argue for the 19th century solution of resolving a dialectic by somehow discovering a transcendent or over-arching solution that encompasses both sides.  It is, rather, a shift from the need for “a” solution to the embrace of the tension itself, a shift from content to process, from knowledge (in the form of certainty) to relationship.

Ever the preacher’s son, Jung struggled inconclusively throughout his life to reconcile the competing healing claims of psychology and religion.  Jungian analyst Murray Stein has even argued that Jung was not interested in demolishing Christianity, but rather, healing it from its historic complexes and transforming it “along lines compatible with the Jungian therapeutic,”66 encouraging “the development within Christianity of a kind of Hinduistic spirit of ecumenical tolerance for every conceivable image of God and for every possible expression of the self.”67  In Jung’s essay “Psychotherapists or the Clergy?” he offered the following concluding paragraph: 68

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression [a reference to both religion and psychotherapy]; it freely chooses the men [sic] who proclaim it and in whom it lives.  This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind.  Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean very little; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree. (emphasis added)

Although Jung’s emphasis here was on a singular spirit, the numinous or the divine as it manifested itself in ever-changing images and symbols of the human imagination across cultures and centuries, it is the relationality of the word expression I want to highlight here.  I would propose that by “standing in the (perhaps multiple) spaces”69 between Freud’s atheism and Jung’s archetypal theories, in the realm of expression itself, we may discover a more messy but fruitful realm—a realm of relationality, a livingness of Spirit rather than a rejected totem or a carefully defined archetype.  Here we may find, congruent with the more postmodern context of our own time, a “third” domain, always in flux, of relationality, tension, and mutual expression—a “transitional” domain of imagination.

       Again, this is not a dialectic in the Hegelian sense.  What I am attempting to describe is not a reconciliation or sublation of ideas/doctrines/theories.  Ideas won’t save us in this conundrum between theology and psychology.  Rather, I am proposing that it is in fully embracing the paradoxical relationship between the two realms, and continuing to imagine their interplay—even in the midst of its seeming impossibility—that new chances for dialogue may spark and ignite.  By “standing in the spaces” tolerating the conceptual clashes and the not-knowing, tolerating the uncertainty about whether or how these domains may co-exist, we may be driven again to the dimension of preverbal experience, symbolization, and what Christopher Bollas refers to as “the unthought known.” 70  It is likely, then, that we will find a dance of mutual concern and interrogation between theology and psychology more in our practices rather than in our intellectual elaborations of theory and dogma. 71  The meeting ground of psychology and religion may best be discovered in the place of ethics, as our practices as theologians and as clinicians come together in response to real, suffering persons with whom we engage in relationship.

Potential Space: Object Relations and Standing in the Contradictions

       This concept of “standing in the spaces” between subject and object, subject and subject, known, and unknown, and tolerating ambiguity and unknowing as a field for creativity, including religious thought and theological imagination, find support in earlier psychoanalytic writings of the British object-relations school, especially the work of D.W. Winnicott (as has been noted by now by several scholars in our field of psychology and religion).  Winnicott identified religion, together with art and philosophy, as belonging to the realm of “transitional phenomena.”72  Winnicott defined transitional phenomena as “the third part of the life of a human-being, a part that we cannot ignore, …an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute…a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated.”73  Winnicott (following Melanie Klein) proposed that an infant initially makes no distinction between the mother’s actual breast and the internal fantasy of the breast that is needed and desired.  To the extent that the mother is able to anticipate the baby’s needs and provides breast (and by extension, the provision of food and nurture) “at the right moment,” the baby is confirmed in the illusion that s/he has created the breast.  The object of desire is simultaneously created (from the inside) and discovered (from the outside).  There is thus an intermediate psychic area or “potential space” between “me” and “not-me” that is initially blurred and undefined.

       In order to navigate the maturational process by which the mother comes to be recognized as a separate entity outside the infant’s control, a child will often adopt a teddy bear, blanket, or other soft object that can stand in for the mother’s breast and at the same time can remain totally under the child’s control.  This is the origin of Winnicott’s term “transitional object.”  The object helps the child make the transition from believing that everything is a part of him- or herself, to tolerating the loneliness engendered by a realization of his or her separateness.  In health—that is, in Winnicott’s terms when provided with “good enough” parenting74 and a “facilitating environment”75—the child eventually lets go of the object as the capacity to relate to actual other persons increases.

