Discussion question: Discuss whether the film “Jesus Camp” depicts any aspects of mature or immature religious participation using either Freud’s views about religious ideas from Lesson 1 or Jones’ criteria presented in Lesson 2. Lesson： Introduction to the Course Let's begin our course with an excerpt from a session with a psychologist: The client is well-dressed and articulate but strangely disheveled. It is clear he has been under lots of stress recently. He seems calm but sits on the edge of his chair like a man on a mission. The psychologist listens attentively as she does her intake evaluation. "So you have been seeing and hearing some things you are not sure about?" she asks. "Well, they seemed real enough to me. Sometimes I think they weren't real, but now I just don't know. They were pretty strange, at least," answers the client, shaking his head. His voice rises a little with the emotional stress, and he adjusts himself in his seat. "Could you describe them to me?" "There was the bush I saw in the desert that looked like it was on fire, but there was no smoke. I felt the heat and saw the flames flickering, but it never burned up. And of course, there was the voice of God." "What did the voice say?" "It gave me commandments and told me that I should lead my people to the Promised Land." "I see," said the psychologist with a compassionate tone. She makes some quick notes: auditory and visual hallucinations, referential ideation, delusions of grandeur, magical thinking. "Could you tell me something about your childhood?" she continues. "Well, I never knew my mother or father. You see, I was left when I was an infant. From the story I heard, they put me in the reeds by the river. I was adopted by the Pharaoh's family . . ." As he continues his story, the psychologist makes more notes: early parental abandonment, severe disruption of attachment. "No wonder this poor fellow thinks he has been chosen by God to lead his people," she thinks to herself. "Since his break with reality was relatively acute, perhaps there is something we can do here for Mr. Moses." She notes to herself as he provides other details, Probable diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia, subchronic, DSM code: 295.31. But then, his functioning is not particularly impaired. Perhaps Atypical psychosis: 298.90. From "Introduction to Transpersonal Psychology," by John Davis In Davies' fictional account of Moses's psychological assessment, his psychologist, using categories from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM), has determined that he has a psychiatric disorder, or a "psychopathology"—a term that literally means mental suffering and refers in common clinical practice to any deviation from what is considered normal mental health. (Clinicians too may have vastly different opinions about what they consider to be normal and pathological). She will likely suggest some antipsychotic medication for Moses and get him into long term therapy to address his thought disorders. In doing so, she would be following in the footsteps of many psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts who have tended to "pathologize" the religious beliefs and practices of their patients, that is, to see religion as contributing to and/or arising from some psychological disorder. There is a counter-trend, however, in the mental health professions. Rather than rejecting religion categorically as regressive and pathological, these others have tried to come up with criteria by which to determine when one's religious belief or practice is indeed evidence of some pathology and when it is not. So with our patient Moses, those from this counter-trend may not be so quick to pathologize him. From their perspective there is nothing inherently beneficial or pathological about religion. Any religion can be used on one hand to foster growth, wholeness, integration, transformation, and so forth, but it can also be used defensively and may indeed be an indication of psychopathology. The aim of this course is to see how various psychoanalytic thinkers have tried to tell the difference. We begin in this Lesson by looking at the view of religion presented by Sigmund Freud, who is the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud is part of the tradition of those who have rejected religion as pathological. Indeed his ideas are largely responsible for what for many health professionals was and still is accepted practice of dismissing religion. The remaining Lessons will be devoted to those psychoanalysts who are part of this counter-trend. Throughout this course we will keep in mind the complexity of our subject matter: the psychology of people who are religious. No one has direct access into the mind of another. We can therefore only offer interpretations about the psychology of religious participants based on their words and behaviours. As we read of the many ways different theorists have interpreted religion in psychological terms and then learn to apply these interpretations ourselves, we will be mindful that they must be held provisionally. Introduction to Freud Sigmund Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis, which is both a clinical treatment for neurotic suffering as well as a theory of human nature and culture. The focus of Freud's psychoanalysis is the unconscious mind and its contents, how this unconscious material leads to suffering, and how psychoanalytic treatment can relieve this suffering. Although there are now many different schools of psychoanalysis, all schools recognize their heritage in Freud, even if they have an understanding of psychoanalysis considerably different from its founder. I would like to present now some of Freud's key