I believe our work, our knowledge, and our theories make use of both science and art but psychoanalysis is neither. It is a religion.
Many years ago, the Vietnam war knocked me out of training in the Chicago Institute. If it were not for the war, I would have spent my life in Hyde Park and on Michigan Avenue. But to stay out of the army, I enlisted in the United States Public Health Service, volunteered for the Division of Indian Health and was sent to the Navajo Nation. I expected to stay two years but was so happy there I stayed ten. Several years earlier, an unfortunate experience with my cousin, the rabbi, completed my disillusionment with Judaism and religion in general.
Back then, most Navajos spoke their own language and only about half of them could speak English, and they valued their traditional medical systems more highly than ours. Intelligent PHS leaders, needing to earn the people's trust, had cultivated cooperative relationships with the medicine people. And, given the task of creating a mental health system, I did the same. I hired hatathli, Navajo Ceremonialists as consultants and ultimately became the one nonnative faculty member of a school for medicine people. In 1967, when I met my first consultant, Tom Largewhiskers, when he was 100, he said, “I don't know what your grandfathers told you, but the most important thing mine taught me is that there is a part of our thoughts that we don't know about.” He had a crooked lower leg he had broken in a wagon accident when he was young. The medicine man who had set the fracture told him that besides the splint he needed treatment for the cause of the accident because Tom had unconsciously decided to hurt himself. I figure that conversation took place about a decade before the publication of Studies in Hysteria. The hatathli were
not only the most learned of the healers but were also the priests of the Navajo religion. The two roles were inseparable; there was no distinction between medicine and religion. (When the medicine person school was established with the support of the NIMH, I worried that we'd get in trouble because the government was supporting a religion, but when a constituent complained about that to a congressman, he dismissed the complaint as ridiculous.)
Besides traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church, a pan Indian religion had spread to the Navajo and about half the tribe had joined despite the Tribal Council, influenced by white missionaries, having made it illegal when it arrived about twenty-five years earlier. It was legalized in 1970, but in my first years there, I couldn't find anyone who would acknowledge membership to a white government employee like me. I wanted to go to a Peyote Meeting to learn what it was that half my patients believed in and were doing. Finally, a man whose trust I had earned invited me to one. I went as a frightened observer but left the all-night ceremony moved and changed. I kept up the idea that I was going as an observer for another meeting or two and then recognized that I had become a member and asked and received permission to officially join despite not being Native American. The man who had taken me to the meeting, Tom Nez, became my adopted brother. I had dropped back into religion. The NAC, like traditional Navajo medicine was psychologically sophisticated. It also served both the functions of healing and worship. Most meetings are for the purpose of treating a specific person. One night that person was Tom's wife, Carol, who was depressed. There is plenty of time for talking between sundown, when the ritual starts, and sunup, when it ends, and that night, Carol talked about her sadness at reaching menopause and never having any more children. Her husband said that he thought he was also part of the problem because he was so often away running meetings and doing other church business. He said that he had noticed that sometimes he had doubts about the religion and that then he threw himself more heavily into its work to forget those thoughts.
After some years of my going to meetings, Tom told me that it was time for me to take up my training as a road man, the priest who officiates. I was delighted by his confidence and was initially simply happy with the idea. But then I stopped to think that I would never be known as a good
or bad roadman but always as the white roadman, my freakiness more important than my dedication or my skill and I decided to study what I would fit into better. I dropped back into psychoanalytic training.
As psychoanalysts, just as our knowledge of the unconscious is not new, our role in people's lives is as old as humanity, and this role is much the same as the one medicine people have always played. We are attentively close to the person so that they are not alone. Tom Largewhiskers said of his schizophrenic patients that they are way out somewhere all by themselves and it's our job to go join them and bring them back. We inform our people that their troubles are understandable and that our understanding will help. We help them to see that their suffering and they themselves have meaning. We have a system of ideas that organizes our relationship with patients and which they can learn. We assist them in finding their way in the family, community and culture. Like hatathli but unlike roadmen, we pretend not to have moral authority but we do, and like the priests and healers of every culture we have a value system. We think knowledge is better than ignorance, that honesty is better than deception, especially self-deception, that independence is better than conformity and that self-respect is better than guilt and shame. Though many of us tend to deny it, our opinion has weight and we counteract other authorities, real or imagined, who scorn, scold or punish. We give permission for activities and thoughts that previously felt forbidden. Our value system is crucially different from that of many other religions in that we believe that actions, but not fantasy and thought, should be evaluated as good or bad.
