A Window In

As a magazine at the intersection of the psychological and the political, Room has published a number of articles that aim to explore the cultural divides in the US and beyond. In this vein, Jacob Smith has written a piece about being an Evangelical Christian in 2019, who cares deeply about humanitarian as well as spiritual issues. (Who are the Evangelicals Room 10.18) He is the pastor at Calvary-St. George's Episcopal Church in New York City, which is home to a racially and politically diverse congregation.

Parts of the essay, however, could function more as a wall than a window for secular readers with little familiarity with Christianity as it can function in the life of a religious person. He speaks of central tenets of his faith. But talk about Jesus can be alienating, if one's associations are to the Crusades or to the Holocaust, or if one assumes believers to be concrete and incapable of what we think of as symbolic processing. It is a problem we are familiar with in psychoanalysis: Therapists can't talk about transference resolution or pre-Oedipal conflict with a new patient. The terms are jargon until they are lived.

I grew up in a mostly secular intellectual family. My adolescent anxiety took the form of religious dread. These concerns eventually led me to study the phenomenology of religion. In the years between college and starting training to become a psychoanalyst, I lived in a Christian community that worked with emotionally disturbed children. As an analyst, and as a person aiming to grow over the course of a lifetime, I find myself drawing on a range of sources that explore the human condition. I am drawn to play with translations between literature, religion, neuroscience, and many schools of psychoanalysis. Many are possible; reasonable people can disagree about which ones work.

I have always been struck by resonance between Christian and Kleinian models. In the Judeo-Christian universe, Adam and Eve start out in Eden