The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Part 12, Terror Management Theory and Worldview Defense

i.
In The Future of an Illusion Freud famously argued that religious belief functions as a kind of existential defense mechanism. Faith represses, denies or hides existential realizations, realizations that cause us anxiety (e.g., I will die.). Rather than facing the fragility of existence I posit, through faith, a Benevolent Protector, a Heavenly Father, who cares for and protects me. According to Freud, the function of this belief is to provide, to use Ernest Becker's word, equanimity. Peace of mind. Existential fear is so disturbing it is pushed aside, allowing us to go on with our lives with a modicum of comfort. Our God is watching over us. We are not living in a hostile, indifferent universe.

It is now time to ask if Freud's analysis has any empirical support. Freud is making a claim, so what does the data say?

But with this claim we quickly encounter a problem: How could one possibly determine if faith was functioning as an existential defense mechanism for a given individual? You cannot simply poll people in churches asking them questions like "Do you believe in God because of your fundamental terror of death?" or "Do you feel your faith is an existential illusion?" Self-report techniques are woefully inadequate to test these dynamics. Further, the phenomenological approaches of Freud and William James do no better. Without some methodological innovations we are left with two rival claims regarding religious experience with no sure way to adjudicate between them. In the absence of evidence people will simply line up behind the claim that best suits them. Non-believers will align with Freud and religious believers will file in behind James.

But as we've noted, there have been methodological innovations developed by psychological researchers that can shed light on existential defense mechanisms. These techniques were developed in the late 1980s and early 90s as a part of what is called Terror Management Theory (TMT), a paradigm pioneered by Jeff Greenburg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski who were inspired by the work of Ernest Becker. Since the 80s, TMT has built up an impressive empirical record, with hundreds of studies and an array of innovative laboratory techniques. With the advent of TMT techniques it is now possible to formulate research questions that could shed light on the Freud/James debate. We can now examine existential defensiveness in the psychological laboratory. Here in Part 3 we'll review the first wave of data relevant to the Freud/James debate, seeing how their theories fare in the light of psychological research.

Whose theory, Freud or James, has the data on his side?

ii.
To understand the research in the chapters to come in this chapter we will give an overview of Terror Management Theory and it techniques. Importantly, we'll need to see how TMT manipulations function as tests of existential defensiveness as described by Ernest Becker, the TMT theorists, and Sigmund Freud.

Let's begin with the theoretical side of TMT. You will recall that Ernest Becker begins his analysis by noting that humans, being self-reflective creatures, are fully conscious of the fact that they are, minute-by-minute, growing closer to their eventual death. To quote Becker again on this subject:

The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it…But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days--that's something else.

Pictorially:

And, as Becker notes, this approach causes existential anxiety and terror:

How do we cope with this anxiety? Recall Becker's theory of cultural heroics. We cope with death anxiety by creating cultural worldviews that allow us to approach death via activities that take on symbolic, transcendent, and religious significance. We approach death by investing in cultural activities that give life meaning. As described in one early TMT study (Rosenblatt, Greenberg, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Lyon, 1989):

According to Becker, sophisticated human intellectual abilities lead to an awareness of human vulnerability and mortality, and this awareness creates the potential for overwhelming terror. As these abilities evolved, cultural worldviews began to emerge. The potential for terror put a press on evolving conceptions of reality such that any worldview that was to survive needed to provide a means of managing this terror. The conception of reality espoused by any given culture is thus the basis of a cultural anxiety-buffer that serves to protect the individual from the anxiety that results from awareness of his or her vulnerability and ultimate mortality.

According to the theory, however, protection from anxiety requires that one achieve a sense of value or self-esteem within the cultural context. This is because the culture promises security only to those who live up to the cultural standards of value...Thus, the cultural worldview provides a context within which an individual can conceive of him- or herself as a valuable participant in a meaningful world, and thus function with equanimity in the face of his or her ultimate mortality.

Pictorially, we don't approach death directly. Rather, we approach death through a cultural worldview:

When we approach death though the cultural worldview our death anxiety evaporates or, at the least, is momentarily repressed:

In the TMT lingo, culture is believed to function as an "anxiety buffer," protecting us from the "terror" of death.

iii.
To this point, TMT borrows heavily from Ernest Becker. One of the innovations of TMT is its particular analysis of our behavior when our cultural worldviews become threatened. Recall, Becker called cultural worldviews "vital lies." Well, what would happen if someone tried to deprive you of something like air or food? We'd act in a self-protective fashion. If culture is vital, existentially speaking, TMT predicts that we should protect and defend our cultural worldviews.
How might our cultural worldviews become existentially threatened? First, life might directly threaten us, bringing our physical vulnerability to mind (Rosenblatt et al., 1989):

Unfortunately, the cultural anxiety-buffer requires continual bolstering and defense against threat. In their daily lives, people are constantly confronted with reminders of the potential for pain, aversive experience, and death. One need only pick up a newspaper or turn on the television to encounter such reminders.

Even worse, the arbitrary nature of our cultural worldviews might become exposed. According to Becker our worldviews are "lies," culturally constructed fictions that seem unshakable and eternal but can, upon closer inspection, be exposed as a kind of mass delusion (e.g., "the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation"). This realization is destabilizing. We want our cultural worldviews to be sturdy, reliable, eternal and true. We don't want to be reminded that the projects that give our life "meaning" are fragile, fickle, socially constructed and arbitrary.

