Drafting Bridges

With 25.4% of the United States population identifying as Evangelical Christian, and with 81% of Evangelicals voting for Trump, we cannot afford Freud's attitude quoted here in the left side bar. Where religious people sense we feel them to be delusionally distorting the world and suppressing their intelligence, we are likely to go nowhere together. In looking at the question as to how we, as psychoanalysts, can live up to Obama's challenge to discover the basic sense of solidarity that must underlie democracy, I am drawn to look both at the ways psychoanalysis can be guilty of dismissiveness of the religious endeavor, and to think about how we have more in common with those involved in spiritual yearning than we often acknowledge.

As George Makari describes in Soul Machine and Revolution in Mind, psychoanalysis is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment project of understanding the mind from a scientific perspective. Freud wanted individuals to win the capacity to think and take responsibility; he also guarded his movement from trends that could make it look backwards or cultish. As a field, we have moved on from much of what seems dated in the theory: Analysts rarely interpret penis envy as psychological bedrock or see homosexuality as pathological.

“Religion … imposes … on everyone its own path to the acquisition of happiness and protection from suffering. Its technique consists in depressing the value of life and distorting the picture of the real world in a delusional manner—which presupposes an intimidation of the intelligence.”

However, even at a time and at an institute where we value looking at diversity, the secular/spiritual divide is not well explored. We can be leery of those who turn to religion as a way of coming to know what is deepest in themselves and in the world. The bias can be subtle: I can think of any number of case conferences where a patient's parents were described as religious and the assumption was that they were rigid or authorita