Annual Meeting Papers

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Of Meaning and Meetings
in Psychoanalysis and Religion

Michael Oppenheim, Concordia University

Draft only: please do not cite without permission.

While the phenomena that scholars group together under the term “religion” have been understood in a wide variety of ways, certainly the ability to provide a meaning scheme for social and individual life is one of the most prominent features of their examinations.  This inquiry will examine the appreciation for religion by the important American post-Freudian psychoanalyst Hans Loewald as an example of how the emergence of the issue of meaning as central to psychoanalytic theory and practice has helped to open the way for a deeper understanding of religion.  At the end of the paper it will be suggested that combined with another development in some American post-Freudian streams, the focus on relationality, a path is cleared toward a mutually beneficial dialogue between post-Freudian psychoanalysis and a current of modern Jewish philosophy.

The term “meaning” takes on multiple casts in different studies of religion, and appears to be almost omnipresent in scholarly inquiries of at least the last half-century.  I hope that the following examples do more than just confirm this statement, one which it seems to me is hardly controversial, but provide some considerations of the range and overlapping concerns that coalesce around the term in the context of the study of religion.  The sociologist Peter Berger highlighted the challenge of secularism to traditional religious notions of order and meaning in his work The Sacred Canopy.  The key enterprise of society according to Berger is “world-building,” that is, imposing “a meaningful order, or nomos” upon reality (19), and religion is the power that sacralizes this order.  From a slightly different angle Berger wrote: “In all its manifestations, religion constitutes an immense projection of human meanings into the empty vastness of the universe” (100).  A more contemporary sociologist, Colin Campbell, expanded on this, describing three dimensions of the “meaningfulness” of religious systems, taken in the widest sense: a descriptive account of reality, what persons are meant to feel about the portrait of reality presented, and the reasons why things are the way they are (75-76).

The influential anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, focused on the feature of meaning in his definitions of both culture and religion. In terms of the former, he spoke of culture as: “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge and attitudes toward life” (89).  Without explicitly using the word “meaning,” Geertz more or less characterizes an understanding of it in his definition of religion: “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” (90-91).  A bit less abstractly, and more helpfully for us, Geertz sees religious symbols as responding to the “problem of meaning,” that is the “suspicion that perhaps the world, and hence man’s life in the world, has no genuine order at all - no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence” (108). They respond to this suspicion by relating “man’s sphere of existence to a wider sphere within which it is conceived to rest” (108).

The connection between religion and meaning is prominent in the work of many religious studies scholars. Jonathan Z. Smith, in Map Is Not a Territory, described the task of  the historian of religions in the following way:

What we study when we study religion is one mode of constructing worlds of meaning, worlds within which men find themselves and in which they choose to dwell.  What we study is the passion and drama of man discovering the truth of what it is to be human…Religion is the quest, within the bounds of the human, historical condition, for the power to manipulate and negotiate ones ‘situation’ so as to have ‘space’ in which to meaningfully dwell. (290-91)

Finally, in Plurality and Ambiguity, David Tracy explored the continual power of religious classics in the face of post-modern challenges.  He saw the “classics” as  addressing “the fundamental questions that are part of the very attempt to become human at all” (86).  Tracy described these questions in terms of asking about “the meaning and truth of Ultimate Reality not only as it is in itself but as it is existentially related to us” (87).  Included among those questions addressing our shared limit situations were:

questions provoked by radical contingency and mortality; questions evoked by the transience of all things human; questions attendant upon an acknowledgement of the historical and social contingency of all the values embraced and all the convictions lived by; the question of suffering…; the question of the meaning of that ennui that can erupt into a pervasive anxiety, even terror…at certain moments…; the question of why we sense some responsibility to live an ethical life…; …the question of the need to understand what possible meaning might be present in the profound love and joy we experience; the question of why I possess a fundamental trust…that allows me to go on…; the questions provoked by the sense that in every act of resistance some strange and unnameable hope, however inchoate, betrays itself. (86-87)

Despite the diverse suggestions coming from scholars in these different disciplines, there are some “resemblances” shared by the “family.”  Meaning in the context of religion refers to something that has both social and individual dimensions and is expressed through symbols.  It points to a general order of existence, which includes a moral aspect. The portrait of reality is not just objective, but concerns the individual’s particular place in this order. The meaning provided is able to elicit powerful passions, moods and motivations.  It is drawn upon particularly when the individual faces limit situations or crises in the face of events such as suffering and death.