ideas, not only so we can understand his views on religion, but also so we can see how later theorists of religion developed, modified, and challenged some of his foundational views. Freud was born in Freiberg in Moravia on May 6, 1856 and he died in London on September 23, 1939. He moved to Vienna when he as 3 and lived there until the end of his life when in 1938 he moved to London after Hitler invaded Austria. As a boy, young Freud was hard-working and intellectually precocious. He was certain that he was destined to make an important contribution to knowledge. In 1873, he began medical school and he graduated in 1881. He was made a lecturer in neuropathology at the University of Vienna in 1885. That same year he went to Paris for 5 months to work with the great neurologist, Charcot. It was Charcot's work with "hysteria" that sparked Freud's interest in neurosis. Neurosis, for Freud, was a particular kind of suffering resulting from psychic conflicts, as we will see below. His first psychoanalytic publication, which he wrote with Joseph Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, appeared in 1895 when he was 39. In this book, Freud and Breuer came to the conclusion that hysterics suffer from unpleasant reminiscences. Hysteria, in their view, was caused by split-off memories and the feelings associated with them. While these memories and feelings were split-off from the person's awareness, they nevertheless would appear in the form of hysterical symptoms. Why were these memories and experiences split-off from consciousness? Freud's answer was that the content of these memories and feelings were deeply troubling and unacceptable to the person's conscious mind. Because these memories were not easily accessible, Freud came to the conclusion that there must be some mechanism that tries to banish them from awareness. He concluded that these memories had been repressed and thus repression became a critical building block of Freud's new and developing theory. From the beginning of psychoanalysis to the end of his life, Freud saw the psyche as inherently conflictual. In these early days, Freud believed that his hysterical patients experienced a conflict between an affect wanting to be conscious and the mechanism of repression. We might think of it as the self keeping secrets from the self. The disowned affect, however, was manifest in neurotic symptoms including physical symptoms. Based on his study of 18 cases of hysteria, Freud concluded that hysterical symptoms were manifestations of early trauma and the root of all trauma was premature sexual experience. He later expanded this idea and thought trauma can come not only from external events but also from endogenously arising sexual drives. In other words, he thought it was possible that the child's sexual fantasies could also be experienced as traumatic and unacceptable and therefore subject to repression resulting in neurotic symptoms. Over the next 10 years, Freud unpacked and developed this seminal idea into a creative intellectual outpouring. He also fashioned a clinical treatment designed to relieve patients of suffering arising from inner conflicts. This controversial notion of infantile sexuality emerged in Freud's thinking in 1897, right at the beginning of his development of psychoanalytic theory. Based on his observation of his clinical data as well as his own self-analysis, Freud was convinced that intense and conflictual sexual fantasies mark the childhood of every single person. Infantile sexuality is universal, Freud thought, and is based on an instinctual drive. Thus his drive theory became another critical building block for his psychoanalytic system. The mind, he proposed, deals with stimuli by controlling and if need be discharging it. The internal stimulus is principally the libido, which Freud considered sexual in nature. These sexual instincts manifest in tensions in different parts of the body. If it is manifest for example in the mouth, the infant will experience the need to suck. The breast then becomes the object that satisfies the aim of this particular manifestation of the sexual instinct. Freud thought that the growing child moves through a series psychosexual stages: the oral, anal, phallic and genital. In each stage, the particular body part becomes the zone around which the child's "libidinal," that is sexual, energies are focussed. The task of the growing child is to make it through the trials of each psychosexual stage. Freud believed that neurotic suffering in his adult patients could be traced back to childhood difficulties with navigating through one or several psychosexual stages. According to Freud's theory, for instance, an excessively tidy person would likely be found to be particularly defended against anal erotic impulses while excessively messy people might be understood by Freud as always looking for ways to satisfy these same impulses. Freud's first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900. Dreams, he thought, were the disguised fulfilment of repressed wishes from childhood. When we sleep our defences that keep forbidden wishes from our conscious mind are not as strong and the wish appears but in disguised form so as not to disturb our sleep. The bizarre images and events of our dreams are precisely these disguised wishes. He distinguished between the manifest content---what the dreamer said she dreamt, and the latent content---the true, hidden meaning. He thought of dreams as the "royal road (i.e., most direct road) to the unconscious," and the interpretation of dreams became one of his main analytic tools. The principal building block of classical psychoanalysis is what Freud called the "Oedipus complex," an experience that he thought