RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS STATES OF MIND
"Every man seems to know
all things in a dreamy sort
of way and then again to
wake up and to know nothing."
(Plato, Statesman) (1)
Once, I saw a little child of about four years old who was fascinated, curiously observing the damage that the high tide had caused to the beach. The child asked his mother many questions about the cause and nature of the phenomenon. As she was answering him, and in view of the increasing complexity of the questions, she became more and more irritated. When she heard one more "why" she lost control and impatiently answered: "It was God's wish!..."
I - Religious States of Mind
Archaeological and historical research have shown that religion has been a powerful force since ancient times. Practiced either by the State or by the clergy, either in a sanctuary or by groups, even by a nation, on behalf of one God or gods, religion has always been present at different times and cultures. Religion has shaped its own vocabulary which, nowadays, imperceptibly, impregnates people's communication. This vocabulary is present even when the object of communication is very far from religious ideas and practices. Over the years gods have changed but, religion, itself, has not.
A patient relates that, during a conference, he became intrigued and surprised. He asked himself the reasons for such feelings until he realised that the friendly atmosphere among the lecturers and between the lecturers and the audience that was making questions was the surprising element. He thought it was strange that there could be such cordiality with such divergent opinions. There did not appear to be any tension at that meeting, but if at any moment there might have been some, it ebbed away during the debate. The analysand made some more associations and other evidences came up showing that his surprise corresponded to a "splitting", in which he himself thought that when there was a divergence of ideas, one or the other should impose himself as the better one; the final result should be an agreement in which one would accept the other's idea as the right one.
Another patient, a young man, enters the office. He is anxious, lies down and remains in silence. He makes some associations that are a kind of explanation for his anxiety. Little by little I learn that he is worried about his teenage daughter who was depressed because she had not passed her entrance exam to University. The night before the session they had talked about the subject and he had come to the conclusion that he could not help her. He felt dejected about his daughter's fate and, finally, concluded that: "She studied so hard, she did not deserve this." Since the beginning, the floating anxiety was visible, dramatised. I know through other means that this man feels responsible for the suffering of his children. He always has a theory about this subject, a kind of faith. He thinks he must suffer and protect his children from any frustration. As in his above conclusion, his speech is always sprinkled with words that contain religious ideas and beliefs. Thus, for instance, virtue and effort should be rewarded. His vertex of life observation sways between what should and what should not be done; between what is right and what is wrong. He has theories about himself and about life which are imbued with ideas of love for one’s fellow person, of sympathy and of abnegation. He submits compliantly to his groups' demands and has an optimistic, cheerful and smiling attitude towards them. He generally idealises his friends and usually denies feelings of hatred, antagonism and competitiveness. He always tries to guide the dialogue, in psychoanalysis sessions, to intellectual, rational and logical debates grounded on moral theories, ideologies and principles.
Another analysand starts the session relating how distressed he is because he has realised he has not made good use of life. He embarks on a torrent of examples to illustrate how he came to these conclusions. He agrees with an interference I make by saying that my interpretations were very important because "they fit in the system" he was formulating about himself; and they matched the conclusions he had reached about his life. Now, he could understand his childhood and adolescence well, and his difficulties with women. These conclusions were bringing him a lot of self-knowledge. He could see, for example, "how much time he had wasted". He went on talking without, apparently, pondering over what I was showing him in the office. I asked the analysand whether that which I was trying to tell him was making any sense. He answered affirmatively because he noticed I was listening to what he was saying and that helped him "to organise" himself. He frequently seemed to listen to my interferences, but then he would go back to the series of his associations and he would say: "As I was saying..." "O.K., but I was going to say something else..." This patient's answer made me wonder about the psychoanalyist’s function in that session. I thought that the analyst talked on behalf of "somebody else" (speaker), maybe a personal God who helped him in his despair.