     The significant changes in the ways that many psychoanalysts have come to view religion are concomitant with wider post-Freudian transformations – especially in British and American schools – in the last half-century or so. While there is some disagreement about the identification and description of these developments, there is a general consensus about their nature.1 Critics point to what can be seen as four overlapping shifts in psychoanalytic theory and practice: from drive theory to object relations and the interpersonal; from the focus on the Oedipal dynamic to the mother-infant dyad; from analysis as objective and neutral to analysis as an interpersonal meeting where shared events occur and shared meanings are generated; from psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline to psychoanalysis as a hermeneutical activity that offers a variety of narratives.  Although a number of these changes have had some influence on the general reevaluation of religion, it is primarily the last two enumerated that will be discussed here.

Freud creatively utilized perspectives, stories, and metaphors from many disciplines and areas in contributing to his psychoanalytic portrayal of human behavior, but his model of what it meant to investigate and understand mental life was taken from science, and especially a nineteenth century view of it.  In his “Some Elementary Lessons in Psychoanalysis” of 1938, he speaks of psychoanalysis as a “natural science” (cited in Loewald, 1978: 7).2 He deeply admired the worlds uncovered by Newton and Darwin, which together evoked a strongly positivistic view of reality.3  Both the world “out there” and “within” was constituted by set facts that may have been deeply elusive, but were at least partially available through scientifically disciplined persistence. In terms of this background, two fundamental concerns for psychoanalysis in Freud’s view were the description of the basic processes of mental life, metapsychology, and the identification and especially the investigation of the origin and development of the psychic illnessness of his patients, psychopathology. The first was ultimately described in terms of the instincts/drives and their structures (id, ego, superego), and the latter was told against the background of his psychosexual stages from infancy through adolescence.

In terms of religion, since neither the gods nor the monotheistic, patriarchal God partook of this circumscribed “reality” - as Laplace put it well, the God-hypothesis was not needed in this account ("Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là") - Freud was left, or free, to label religion as an “illusion.” The processes behind this projection and behavior were correspondingly described, much as dreams, in terms of wish-fulfillment, and obsessional neurosis.  Put in another way, religion was a symptom of human’s mental immaturity, the need for parental protection from the existential challenges to life: suffering, instinctual privation, death.  From Civilization and its Discontents: “Its [religion’s] technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner” and thus, keeping its practitioners “in a state of psychical infantilism”  (1961, 31-32).

It is not a change concerning the ontological status of the gods, as it were, that characterizes many later post-Freudian directions, but a different view of humans and, correspondingly, the psychoanalytic enterprise. Actually, the hermeneutical turn, as it were, characterizes a whole sea-change affecting scholarly work in all the social sciences and humanities. Tracy observed this “present interest across the disciplines in hermeneutics” (10), and attributed it to a crisis in the West in appropriating earlier foundational traditions and texts that are now experienced as profoundly riddled with “plurality and ambiguity” (8).  More widely, Tracy argues that interpretation is a necessary platform for such quintessential activities as “experience, understanding, deliberation, judgment, decision, and action,” for “to be human is to be a skilled interpreter” (9).  While Tracy ties hermeneutics to the quest for “meaningful action” (9), the focus on meaning includes all of those human activities noted above.