To be concrete, recall the time you first encountered a person from another world religion. The mere existence of this person creates a bit of an existential crisis. Here is a reasonable person whose view of the Ultimate is very different from your own. These differences suggest that what we consider most important in life (e.g., my faith) might not be true but the product of the whims of cultural history. But we don't typically reject our faith during our first encounter with a person from another world religion. Our worldviews are too vital for such a quick dismissal. So we dig in. We harden in our views, defending their truthfulness in the face of this existential assault. My God is real. Yours is false. TMT theorists call this response worldview defense:

[B]ecause cultural worldviews are essentially socially constructed fictions, they are always vulnerable to threat by incoming information and require constant social validation. Given that people rely on social consensus to instill confidence in their conceptions of reality, the diverse array of beliefs, values, and behaviors to which people are exposed make it difficult to sustain faith in any particular worldview or in one's place in it. Terror management theory, therefore, posits that people will respond positively to those who bolster their cultural anxiety-buffers and negatively to those who threaten their cultural anxiety-buffers. (Rosenblatt et al., 1989)

[T]he diverse array of beliefs and values that are encountered provide a reminder that one's worldview may not be valid in any absolute sense, highlighting the tenuous nature of the cultural anxiety-buffer and contributing to the need for ongoing bolstering and protection from threat. To the extent that people need to believe that one and only one conception of reality is ultimately correct, the existence of conceptions at variance with their own implies that someone must be mistaken. Given the vital terror management function served by these conceptions, we suggest that the existence of others with different worldviews therefore increases the individual's need for validation of his or her own worldview. (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon, Rosenblatt, Veeder, Kirkland, & Lyon, 1990)

What the TMT researchers are suggesting is that out-group hostility and intolerance might be due to existential defensiveness. The reason we cling to ideologies is that they are performing an important existential function. We attack (verbally or physically) the out-group members who threaten the "vital lie." Engaging in worldview defense by attacking outsiders is much easier than rethinking one's existential predicament from scratch.

iv.
A second innovation of TMT is the mortality salience hypothesis. Specifically, how can we be sure that cultural worldviews are acting as existential anxiety-buffers? Worldview defense--attacking out-group members to protect existentially important beliefs--seems reasonable but how can we activate and measure it?

As noted above, we feel existentially threatened for two reasons: A direct confrontation with physical threats (e.g., a car accident, a cancer diagnosis) or the encounter with a cultural Other (e.g., a Christian encountering a Hindu). Thus a procedure for activating worldview defense recommends itself. Specifically, a standard TMT manipulation involves creating an existential threat via a death prime and then observing behavior with a cultural Other (e.g., someone with a different cultural worldview or someone who dismisses or violates my cultural values). This is frequently done through a mortality salience manipulation where participants in a study are asked to meditate upon their death (e.g., writing an essay about dying or watching autopsy footage). By making mortality salient TMT studies create a mild existential threat: Remember, you will die! After the mortality salience manipulation we can observe how people respond to other existentially threatening situations. For instance, we might see if participants treat an ideological Other fairly after a mortality salience manipulation.

The mortality salience hypothesis predicts that after undergoing a mortality salience experience participants, feeling existentially unsettled because of the death prime, would tend to shy away from another existential threats. For example, in the face of a mortality salience manipulation participants are predicted to engage in worldview defense if asked to encounter a cultural Other. In the face of death (the mortality salience prime) we respond by bolstering our worldview and attacking those who don't share it. As Greenberg et al. (1990) summarize the findings from one TMT study:

[T]he practical significance of our findings is clear. Mortality salience appears to increase in-group favoritism, rejection of those who are different, and authoritarian tendencies. This suggests that whenever events heighten mortality salience (e.g., newspaper accounts of catastrophes or violence in intergroup and interindividual conflicts), in-group solidarity, out-group derogation, nationalism, religious extremism, prejudice, discrimination, and intolerance of deviance are likely to escalate. More generally, the findings are consistent with the oft-stated contention that prejudice and hostility toward those who are different may be one particularly costly means of coping with fears and insecurities.

Perhaps an example might concretely illustrate the link between mortality salience and worldview defense. This example will also prove helpful in the chapters to come as it takes us inside the mechanics of a TMT study. Our example is from a study conducted by Greenberg, Simon, Pyszczynski, Solomon, and Chatel (1992). In one part of this large study Greenburg et al. had a group of American college students go though a standard TMT manipulation. Specifically, the participants were asked to write answers to two questions/prompts: "(a) describe the feelings that the thought of their own death arouses in them and (b) describe what they think will happen to them physically as they die and once they are dead." Control subjects wrote answers to innocuous prompts. After moving through either the control or mortality salient manipulations the participants were told that they were going to evaluate essays written by foreign students attending the university. The participants were told that their evaluations would help the researchers "content analyze the best of these essays and report the results in a paper about foreign views of America and American reactions to them." The students were then given two essays to evaluate.

The two essays were very different: "The pro-U.S. essay was very favorable to the United States, focusing on freedom, opportunities, and safety. The anti-U.S. essay was highly critical of the United States, focusing on economic inequities, emphasis on money, and lack of sympathy for people." That is, from a worldview defense standpoint, one essay (pro-America) was consistent with the students' own worldview. This essay bolstered and confirmed their worldview. By contrast, the anti-America essay undermined and attacked the worldview of the students.

The students were asked to evaluate each essay by rating the applicability of various negative (e.g., contemptible, hypocritical, obnoxious, arrogant) and positive (e.g., likable, humane, generous, kind) adjectives to the author of each essay.