These and other analysands have placed me before what I call "a religious state of mind". Working with these analysands, I have noticed a great lack of curiosity about reality. Thus the knowledge of this reality becomes more difficult because the search for "established truths" seems to prevail next to an exaggerated subordination to their group’s authority (family, work group, friends, etc.). They had no idea that they should look for the origin of the difficulty by understanding the reality of their most inner self. Greed, jealousy and fantasies of possessing knowledge led the analysands to postulate and accept theories about life and about themselves. This led to explanations and understanding of their anxiety.
Religion has been generous in offering pacifying answers to people's anxiety. Melanie Klein(2) maintained that the fear of annihilation is a primary factor for anxiety in babies. In adults, the fear of the unknown, of what has not yet happened, seems to be closely linked to existential anxiety. All knowledge happens only in the present. Man can know nothing about the future. This seems to generate a basic anxiety in which the human being, fearing the unknown, frequently tends to deny it and to replace it by rationalisation, understanding and explanations.
From my point of view, religion established that which in the Kleinian theory occurs in the person as a paranoid-schizoid position(3) . Religion causes sharp splitting between love and hatred, good and evil, the righteous and the sinners, the saints and the damned. The extremes are always apart and in opposition. A moral system of principles and rules is organised upon these splitting and it is expressed in terms of "what should and what should not be". Observations become repetitive, rigid, tedious, and flat (without a way through). Paranoid anxiety prevails because gods have been demanding, critical, cruel, and often vengeful and sanguinary. They reward the righteous and punish the sinners.
The "use" of the projective identification seems to be the essential condition to preserve the state described in the above paragraph. Authority and personal responsibility are submitted to religious authority.
An opposition among order, group authority and the individual sets in. Group hatred makes the individual sacrifice his narcissism. Submission is rewarded with promises of immortality and of endless "love" from the group. As religious ideas expand, they limit the freedom of the individual "to be" . Consequently, the individual's relation with reality is jeopardised.
Proselytism is an existing aspect in the religious states of mind. It seems to originate in the necessity to divulge and promote doctrine. Frequently it is backed up by fantasies of superiority that propitiate the desires to recreate the world and life.
In a group, projective identification is dramatised. Its objective manifestation appears in rituals. I think that the "truths" experienced and proclaimed by the group can be expressed by means of dramatisation. Dramatisation seems to have a wider use: in the maintenance of faith and of belief in mystery and magic. "The Bacchants" by Euripides is an example. In this play, the ritual comes up imposed by Dionysus. First to worship him and then to initiate most participants in the mysteries of faith and to divulge the new religion.
Finally we come to hallucination. This is the factor that links the former ones and preserves the religious group. In order to remain so, the believer hallucinates. The hallucinated messianic idea is unknown. Reality is replaced by a false system in which the known prevails.
In a religious mind, uncertainties and doubts, inherent to life, tend to be obscured by the comfort of doctrines, of dogmas, of the established and approved by the group authority that speaks on behalf of a god. For an appropriate language to cope with religion, it developed and nowadays its vocabulary is part of our daily communication. This language is appropriate to deal with the rational. It establishes basic rules in terms of rationality so as to abolish intuitive queries that may arise in people's minds, leading them to face common sense. Omnipotent fantasies easily set in so as to hide the individual's helplessness. As a result, he is led to superficial, improper, premature, and frequently false conclusions.
When psychoanalysis becomes possible as a method of investigation of the mind, an opportunity to scientifically examine facts of reality is offered to people. This is not easy because religious thought is relatively unconscious, irrational and operative(4). An opportunity to choose between what is false and deceitful and what is the unknowable truth is also offered to people.
II - Curiosity and Religious States of Mind
I was invited to a wedding ceremony in a Catholic church. While I was sitting in one of the pews, my attention was caught by a half-hidden piece of paper carefully folded, but visible on the kneeler right in front of me. I took the paper, unfolded it, and read a prayer addressed to a Catholic saint written on one side of the paper. At the bottom, there were instructions to the reader to say three prayers, three times, during three consecutive days. On the other side of the paper was written:
"Whoever finds this prayer, if facing difficulties, make twenty-five copies and leave one per day on the pew of this church. Even before the date expires, the grace will be obtained, no matter how difficult it may be."