For many psychoanalytic theorists, there was a shift from seeing humans in terms of drives to see them in terms of constructing lives of meaning, as well as oriented towards objects/others. Meaning-making itself has come to be seen as a fundamental human activity. As one critic, Anthony Elliott, stated it, “the psyche is the launching pad from which people make meaning” (7).  This understanding has become so prominent that Freud’s legacy has been reformulated by Elliott, not without some justification, as: “Freud compels us to question, to endeavour to reflect upon, the construction of meaning – representations, ideas, affects, desires – and the mode of subjectivity implicated in the fabrication of signification” (7).

Still, the new hermeneutical paradigm has distanced many analysts from part of the Freudian legacy.  Instead of uncovering the structures of the mind and the repressed past of the patient, the various schools and streams are now seen as constructing alternative models of thinking and acting. As Stephen Mitchell saw it: “The analytic method is not archeological and reconstructive; it does not simply expose what is there.  Rather, it is constructive and synthetic; it organizes whatever is there into patterns it itself supplies” (1993, 56).

Speaking from within the same broad relational stream of post-Freudian psychoanalysts, Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris see “the core activity of psychoanalytic work” once again as “meaning making” (Aron, ed., 311), and Karlen Lyons-Ruth writes about the patient and therapist working together to deconstruct old, limited meanings and “constructing more integrated, flexible, and hopeful ways of making meaning and being together” (Aron, ed., 342). Finally, Mitchell summarizes well the shift within psychoanalytic practice:

What the patient needs is not a rational reworking of unconscious infantile fantasies…(but) revitalization and expansion of his own capacity to generate experience that feels, real, meaningful, and valuable. (1993, 24)

[Adding that] The term meaningful here refers to a sense of personal value, importance, and devotion. (1993, 234)

The word “meaning” has a precise use and plays a very important role in Hans Loewald’s thought.  He holds that the earliest experiences of the infant constitute the base of mental activity and are in various ways repeated in later, especially intense, relationships with others.  Borrowing and adapting terms from Freud, Loewald labels the infantile and foundational psychic operations as “primary process” activity.4  The primary process is unconscious and primitive, “unitary, non-differentiating, non-discriminating between various elements or components of a global event or experience” (2000, 196).  What have been described as higher mental operations constitute Loewald’s “secondary process” mentation.  Here “duality and multiplicity are dominant, i.e. differentiation, division, a splitting of what was unitary, global, unstructured oneness” (2000, 196). These mental operations and behavior are ascribed by Loewald to the preconscious, his term is “conscient” processes (1978, 16), which is more than just ways of operation susceptible to conscious direction, but are characterized by processes that utilize distinctions, relations, self-reflection, and, ultimately, responsibility.  Engagements with others and the environment that presume some differentiation, that is separation and distance, between selves or between the self and the world are secondary process.  This is the realm of rationality, the abstract, of those positions that we normally label as “objective.”  Both processes play roles in our everyday activities, although one or the other may be dominant, in shifting constellations.

For Loewald, health and meaning arise from the creative interweaving of the two processes, of these two ways of addressing the world.  In his words:

It is this interplay between unconscious and consciousness, between past and present, between the intense density of undifferentiated, inarticulate experience and the lucidity of conscious articulate experience, that gives meaning to our life. Without such meaning-giving play we have no future of our own. Perhaps what we call man’s symbolizing activity is that play” (1978, 49-50).

Loewald titles the third part of his famous Freud lectures at Yale University, “Comments on Religious Experience.” The connections between psychoanalytic concerns and religion, via the shared focus on meaning, are elaborated in two ways. In his words:

some aspects of religious experience are related to unconscious mental processes.  Other aspects of religious life and thought can be approached by interpreting them in terms of the emergent dialectic between unconscious and conscient mentation, roughly speaking, between the irrational and the rational” (1978, 57). 

