Psychoanalysis at the United Religions Initiative

MMM: First, Lisby, I'm fascinated that a psychoanalyst should have been invited to participate in helping form the United Religions Initiative.

ELM: Actually, those of us from outside, those of us who were not religious leaders, represented a very wide range of human endeavor. The idea, I think, was to get a few people from what you might call dominant secular paradigms interested in the issues raised by the United Religions Initiative. So far as I personally was concerned, I think there was strong interest in having feminist thinking represented, but also in addressing some of the questions that have recently occupied my research work. For example, how is it that we know what we know “intuitively?” Or questions regarding what happens physiologically, psychologically, and even in the physical environment when people feel highly “resonant” with each other — as, say, can happen in religious celebrations.

MMM: Do you see psychoanalysis more generally having anything to do with the URI?

ELM: Yes, I do. Go back to Hans Küng, the Swiss theologian whose statement [quoted at the beginning of this article] was kind of a rallying cry for this conference. The idea of an organization dedicated to unprecedented forms of dialogue among religions, based on self-understanding and empathic understanding of the other — that's got to be compelling for most psychoanalysts, especially since analysts are acutely aware of how organized religion has often institutionalized just the opposite. On top of that, I think there are some very specific ways analysts might contribute to the URI while finding it a venue for enriching analytic understanding of certain aspects of human development — for example, what spirituality is all about and what may be adaptive, not just pathologic, about it.

MMM: I want to go back to what you just said about the emphasis on understanding. You can look so many places in the world and see how completely infused with political self-interest — just the opposite of mutual understanding — organized religion is.

ELM: You're identifying what I think may be the most significant aspect of the URI, and certainly what I found the most impressive aspect of the conference. There was an extraordinary emphasis on listening and learning how to listen, on self-awareness as well as non-judgmental awareness of the other. That led to quite a remarkable atmosphere, as well as to a lot of real work getting done with unexpected smoothness, given the diversity of races, nations, languages, and religions represented.

The facilitators drew heavily on Martin Weisbord's “Future Search” approach, which builds on psychological principles familiar to us as analysts but develops an impressive set of implications for how you can get very different sorts of people with very different agendas working together productively. At various points I found myself thinking about our own institutes and societies, and about how fruitful some of those same methods might be in helping us deal with our difficulties in working together, given our diversity.

MMM: Can you give an example?

ELM: One striking principle: When you hit a problem, the one thing you don't do is try to solve it. Instead you just name it — and move on. Fascinating, because what looked like a genuinely non-negotiable problem on day one (like agreeing with a group of Muslims on the status of women as potential member representatives of the URI) became, over three days of building trust and mutual respect as we reached agreement about other things, actually negotiable by day four.

MMM: How did the URI get started?

ELM: It started as a vision that William Swing, the Episcopal Bishop of California, developed in 1993 at the 50th Anniversary Celebration of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco. What hit him was that 183 nations were there who'd been at least attempting to struggle toward global good together for 50 years, but over those years most religions of the world had barely been talking to each other. Meanwhile, there were 30 religious wars going on in the world. So his vision was to get religions talking, and he spent his sabbatical the next year visiting religious leaders all over the world, gaining their commitment to this vision of religions in dialogue.

Of course the vision keeps growing and changing. For instance, a number of representatives of indigenous peoples were at the [URI] conference — in itself a landmark, since they had never before been invited to share in anything like a conversation among world religions. Their self-designations aren't about organized religion at all; they're much more about something we might call spirituality. Partly because of them, there seemed to be a growing consensus over the week that a word like “spirituality” captures the commonality the URI seeks to express better than “religion.”

MMM: How did you as a psychoanalyst relate to that interest in spirituality?

ELM: That brings up another reason why I think the URI may be of interest to psychoanalysts. A number of analysts seem to me interested in deepening their learning from the forms of wisdom that have been at the kernel of many religions and forms of spirituality — wisdom about how we come to know ourselves and our place in the scheme of things, or what it means to love with genuine compassion, or what leads to a sense of meaning in life. Pieces of that wisdom lie within a lot of faith traditions, and there they all were, leading representatives of each one, talking with each other, trying to understand each other, engaged with each other at a very deep level. Muslims, Buddhists, Sufis, Sikhs, Jains — not to mention the occasional Western rabbi, Carmelite nun, or African Methodist minister. Part of what was deeply moving to me was — this is the best way I can describe it — how many truly great souls were there. The sense of collective wisdom was palpable.