       In Winnicott’s concept, maturation brings about a shift from “object relating” (by which he means relating to one’s own internal objects and relating to others through projection) to “object usage” (a somewhat utilitarian sounding term for what we might commonly understand as relating to an actual other person, perceived with his or her own separate subjectivity.)76  This process is actually initiated by the child’s innate aggression, in which s/he attacks and destroys the object (as s/he perceives the other internally), and is then confronted by the actual object, beyond his or her projections, which survives.  During infancy, this is the parent who survives the child’s biting and pummeling and continues to care for the child, neither retaliating nor abandoning.77  As the child grows, fantasy is gradually modulated by the ongoing interaction between internal objects that are loved, hated, tightly held, devoured, attacked and controlled, and external others who have their own uncontrollable reactions and jar against the child’s internal fantasies and projections.

       Yet the “reality principle” does not quash internal fantasy altogether.  This interplay between inner and outer remains as a third dimension, in the realm of imagination and play, and it continues over the lifespan, encompassing both personal reverie and creative outward expression.  It is also the realm of cultural experience, in which both the capacity for trust and the potential for “creative living” are engendered in the space between baby and mother, child and family, individual and society.78  As Ana-Maria Rizzuto has pointed out, religious symbols and God-representations do not fade away as blankets and teddy bears do, but continue to mature alongside one’s representations of self and other, as an individual continues to engage ultimate questions of mortality, meaning, and the purpose of existence.79

       Winnicott did not expand upon his brief statements locating religion within transitional phenomena.  More recently, however, psychologists of religion have extended Winnicott’s ideas to explore human experiences of faith and images of the transcendent.  James Jones has highlighted the primary relationality of all human knowing—including the human project to construct images of God—existing in an interactive space analogous to transitional phenomena.80  William Meissner similarly located religious faith, including God-representations and the use of religious symbols, and the experience of prayer, in Winnicott’s “potential space,”81 in which “the experience of faith…is neither exclusively subjective nor wholly objective by reason of its own intentionality; rather, it is a realm in which both the subjective and objective poles of experience contribute to the substance of belief.”82  The child simultaneously finds and experiences him- or herself to be creating the provisions of faith as it is provided by family and community.

       Meissner’s observation that religious objects are “the vehicles for the expression of meanings and values that transcend their physical characteristics”83 is important in countering Freud’s critiques of religion’s tendency to collapse symbols into concrete objects.  What Freud viewed as a totem or fetish, we might, with Meissner, more accurately identify from within religious tradition as an idol.  Just as in Eastern Orthodox tradition an icon is intended as a “window” into the divine, and not as something to be worshipped in itself, religious symbols participate in the transitional space between the inner world of fantasy, dreams, and images, and the external world of separate reality.

       Winnicott and object relations theorists have not attempted to solve the question of God’s existence.  But they make room for the dialogue between psychology and religion by relocating the mystery of human experiences of transcendence from the realm of searching for empirical answers to the realm of relationality.  They invite us to “stand in the spaces”84 between inner certainty (which actually belongs to internal fantasy and splitting), and external “truth.”  Just as Jung found in Christ an archetypal symbol for the Self, object relations theorists have also perceived Christ as a symbol of the object that is destroyed by human aggression, yet paradoxically survives as a genuine object of love.85 God-in-Christ neither retaliates nor abandons humankind—but on the contrary, by being destroyed, lives to become the very means of forgiveness and redemption.  Dodi Goldman also finds in the contemplative religious tradition an analogy with the child’s sense of safety with the “good-enough” mother: “The capacity to be alone in the felt presence of the mother parallels the traditional idea of the Presence of God as being both intimate and ultimate.”86

       Good-evil, all-or-nothing fights about absolute truth belong to Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position,” in which one identifies with the good and projects the bad onto external objects.  Holding a “depressive position” toward religion itself, relinquishing the twin illusions of perfection and certainty, frees us to recognize the ambiguities and unresolvable questions that faith poses.

       Regarding God from the transitional space of our own simultaneous knowing/not-knowing, we are thus able to enter into a space of holy imagination—a sacred space in which we experience God through relating with other human beings.  God is both like us and not like us as we simultaneously create and discover God through our ineractions, ethical dilemmas, and inevitable conflicts with other people—perhaps especially those who are least “like us.”  God is thus encountered as the “uncanny,” the strange, and the unhomelike—as in Rudolf Otto’s description of numinous experience, the Holy as “mysterium tremendens.”87  It is not surprising, then, that in our Judaeo-Christian tradition God is allied with the stranger, the sojourner, the one(s) we ourselves oppress, this discovery becomes transformed into an ethical call for justice, to meet and love the stranger as/who is ourselves.88