The first connection, which has been explored in a number of articles by James Jones,5 points to the similarity between the realm of primary process mentation and “mystical and other timeless experiences” (1978, 76).  In both, there is what may be called “an experience of eternity” (1978, 62).  It is the experience of a moment not of chronological or “objective” time, but of an instant of fullness.  Here the total discrete elements of the life-history of the individual are condensed into this transient experience; with nothing lost.  This may occur as one is taken up in some powerful memories.  He writes: “these experiences take on a prototypical significance, as though they easily might stand for all experience, as though in them could be represented or fulfilled the essence, the sum total of our life, in archetypal form” (1978, 66).  Through these events one gets in touch with the meaning of one’s life; again in his words: “As experience augments and grows in an individual’s life course, these instants…contain more and more meaning which is poured into the nunc stans” (1978, 65).  Thus, in this first instance, the psychoanalytic study of the unconscious highlights a particular type of experience of meaning, which is similar to the timeless oneness reported by mystics. It is in terms of this aspect that Loewald evokes Freud’s reference to Romain Rolland and the “oceanic feeling” (1978, 58).

For me, it is the second dimension that Loewald discusses that ties religion and psychoanalysis together in a most profound way.  Above it was noted that he held that “religious life and thought can be approached by interpreting them in terms of the emergent dialectic between unconscious and conscient mentation” (1978, 57).  Or, at the end of his Lectures he writes: “And the dialectic of id and ego/superego can be understood as paralleling the philosophical-theological or religious dialectic of eternity and temporality” (1978, 77). In religious terms this is the reflection and articulation (secondary process) of experiences of “eternity” (primary process), as well as the incorporating into one’s everyday life or “temporality” (secondary process) the feeling and significance that was experienced in these undifferentiated instants (primary process).  We saw before that it was in the context of this “dialectic” that Loewald wrote about meaning.

In light the significance that Loewald attributes to religious experience, reflection and life, toward the end of the lectures he speaks of the need for psychoanalysis to revise its traditional negative evaluation of religious experience; “we may be at the point where psychoanalysis can begin to contribute in its own way to the understanding of religious experience, instead of ignoring or rejecting its genuine validity or treating it as a mark of human immaturity” (1978, 73). Loewald’s protest again Freud’s standpoint, which he characterized in this case as “narrow and biased” (1978, 6), is clear.

There is a legitimate question of whether one can utilize Loewald’s very distinctive notions of meaning to illustrate the wider appreciation for religion by some post-Freudian psychoanalysts.  What are the referents and contexts for Loewald’s use of the term?  Meaning refers to both a distinctive psychic process, this dialectic, and more broadly to an overall psychic organization characterized by integration, wholeness, comprehensiveness and articulation (1978, 21), as well as responsibility.  One of the Lectures, “Man as Moral Agent” focuses on this last feature, that effort “to own up to our own history, to be responsible for our unconscious” (1978, 21). Loewald sees as dangerous the exclusive reliance on or dominance of either primary process, in psychosis, or secondary process, leading to neuroses. Meaning also is fashioned in a particular experience.  In this experience the everyday ego is – is it proper to say? – transcended. The individual’s whole life is “poured” into one moment out of time.  The meaning, however, is inexpressible.  While this last, experiential context for the term “meaning,” is probably distinctive to Loewald, at least within the post-Freudian stream, the discussion in terms of psychic processes and organization characterized by integration, wholeness, comprehensiveness, articulation, and responsibility is shared by many psychoanalytic theorists.

At this time I would like to follow another rich vein in Loewald’s reflections that has many parallels within psychoanalysis.  This is the connection between meaning and relationality, that is all of the different levels of the meeting of subjectivities/persons. Recounting some features of Loewald’s reflections that highlight relationality, meaning arises from contact in the experience of the nunc stans with primary process mentation, and through the continual dialectic - what he terms “transference” (1978, 27) - between primary and secondary processes.  We also saw that primary process activity is the individuation into, as it were, the infant of the many-leveled processes of the mother-infant matrix.  In addition, the mother’s continual interactions and anticipations lead to the emergence of secondary process mentation, the infant’s first sense of self and of its own mind.  Further, secondary process reflection is itself depicted as a “cons-cire, a knowing-together…the internalization of an interplay originally occurring between the infant and his or her primary caretaker, mostly the mother, and then recurring in many other relationships” (1978, 13). Finally, in analysis it is this dialectic that the analyst helps the patient to achieve, in order to live-out a life of meaning and “responsibility”  (1978, 21).  In Loewald’s words, the analyst’s:

interpretation…brings the unconscious memory, reproduced in the here-and-now, into the context and on to the level of conscious thought. Under favorable circumstances, it enables the patient to connect or reconnect the two levels of mentation, to make the restructuring of the experience his own. (1978, 20-21)

 Many theorists within the relational stream see the emergence of meaning as arising from various types of human interaction or “meetings,” which is particularly clear in Stephen Mitchell’s work. Mitchell believes that all experiences are interpersonally mediated and that; “The meanings generated by the self are all interactive products” (1993, 125).  The particular focus on meaning in terms of a relational view of analysis is well elucidated by Lewis Aron:

Meaning, in the analytic situation, is not generated by the analyst’s rational (secondary) processing of the analysand’s associations; rather, meaning is seen as relative, multiple, and indeterminate, with each interpretation subject to continual and unending interpretation by both analyst and analysand. Meaning is generated relationally and dialogically, which is to say that meaning is negotiated and coconstructed. Meaning is arrived at through “a meeting of minds.” (1996, xii)

In relating meaning construction to the interpersonal, a way is opened to compare these psychoanalytic developments with the reflections of a significant stream of modern Jewish philosophy, those philosophers of encounter: Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas.  All three believed that religion6 provides meaning or orientation and insisted that this is not self-generated, but arises or is revealed through meetings between “persons.”  A brief examination of these thinkers will provide a glimpse of how a significant group of modern Jewish philosophers feature the creation of meaning as the product of the interhuman.

For Buber, others have a central place in every narrative of a life.  In I and Thou he insisted that it was impossible to speak of a single person in isolation, that is; “There is no I as such” (1970, 54) outside of relation.  To become an authentic self, an “I” or “person” one must have significant relations with others. In his words: “Man becomes an I through a Thou”7 (1970, 80), and “Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons” (1970, 112).  Rosenzweig sees the quintessential relationship to another in terms of the love for the neighbor that both brings the development of the self to fruition and provides direction into the world.  The Star of Redemption affirms that with the commandment to love the neighbor, the “soul declared grown-up…[can now] go out and travel through the world” (221).  With Levinas, the authentic interhuman is the realm of ethics.  For him, one comes to be, one is born, through “serving” the other.  In Totality and Infinity he writes: “The accomplishing of the I qua I and morality constitute one sole and same process in being…[coming] to birth…[in] serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan” (1969, 245).

Of course, there is an important transcendent feature in their discussions. In particular, the transcendent is portrayed as person; what Buber refers to as the “absolute person” (1970, 181).8  The God-relationship, for Buber, fulfills or completes all other truly defining relationships - that is, the realm of the I-Thou.  He writes that the inner power in each person to turn toward another, that is, “the innate Thou…attains perfection solely in the immediate relationship to the Thou [God] that in accordance with its nature cannot become an It” (1970, 123).  Rosenzweig holds that to be able to transcend self-concern, including the fixation on death, and thus to become fully human, God must first transform the self.  Thus, we find that it is: “in the fact that he loves us, and awakens our dead Self” that the individual emerges to that status of “beloved soul that loves in return” (2000, 403).  A common theme in Levinas’ writings is that the self is upheld or confirmed by standing before God’s judgment in the context of the relation to the other.  In his terms: “To place oneself under the judgment of God is to exalt the [one’s] subjectivity…The judgment of God that judges me at the same time confirms me” (1969, 246).