The research question was this: How would the students in the mortality salience condition evaluate these essays in contrast to the control subjects? The mortality salience and worldview defense hypotheses suggest that in the face of death the participants would engage in worldview defense. That is, feeling existentially unsettled the participants would gravitate toward the essay that bolstered their worldview (the pro-America essay) and denigrate the author that attacked their worldview (the anti-America essay). By contrast, control subjects, feeling existentially more secure having not undergone a mortality salience manipulation, were predicted to be more objective and fair when evaluating the two authors.

What were the results of the study? Well, not surprisingly the students in both conditions tended to favor the pro-America author over the anti-America author. But importantly for our purposes the study also found that this bias was significantly strengthened by the mortality salience manipulation. Participants in the mortality salience condition were significantly more favorable toward the pro-America author and significantly more harsh toward the anti-America author. The only reasonable explanation for these findings is that the participants were engaging in worldview defense when they felt existentially threatened.

v.
The reason for going into the guts of a TMT study is that we can see how existential defense mechanisms are now being routinely studied in psychological laboratories across the world. Described simplistically, in these studies psychologists poke at the defense mechanism with a mortality salience manipulation and then look for predicted outcomes such as worldview defense. If we routinely see people defend cultural worldviews in the face of death we have relatively good evidence that cultural worldviews are engaged in death repression. Amazingly, the very abstract ideas of Ernest Becker encountered in the last chapter are now being tested empirically in the laboratory. And by and large the data seem to confirm Becker's theory: Culture worldviews and the self-esteem we attain by succeeding within them are intimately involved with death repression.

What does TMT have to do with the Freud/James debate? Recall, Freud argued in The Future of an Illusion that religion functions as an existential narcotic. In the language of TMT religious faith functions as a cultural "anxiety buffer." If so, then it is a relatively straightforward process to assess religious belief in a TMT study. That is, do religious believers engage in worldview defense? In the face of death would religious believers denigrate people from other world religions? Because if they do then some solid empirical evidence would line up behind Freud. Freud would have laboratory results that supported his notion that the function of religious belief is existential consolation.

In the next chapter we examine the outcome of the very first (and still one of the few) studies that examined religious belief with a mortality salience manipulation. We'll discover that, 63 years after the publication of The Future of an Illusion, Freud's theory suddenly began looking a whole lot better.

Nuns Facing Vatican Scrutiny

This is an interesting development.

Being the product of both a Catholic grade school and High School I have a great respect for nuns. They, specifically the Sisters of Mercy, were my teachers, friends and mentors. I hope they aren't about to face a Vatican crackdown for "liberalism."

Stand up for the sisters!

Welcome to the Future

If you've been reading along with my unfolding book The Varieities & Illusions of Religious Experience, well, God bless you! You must be as crazy as I am.

Here's a bit of a break from weeks of heavy intellectual lifting as we head into a holiday weekend.

I'm a native Pennsylvania boy from the city. I now find myself living in West Texas having a slowly growing romance with country music and cowboy boots (I was already sold on "dress jeans," sweet tea, straw hats and barbeque). I don't like a ton of country music but the one artist I follow religiously is Brad Paisley. I love Paisley's voice, guitar skills, intelligence, humor and wry social commentary. Plus, he seems like a legitimately nice guy. So, two days ago when Paisley's new album American Saturday Night came out, I drove by WalMart to buy it.

You might hate country music and you might hate the track I'm about to recommend, but Paisley's song Welcome to the Future brought tears to my eyes. When I got home I played it for my wife and she started crying. I cried again.

It would be best to hear the song on a good sound system up really loud. In place of that here's a YouTube link which will probably go inactive for copyright violation as soon as I post it. If the link below is inactive click on this link and go to Paisley's site where you can play Track 3 Welcome to the Future on your computer.



The lyrics to the song:

When I was ten years old,
I remember thinkin' how cool it would be,
when we were goin' on an eight hour drive,
if I could just watch T.V.

And I'd have given anything
to have my own PacMan game at home.
I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade;
Now I've got it on my phone.

He-e-ey...
Glory glory hallelujah.
Welcome to the future.

My grandpa was in World War II,
he fought against the Japanese.
He wrote a hundred letters to my grandma;
mailed em from his base in the Philippines.

I wish they could see this now,
where they say this change can go.
Cause I was on a video chat this morning
with a company in Tokyo.

He-e-ey...
Everyday is a revolution.
Welcome to the future.

He-e-ey...
Look around it's all so clear.
He-e-ey...
Wherever we would go and well we...
He-e-ey...
So many things I never thought I'd see...
happening right in front of me.

I had a friend in school,
running-back on a football team,
they burned a cross in his front yard
for asking out the home-coming queen.

I thought about him today,
everybody who's seen what he's seen,
from a woman on a bus
to a man with a dream.

He-e-ey...
Wake up Martin Luther.
Welcome to the future.
He-e-ey...
Glory glory hallelujah.
Welcome to the future.

Obviously, it is the last part of the song that catches me. I know there's a lot of concern from people in my life (again, I live in West Texas one of the reddest areas in the US) about President Obama. But as a Christian and an American I'm just grateful that I got to see, live, the election of the first African-American President. From slave ships to November 4, 2008. What a sad but heroic journey. I wish MLK could have seen it. As well as the unnamed souls who were brought in chains to this City on a Hill.

Welcome to the future.