Pastoral Psychotherapy: Faith Seeking Understanding

What are the implications of this practice of holy imagination for pastoral psychotherapy?  Wilfred  Bion, in his summary of psychoanalytic practice theory, located psychoanalysis at the intersection of “the medical and the religious.”89  By “religious” Bion was not referring to organized religion or theology, but was noting the dimension of the ineffable and the poetic in psychoanalysis, and its engagement with the deep human questions of existence.90  From Freud’s correspondent, the Swiss Pastor Oskar Pfister onward, religious therapists and ordained clergy have not only embraced psychodynamic theory, but have made major contributions as psychoanalysts.91  Anton Boisen’s Exploration of the Inner World was a foundational work for pastoral theology, in which Boisen’s own experience as a mental patient in mid-20th century America prompted him to advocate for the integration of a humanistic, religious perspective into the treatment of mental illness, and regarding the patient as the primary textbook for psychotherapy: “the living human document.”92

More recent analytic writers have also explored the concept of “faith” as it relates to therapeutic practice and a philosophy or psychoanalytic attitude toward human growth and meaning.  Psychoanalyst Michael Eigen, whose published musings on the edges of psychosis, union and differentiation, ecstasy, and rage are some of the most thoughtful and adventurous in psychoanalytic writing,93 brought attention to “the area of faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion” in a much-discussed article in 1981,94 and more recently Marie Hoffman explored the connection between Fairbairn’s and Winnicott’s religious upbringing and milieu, and the relational turn in psychoanalytic theory.95  The broader category of spirituality has recently become a hot topic in psychoanalytic writing,96 as contemporary theorists have recognized psychoanalysis as a way of touching the ineffable, and moreover, describing the particular form of hope that underlies all psychotherapy even when formulated in the most secular terms—the faith that human beings can grow and change, and that the therapeutic relationship has something to do with the deepest questions of human meaning, purpose, and existence.

New voices have entered the dialogue between religion and psychology from multicultural and interfaith perspectives as well.97  Even the category of sin, from which psychological theorists tend to shy away, is readmitted in somewhat different language, like the “return of the repressed.”  For example, Heinz Kohut wrote a little known essay validating altruism and moral courage as something more than simply a neurotic reaction formation,98 and in an interview toward the end of his life, Kohut quoted Eugene O’Neill’s statement, “Man is broken.  He lives his life by mending.  The grace of God is the glue.”99

In a recent textbook on psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Nancy McWilliams describes this psychoanalytic sensibility as a form of “theology,”100 whose articles of faith include a commitment to authenticity and a belief in the positive power of self-knowledge.  In her summary of the “psychoanalytic sensibility,” McWilliams also draws further implications for social transformation and political justice:101

It is my deep conviction that the attitudes I have discussed—curiosity and awe, a respect for complexity, the disposition to identify empathically, the valuing of subjectivity and affect, an appreciation of attachment, and a capacity for faith—are worth cherishing not only as components of a therapeutic sensibility but also correctives to some of the more estranging and deadening aspects of contemporary [American] life.  Their opposites—intellectual passivity, opinionated reductionism, emotional distancing, objectification and apathy, personal isolation and social anomie, and existential dread—have often been lamented by scholars and social critics as the price we pay for our industrialized, consumer-oriented, and technologically sophisticated cultures.  The cultivation of the more vital attitudes that undergird the psychoanalytic sensibility just might be good for the postmodern soul whatever one’s orientation to psychotherapy.

       Freud called psychoanalysis the “impossible profession”102 If psychoanalysis was already impossible in Freud’s day, then is it plainly unthinkable to integrate it with the even more “impossible” interdisciplinary profession of pastoral psychotherapy? Yet, if psycho-therapy is at heart the healing (therapeúo) of both mind and soul (psyche), can the two vocations of pastoral helper and psychotherapist not somehow find a way to meet in in a distinctively pastoral practice?  Is it not possible to develop, borrowing a term from John McDargh, a “psychotheological perspective?”103  Our colleague Jim Jones wrote this invitation to a dialogue between psychoanalysis and theology:104

In this dialogue, theology’s role would be to take this psychoanalytic image of inherent relationality and carry it to its furthest reaches, thus connecting psychoanalysis and theology in a common exploration of human relationality and shedding light on the larger implications of a category that psychoanalysts may use unreflectively.  The theologian might help see the larger implications of the analyst’s implicit image of relationality.  The analyst might help the theologian see the unconscious themes at work in the theologian’s image of the ultimate reality.  Together, they shed light on both the depths and heights of human experience of existing as relational beings.

With this paper, I hope to generate discussion in which we can continue that dialogue, drawing from contemporary and postmodern psychoanalytic models that have been considerably elaborated in the decade since Jones made this invitation.

NOTES