These brief allusions to the interhuman allow us to examine the Jewish philosophers’ understanding of meaning.  Buber sees meaning as the outgrowth or, alternatively, the gift of relationships, both human and divine.  In terms of the former, he once powerfully expressed this insight: “What do we expect when we are in despair yet go to a man?  Surely, a presence by means of which we are told that nevertheless there is meaning” (1965, 14).  Buber’s classic statement about revelation, which for him is an ever-present possibility, and meaning is found in the third section of I and Thou. In discussing the main features of revelation, he writes:

the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless...It does not wish to be interpreted by us - for that we lack the ability…The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of his being and in the uniqueness of his life. (1970, 158-59)

Rosenzweig took an epigram of his friend, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, “Revelation is orientation,” as the foundation for his understanding of the impact of revelation; that it brings “an absolute symbolic ordering to history” (in Rosenstock-Huessy, 161).   Revelation provides a sense of where one stands, as an individual and within community, as well as a direction, which, again is into the world, loving the neighbor - the one who appears next-to one. For Levinas it is the neighbor who introduces meaning into life.  There may be various traces of the divine in Her ethical height, but there are no direct relations with the divine that bestow meaning.  Additionally, the topic of death is sometimes brought up in the treatment of meaning with Levinas, as it is with the other two philosophers.  He writes:

The [authentic] approach, inasmuch as it is a sacrifice, confers a sense on death…In it life is no longer measured by being, and death no longer introduces the absurd into it…we can have responsibilities and attachments through which death takes on a meaning. (1981, 129)

     What is being referred to through the uses of the terms “meaning” and “meeting” in these discourses of psychoanalysis and Jewish philosophy, or; “Of Meanings and Meetings in Psychoanalysis and Religion”?

     The word “meaning” as is the case with the word “meeting,” is equivocal in the two discourses, or showing difference in similarity and similarity in difference.  Initially, I would suggest that in psychoanalysis meaning refers to an overall psychic organization characterized by integration, wholeness, comprehensiveness and articulation, as well as responsibility. Patients, as Mitchell finds and as we saw, seek a “revitalization and expansion” of their capacities to “generate experience that feels, real, meaningful, and valuable” (1993, 24).  Lives that are meaningful correspond to ways of living and, particularly, relationships that feel powerful, responsible, of value, authentic.9

     To what does meaning refer in the Jewish narratives?  Meaning, although itself inexpressible through a formula has constituents.  It is probably first about responsibility for the other, for the neighbor.  A life has meaning when there is a sense of direction,  built upon a recognition of where one stands in terms of one’s biography and one’s wider community.  Meaning arises out of a trust that one’s life and, thus necessarily, all of life has purpose and coherence, grounded in the transcendent - what Rosenzweig, in a prophetic allusion, speaks of as “to walk humbly with your God” (447). Even death, while not evaded or ignored, does not destroy life’s meaning.  For example, at the heart of the Star stands Rosenzweig’s reference to the biblical Song of Songs, “Love…is as strong as death” (217).

     Meetings in psychoanalysis are intrasubjective and intersubjective; taking place, as it were, on the plane of the unconscious and conscious; of past, present, pointing to future.10 In some sense, the term “transference,” which for Loewald evoked the term “love,” coalescences or crystallizes all of these dimensions of meetings.11 For the Jewish philosophers meetings occur between an “I” and “Thou” or an individual and her/his neighbor in the everyday world as well as within communities.  Grounded on past meetings, one is obligated to those in the present and future, and in all three cases there is both a human and transcendent referent – the commandments are to love both God and the neighbor, that in ways cannot be fully untangled. The interhuman is the major instrument for the encounter with the divine, or in Levinas’ words, it is the context within which “God comes to mind” (1998).

     Despite these significant differences, what might it be suggested that they share? Psychoanalysis and Jewish philosophy, as we have diagramed them, are two discourses concerning meetings or love.  Paraphrasing Rosenzweig, they may be said to proffer the view that “meaning is as strong as love.”12

Works Cited

NOTES