Part I
This is the first in a series of 3 blog entries about psychotherapy and religion. Here, I examine the status of religion within the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I highlight the phenomenon of psychological reductionism in each of their theories and go on to discuss more generally the phenomenon of reductionism.
Part II
In the second entry, I explore the psychological reduction of religion with emphasis on the clinical context. I underscore the importance of careful mutual understanding and respect between religious and non-religious parties, recognizing there may be keen difficulties when each party feels deeply wounded by the other.
Part III
In the final entry, I expand to a view of cross-cultural understanding and communication in the contemporary context. Specifically, I address the claim of divine revelation within Islam. I explore the psychological barriers that may prevent Muslim and non-Muslim parties from genuinely understanding one another as they understand themselves.
Religion in the history of psychology: the problem of reductionism
The birth of Psychoanalysis was so compelling and controversial because it offered a new way of understanding the world. We were no longer the masters of our own house, Freud famously noted. In other words, there were unconscious forces at play that influenced our decisions without our knowing it. Freud found the royal road to an underground kingdom and gave us the keys.
The world after that moment became something else. Psychoanalysis was part a break from our historical tradition. Freud affirmed Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God. We were the new mystery, not God. The new, the scientific, the progressive, was victorious over the old, traditional, what were considered to be our highest principles.
For Freud, the unconscious was embedded in biology, were sexuality was center stage, and that was the essence of who we are. Freud advertised himself as an atheist and a man of science so as to divorce himself from the religious dimensions of his Jewish heritage
Freud thought God was an illusion that developed out of our need for a powerful father figure. Without the fiction of God, we’d be lost in a war of all against all. We needed God’s laws to establish order. The atheist was a special case—an evolved individual who good attain civility without god and through reason and science alone.
No doubt, Freud’s reading of religion took away much of its dignity. But his criticism was well intended in the service of psychotherapy. Atheism for him meant freedom from the harsh punishment the psyche unleashed upon itself. If we punish ourselves in the service of God, that is one thing. But if we punish ourselves for no reason at all, that is a whole other thing. Freud’s project was to stop the severity of the punishment we inflict on ourselves. He wanted to liberate humankind from the constraints of religion.
Jung’s departure from Freud
Perhaps the first high stakes battle in psychoanalysis was over religion and spirituality. Carl Jung, the prince of psychoanalysis ordained by Freud himself, refused to accept Freud’s reduction of religion to psychosexual conflicts. He challenged many of Freud’s assumptions in a way that freed religion from the stigma of pathology.
Jung embraced God and everything spiritual under the sun: Gnosticism, Wicca, Judaism’s Kabbalah, Buddhism, just to name a few. Religious imagery evoked from the unconscious represented a universal template for religion. For Jung, our psyches are primed for religion and it is essential to our personal development.
In Jungian psychology, religion gains its legitimacy as it is filtered through essential images from the unconscious—the psychology of archetypes. Though his model is sympathetic to religion, it ultimately leads to reductionism. God is a product of the psyche, a matter of subjectivity. For the religious orthodox, it is the other way around. The psyche is a product of God, who exists independent of humans.
In sum, Jung offers a rich wing under which many psychological and spiritually oriented individuals find a home. However, his psychology isn’t suited to those who are orthodox with respect to the scriptures of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, for instance.
Psychological reduction
Analysis is a type of reduction. It is an interpretation of a thing as broken down into its elements. A chemist understands water in terms of the elements of Hydrogen and Oxygen, not in terms of its wetness. In Freudian and Jungian analysis, the superhuman is understood exclusively in human terms.
It is useful to understand reduction in terms of “nothing but” statements. For example, Water is “nothing but” H20. The Bible is “nothing but” a product of the psyche. Love is “nothing but” a biochemical reaction. To invoke Freud again, the experience of God is “nothing but” a projection of the father.
Psychological reduction, or “nothing but” statements search for what lies beneath while dismissing what is presented at hand. You may have had experiences speaking with friends or a therapist and find you’ve developed a sense that they may be thinking, “Well that’s all fine and good, but what’s really going on?” You may have also felt from them a subtle disrespect or condescension. It is as if the listener isn’t really concerned with the content of your communication but has instead begun the process of interpreting you through an alternative lens.
In the blog entry that follows, I will examine a clinical vignette of a Catholic family where the potential for disrespect and psychological reduction is ripe as the emotional stakes are high, and the need for careful listening and mutual understanding is critical.