MMM: What was it like to be the only psychoanalyst there?

ELM: I found myself very appreciative of being an analyst. In one working group, several people — mostly from the southern hemisphere, the “Third World” — described the kind of understanding they hoped the URI would facilitate. They were describing a version of exactly what we analysts try to facilitate. They hoped the URI would develop people's capacities to listen undefensively, be unthreatened by difference, express their own convictions and passions, and remain unintimidated by the authority of those who are wealthier or more powerful.

MMM: Can you tell me something about what you actually did in the working groups?

ELM: By the second day, I had joined one of several groups working on the beginning articulation of a mission statement for the URI. Agreeing on values — much less on individual words — was an extraordinary challenge. We were eight people representing seven countries and eight religious backgrounds. We learned a lot, including some humbling things about our respective prejudices and stereotypes. But we were also able to agree on a six-part preliminary statement of purpose we could collectively stand behind:

• To value life in all its forms.

• To value the relatedness of all life.

• To value spirituality as a basic dimension of life.

• To provide a process by which peoples of all religions, traditions, and ethnicities can join in cooperative efforts towards global awareness and responsibility.

• To recognize and reconcile the ways in which religion has been used to abuse life.

• To appreciate and celebrate the diversity of religions, ethnicities, gender, and species existing in our world.

It's far from a final mission statement, but it was a start. We could not, for example, agree unequivocally to “non-violence.” But “valuing life” we could agree on.

MMM: You are also the artistic director of San Francisco Bay Revels. Revels is such a celebratory form of music theater, and so many thousands of people are deeply moved by it that I think of it as having a sort of spiritual quality, even though the context is secular.

ELM: People at the conference were very interested in Revels, much more than I'd anticipated. Part of my motivation for starting Revels in San Francisco was out of the sense that so many people, living secular lives and without religious affiliation, were missing the chance to come together in a celebratory experience of music and the ritual elements that are what theater was originally all about. So at the conference, in this gathering of people who themselves know plenty about the power and beauty of glorious celebratory ritual, there was real eagerness to think about forms we might call trans-religious — not rooted in particular dogma or belief. Great liturgy (from the Greek leit ergos, “work of the people”) is for me quintessentially about the art of combining experiences of awe with experiences of participation, juxtaposing experiences that are beyond yourself, beyond your own capacities, with experiences of belonging, being drawn in. Revels grabs that paradox in the realm of the performing arts, and because Revels isn't rooted in any particular religion, it may be relevant to the way the URI imagines celebration.

Wesley Mabuza, an extraordinary black minister and political hero in South Africa, said to me at one point during the conference, “You from the North have something to learn from us about celebration. You think celebration is something you do to pat yourself on the back — when you graduate or do something well. For us, even in terrible pain and struggling, celebration is about life, just having life every day.” He loved the idea of Revels; he felt it spoke to something akin to that African sense of celebration.

What he was talking about really hit home for me when, two days later, I was telling him how I'd once spent time working in his home town of Johannesburg. I told him it had been a wonderful but lonely time for me. He looked at me in disbelief. “Lonely?” he said, “Lonely — in Jo'burg? It's not possible! Not in Jo'burg!” He meant it. That quality of celebration and community so infuses the Jo'burg he knows, that, agonizing though life has been for him and his people — devastating poverty, in and out of jail — he truly does not recognize the loneliness familiar to most of us in the West.

MMM: What do you see as a role for psychoanalysts in the URI?

ELM: We're hearing from all quarters about bringing our psychoanalytic skills and orientation to bear on problems outside the consulting room. As the URI develops, I think it may provide a fascinating venue where those skills will have a place. For example, to the extent that the URI is pre-eminently defined by the challenges of cooperating in the face of diversity, I think we have something quite particular to offer. To work with diversity means, I think, really understanding certain anxieties — the anxieties that lead to intolerance, to ruthless proselytizing, to the need to make everybody else just like oneself. Analysts know a lot about what leads to those anxieties, and also about the behaviors those anxieties insistently hold in place: narrow-mindedness, self-protective hatred, the need to destroy others. The real heart of our work entails helping people confront and transcend those anxieties. As the URI dedicates itself to helping individuals and religious organizations do just that, I would hope we can find ways to contribute.

And I think there'll be a lot for analysts to learn as well, personally enriching and also enriching to our field. We've been pretty good at understanding what can be maladaptive about religion; the URI might offer a wonderful opportunity to learn more about other aspects of what spirituality provides for people. Certainly the conference taught me a lot in that regard.