In that, among other ways, we are an improvement on religions that came before us, and like all religions, we came into being as part of a cultural change and we were more adaptive to new conditions. Usually the religious revolution is led by a prophet who rebels against old beliefs and practices and formulates a new and more adaptive system, which the prophet's followers institutionalize. The prophet's insights and inspirations become dogma. I was lucky to become a member of the Native American Church in its prophetic days when we flocked to meetings because they meant so much, despite the risk of arrest. Fifty years later, alas, lots of people go because it is expected. Young people rejecting rigidity of belief in the Native American Church and psychoanalysis or any system, create schisms if not revolutions and
divide the original religion into competing sects.
Martin Luther and the Reformation were part of the end of feudalism, the rise of capitalism and the explosion of technical invention, especially movable type which made it possible for everyone and not just priests to read scripture. In the mid-nineteenth century, much of North America had been lost to the European invaders, and native nations were despairing of being able to save the rest. The Ghost Dance religion arose in response to this. Its main idea was that all natives should cease fighting each other and unite against the common enemy. When that didn't work, one of its leaders, Kwanah Parker, a war chief of the Comanche who had succeeded in holding onto their land for longer than almost any other group, became the prophet who founded the NAC, a redemptive religion that helped mourn the loss and offered solace in the idea, among others, that like the Jews, they were special to the Creator, who gave them the gift of the sacrament, Peyote, and a ritual that made them closer to the divine than other people. “The white man prays to God. We speak with him face to face.”
When the NAC reached the Navajo, decades later, it served other purposes. In The Peyote Religion Among the Navajo, David Aberle showed that the NAC redeemed the nation from the destruction of its agrarian economy. What happened was that the growth of the human population in the first part of the twentieth century led to a growth of the sheep population that resulted in the overgrazing that destroyed the grassland. The Bureau of Indian Affairs thought to improve the situation by a program of stock reduction, which was carried out in an authoritarian and humiliating manner. People saw their beloved flocks seized, killed and burned. They didn't lose their land but they lost their livelihood and the organizing principle of their society. Besides its redemptive nature, the religion also provided new social structure as the matrilocal, extended family system broke down, and Peyotists became each other's new extended family by adoption in the way that I became a member of the Nez family and a whole family system of adopted relatives from a number of other regions.
Freud, our psychoanalytic prophet, was brought to the big, sophisticated city from a rural extended family culture when he was a little boy. I think that seeing his mother unclothed on the trip was not only
oedipally significant but also a screen memory for the culture shock of his dislocation. His fine secular education, which his parents valued so highly, marked an enormous cultural change in one generation. It gave him the keenness of social vision common among well-informed outsiders and a need to resolve the conflicts resulting from losing old ways and digesting new ones. His replacement for Judaism was Science, which was a religion for him and for many of his time. His reverence for science and his insistence that he was a scientist was the ultimate origin of this collection of essays. The idea that we are scientists is a religious dogma that still has considerable sway. Many analytic meetings call the sessions where we read papers to each other “Scientific Sessions”, a name which makes me, for one, a little queasy. I identify with Mark Twain, who after meeting with Louis Agassiz, said, “Between us we comprehend all of human knowledge. He knows all that can be known, and I know the remainder.”
In addition to needing to replace Jewish religious belief, Freud had to bridge the gap between an extended family culture and a nuclear family culture. In the heyday of American psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century, analysts thought the main focus of their work was the Oedipus Complex, but the public knew it was separation-individuation, a concept that had only just then been specifically formulated. Everyone knew in those days that you got analyzed to free yourself from your parents, especially your mother. Almost every sketch in Mike Nichols and Elaine May's show about analysis was about a controlling, guilt-inducing mother or, in one case, a controlling guilt-inducing motherly analyst.
When families migrate from an extended family culture to the United States or when the industrial revolution arrives in a new part of the world and the population moves from the country to the city, there is a strain between the generations. Under the old regime, children remained unseparated and it worked all right. In the industrial and post-industrial world, the children see and want separation and, anyway, it is necessary in order for people to be mobile enough to succeed economically and socially. Americans, by and large, don't need help with this problem any more, but millions of Asians do. They, like other ethnic groups before them, are climbing the acculturation and status ladder, and in their turn are subjecting their children to ambitious parental control with the result that the next generation, like Freud no longer fit the extended family
system and have to solve the resulting conflicts. The same circumstances are favoring the growth of psychoanalysis in Iran, where it is relatively new and has been growing rapidly. I am fortunate to be a consultant and hear frequently about the struggles of analysands who come from rural traditional families and have become doctors and lawyers in Tehran.
I don't know what comes next, but I feel hopeful we will be relevant for a long time. Buddhism has shown great staying power and I think that in two crucial ways, it's like psychoanalysis. Neither the Buddhists nor we compel belief in a magical explanation for the origin of the universe. The Dalai Lama, asked what Tibetan Cosmology was, said that it evolved as science made new discoveries. Like the Buddhists, our essence is a practice, which I think will remain valuable no matter what else happens.