The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Part 11, Vital Lies and Cultural Heroics

In Part 3 of The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience we will wade into the waters of modern psychological research to evaluate how the theories of William James and Sigmund Freud are faring in psychological laboratories. As noted at the end of Part 2, many of the techniques being used to assess the Freud/James debate were created and perfected in the 1990s. These techniques are a part of a new movement in psychological research called experimental existentialism. Surveys and handbooks about experimental existentialism are now being published. Interestingly, parallel innovations are being seen in the emerging field of experimental philosophy. Taken together, these innovations are allowing researchers to empirically investigate questions that had hitherto been considered too abstract or vague for laboratory research. Our focus will be on the developments in experimental existentialism. To understand this literature and its associated techniques we need to trace the changes in psychodynamic thought from Freud to the present day.

i.
In the years and decades following Freud's death, psychoanalysis split into various factions. Many continued with Freud's focus on the family and the effects of early life upon adulthood personality and psychopathology. Others followed Freud's more charismatic followers such as Alfred Alder or Carl Jung. But a significant number of psychoanalysts began to blend Freud's theory with Continental existentialism. This was a easy merger because existentialism involves human experience, phenomenology and meaning-making. It was easy for these followers of Freud to see how many of the psychological problems in modern life were, in fact, existential problems. What is the purpose of my life? What makes life significant? This conflation of psychology and philosophy is nicely captured by Camus in the opening lines of his essay The Myth of Sisyphus:

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

One can see in Freud's later works how the founder of psychoanalysis was gravitating toward existential reformulations of his work. All his life Freud fiercely defended his theory of infantile sexuality but one can see his nascent existentialism in his amendment to the libido theory when he added a "death instinct." In addition, we've already noted how in The Future of an Illusion Freud's analysis of religion there has less to do with sexuality than existential anxiety. Although Freud's other significant work on religion, Totem and Taboo, does attempt to link the origins of religion to the the Oedipus Conflict (and a primal murder of the father), Freud's more mature analysis in The Future of an Illusion elevates the existential over the Oedipal. That is, the God-Father figure is less an object of sexual and aggressive impulses than a protector and comforter in the face of a terrifying existence.

After Freud's death many of his followers continued to follow the existential trajectory of his later works. For these thinkers, deeply informed by existential philosophy, death and existential terror begin to displace sexuality as the prime mover in the human psyche. Otto Rank, Rollo May, and Victor Frankl did important pioneering work in this area. Today, Irvin Yalom is a leading thinker, practitioner and author in the area of existentially-based approaches to therapy. Yalom's book Existential Psychotherapy is a widely read clinical manual.

ii.
But many think that the most important and influential work integrating psychology, Freud and existentialism was done Ernest Becker. Becker died of cancer on March 6, 1974. Two months after his death Becker's monumental work, The Denial of Death, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Becker's work is important for our purposes because the experimental innovations in the 1990s were directly inspired by his work, particularly his book The Denial of Death. Consequently, we need to review Becker's ideas as they form the theoretical foundation for much of the research in experimental existentialism

The genius of Becker's synthesis in The Denial of Death is the notion that existential anxiety can function as a creative social and psychological force. When we think about existentialism we often think of despair, suicide, meaninglessness, and the absurd. But in Becker's work we discover the creative facets of existential terror. In this, Becker follows Freud. Freud showed how anxieties associated with amoral and primitive sexual and aggressive drives are redirected into creative outlets. In a similar way, Becker shows how existential anxieties are channeled into significant psychological and cultural outlets. Take a simple example. I endeavor to write a book. For Freud, guided by his drive theory, the energies behind my book are sexual and aggressive impulses. In writing the book I redirect Id drives into an outlet that is acceptable to both myself and my culture (e.g., maybe my sex drive comes out in the steamy sex scenes I write in the book). Becker, following the existential psychologists, replaces the Id with existential motivations. I write the book, in this view, to feel significant. I write the book because I find it meaningful. In activities such as these we have, to echo Camus, answered the question of suicide. We've found reasons for living.

But if we scratch at these feelings of "significance" and "meaning" we uncover some anxieties. Our efforts toward attaining significance often seem frantic and obsessive. Something is at stake. Meaning seems fragile. In short, these accomplishments are important because they occur against the backdrop of an indifferent universe and a clock ticking down to death. Meaning is meaningful because it is effortful, rare and fleeting. Meaning isn't given. Meaning is constructed.

iii.
But it's not like you have to do this all on your own. When we are born life doesn't come at us like a Jackson Pollock painting. Life might be a Jackson Pollock painting, but that's not how we first encounter it. Thousands of years before we were born humans had been imposing structure upon existence. When we are born we step into those structures. We are given a language, norms, a history, a religion, a race, a class, nation and, most importantly, a general sense of what makes for a good and happy life. At birth we are handed well-worn existential structures that, for the most part, allow us to answer Camus's question. In fact, these structures are so effective that Camus's question--Why is life worth living?--never occurs to most people. Life seems intrinsically meaningful, significant and full.

But these structures are not intrinsic to existence. They are imposed upon life. Anyone who has gone through an existential crisis knows this. We suddenly ask, why am I chasing the gold ring? Only because everyone says I should. Chasing the gold ring is what we do to make life meaningful, to be a success. But a bit of reflection suggests that all this might be nonsense. The blind leading the blind. Such reflections drove Thoreau into the woods. He looked around and saw people leading lives of quiet desperation. Suddenly life did look like a Jackson Pollack painting. Take, as an example, this account from Irvin Yalom:

Not too long ago I was taking a brief vacation alone at a Caribbean beach resort. One evening I was reading, and from time to time I glanced to watch the bar boy who was doing nothing save staring languidly out to sea—much like a lizard sunning itself on a warm rock, I thought. The comparison I made between him and me made me feel very snug, very cozy. He was simply doing nothing—wasting time. I, on the other hand was doing something useful, reading, learning. I was, in short, getting ahead. All was well, until some internal imp asked the terrible question: Getting ahead of what? How? And (even worse) why?

