The Experience of Religious Transformation During Psychoanalysis as an Event Horizon

Abstract

Reflection upon the psychoanalytic literature dealing with religious faith and practice indicates that our conceptualizations since Freud's original formulations have run into a blind alley and are in danger of becoming repetitious. It is clear that the decision to focus upon the more general phenomena of faith and “spirituality,” which do not demand a firm commitment to the belief in an independent entity known as God, evades all that is of theological relevance to the religious believer and all that is clinically complex for the psychoanalyst. I suggest that the notion of the event horizon, borrowed from astrophysics, offers a better, if frustrating, portrait of the apparent encounter with the divine object representation.

Notes

¹We can surely understand the fear of moving back regressively toward more archaic determinants of faith and divine images. “To understand one's images of God one needs to consider the relationship between the mental images one has constructed prior to one's acquisition of language and cultural constructs that are collectively represented and symbolically embodied through the use of language” (Soo-Young, 2005, p. 405). And yet, one hastens to inquire: How can a languaged mind return to a state “prior to the acquisition of language” and not thereby permanently modify the very conditions we wished to study?

²Oddly enough, Simmonds's title “The oceanic feeling and a sea change” (2006), immediately brings to mind Randall Sorenson's intriguing essay regarding the tormented soul of the religiously-oriented psychotherapist, entitled “Sea changes, interesting complements and proselytizing in psychoanalysis” (1994). Regrettably, Simmonds makes no reference to Sorenson's work. De Mello Franco (1998) articulated a fine middle ground between an attitude of complete solipsism toward the role of the patient's and analyst's God representations and a more refined capacity to differentiate between the states of man-as-God and man-with-God, which is more compatible with the capacity to remain open to various forms of theistic and nontheistic religious expression.

³In general, contemporary stage theories and developmental models are biased against two aspects that religious belief generally requires: (a) that earliest forms of faith may be primary and necessary to be retained in their primary form despite ongoing development in other dimensions, and (b) the role of the divine itself may make certain development dynamics inevitable and not just process (see Roehlkepartain, Benson, King, and Wagener, 2005). An effort to revise this theoretical bias has been forwarded by Strieb (2001), who envisioned heterodyne versions of earlier phases that remain creatively active and embedded within so-called later styles of religious expression.

⁴We encounter the same quandary when Grotstein (2001) said: “A God representation is our antinomic response, an idolatrously imaginative way of conjuring an object-as-idol so that we can contemplate the uncontemplatable” (p. 333). This proximity to the deity or its representation, is achieved, according to Grotstein, “when one transcends the paranoid–schizoid position of unconscious fantasy and the depressive position of reality and actuality, and ascends to the transcendent position where one can ‘become’ the deity through resonance” (p. 333).

⁵For additional analysis of Kristeva's views and an excellent evaluation of nondefensive religious ritual, see Joseph H. Smith (1990a, 1990b).

⁶It goes without saying that the kaleidoscopic “religious” or religious-like states I am advocating may not be immediately welcomed by the individual undergoing them. Strongly antireligious or religiously indifferent individuals may react anxiously to the unexpected emergence of religious sentiments and representational presences. Spiritual, religious and God-fearing individuals may react with alarm to the uncanny relentlessness of repressed superego introjects or become suspicious of the effect of increased symbolization upon their cherished idealizations. At this phase of analysis, individuals of all stripes will need to confront a whole new order of early objects that had been cast off as the unified mind was being forged: libidinal seductions, anxieties, and desires. The clinician must anticipate that all entry into the event horizon of de- and re-representationalized religious objects entails the risk that the patient may regress, throw up bulwarks of defense, act out, or even bolt the treatment. Now, it is possible that these perturbations will adopt content matter that is similar to the great themes and episodes of Biblical myth, mystical, and apocalyptic states, and similar phenomena. If, for instance, a patient begins to undergo his or her own private “temptation in the garden,” “nirvana-like nothingness,” “emptying out of the self,” “dialogue with God,” “creation epiphany” and so forth (I am intentionally here borrowing the terms that certain well-known religions would consider familiar), this may be considered an idiosyncratic expression of a larger universal phenomenon, or, from the point of view of those certain theologies that would use the phrases I utilized earlier, may be considered (i.e., may be in fact) a fragment of an actual moment of struggle between man and God, played out within the analytic frame, a phenomenon that is simultaneously—and, again, paradoxically—theological and psychoanalytical at one at the same time, and also completely distinct. Space does not allow me to take up this larger philosophical problem here (see Spero, 1992). Most important, these seismic phenomena may be projected into the psychoanalyst and gain expression within the countertransference, in a variety of disguised and perplexing ways (e.g., when the analyst begins to experience incipient religious crises whose source is unclear).

⁷ Bion (1974) is among those who have unabashedly referred to the truly creative analytic space as a religious and aesthetic space.