by
James V. Spickard
University of Redlands
Presented at the Annual Meeting of the
Society for the Scientific Study of Religion,
Houston, TX, Oct 22, 2000.
Copyright © 2000
Without psychoanalysis we would never know that when we think a thing the thing we think is not the thing we think we think but only the thing that makes us think the thing we think we think we think.
- AnonymousIt is somewhat ironic to be asked to comment on the revival of psychoanalytic approaches to the study of religion at the SSSR. This is, after all the Society whose journal was roundly criticized some years ago for publishing a psychoanalytic interpretation of the Rosary.1 One of those critics, a prominent rational-choice theorist, expounded his views to me over salmon at my father's house some years ago. Little did he know that my step-mother was a sponsor of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute, though her firm Catholicism gave her as much antipathy as he to seeing rosary beads as symbolic feces.
The merriment goes on: the author of that Rosary article later published a devastating critique of that same rational-choice theorist's work, which exposed several biases of the rational-choice approach to religion.2 This tit for tat, however, did not return the psychoanalysis of religion to its former state of grace. To say that it has been out of favor in recent years is an understatement of the first water.
I shall not restore it today. Nor shall I try to undercut it further. With Herbert Marcuse,3 I respect psychoanalysis precisely to the degree that it honors religion's depth and its ability to unite human cognition, emotion, and physicality. Few theories treat religion with as much respect; but few theories are as empirically undemonstrable. Can psychoanalytic approaches to religion be scientific? Or are they condemned to being suggestively meaningful?
It is worth reviewing Jürgen Habermas's analysis of the grounds of scientific inquiry, which is still the best epistemological treatment that psychoanalysis has received. In Knowledge and Human Interests,4 Habermas described three forms of scientific inquiry arising out of three specific human interests. These are descriptive or explanatory science, interpretive or hermeneutic science, and liberatory science - the word "science" here being used in its original meaning of 'a disciplined way of knowing'.
According to Habermas, descriptive/explanatory science stems from the human interest in control, from an intent to model reality so that we can manipulate it. Descriptive/explanatory theory is thus 'true' if it predicts events accurately. Among the social-scientific theories of religion, rational-choice theory claims this mantle, though rational-choice work to date has produced possibly true predictions from demonstrably false premises - not a good sign if one seeks to explain anything.5 In any event, descriptive/explanatory science does well with the physical world, but not so well with human beings, who are notoriously unpredictable. (They are especially unpredictable after they read scientists' reports and decide to change their behavior.)
Habermas argues that humans are better understood through the hermeneutic sciences, which stem from the human interest in communication. These ways of knowing try to capture people's views of the world. Like descriptive science, hermeneutic science puts forth theories, but these theories' test of truth is different: not predictability, but affirmation. I can only know whether I have captured others' world views by checking with them, and being told that I have done so. My success is limited, however, because people's views change, sometimes because of my conversations with them. Simply by studying the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community, for example, I change it. My presentation of their view of reality is thus not 'objective' as would be my description of the flight of an artillery shell. 'Objectivity' is not truth, in the hermeneutic view. The model for these sciences is dialogue, in which knowledge arises as much from the process as from the conclusions.
For Habermas, psychoanalysis is neither a descriptive nor an hermeneutic science. Its theories do not depict fixed aspects of the human psyche; neither do they capture people's self-understandings. Instead, psychoanalytic "truth" transforms those understandings in the direction of human freedom. By describing people's inner blocks, it sets off their transformation.
The process works something like this. If we look at Freud's treatment journals, we do not find the reified "ids", "Oedipal conflicts", and "super-egos" of his theoretical works. Instead, we find accounts of client-therapist conversations. Mostly, the client talks, both exploring and demonstrating his or her neuroses, though as yet in an ungraspable form. After months of this - or years, in some cases - Freud intervenes: "I think you have an unconscious conflict with your father," he may say, or: "Have you noticed your underlying desire for your mother?" These statements take the form of descriptive explanations, yet they are not that. Their subject matter is unconscious, remember, and is thus not subject to confirmatory observation. We can only know their 'truth' by their results: by whether their utterance changes the client's inner life.
