Christian faith & human understanding: studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the human person

17. Religion and Psychoanalysis: Some Phenomenological Contributions

[ 1 7 ] RELIGION AND PSYCHOANALYS I S Some Phenomenological Contributions How is the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion to be examined ? It might seem that the best approach would be to study what each of them has to say about the human condition.We might compare religion and psychoanalysis as two theories about the human estate, two competing claims to truth.But there would be something abstract about treating them in this way. Psychoanalysis is a special kind of science and art, and religion comprises a way of life as well as a set of beliefs of a special kind. In many ways the two are incommensurate. I propose therefore to join the issue of religion and psychoanalysis in a more concrete way by asking how the psychoanalyst can be related to the religious beliefs of his patient.The issue of psychoanalysis and religion arises in its sharpest form in the interaction between analyst and patient, and some dimensions of this interaction may be relevant to the issue itself.The interaction between therapist and patient is not a mere occasion that lets the question be raised, something that could be discarded when the two elements, religion and psychoanalysis, come to the center of our discussion.The situation in which this problem arises is part of the phenomenology of the problem and part of a possible resolution . I will examine the relationship between religion and psychoanalysis by commenting on the work of Hans W. Loewald, who has provided both an authoritative interpretation of the writings of Freud and a favorable view  of the place of religion in psychoanalytic theory.1 My essay will discuss two topics: first, how the analyst can be related to the opinions of his patient, and how the patient can be related to the opinions of the analyst—in other words, how analyst and patient can quote one another—and, second, how the object of religious dispositions and beliefs, how “the divine,” is to be understood.A third part will be devoted to bringing these two themes together . In developing these issues I will draw extensively on the principles of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. How the analyst and patient quote each other Loewald mentions two features of psychoanalysis as a science.The first is that the essence of psychoanalysis is interpretation. Its task is to interpret whatever the patient makes known to the analyst and whatever can be deduced from what the patient makes known; its task is to interpret such things in terms of personal motivation.2 A second feature of psychoanalysis is that the patient, the “object” of the science, is also able to enter into the investigative process:“there is no other field of scientific activity where the order of organizing potential is the same in the ‘object’ and the ‘investigator .’” Loewald goes on to describe psychoanalysis as “calling forth . . . the investigator in the one investigated.” (Could Oedipus himself be described by a better phrase?)The object of study in psychoanalysis is not just a target; the object is called upon to express a self-understanding and hence to interpret himself and his behavior,to enter into interactions with the analyst,into transference relationships, and eventually to reinterpret himself and his actions in the light of what the analyst has said and done.Loewald,in“On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” says,“If an [analyst’s] interpretation of unconscious meaning is timely, the words by which this meaning is expressed are recognizable to the patient as expressions of what he experiences .”3 The words spoken by the analyst “organize for him [the patient] what was previously less organized and thus give him the distance from himself that enables him to understand,to see,to put into words and to‘handle’what was previously not visible, understandable, speakable, tangible.”4 The patient 1. HansW. Loewald, Psychoanalysis and the History of the Individual (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1978); Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1980). 2. Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis, p. 103. 3. Ibid., p. 238. 4. Ibid., pp. 238–39. Religion and Psychoanalysis  is able to assimilate “the organizing understanding which the analyst provides .”5 Patient and analyst must interpret each other.This dialogical process, which has been described as such by Stanley Leavy,is based upon the ability of the patient and the analyst to quote each other.6 Even to begin the process , the analyst must be able...