was universal. The oedipal drama in the life of every person marks the pinnacle of the child's psychosexual development, making the Oedipus complex the centerpiece of Freud's theory. He named it after Sophocles' play "Oedipus Rex," for he felt that this universal human experience is portrayed in the life of the play's main character, Oedipus. Freud developed the idea of the Oedipus complex from his own self-analysis where he saw that as a child he was in love with his mother and jealous of his father. He then developed his ideas of what he felt was this universal event of childhood. His formulation is as follows: once the child reached the genital stage of psychosexual development around the age of 5 of 6, the child's libido is aimed at having intercourse with the parent of the opposite sex and the parent of the same sex is now seen as a contender. Freud's presentation of the Oedipus complex centres around the experience of the little boy. The boy, he thought, eventually renounces his plan to possess the mother and destroy his father when he fears that his father will retaliate with castration. The boy eventually gives up hope of sexual union with his mother, identifies with his father, and turns his attention to securing satisfying sexual relations with other females. Although Freud tried, he had a difficult time articulating just how this same process would play out in the lives of little girls. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, important challenges to and modifications of psychoanalytic theory have come from theorists who have paid particular attention to the experience of females, a part of human experience that Freud often overlooked or was not able to capture well in his theory. We will see as the course progresses how this missing female element becomes the central feature of a number of different conceptions of psychoanalysis. In the very early days of psychoanalysis, Freud used hypnosis as a main clinical technique. He then stopped using hypnosis and developed what he called "free association." He had his patients recline on a couch and he sat out of sight behind them. Freud instructed his patients to put into words, without censor, whatever thoughts or fantasies spontaneously occurred to them. Using an analogy, he told them to imagine they are on a train watching the changing scenery and reporting what they see to a person sitting next to them. Freud then listened carefully to this stream of consciousness in order to be able to hear these secrets his patients kept from themselves. He would then point out these hidden meanings to the patient as well as the ways they defend themselves from such awareness. Click here, and then go to the link for "House, couch and study" to see a photograph of the couch in Freud's office with Freud's chair behind it. You might also enjoy looking at the other series of photographs on this page. In his clinical work, Freud began to notice that his patients were developing very strong feelings towards him such as longing, love, and hate. Freud called the patient's thoughts, feelings, and fantasies about the therapist the "transference." In the transference, the patient "transfers" on to the analyst attitudes that belong to previous people in the patient's life, and especially the patient's parents. But Freud's patients typically did not speak directly about their strong feelings for him. Nevertheless he suspected he was hearing evidence of these hidden feelings in the things his patients were saying and doing. While he initially thought of the transference as an annoyance and obstacle to his psychoanalytic treatment, he later came to see the transference as the most important aspect of the analysis. Freud felt that it was in the analysis of the transference, that is, the uncovering of the feelings the patient had for the analyst, that the patient would be cured of his or her neurotic suffering. Thus the analysis of the transference became the principal focus of his clinical work. During the 1920s, Freud revised his ideas extensively. His earliest model of the psyche, coming out of his studies of neurosis, led him to posit a psyche consisting of the conscious mind (what we are aware of), the preconscious (acceptable ideas and feelings that are able to become conscious), and the unconscious mind (the thoughts and feelings that are unacceptable and out of awareness). Then in the 1920s he developed a new model where he proposed that the psyche is composed of the id, ego, and super-ego. The id consists of our raw energies and impulses; the ego employs a number of functions to control these impulses; and the superego is comprised of internalized cultural expectations and ethical ideals from parents and society. His initial model captures his idea that psychic conflict takes place between the conscious and unconscious mind. His revised model shows that conflict takes place within the unconscious mind itself between the id, ego, and superego. This new model he felt was a more accurate description of how the mind works. Not only were the secret wishes (id) unconscious, but part of the ego, namely the ego defences that kept these wishes from the conscious mind, were also unconscious. Now Freud could explain why his patients were not only unaware of their forbidden wishes, but also why they didn't know that they were keeping them hidden. In this period he also came to see that the aggressive drive was equally as important as sexuality and he saw all life as the interplay of these two instincts of sex and aggression. In sum, psychoanalysis, as Freud conceived of it, is an instinct or drive theory. It is concerned with how a person finds or fails to find ways to discharge their drives. Freud overall