When I finished reading, I surprised myself with some questions: is it possible for the reader of one of these papers to follow the instructions without a single question? In what state of mind would he/she be? Would he/she not be curious about the author’s state of mind? Would he/she question the meaning of what had been written; what could be the purpose of such an ongoing distribution for twenty-five days? Other questions occurred to me, but I have to stop at this point because this message is just a means to introduce my topic.
When I observe a religious state of mind I see that the curiosity about reality is restrained, restricted, all questions being replaced by moral statements, unquestionable propositions and misrepresentation of the observed phenomena. The associations, in the analytic session appeared to be impregnated with omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The previously presented clinical material of the third patient exemplifies these types of situations. I would also like to extend this observation to similar phenomena which may occur at the psychoanalyst’s. Curiosity about what is unknown in the psychoanalytic relationship becomes restricted or inexistent and is replaced by some nonsense-type talk, impregnated with religiousness, a collusion without creativity, where the known, always present, enables a relationship which occurs without emotional turmoil, but with predominance of reassurance and satisfaction with the analysis progress aiming at improvement and cure. Thus, the analysis is tolerated at present, because implicitly a better life is expected , that is, - the cure.
It is also necessary to consider that the scientific knowledge of the mind is still limited, the investigation field being wide and potentially favourable to new discoveries. The inhibition of curiosity implies stereotyped or distorted observation causing premature and false conclusions, and subsequent elaboration of wrong theories. In the psychoanalytic relationship, the analysis of the personality’s psychotic aspects is essential, and according to our point of view, it is useful, from the beginning, to focus our attention on the elaboration of such aspects. The religious states of mind result from the interaction of multiple, quite primitive factors, which appear to observation as archaic fantasies, psychotic anxiety and mechanisms of mental performance inherent in Melanie Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position.
The psychoanalyst can become free from the need of a religious mind through an extensive and deep analysis of his psychotic aspects and thus develop the discipline recommended by W.R. Bion. This demands a constant reflection from the psychoanalyst about his own conflicts in his relationship with himself. It is also advisable to consider the relationship of the analyst with the group. The history of the psychoanalytical movement is rich in examples in which the Institution is contrary to discoveries, and innovators are questioned about their loyalty to Psychoanalysis. There is no postulate to give us guidance in this field; a conflict will always exist between what are real scientific discoveries and the conclusions which are not. However, it is useful for us to keep a state of mind inclined to the said discoveries, being aware that it is the unknown that stands out in the psychoanalytic process. To achieve this, it is essential to have discipline related to memory, desire and comprehension.
When I first wrote this paper, I had a dream at the end of the week in which my work was at a standstill; I couldn’t even advance one line. I dreamed I was at the ophthalmologist’s . He was a well-known professor in his expertise. After examining my eyes, he said: "You need to use my eye drops. I’m going to give them to you." And so he went to get them, but I said: "But I have my own." During that week I had thought of extending this project, after the Peer Review Committee’s advice. Also, I read a psychoanalyst’s paper which produced an insistent impression on me that I had, in hand, something very well written, very valuable. Talking to myself I wondered: It’s so well grounded and so perfectly structured! This is the way a scientific paper should be. I felt discouraged and compelled to consult other psychoanalysts’ papers. I made a huge list. On the night of the dream, before going to bed, I read the following sentence: "It is in darkness that reality lights up". Freud’s letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé came to mind* . The next morning I woke up willing to go back to my work. I narrated this dream to introduce the question about the psychoanalyst’s relationship with the Institution and his relationship with himself, when the institution may work with authoritative aspects on the individual’s intimacy. In this sense, W.R. Bion’s work published in "Cogitations"(5) very much encourages thinking. From A.A.Mason I borrowed his "suffocating super-ego(6)" concept, using it to complement my subject, since the authoritative aspects of the super-ego become "suffocating", leading to the psychosis contained in the states of religious mind.
