In a way, I guess, my "paring down" is spiritual as well as material.
I have begun posting some non-blog writing from pre-blog days, a kind of combination of the material and the spiritual purgation. Re-organizing my old journals, I ran across a paper I wrote for some class I had now more than 13 years ago, when I was studying to be a psychologist. As many of you know, and some may not, I took evening and weekend classes for nearly six years, all but dissertation and final oral examinations. My reasons for stopping the pursuit and moving into management at the Bar instead may one day be the subject of another entry, but for now, I will reprint this paper. As both a client of therapy and a student of it, I needed to integrate my faith and the many variations of the "talking cure". I never liked the chasm between the two camps, those religious folk who distrusted psychology and those secular folk who distrusted and even discounted the need for religious belief. I saw them always as complements of one another, not adversaries. I wasn't original in that, but it was not a well known subject of advocacy. As a patient I did not want to be talked out of my religion. It was one reason I had delayed ever seeking a therapist. As a trainee therapist, I knew how indispensable the structure of religiosity was for a client who came with life issues for sorting out and how precious and I did not want to talk such a person out of it. It was part of our respective essences. So, in some class I presented this paper. I recall also another--on sexuality--in which I did a talk about the need for therapists to be cognizant and sympathetic and not dismissive of religious precepts that informed client function, and dysfunction in the arena of human intimacy. I don't think I wrote a formal paper there; if I did, it will turn up and I will consider posting it. But this one is present and accounted for and provided for whatever interest you might have in it.
It was called, "Points of Intersection in the Goals and Methods of Christian Mysticism and Psychotherapy".
Some months ago, I went to dinner with a long time friend who is profoundly suspicious of psychology and, what she calls its "false premises". We are both practicing Catholics. Her Catholicism is far more certain, publicly and privately, than is my own. She is given to open reference to god, the Lord's Will, and to regular exhortations on the power of prayer. I respect her and admire her faith.
I am, however, more what Malcolm Muggeridge denominated the "fitful believer" (Muggeridge, 1988). I cannot, however much I might wish to do so, lay claim to belief, once and forever.
It would be comforting to be able to say, 'Now
I see!' To recite with total satisfaction one of the
Church's venerable creeds: 'I believe in God, the
Father Almighty. . .' To point to such a moment
of illumination when all became miraculously
clear. To join with full identification in one
of the varieties of Christian worship. . .Comforting
but alas, it would not be true. The one thing
above all others that You require of us, surely,
the Truth. I have to confess, then, that I can only
fitfully believe, can believe no creed wholly,
have had no self-sufficing moment of illumination.
(Muggeridge, 1988)
My friend's words worried me, as had my own acquiescence to therapy when I sought it and found myself profoundly interested in both its theory and practice. I have harbored the incipient concern, despite an adequate academic and cognitive understanding to the contrary, that I might lose even my fitful belief as I explored the field of which Freud, considered anti-religious, is the most well known progenitor. It has often occurred to me that I have lost that faith and may not have realized it. I will not, however, accept or resign myself to that idea. So, I have had something of a hero and heroine in Sts. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, and in one of their interpreters, Thomas Merton.
It has always seemed to me that therapy is a sibling or cousin to their purgative process with several points of intersection.
It was quite pleasing in the course that has required this paper that their method was a precursor of modern psychotherapy. To be sure, one has a theological Divine end, relationship with God, and the other a whole human relatedness, but both effect a cure of soul. Perhaps it is to be said they have the same end and a complementary approach. In each, the end is true identity. In each we can lay claim to disposing of false selves. For the Christian mystic, that is sin. For the therapist, it is those perceptions, ideas, feelings, behaviors which get in our way, which distort our relationships, which are equally "an orientation to falsity, a basic lie concerning our own deepest reality." (Finley, 1988). What if they are the same thing and we have simply not understood it to be so?
Both have methods which are at once detached and passionate. The way of St. John and St. Theresa is one of detachment "from possessiveness in natural things." (Kavanaugh and Larkin, 1987) And yet, St. John wrote what can only be described as sensual poetry about an unfettered, intimate relationship with God by removing layers of distraction and the inauthentic parts of our natures. For example,
How gently and lovingly
You wake in my heart
Where in secret you dwell alone
And in your sweet breathing,
filled with good and glory.
How tenderly you swell in my heart with
love.
(Kavanaugh and Larkin, 1987)
In relationship is the cure and the restoration of the true self. The therapist has an odd human mystery. God has His cosmic Mystery. Relationship with God may not be so unlike relationship with a therapist. Both peel away the distracting, the unnecessary, the wounding, the obstructive.
The mystic in progress reaches the top of the mountain by the road of "todo y nada"--"all and nothing."
To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing
To come to possess all
desire in the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.
To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by the way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.
(John of the Cross, quoted by Kavanaugh and Larkin 1988)
It is a tumultuous process. At first there is fervor and a sense of relief, even power. But then, something nearly unmanageable settles into the soul. A darkness, but more than that, for it includes futility, even a desire to move no further. It is desolation. Utter absence. But then, I am reminded that it is in absence that we understand presence, the presence of other, or the Other.
God brings these people into the way of
life by depriving them of the light and
the consolation which they seek, by impeding
their own efforts, by confusing and
depriving them of the satisfactions which
their own wishes, their self-esteem, their
presumption, their aggressivity and so on are
systematically humiliated. What is
worse, they cannot understand how this
comes about! They do not know what is
happening to them. It is here that they
must decide whether to go on in the way
of prayer under the secret guidance
of grace in the night of pure faith or whether
they will go back to a form of existence
in which they can enjoy familiar routines
and retain an illusory sense of their perfect
autonomy in perfectly familiar realms, without
having to remain subject to the obedience of
faith in these trying and baffling circumstances
proper to the 'dark night'. (Finley 1988)
It is a tumultuous process as well in modern psychology. The therapist is exhorted by Bion to let go of memory, desire and understanding when approaching a session (Seinfeld, 1996).
The client goes down a dangerous, unknown, not pleasurable road. Failed for example, by a mother who was not 'good enough' the client develops a mask of compliance, creates a false sense of relationships, which might even appear to be real, abut are not. (Davis and Wallbridge, 1981). It is familiar and preferable even if all relationships are rendered null by this way of being. To unmask, and to examine the mask requires a period of darkness, of aridity, parallel to the 'dark night of the soul'. The client may experience at first a sense of relief and well being, often considered the 'transference' cure. But then, it becomes more difficult as the client proceeds through the different levels of self and relationship. Some may leave the process, for it is too difficult, too painful, too long. The therapist will remind the patient, "I know of no other way". Those who can endure the unknown will continue. Those who cannot, flee. The desire to run is compelling. Therapy is not for the faint of heart.
While, as I have said, I admire my friend's faith, I cannot agree with her that psychology has false premises. There are points of divergence to be sure from religion, from the truly mystical. But in significant ways, there are the substantially similar goals and approaches. It can be no accident that the heroes and heroines of psychology have had as part of their psychic structures the religions of their youths and even, adulthood. Perhaps religionists would call them heretics. Gassner. Jung. Even Freud, despite his protestations was a creature of the Judaic tradition which cultivated him. It was compelling enough that he analyzed Moses himself. For my part, I will not accept that therapy and the religious 'dark night of the soul' are other than kindred spirits.
I wish that some of these thoughts had come to mind that night in a Westside restaurant with my friend. Apolgia for faith in both religion and therapy. Here I am, Lord, devotee of John and Teresa and Freud and his psychoanalytic progeny.
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