Minding Your Language: A Response to Caroline Brett and Stephen Sykes

THE PAPER BY Jackson and Fulford (1997), to which ours is a preliminary response, has opened up an important and much-needed conversation on the borderlands of theology, philosophy, and psychiatry. We are deeply grateful for lapidary and attentive responses to our paper from Caroline Brett and Stephen Sykes, in which each have affirmed the value of this conversation, but also indicated the issues that need to be thought through in greater depth. Sykes makes the point, quite rightly in our view, that the language of both theology and psychiatry are needed to illuminate the gray area between spirituality and mental disorder. Part of the difficulty, perhaps, has been the tendencies of theologians and psychiatrists alike either to speak past each other's shoulders or to refuse to engage in conversation at all (Watts 2002).

Both commentators have accurately represented the core arguments of our thesis: that genuine spirituality may involve ego disablement and that positively evaluated psychotic, action-enhancing experiences are not, by definition, spiritual. They also both agree that religious traditions may offer resources that help discrimination at the borderlands of theology and psychiatry, beyond the reach of descriptive psychopathology. However, Brett has helpfully drawn attention to a number of possible weak spots that deserve further reflection:

the distinction between breaking downand breaking throughand the possible continuing value of using the criterion of preserved or enhanced functionality; our failure to appreciate the precision with which Jackson and Fulford use the language of psychosis; and the uncertain clinical value of a schema that only allows an assessment of the contribution of an experience to spiritual reorientation after the event.

Although it is not appropriate in the form of a final response to engage with these issues in depth, we thought that a few brief observations might be in order.

Breaking Down and Breaking Through

Brett's distinction between breaking down and breaking through is helpful but may disintegrate where the breaking down itself is considered to be constitutive of spiritual experience. The Pauline insight "for when I am weak; then I am strong" (2 Cor. 12:10, New Revised Standard Version [NRSV] 1989) finds vivid expression, for example, in the life of the Abbe Marie-Joseph Huvelin (Williams 1994). This Parisian curate, with chronic and debilitating ill health and an almost unrelieved sense of personal worthlessness that bordered on despair, managed to transmit hope to an astonishing range of people who came to him for spiritual direction. There was no obvious, schematic breaking through the rigors of ego disablement to sunlit uplands of ethical conviction or renewed sense of vocation. It is by no means clear that he would have wished his predicament on anyone else, let alone himself, notwithstanding the fruitfulness of his ministry. The breaking down was arguably part of his life-long vocation and it perhaps stretches the meaning of action enhancement a little too far to use it encompass the often paradoxical nature of sanctity.

The Language of Psychosis

An important feature of good conversation is mindfulness in the way language is used and guardedness against misrepresenting the position of one's conversation partner. The expression of our discomfort with the application of the language of psychosis to spiritual experience was perhaps designed primarily to signpost our concern with certain reductive and assimilating tendencies in modern psychiatry. Perhaps psychotic may be used with precision and designed to draw attention to the complexities of discriminating at the borderlands of theology and psychiatry. Words, nonetheless, have resonance—philosophically and culturally—that radiate well beyond the boundaries of precise usage. The same could be said of Brett's use of anomalous, which might refer to a range of phenomena that most people would regard as abnormal: hallucinations, synesthaesia, out-and of-body, past-life, and near-death experiences. It is legitimate, we contend, to draw attention to these resonances even if they stray...