During our moments of intimate truthfulness we all experience doubts, uncertainties, and, sometimes, fear. To keep the vertex of the unknown in our work may cause anxiety. In chapter IX of "A Memoir of the Future" (7) there is a dialogue between Roland and Robin, in which the atmosphere described is of fear and abandonment; voices then appear in the text related to God or to the Devil. This makes me think that the individual, overwhelmed by anxiety and abandonment, is religiously affected. Thus, he produces temporary and transitory gods which have very particular and single features; they are ephemeral and momentary creations to meet also transitory present needs; these gods act like an "interlocutor" with many different qualities and who exercises a psychological split function: sometimes "the good" prevails, sometimes "the bad", sometimes "love", sometimes "hatred".
M. Klein’s contribution concerning the baby’s primitive development and W.R.Bion’s contribution concerning the thinking apparatus made it possible for us to observe the interplay of the paranoid-schizoid and depressive position and the Dream Work a operation. I believe, we will never know when these functions have been established in human beings. Nevertheless, I think it is an encouraging quest for our observation, mainly when it seems that the baby repeats, in its development, the evolution of the human species. I dare to make an imaginative proposition, supposing that in primitive times the first human beings that appeared were always frightened by Nature’s forces, with the real danger to survive, suffering pains, illnesses and unimaginable anxiety. As they were almost totally ignorant about everything, they created ephemeral gods with personal and variable characteristics; I call these gods "the interlocutor", since they were created to help them in their abandonment and solitude.
Freud in "Two Principles of Mental Functioning" (8) and W.R.Bion in "Cogitations"(9), encouraged me to extend my suppositions, imagining something about the life of the first hominides, at an early stage when language had not yet been invented. At that time, the elementary mental activity would be hallucinatory and communication would be pre-verbal. Non-stop pain, fear, hatred would lead individuals to use projective identification as a way to free themselves from disturbing emotions. Projective identification would take place among the members of small groups and in external world objects. As a consequence, unreal, dead objects(10) would appear, with omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent characteristics. I call these bad, strict, cruel objects "the interlocutor" with characteristics of b elements, that through re-introjection would be felt as if they had their own existence within the personality. This primitive "interlocutor" has been organised in this original chaos, giving birth to the personal god that later on became the familiar god, the tribal god, and so on, until the appearance of the different religions.
III-Mirages *
The chapter "Notes on Ritual and Magic"(11) from the book "Cogitations" is an important contribution to psychoanalytic practice. It presents extremely deep and useful observations to our reflection, mainly in relation to personality psychotic aspects.
The reading of this text is exciting; I experienced similar feelings when I read "A Memoir of the Future". This reading encourages us to use our own minds, to use our life and work experience to give meaning to the different observations W.R.Bion makes during his narrative; we are always examining our own mental processes because fading, changing and ephemeral images happen as a consequence of the way the theme is presented; deep and sometimes primitive experiences are evoked; there are moments when we feel we have attained something, then, we feel we are lost in the darkness. Sometimes our intuition appears, sometimes it disappears. We end by accomplishing the author’s statement that says: "The rigidity imported by limitations of rigorous discussion has any counterpart in the nebulous domain that is object of discussion."