tried to show how individuals and cultures are mobilized and at times controlled unconsciously by these drives. He was a pioneer and his ideas on the extraordinary complexity of our minds have had and continue to have an enormous impact on how we look at ourselves. While many of his ideas are controversial and have been hotly debated and sometimes vehemently rejected, his notions that we are all creating and participating in meanings, many of which we are not even faintly aware and many of which can lead to suffering, has come to be a common way to understand human nature and suffering. This is Freud's legacy and each theorist whom we will study has been influenced by this view of human nature even though they may differ on just what these meanings are, how they are created, how they contribute to suffering, and how we might get relief from this suffering. Clickhere to hear a brief audio clip of Freud speaking on the BBC. Under the clip there's a transcript of what Freud is saying. And here are some video clips of Freud late in his life: Freud and Religion While Freud was raised by Jewish parents and received formal religious instruction as a child, he came to reject the religious aspect of his Jewish heritage and considered himself atheist. Despite his rejection of and even hostility towards religion, he remained fascinated by it throughout his life and wrote several psychoanalytic studies of different aspects of religion. In his earliest paper on religion, "Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices" written in 1907, Freud notes the parallels between the obsessive ceremonies of neurotics and religious rituals. He asks us to consider a case of what he calls "the bed ceremonial": the chair must stand in a particular place beside the bed; the clothes must lie upon it folded in a particular order; the blanket must be tucked in at the bottom and the sheet smoothed out; the pillows must be arranged in such and such a manner, and the subject's own body must lie in a precisely defined position. Only after all this may he go to sleep. Thus in slight cases the ceremonial seems to be no more than an exaggeration of an orderly procedure that is customary and justifiable; but the special conscientiousness with which it is carried out and the anxiety which follows upon its neglect stamp the ceremonial as a "sacred act." (Freud vol. 13, p. 32) He underscores what for him are the similarities between these sorts of ceremonies of neurotics and religious rituals. Both 1) produce anxiety and guilt if they are not performed; 2) are carried out in isolation from other activities and cannot be interrupted; and 3) are done with meticulous attention to detail. Based on his clinical observations, Freud thought that the obsessive rituals of neurotics arise from the repression of sexual impulses and the ceremony serves as a defence against committing the forbidden act. Likewise, Freud felt that religion is based on the repression of instinctual impulses. Because of these common features, Freud concludes that religion is a universal obsessional neurosis and neurosis is individual religiosity. In 1913, Freud completed a much longer study called "Totem and Taboo." Here Freud set out to explain two prohibitions of the so-called "primitive" people: 1. the totem (a symbol, usually an animal, of the tribe's ancestry) must not be killed; 2. sexual relations between members of the same clan are forbidden. Freud was struck by the similarities between these two prohibitions of totemism and the two aspects of the Oedipus complex: the boy's desire to possess the mother sexually and murder his rival, his father. But now Freud had another question that needed an answer: what was the origin of totemism? Freud speculated that there was a single event that marked the beginning of not just of totemism, but all society, morality, and religion: One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength). Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion. (Freud vol. 13, p. 203) This horrible act filled the brothers with remorse since they also loved and admired the father. Now with the father gone, they have become rivals with each other for the possession of the women. And so they dealt with these problems with the two prohibitions discussed above: do not kill the totem and do not have sex with women in the same clan. Freud believed that these oedipal themes have remained in all subsequent religious forms and practices. As well, every human being has inherited this guilt from having killed the primal father. In the Christian religion, for instance, Freud finds evidence of this guilt for this primal crime. He reasons that since the sacrificial death of Christ which redeemed humankind from original sin brought about reconciliation with god the father, the original sin that was redeemed has to be this primal crime of patricide. We also see the son's ambivalence towards the father: through his sacrifice, Christ became God and replaces the father. The Eucharist (the Christian ritual of sharing bread and wine as symbolic of the body and blood of Christ) for Freud is a revival of the ancient totem meal. Eating the body and blood of Christ is a way both to identify with the son but also to eliminate the father again, thereby repeating the guilty deed. The Future of an Illusion Freud wrote a number of other papers on religion but we turn our attention now to his most well-known book on religion, The Future of an Illusion. His purpose in this book, written in 1927, is to convince his audience that science is incompatible with religion since religion has its roots in infantile psychology. He felt that in the scientific age in which he lived, fulfilling childhood wishes through a