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Psychoanalysis and religion can be inspiring. They can also be deadly. Perhaps this is why psychoanalysis has eschewed religion. Born of the triumph of nineteenth-century material and scientific progress, psychoanalysis seems the very antithesis of religion. Nevertheless in his book, Emotion and Spirit, Neville Symington began to bring them together.
Maybe his success in doing so contributed to his being invited to run a weekend conference on the subject at the Tavistock Clinic in September 1999. Its proceedings constitute the material of The Spirit of Sanity. In it Symington emphasizes the shared concern of psychoanalysis and religion with the life of the psyche or spirit. But what brings the spirit to life? Hegel described it - consciousness at least - as brought into being through its recognition by the consciousness of another. Winnicott described it as brought alive through ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, through the mother lovingly identifying with, and thereby discovering and nourishing, her baby's spirited imagination - or illusion - of what is already there. Bion described the mother transforming and animating the baby's inanimate sense data - ‘beta elements’ - by dreaming them into ‘alpha elements’ to furnish his conscious and unconscious mental life. Symington likens this process to mysticism. Through her ‘loving act’ of ‘related-to-the-object’ contemplation of the ‘actual contours’ of her baby, he says, she finds and brings alive the spirit that is both infinite and unique to him (pp. 65, 73).
But what happens when this loving act is absent? The vacuum may then be filled, says Symington, by making a god of oneself or others. Freud called this figure the superego. Either way, through being consciously or unconsciously projected or repressed as a reified or deified person or thing, the spirit becomes senseless. It loses meaning and life. Reviving it is painful. For it means shouldering freedom - the counterpart of the determinism and necessity of material