In the first paragraph of "Notes on Ritual and Magic", W.R.Bion says: "I define magic as a resort to control the physical environment. I reserve "ritual" to define that aspect of magic which is concerned to control the spiritual world". I am going to try to examine the magic and the ritual, at mind level, which appears in the free associations of the analysand and in the magic ceremonies that happen in the analysis room. As I previously tried to show, colloquial and official languages are impregnated with a sense of religious, ritualistic or magic words. In the individuals’ daily routine, the practice of rituals and magic means a great deal, presented through rules and ceremonies, when superior spirits and gods are evoked, when using amulets and magic spells. It seems to have been an ongoing practice in the history of humanity, and strongly persists to date, sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden and disguised. In the psychoanalytic relationship, we observe these facts as well as the transition of magic ways of thinking to the ritual and to the scientific thought and vice-versa, from the scientific to the magic. This demands the development of a constant and sharp observation during the session, the psychoanalyst’s consideration of truth, and the vertex maintenance where only the unknown is relevant in psychoanalysis. W.R.Bion calls the attention to the investigation vicissitudes when "observations are inaccurate, suppositions are wrong and conclusions are false."(11) We come to the conclusion that without some observation discipline it is easy to slip from scientific investigation to magic or superstitious beliefs or formulas establishing ritual procedures.
An analysand, an outstanding, well-bred, cultured, civilised, graduate professional arrives to his session- early in the morning - and after a period of silence which denotes his anxiety, he says something like: "I realised how I get mixed up, how I create things for myself". After his shower, getting dressed to come to the session, while putting on his shirt, he had an idea which he considered childish: he didn’t want to go out wearing that shirt, he wanted another one because if he wore that one, something would happen. "Bad things" came to his mind, he immediately felt anxious, although he tried to assure to himself that everything was just nonsense. I talked to him about the superstitious idea, about its function of hiding the psychic perception of reality, about the possible investigation, during the session, of what was happening within himself; I explained, in more details, superstitious thinking, the magic character given to the shirt and his refusal to wear it. I pointed out his submission to the idea, his mental production that could not be relieved, and the non-appearance of free associations because of his lack of aggressiveness. He listened, remained silent for a while and told me he went somewhere with his teenage son, where he met an acquaintance of his whom he liked; he was introduced to his wife. Suddenly he thought: "what a beautiful woman, she’s the woman of my dreams". He felt heart palpitations, he was overcome with distress; he had to leave, to get away from that woman. At this point, I interrupted to show him how his beliefs reflected on his ideas and that his beliefs were responsible for his reactions, giving them a primitive characteristic yet to be discovered. This is the point I would like to highlight now. He then referred to an invitation he and his wife had received the day before. It was a birthday party where there would be "food, beverages and a lot of dancing". He said he felt something in his friend’s voice and suddenly he felt anxious; he felt like lying, so he told his friend that they would probably not be able to go since they were going to travel exactly on the date of the party. He was aware of his lie, but his uncontrollable anxiety would not let him say anything else. Only after he had hung up, he thought: "but I don’t need to dance if I don’t want to."
This material explains how an emerging idea or emotion in the individual organises itself as a magic ritual and the idea or emotion reification is felt as a real threat, thus, the reification is hallucination(12).. It can be observed that a certain judgment capacity is broken up and the produced idea and fantasy prevail. We see that a civilised man, who consciously comes to an analysis, is defeated by primitive forms of thinking based on the belief that there are spiritual forces which interfere in his psychic life and with the world. Thus, this man projectively transforms his primitive fantasies into religious or superstitious images and ideas, abandoning himself to psychotic anxiety, abandoning himself to the logic and grammar of psychotic processes. His hallucinations are hindered at present from a greater contact with reality to allow his participation in the scientific investigation of the states of mind unknown to him. As a substitute, the need to get better and to be cured appears. In this session, therefore, it was possible to elaborate some of his fantasies and psychotic anxiety, such as primitive fantasies related to the breast, to the premature Oedipus complex and to the initial cruel and sadistic impulses involved in the premature super-ego development.