The point of all this, for Becker, is that much of the creative activity we see in culture is really being driven by vague existential anxieties. For the most part, on a day to day basis, this cultural activity does the essential work of repressing existential anxieties and worries. We simply move along with the culture, following the well-worn grooves leading to good jobs, good families, and a "significant" life. Psychologically, therefore, our sense of self-worth and self-esteem is rooted in how well we travel this path of "meaning" and "significance." Becker calls this process "heroism," the act of achieving significance as defined by the surrounding culture:

The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of status and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call 'cultural relativity' is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural hero system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the 'high' heroism of a Churchhill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the 'low' heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled working hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.

It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count...In this sense everything a man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

Why the danger of fictitious heroics? First, as we have noted, we are generally unaware of why we are doing what we are doing in life. We are oblivious to the hero-system that surrounded us from birth. We breath it like air. Only occasionally, like Thoreau heading into the woods, do we stop and question the cultural path to heroism/significance:

But the truth about the need for heroism is not easy for anyone to admit, even the very ones who want to have their claims recognized. There's the rub. [For] to become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.

But this "self-analytic problem"--What am I doing to feel significant?--is complicated when we uncover the existential anxieties driving the whole enterprise:

The first thing we have to do with heroism is to lay bare its underside, show what gives human heroics its specific nature and impetus...[namely] that of all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death...heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.

Now the objection might be raised, "It doesn't feel like the terror of death is driving my life goals, ambitious and projects?" Again, note that Becker is working a synthesis between Freud and existentialism. Thus, for Becker the "denial of death" is largely taking place at an unconscious level, outside of awareness. The reason for this is that, and here we have echos of Freud's The Future of an Illusion, the reality of death is too difficult to bear:

The fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning, in order for the organism to be armed toward self-preservation. But the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one's mental functioning, else the organism could not function.

For example, compare the human experience with those of other animals:

The animals don't know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it…But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one's dreams and even the most sun-filled days--that's something else.

This is why humans create cultural hero systems. These culturally conditioned routes to meaning and significance help take the existential burden off our shoulders. I don't have to, from scratch, face the indifference of the cosmos or the shadow of death. I can simply go to school, get a degree, get a job, raise a family and never once worry about what it all means. I don't have to feel like Sisyphus, that the sum total of my life is simply rolling a rock up a hill. And the reason I don't feel like Sisyphus is that every cultural voice I encounter--parents, teachers, God, nation--tells me I'm a leading a "meaningful" life.

But this sense of security is a lie, according to Becker. A kind of mass delusion that I participate in. I'm drinking the kool aid. Living in bad faith. That may seem harsh, but remember that the lie is a creative lie. It has built the entire cultural structure now surrounding me. Plus, this lie keeps me from facing my death every second of every day. Without this vital mechanism in place how could we function? We'd be incapacitated by the fear of death. We'd have to face, moment-by-moment, Camus's question: Why live?

We call one's lifestyle a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary, a basic dishonesty about oneself and one's whole situation...We don't want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his 'courage to be' from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, a proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.

The defenses that form a person's character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity.

This, then, is the great danger in examining our cultural heroics too closely: When we confront our cultural heroics, what makes our life "significant," we find that this "significance" is culturally constructed, arbitrary, a "lie." And it is all motivated by attempts at death transcendence. Rather than peeling all this back to the existential core it's just much easier to adopt an unthinking "automatic equanimity" in the face of life and death.

iv.
We've gone on a long circuit in reviewing Becker's work. But we've ended up in a familiar place. We are back, in essence, to Freud's formulation in The Future of an Illusion. Only Becker has pulled in a much bigger fish. Freud's narrow focus was on the role of religion in repressing existential anxieties. Freud felt that once religious people "grew up" and became "educated to reality" they would have achieved a kind of maturity. But Becker cuts across Freud by noting that "cultural heroics" are not uniquely religious. Even atheists, living bravely with no God, need to lean on something, existentially speaking. We all need to answer Camus's question. Otherwise we are just rolling rocks up a hill and our life becomes absurd. Life is then just waiting around for Godot. Thus, while Freud might have despised religion he worshiped science. More, he worshiped his own theory and legacy. Passionately. Freud had a notion of heroics and, thus, a means to approach his own death with a feeling of significance and accomplishment.

The point that Becker makes is that every cultural product functions as a form of existential consolation. Freud's legacy was important to him for religious reasons: He wanted to live on. If not in heaven then in the hearts and minds of his followers. We all worship some kind of god and desire some form of immorality.

This conclusion might, in itself, function as a refutation to Freud's criticism of religion. It places him on the same footing with the religious believer. Both, according to Becker, orient their lives around "vital lies," illusions embraced to achieve significance. But Becker's analysis goes on, suggesting that some people can achieve greater or lesser existential honesty. If so, Freud could contend that the non-believer has a much better chance of achieving this end. After all, the non-believer is willing to live without God. That feat, it could be argued, represents a greater capacity for existential courage.

These are important issues to discuss. For now we'll note that our conversation with Becker is not done. But having duly reviewed Becker's ideas it is now time, in the next chapter, to tell the story of how psychological researchers in the 1990s took Becker's ideas concerning cultural heroism, self-esteem and death anxiety and tested it all in the laboratory.