One of two things happens. Either the client does not respond (or responds with the equivalent of a "Huh?"), in which case the talk resumes. Or the client responds with a "Eureka! You've hit it!" In the latter case, the client then alters his or her own self-understanding, accepting Freud's theory as a "true" account of his or her inner life.
So far, this is merely an hermeneutic in which the observed accepts the observer's narrative of the inner life, rather than the other way around. But what distinguishes liberatory science from hermeneutics is that this changed self-understanding often makes neuroses vanish! Not only does the client's understanding of his or her inner life change; that inner life itself changes - a change made manifest by altered behavior. Psychoanalysis has effected a "cure" - has moved the client from (as Freud elsewhere put it) from being "neurotically unhappy" to being "normally unhappy." (Freud did not have a very optimistic sense of life's possibilities.)
Habermas developed his account of liberatory science to justify Marxism, which, he argued, transforms society by transforming the consciousness of the working class. Like psychoanalysis, Marxism masquerades as a descriptive/explanatory theory of real life, but is not "scientific" in that limited sense of the term. Its "truth" is not demonstrable "objectively," but only demonstrable in so far as it transforms society in the direction of human freedom. It is an hermeneutic-with-results. The results are objective, though the theory that generates them neither models an objective reality nor reflects people's preexisting consciousness. The proof of liberatory science is thus "in the pudding," as it were, as it moves people towards freedom.
I am not, here, going to discuss any of the wider issues opened up by this account, including "Why towards freedom?" To do so would involve us with Hegel, and if there is anything more out-of-fashion than psychoanalysis in the SSSR, it is Hegelian philosophy. But Habermas's schema puts the words "truth", "science", and "psychoanalysis" into the same sentence in a rather useful way. By distinguishing between three types of science, he opens the door for psychoanalytic theorizing to reenter the social scientific study of religion - and thus prevents the papers we have heard today from being ruled out a priori .
In this light, let us look at the two papers that I was able to review before this conference.
Julius Rubin6 argues that we cannot understand religious conversion without considering its psychological dimensions - and on a deep, not just a superficial level. In his discussion of cases from the First Great Awakening, he shows the compatibility of psychoanalytic and theological accounts of conversion - not just as changes of mind but as changes of soul. George Whitfield's charismatic conversion undid and redid his Self in exactly the way that his spiritual mentors said all conversions require. Samson Occom's account, though less detailed, shows how he "achieve[d] new integrations of religious personhood and public ascendance as an Indian leader and spiritual intermediary between Indian and White worlds."7
The question is: does psychoanalysis "offer an explanatory model that provides additional insights into New Light religious experience and conversion,"8 as Rubin claims? I don't think so - and not because of any failure on Rubin's part. He shows, instead, how one psychoanalytic description of the conversion process matches the then-current theological description of First Awakening conversions. Both describe the subjective experiences of the converts, and neither reduces these experiences to something that they are not. But they both have the same metaphysical status: they are both hermeneutic descriptions of subjective events, not explanations of them .
What Rubin has done is to translate a theological description of conversion into a psychoanalytic one, without demonstrating the objective truth of either. He has thus not "explained" anything - though I am not sure why he would want to. His psychoanalytic understanding of conversion is phenomenally identical to Whitfield's theological understanding of it. Both exist on the same plane.
There is one difference, however. I doubt that a psychoanalytic understanding of Whitfield's and Occom's inner processes would have motivated either of them to pass through the trials that led them to their transformed life's work. Had they seen themselves as tearing down and rebuilding a Self, rather than as opening themselves to God, they would not likely have persevered. In Habermasian terms, neither religion nor psychoanalysis explains conversion, both understand it, but only religion provides liberatory knowledge. In this case, psychoanalysis would not provide the knowledge that allowed Whitfield and Occom to transform their lives.
On to Niame's far more complete and detailed paper.9
Niame presents, with a great deal more sophistication, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan. She differentiates him from Freud, especially in his insistence that the Self is constructed in social interaction. (This is not the cheap, contentless constructionism that one gets from the symbolic interactionists, but a depth constructionism with various hypothesized dynamics, growth, and development. Surely, this is a fruitful line of inquiry for sociology as a whole.)