religious view of life was intellectually untenable and emotionally harmful. Thus he poses the question of whether in the future humans will be rid of such childish illusions. In this book, Freud continues his interest in the origins of religion. This time he turns his attention to religious ideas. He wants to show that these ideas are a relic, a vestige of childhood both of the individual and of the human race. Freud makes the point that, as adults we are at the mercy of superior powers of nature, which is similar to the state of helplessness we are in as children in relation to our parents. Children naturally fear parents, especially the father, but they also know that in the end he is there to protect. As adults, Freud says, we respond to the superior forces of an uncaring nature the way we did to our fathers as children. But now as adults we turn these forces into gods with characteristics of our earthly father. Then in relation to these gods, we create all sorts of religious ideas such as: • Life has a higher purpose • Everything that happens is the will of a higher intelligence • This higher intelligence watches over us • Death is a new beginning • Good is rewarded, evil is punished Freud wants us to look at these ideas psychologically. But before he does this, he introduces us to his "opponent," an imagined critic of his arguments. I will highlight some of this exchange between Freud and his objector. His opponent read Totem and Taboo and reminds Freud that there he said that a father complex was the root of religion. Now he sees Freud saying it has something to do with helplessness and he wants Freud to make up his mind. Freud responds that the father-complex and helplessness are connected on a deeper level. When we grow up, he explains, we realize we are still helpless and need protection from the strange, ruthless superior forces of nature and we give those powers the characteristics of our fathers. We call them gods. We fear them yet seek to appease them. Ultimately we trust them to protect us. Thus, he replies, our longing for the father and our need for protection are really the same thing. Freud then takes a closer look at religious ideas. The excerpt from The Future of an Illusion contained in your course reader takes up the discussion at this point where he examines the nature of these religious ideas more closely. The book is divided into 10 short sections and the passage we are reading includes only sections 5 and 6, but it is here where he makes his central point. READ: • The Future of an Illusion Religious ideas, he says, are teachings about the world that we are to believe, even though we have not discovered them to be true on our own. Why are we supposed to believe them? Freud outlines three reasons that are typically given by religious people (note: these are not Freud's reasons. Freud will tell us shortly his psychoanalytic understanding of religious ideas): 1. our ancestors did 2. the ancestors gave us their proofs 3. we are forbidden to question them This third reason betrays for Freud the fact that society knows that religious ideas are untenable. Freud is aware of at least two other attempts by religious people to get around the problem of belief in religious ideas. The first is "credo quia absurdum," that is, I believe because it is absurd. Religious ideas, according to this view, are above the court of reason. You just feel their truth. Freud responds, but of all the absurd things to believe, why these things? The other attempt goes like this: For practical reasons, let's just act "as if" these things are true. And to this Freud replies that this is not unlike the example before and furthermore, this might work for a philosopher, but not for your average religious person. Freud's point is that religious ideas are not adopted through a process of reasoning. From where, then, do they come? And here, on p. 55 of your reading, he makes the central point of the book: religious ideas are illusions, and by this he means they are "fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind." They are a carry over from our childhood helplessness and need for protection. In other words, religious ideas come from our infantile wishes. Freud wants us to look carefully again at these religious ideas: • Life has a higher purpose • Everything that happens is the will of a higher intelligence • This higher intelligence watches over us • Death is a new beginning • Good is rewarded, evil is punished From a psychological point of view, what is the nature of these ideas? For Freud, they are nothing other than exactly what we want to believe! In other words, they are just what we would wish to be true! Freud continues in the remaining chapters to address the questions of his opponent and he continues to underscore his point which is the need to step out of our infantile state and into reality. Overall his point is: grow up and get over it! Stop putting your energy into the stars and other worlds. Put your energy into this world. Life would be much more tolerable if we all did this. Freud is urging us to see religious ideas for what they are. They are simply the fantasy that by personalizing and appeasing uncontrollable forces of life and by making them into gods, we will be protected, conquer our mortality, and be rewarded. But since these religious ideas have their roots in infantile wishes, they are illusions and will not be able to be sustained in an age of reason. Therefore, in the future, this illusion, Freud believes, will inevitably be outgrown. Learning Activity: Take a moment now and look at the famous Psalm 23 from the Jewish Bible and Christian Old Testament. What might Freud be thinking about the psalmist if he were to come to