It is possible to follow the medicine evolution in pre-historic times only through supposition inspired in drawings, through the remains of bones and through primitive man’s surgical tools, but almost nothing can be concluded of his mental attitude facing illness and death. There is a great probability that primitive man had acquired initial knowledge through the trial and error method until his mental development reached a certain level to establish some connections, such as: adequate plants for nourishment and plants used as medicine. It seems that, since early times, a belief existed that illnesses could have a supernatural origin or that they derived from the "trickery" of an enemy. Thus, treatment of body illnesses was associated to spiritual care and to the pacifying of bad spirits. Both, the physical and the psychic matched, which perhaps motivated the appearance of sorcerers with great power, mediators between gods and men. Magic and religion were then associated in pre-history; medical treatments were followed by rituals, invocation, chants and magic tricks. Sorcerers turned into priests from different religions which assumed a double power: the cure of the body and the soul. Gradually medicine became free from the sanctuaries, acquiring a scientific "status". Nevertheless, nowadays, not surprisingly, modern medicine is inclined to rituals and is even becoming magic, although physicians are not aware of this fact. Also, from our point of view, many alternative forms of medicine have developed, originated from false observation and doubting interpretation of facts. As a conclusion, rituals and magic procedures appear. Psychoanalysis has developed from medicine and sometimes we observe that it is affected by the same adversity as medical science. Very often the use of psychoanalytic theories is distorted; or theories themselves distort the observation in clinical practice. The various types of anxiety which emerge in the analysis room may interfere in the investigation. Thus, it is important for all psychoanalysts to understand that the psychic phenomena are ephemeral. The apprehension is transitory, as well as the transformation that each mind accomplishes. The discernment between what is really true and what is not becomes difficult because of the mobility and complexity of psychic phenomena.
I recall an analysand who always arrives on time to his session; there are often sessions with similar characteristics which I’m going to try to explain. He lies down and remains in silence for a while; then he stammers, in a very low voice, things like: "I don’t have anything to say", or "it is hard to start", or "here I feel so shy", or "your presence makes it harder for me to speak", and other observations of the same kind. He remains silent for a while, and then mentions a fact that occurred in his job, pointing out that he doesn’t understand his reactions of hatred and anxiety; other times he says his collaboration is essential; at other moments he complains about me, or makes some observation about how useful the analysis is and refers directly to my work which, according to him, doesn’t correspond to what he has learned at the Psychoanalysis Institute. In these sessions he evokes his childhood and relates it to something from the session to confirm or to contradict his difficulties. There are long breaks of silence. The atmosphere is distressing and depressing. These facts have lead me to think how the transference theory, which I take as an example, has been reified, becoming subject both to the ritual and the magic. What was, at first, an investigation method is sometimes being ritualised, the word "transference" acquiring a magic sense; in this way, the investigation of the unknown is transformed into something easily apprehensible and comprehensible: It’s only necessary to use the transference as a magic formula, the key that reveals everything. Many times the psychoanalytic institution itself encourages the ritualisation of theories when it "teaches" that it is "in the transference" that one interprets or that it is "the transference" that must be interpreted, or it is "the countertransference" that is used to apprehend the emotional experience of the moment. The same can be said about the "Interpretation" or about the "Identification", and so on. Theories are deprived of meaning and become magic words established in the psychoanalytic ritual which leads to the impoverishment of both the observation and the scientific investigation. With the above-mentioned analysand, these repeated sessions are like rituals where he tries to manipulate the known , to have transferential interpretations, and, therefore, by blinding himself obtains his cure.
I finish by quoting Bion’s words once more:
"The belief in a universal spirit or principle animating the world has been and is a powerful - a "psycho-analytical fact" (11)
ABSTRACT:
These are previous communications about the theme. Some of W.R.Bion’s ideas in his book "Cogitations" encouraged the development of this subject.
The author presents some psychoanalytical session parts to base himself on his thoughts. Moreover, he highlights curiosity inhibition, schizoid mechanisms predominance, paranoid anxiety, projective identification, transformation in hallucinosis and dramatisation as common factors to religion and religious states of mind. Bion develops clinical and theoretical concerns about the theme, stressing the premature appearance of a cruel and demanding super-ego. The author also establishes an imaginative surmise based on the baby’s psychic development observation, according to M. Klein’s theories. He makes some consideration about the magic and the ritual and their relation and interference with the scientific investigation in the analysis room. The author leaves the subject open to further investigation and observation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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