Niame's paper uses this hypothesized dynamic to interpret Haitian Vodou possession and zombification. As she has pointed out today, she sees "possession not as a pathological phenomenon … but … as a cultural and personal opportunity to transform reality by shifting the boundaries of the mutable self."10 Zombification is its inverse: it is an "imputed mechanism of social control, [which] acquires its intensity from the Haitian history of slavery."11 Both religious events are expressions of peculiarly Haitian psychological dynamics that ultimately reflect Haitian social conditions.
This is a powerful interpretation, which helps us see Haitian Vodou in a new light. It makes us think about the social relativity of all religious expressions, without belittling religion's emotional impact - a belittlement from which many relativist interpretations suffer. I have nothing but praise for Niame's effort, and I hope that she soon finds a suitable spot in which to publish her work.
But: What is the metaphysical status of Niame's interpretation? This is a question that she does not consider, but which is of tremendous importance for her approach. Simply put, like Rubin, Niame is engaged in translation. Her paper translates possession and zombification into psychoanalytic terms. To the extent that she claims that her approach explains or objectively describes Vodou possession and zombification, she is reductionistic - and inaccurate as well. In fact, her approach is hermeneutic: translating the words of the natives into other terms.
But we can go a bit farther in Niame's case than we can in Rubin's. Here, the interpretive hermeneutic is much like good literary criticism. As John Leonard notes, we go to great literature to complicate ourselves, and literary criticism makes both that literature and us more interesting. 12 Niame's paper may not do much for Haitians, besides trans lating them, but it has the potential to trans form us. No longer can we see Haitians and their religion as benighted. No longer can we imagine that we are religiously sophisticated and they are not. Our religions are not 'healthy' and theirs 'pathological'; in a sense, the reverse is more accurate. Vodou domesticates social reality, so that Vodou practitioners can live; our religions domesticate us so that we can abide our "unhappy consciousness".13
Niame's excellent paper encourages us to see the interrelationship between religious psychodynamics and social structure, not just in Haiti, but also at home. Here, psychoanalytic reasoning has the potential to free us from a serious neurosis: the false sense that we have a monopoly on truth. More: it motivates us to change, because it shows us the falsity of our previous beliefs. Like Whitfield and Occom's charismatic Calvinism, it moves us towards freedom. In Niame's paper, unlike Rubin's, psychoanalytic knowledge is liberatory knowledge - but for us , not for the people that it supposedly describes.
Habermas pointed out that psychoanalysis can be liberating; I would add that it can be liberating in unexpected ways.
* These remarks were delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion in Houston, Texas, October 19-22, 2000. They were presented as a formal response to a panel of papers on the topic: "What Psychoanalytic Theory Says to the Sociology of Religion."
1 Michael P. Carroll: "Praying the Rosary: The Anal-Erotic Origins of a Popular Catholic Devotion." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 26/4: 486-498, 1987.
2 Idem.: "Stark realities and Androcentric/Eurocentric Bias in the Sociology of Religion." Sociology of Religion, 57/3: 225-240, 1966
3 Herbert Marcuse: Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
Idem: Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia. Boston: Beacon Press, 1970.4 Jürgen Habermas: Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968 [1971].
5 See my "Rethinking Religious Social Action: What is 'Rational' About Rational Choice Theory?" Sociology of Religion 59/2: 99-115, 1998.
6 Julius Rubin: "Death to the Carnal Self: Theological, Sociological, and Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Religious Conversion." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Houston, Texas, October 19-22, 2000.
9 Niame: "Haitian Vodou Possession: Becoming the Desire of the Other." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Houston, Texas, October 19-22, 2000.
12 John Leonard: "The Wise Woman and the Whale." New York Review of Books, July 20, 2000.
13 Herbert Marcuse: One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.
Copyright 2000 by Jim Spickard
Posted 16 October, 2000 at http://newton.uor.edu/FacultyFolder/Spickard/OnlinePubs/CouchSym.htm