Freud's consulting room and say the following? The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for you are with me Your rod and staff they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. What are your thoughts about what Freud's assessment of the psalmist might be? Review Question: • How does Freud come to the conclusion that religious ideas are illusions and therefore pathological? Lesson 2: Introduction In this Lesson we embark on our study of various ways psychoanalytic theorists have modified and challenged Freud's assessment of religion. We begin with James Jones, a professor of religion and a clinical psychologist, who looks to contemporary relational psychoanalytic theory for his criteria by which he will determine how he thinks it's possible for the same religion to inspire both terrorism on one extreme and transformation on the other. Let's look at the Introduction to his book where he presents his concerns and sets forth his project. READ: • Jones, "Introduction" For his study, Jones chooses to define religion as concerned with "the sacred," a term used by religious devotees. This way of looking at religion allows him as a psychologist to ask the question, how does something come to be seen as sacred? What psychological dynamic can account for this? His answer is that for something to become sacred this thing must come to be idealized. When we idealize something or someone we enter into a special sort of relationship with it. It is this particular sort of relationship that will be Jones' object of study. The theoretical tool he employs to illuminate this particular relationship is relational psychoanalysis. "Relational Psychoanalysis" refers to a number of different contemporary psychoanalytic schools, all of which emphasize that our psychic structure is formed in relationship with people and things, both real and imagined. Relational psychoanalysis is presented as an alternative to the classical Freudian view that innately organized drives are the basis of psychic structure. By examining idealization in terms of relational psychoanalysis, Jones wants to spell out for us how it is that this idealizing mechanism can lead both to good and to harm. Jones begins the next chapter with examples of religious idealization and then shows how different schools of psychoanalysis have understood idealization. READ: • Jones, Chapter 1 On pages 10 and 11 Jones gives five examples of religious idealization. Try out his idea that to be religious is to be devoted to something regarded as sacred. If you are or have been a part of a religion, ask yourself whether this fits your experience of being religious. If you have not been part of a religion, ask yourself if this seems to be the case for religions with which you are familiar. Jones then makes the point that idealization in religion is very close to the experience of being in love. He does this by bringing in Freud's ideas of idealization which for Freud also involved the experience of romantic love. According to Freud, being in love involves projecting our self-love, or "primary narcissism," as he calls it, onto an idealized loved one. In his view, normal libidinal development requires being able to move from self-directed libido, or narcissism, to libido directed to others. Libido, he thought, cannot be directed at both self and other; thus self-love took away from object love, and vice-versa. Maturity then, for Freud, involves giving up our wildly unrealistic narcissistic wishes for a love object, which again is simply projected self-love. Mature love in his view is free from narcissistic idealization. Essentially, for Freud, we must grow up and face reality. Sound familiar? As we saw in Lesson 1, this is the same conclusion Freud came to regarding religion. Because Freud finds evidence of wish-fulfilment and dependency in the idealization present in religious ideas, he considers them narcissistic and must, like romantic love, be relinquished in favour of a mature acceptance of reality. It would be a misinterpretation to see Jones as rejecting Freud's views of religion altogether. In fact Jones feels that Freud has a valid critique of religious expression as marked by infantile narcissism and childish dependency. He disagrees, however, that all religion fits this description. Freud left no room for the possibility that there could be religion that did not have its origins in infantile narcissism. Jones wants to challenge this assumption and he does this by turning to the work of Heinz Kohut. Kohut was born in Vienna in 1913. He spent most of his professional career as a psychoanalyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and died in 1981. Here's a video clip of Kohut's final talk which he gave in 1981: On pages 18 to 25, Jones provides an excellent summary of Kohut's ideas. Read these pages carefully since they furnish the theoretical groundwork for the rest of the book. In order to establish his own theoretical position, Kohut invented a number of terms. The meaning of these terms can be difficult to grasp at first. Let me help you as you read this section by providing a glossary: Self-object: A person (or place or thing) experienced as part of the self and used to foster esteem and a sense of well-being. Transmuting Internalization: The process by which functions of idealized important people (usually parents) in the life of the child are internalized and become psychic structures. Optimal Frustration: Eventually the important people in the life of the child will fail to meet the child's needs perfectly. If these disappointments happen gradually, this frustration will lead to transmuting internalization. Nuclear Program: Our ideals and ambitions. With optimal frustration, the