The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Part 10, Freud vs. James

Having come to the end of Parts 1 and 2 of The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience it's time to take stock before moving into contemporary psychological research. Plus, having finished articulating James's view of the religious experience we should give Freud a fair shot at James before moving on.

i.
In Parts 1 and 2 I have set up a kind of debate between Sigmund Freud and William James regarding the function of religious belief. In Part 1 we discussed Freud's deflationary analysis of religious belief. Freud claims that religious belief is an existentially consoling illusion. I call Freud's analysis deflationary as it attempts to "explain" faith by positing an underlying mechanism, a mechanism that is more concerned with providing solace than in engaging and confronting the "facts" of reality in any honest way. We've noted that Freud can be parried on logical grounds. Our motives for belief don't logically dictate their accuracy. But some motives tend to produce more truthful outcomes than others. Openness to evidence, for example. That is, although Freud might agree that his analysis of faith doesn't have any logical bearing on God's existence, Freud would be in a very strong position to claim that faith wasn't epistemologically virtuous. Freud could contend that religious belief doesn't possess the habits of mind that tend to produce truthful outcomes (e.g., open-minded, curious, evidence-driven, hypothesis-testing, etc.). More, if Freud is correct, the religious believer's need for consolation and solace trump any honest investigation concerning man, God and our place in the universe. Intellectually speaking, the religious mind is compromised by the religious illusion. Needs for consolation will trump intellectual honesty.

As Part 1 concluded Freud appeared to hold a strong hand. Perhaps religious belief was an illusion. But in Part 2 we encountered the work of William James. Interestingly, James is willing to admit along with Freud that religious belief can function as a form of consolation. The healthy-minded believer willfully refuses to endorse the most existentially difficult aspects of reality. The healthy-minded embrace Freud's illusion. But in contrast to Freud, James goes on to posit an existentially honest religious stance. James calls this stance the "sick soul" because there is a price to pay for existential honesty. Both Freud and James agree that the price is melancholy and angst. In the biblical witness this experience is complaint and lament.

No doubt this is a peculiar religious stance. Our stereotypical notions of "religious believers" are that they are deeply consoled by their belief. But there appear to be religious believers who don't seem to be consoled. Or, at the very least, existential consolation isn't the motive for faith. These believers place a premium on existential honesty. They wish to be "educated to reality" as Freud recommended. Thus, these sick souls appear to possess the epistemic virtues which are lacking in the healthy-minded. Since consolation isn't the driving need for the sick soul they seek an honest confrontation with life. And if that confrontation proves difficult then so be it. The sick soul will not retreat into pat and comforting religious platitudes to avoid the pain of existence. The pain is primary. It is not be be repressed or denied just to make us feel better about God or the human predicament. If God is wicked, the sick soul is willing to consider the possibility. Such investigations are not out of bounds. And considering such a possibility is no joy. But joy isn't really the point. Illusion isn't the motivation.

Now Freud might ask at this point: Why go through these contortions? Why not just give up believing in God? Wouldn't it be easier? Isn't the fact that you are clinging to some form of faith evidence that, deep down, you are still holding onto hope? Isn't that hope providing a sliver of comfort? The merest thread of the security blanket?

Just grow up!, Freud would say. Let go of the thread! Don't worry about burning that last bridge. You don't, in the end, need it.

No doubt much of what Freud, and those who speak for him, would say is true. For many people this is the road out of faith. A slow decline, exhaustion and a final letting-go. And maybe the end wasn't even a conscious act. One day on the way to work you just notice you don't really believe anymore.

But it is curious fact that many religious believers are willing to endure so much torment to hold onto a thin thread that provides very little by way of comfort. These believers are not exhausted by faith. The are passionate and energized by it, even if tormented. The hope of comfort seems not to be what is keeping the thread from breaking. The inner economy of their experience, so much turmoil with so little solace, seems to mitigate against that assessment. Something else, something other than consolation, must be animating the religious experience.

What might that something be?

No definitive answer can be given. And answer to that question will likely vary from heart to heart. But, as a first response, I think William James again proves helpful on this score.

The most widely read part of The Varieties of Religious Experience is James's Lectures on Mysticism. For James, the mystical is a primal encounter with the divine. It's an ontological encounter. As noted in Chapter 5, James considers primal, first-hand religious experience to be the root and foundation of religion. Belief, theology and organized religion is constructed in the wake of these experiences. Belief, in this view, is just words, the linguistic structures we create to capture and communicate our experience.

This distinction between belief and experience is important in evaluating the debate between Freud and James. Specifically, Freud's focus is on belief, the mental and linguistic constructs we create. Freud's argument is that we spin these linguistic structures to create emotional outcomes. That is, we "believe" things to feel more comfortable in facing life and death.

James's account is different. James's focus is on experience. Belief emerges from an ontological encounter that we need to represent to ourselves. We need to tell a story about what happens to us. Belief, in this account, isn't a means of coping. It is, rather, much more empirical and data-driven. I don't spin linguistic webs to console myself (although I can certainly do that) I am, rather, in an explanatory mode. Trying to come to grips with what has happened to me.

I'd like to suggest that one way of thinking about the contrast between the wishful believer (per Freud) and the sick soul (per James) is to ask how beliefs originate and function in relation to religious experience. If beliefs originate to handle emotional needs then Freud's diagnosis seems accurate. That is, emotional needs become more important than truthfulness in belief formation and adjustment. In the end, belief adoption and revision is adjudicated on the basis of how it all makes me feel.

In contrast, I think the sick souls are those whose beliefs are adopted to make their experience of reality coherent. From the very beginning emotional issues are marginalized. The goal is to get things right, experientially speaking. This doesn't mean the subsequent beliefs are "truthful" or "accurate." At the end of the day no one really knows the answers to those questions. But the motivation is honestly confronting experience, not existential consolation. In fact, this confrontation with experience might be deeply painful. Regardless, the goal is to make sense of my reality. Which means that, for the sick soul, the experience of God must somehow be reconciled with the experience of evil, an experience the biblical witness calls "lament."