child's idealized image of the parent is internalized as ideals and the grandiose image of the self is internalized as ambitions. Object Hunger: This is the state we are in if the process of frustration, or being let down by care givers, does not happen optimally, that is gradually enough for us to internalize the idealized parent. We remain throughout our life dependent on and hungry for external objects to serve the function of our missing self structures. We can see now the critical difference between Freud's understanding of narcissism and Kohut's. Freud saw the natural narcissism of the child in opposition to the mature acceptance of reality. Maturity for Freud is marked by abandoning narcissism. Kohut saw things very differently. He felt we never outgrow our narcissism and idealization. We never lose our need for selfobjects. Mental health and maturity is not marked by relinquishing these narcissistic needs of the self. Rather, for Kohut, the distinguishing feature of mental health is mature narcissism. Here's how Jones articulates this mark of maturity: Relatively free of object hunger, the mature self can choose the source of its narcissistic supplies. Rather than being emotionally driven and compulsively dependent, mature selfobject relationships are characterized by freedom, spontaneity, and realism. (Jones 2002, 23) Thus autonomy is not the goal for Kohut as it was for Freud. The mature self continues to need selfobject experiences. As Kohut puts it, "a self can never exist outside a matrix of selfobjects" (Kohut 1984, 61). We are born in relation and remain there throughout life. Kohut says we all have three fundamental relational needs: • Idealization: the need to be connected to a greater ideal reality • Mirroring: • Twinship: the need for recognition and acceptance the need to experience that others are like us. (Kohut saw this need as very close to the need for mirroring). So for Kohut, we always have a need for others. But whereas for the infant, selfobject experiences eventually create psychic structures, mature selfobject experiences are necessary to sustain psychic structure already in place. Without this healthy narcissism, the adult can fall into object hunger, compulsive dependency, and depression. In Kohut's view, therapy cures, not through interpretation and insight as Freud thought, but by the therapeutic relationship itself that provides the patient with the selfobject experiences necessary to repair old and grow new psychic structures. But these reparative and growth-promoting experiences can occur in many places, not just therapy. And Kohut acknowledges that religion is one such place to meet the needs of the self. Religion might meet our relational needs, for instance, in the following manner: Idealization: A perfect or near-perfect being obviously can meet the self's need for idealization. A fragmented self can be healed and uplifted by relating to a god, the religious institution itself, its teachings, etc. Mirroring: Kohut thought our mirroring needs are met in religion by what religions refer to as grace. Charles Strozier, a contemporary self psychologist notes that Kohut loved to quote from a non-religious text to make this point. The line is from Eugene O'Neill's Great God Brown: "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." Just like how the gleam in our parents' eye buoyed us when we took our first steps, so also divine grace can bestow on religious participants a sense of their right to be alive and assert themselves confidently (Strozier 1997, 170). We might think here too of the Hindu practice of darsan (pronounced darshan). "Darsan" means "seeing." Taking darsan is a widespread form of Hindu worship and it means going to the temple to see and be seen by an image of the deity (Eck 1981). From a self psychological perspective, we can see how this practice can meet one's needs for mirroring. Twinship: The need to experience that others are like us can be readily met in religion in the communal aspects of religion such as worship. Kohut's self psychology has become very popular and is used by a number of psychologists of religion to show the benefits of religion in its ability to fulfill our selfobject needs. Jones' wants to take this one step further. Of course, he says, religion meets our selfobject needs, but that does not mean religion is automatically healthy. Jones uses Kohut's self psychology to come up with criteria by which to determine whether a particular use of religion is mature or immature. A healthy and mature religion for Jones: • contributes to building and sustaining self structures • supports the self's nuclear program of ambitions and ideals • encourages affirming empathic relationships with others By contrast unhealthy and immature religion in Jones' view: • exploits the narcissistic needs and object hungers of its devotees • encourages addictive dependence • discourages our search for our own unique goals and ambitions • Jones, Chapter 2. Here Jones illustrates some of Kohut's major READ: concepts through clinical examples and shows how this material could relate to religion. VIEW • Jesus Camp. How might a self psychologist think about this film? Learning Activity: 1. Referring to Jones chapter 2. See if you can explain in the terms of Self Psychology how both an uncritical exaltation of religion for one person and a cynical rejection of religion by another may arise from the same failure to idealize. 2. See if you can imagine what might happen to "Marge" should she get involved with a religious group. Review Question: • Using Kohut's ideas, how does Jones distinguish between healthy and unhealthy religion ? Example: 
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