The point here is that the thread of faith can be robustly maintained by an honest confrontation with reality. The sick soul isn't simply "holding on." They are, rather, trying to integrate two powerful yet conflicting experiences. They cannot simply "move on" because these experiences define the selfhood of the individual. The struggle isn't due to a willful hold onto an "illusion," but a struggle in the process of "making sense." This stance very similar to what motivates the best science, the search for agreement between our linguistic structures and our experience of the world.

ii.
It is time to summarize and move on. I have set up a debate between Freud and James regarding the nature of religious experience. The central question of the debate is this: Is religious belief an illusion? Freud (and those who deploy his ideas) answer in the affirmative: Religion is an existential drug, a narcotic, the "opium of the people." James, by contrast, offers a more nuanced answer. James agrees that religious belief is often engaged in consolation. But James also posits an existentially honest religious experience, an experience he calls the sick soul. If Freud is correct religious belief reduces to illusion. The account is deflationary and reductionistic. But if James is correct Freud's analysis only applies to a subset of the religious experience. In arguing for the varieties of religious experience James is claiming that religious experience is larger, more diverse and more complex than Freud realized. Freud is, in the end, only explaining a piece of religion. Much has escaped him.

In short, it is now clear that the sick soul plays a critical role in this debate. That is, the sick soul is the Freudian counter-example. A test case. It's the black swan for Freud's theory. It is the religious experience that shows Freud's theory to be incomplete.

And to clarify, the goal isn't to show that Freud was wholly wrong. Rather, the sick soul demonstrates Freud's theory is limited and narrow. Schematically, in Venn diagrams, we might frame the debate like this:

The existence of the sick soul experience helps us choose between the two models. If the sick soul is a psychologically coherent experience we prefer James's model on the right. but if the sick soul doesn't exist then Freud's model in The Future of an Illusion is attractive.

As repeatedly noted in these chapters, Freud and James's are offering rival empirical claims about human psychology. It should be possible to test the models using the tools of social science. Up until this point the argument has been waged theoretically. But can laboratory science actually test these complex psychological dynamics? How could we possibly know if a person was using faith as an existential defense mechanism, as a means of consolation?

Somewhat surprisingly, in the 1990s techniques were developed in experimental psychology that, for the first time, allowed psychological researchers to test existential dynamics in the laboratory. That is, existential defense mechanisms are now being routinely manipulated and assessed in psychological laboratories throughout the world. The advent of these techniques has caused a sensation in the psychological community and they are now revolutionizing many areas of psychological research. These developments have important implications for the Freud/James debate. For the first time since the publications of The Future of an Illusion and The Varieties of Religious Experience we now have the empirical tools to test the rival theories of Sigmund Freud and William James. Answers to many of the most interesting questions concerning the function of religious belief are now coming to light.

The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Part 9, Saints of Darkness

Before moving on to the empirical evidence concerning Freud and James's rival theories regarding the relationship between faith and existential consolation, it might prove helpful to examine convergent evidence regarding the existence of the "sick soul" experience. This is important as the sick soul, it has been argued, is a point of contrast between Freud and James. Freud claimed that religious faith functions as form of existential consolation. By contrast, William James posits a religious experience that purports to face reality honestly. Faith exists but it is not functioning as a mode of repression or illusion.

As noted in the last chapter the sick soul experience can seem bizarre and contradictory. For most people to be religious means to believe in a loving, solicitous God who protects us from suffering. Having "faith" means absolute conviction and assurance. In this view, doubt and uncertainty are symptomatic of faith problems.

But scholars of the religious experience have long known that faith and doubt often co-exist. Faith and doubt are not polar opposites. Further, experiences with God are frequently not peaceful and rewarding. Very often, God is absent or even antagonistic. Finally, many religious persons minimize the emphasis upon personal immortality and see faith as intimately involved with life this side of the grave. Faith isn't about surviving death. It's more about being freed from the tyranny of death, existentially speaking. In short, before leaving William James it will prove helpful to bring alongside The Varieties of Religious Experience corroborating evidence regarding the experience of the sick soul. This is important as it helps to show that Freud's diagnosis of religious illusion fails for large portions of the religious population.

i.
Interestingly, the experience of the sick soul is amply attested to in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. The Tanakh (the Christian Old Testament) is a rich repository of religious lament, protest, complaint and doubt. This "protest literature" ranges from the complaint of Job to the existential meditations of Ecclesiastes. But the most poignant expressions of the sick soul are the lament psalms.

Somewhat ironically, contemporary Christianity has generally avoided a consistent use of the lament psalms. These psalms seem too "dark" and "depressing" for most worship settings. This phenomenon provides an interesting case study in Freud/James debate. Specifically, the avoidance of the lament psalms appears to support Freud's notion that existential honesty is avoided by many Christians. Positivity and praise are preferred. In short, worship must be consoling, even if it's dishonest about the pain and disarray in life. To use James's terminology, churches are too "healthy-minded" to dip too deeply into the abyss of the lament psalms.

And yet, the lament psalms represent the majority of the psalms. And the sick souls are attracted to them. Although Freud's diagnosis might describe large portions of the Christian community the existence and continued attraction of the lament psalms suggest that motives other than consolation animate the religious experience. Take, for example, this assessment from Walter Brueggemann (pp. 51-52, emphases in original) from his book The Message of the Psalms:

It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control”…The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…

Brueggemann's diagnosis regarding the evangelical avoidance of the lament psalms appears very Freudian. This avoidance is a "frightened, numb denial and deception." The positivity is pathologically "relentless." The optimism is "wishful." In the end, all we have is "denial and cover-up."

Sigmund Freud could have written those words. The point being that Christians have to take Freud's analysis seriously. Consolation is at work in religious faith. Thoughtful Christians acknowledge the cogency of Freud's analysis. However, thoughtful Christians ultimately side with William James noting that faith comes in varieties. There are sick souls amongst us. On the outside this experience, in its embrace of "darkness," the sick soul might seem to be "an act of unfaith" but in reality it is "an act of bold faith."

ii.
Connecting William James with the psalms is helpful as it fleshes out his notion of the "sick soul" and makes his typology recognizable. But even this connection can be questioned. Are not the psalms of lament episodic and situational? That is, just about every Christian would admit that we all experience time-limited seasons of lament. But could lament typify a religious experience? Can lament, protest and complaint be a "type"? Could the lament experience be one's default spiritual setting?

James clearly saw the sick soul as a chronic condition. But James did discuss how even the sick soul could achieve a rebirth and attain peace. For example, James discusses the spiritual journeys of John Bunyan and Leo Tolstoy. Each man, after extraordinary difficulty and suffering, reached a place of salvation. But even then their experience wasn't one of blissful oblivion. The experience of the sick soul is essentially irreversible. As James describes:

But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy-minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget its taste...Each of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith by which it was overcome.

An illuminating account of the dispositional, chronic and long-lived experience of the sick soul comes from the theologian W. Paul Jones's book Theological Worlds. In Theological Worlds Jones discusses five unique theological experiences (“worlds”) which structure a believer’s spiritual journey. These five worlds are identified by unique experiences of what Jones calls obsessio and epiphania. It is Jones’s general formulation of obsessio and epiphania, rather than the specific and unique formulations of his five theological “worlds,” that will occupy us here.

Jones suggests that the faith journey truly begins in earnest when we experience our obsessio. To quote Jones (p. 27, emphases in original), the obsessio is:

An obsessio is whatever functions deeply and pervasively in one’s life as a defining quandary, a conundrum, a boggling of the mind, a hemorrhaging of the soul, a wound that bewilders healing, a mystification than renders one’s life cryptic. Whatever inadequate words one might choose to describe it, an obsessio is that which so gets its teeth into a person that it establishes one’s life as plot. It is a memory which, as resident image, becomes so congealed as Question that all else in one’s experience is sifted in terms of its promise as Answer. Put another way, an obsessio is whatever threatens to deadlock Yeses with No. It is one horn that establishes life as dilemma…The etymology of the word says it well: obsessio means “to be besieged."

If obsessio is experienced as the predicament or brokenness of existence, then epiphania is experienced as resolution, answer and salvation (pp. 28, 37, emphases in original):

…epiphania, etymologically meaning “to show upon,” that which keeps the functioning obsessio fluid, hopeful, searching, restless, energized, intriguing, as a question worth pursuing for a lifetime. It keeps one’s obsessio from becoming a fatal conclusion that signals futility…Epiphania is epiphany precisely because its absurdity resides in being too good to be true.

Jones's distinction between the experiences of obsessio and epiphania are helpful as they allow us to examine the relative balance between the experiences. That is, moment-to-moment the lived intensity of each experience may vary, perhaps dramatically. Peace and contentment are the experiences when ephiphania has more intensity than obsessio. In lament, the experience of obsessio overwhelms epiphania. Again, most Christians would agree that there are seasons in life when the brokenness of existence, the experience of obsessio, comes to dominate. But Jones's formulation is interesting in he contends that obsessio/epiphania asymmetries might be congenital. That is, the sick soul experience (obsessio dominating over epiphania) can be one's spiritual "personality." As Jones writes (pp. 40-41, emphases in original):

There is one more factor to be identified in the emergence of a theological World—the role played by what we will call temperament (“proper mixing”). While the dynamic of obsessio and epiphania is universal, for some individuals, the emphasis falls heaviest on obsessio; for others, on epiphania…There is reason to believe that such temperaments become established at an early age.

iii.
The point of exploring these topics, and there is a vast literature that we are leaving unexplored, is simply to note the biblical, biographical, theological and spiritual voices that support James's notion of religious varieties, the sick soul in particular. This is not to dismiss the power of Freud's analysis. As we noted above, thoughtful Christians are very aware of the fact that many religious believers deploy their faith as a kind of existential drug, just as Freud observed. But the anecdotal evidence supporting the existence of the sick soul as a religious type (and not just a fleeting experience) suggests that religious faith cannot be reduced to the function of existential consolation. Freud's assessment is bounded and limited, applying to some but not to all of the religious population. And, intriguingly, the part of the religious population picked out by Freud is very often the least interesting, spiritually speaking. That is, in trying to penetrate to the very heart of religion Freud seems to have missed his mark. The wound he inflicts is not deep, it's superficial. Take, as an example, the case of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu.

On September 26, 1928 Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, then 18 years old, left her home in Skopje to join the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ireland. In 1947, in a letter to her Archbishop, Agnes (now Sister Teresa) recounted how the Voice of Jesus had consistently come to her, asking for her to create the Sisters of Charity to reach out to the poor of India. The Voice asked and demanded:

"I want Indian Missionary Sisters of Charity--who would be My fire of love amongst the very poor--the sick--the dying--the little street children--The poor I want you to bring to me--and the Sisters that would offer their lives as victims of my love--would bring these souls to Me. You are I know the most unacceptable person, weak & sinful, but just because you are that I want to use you, for my Glory! Wilt thou refuse?"

This incident and others pushed Sister Teresa to begin her work among the poor in Calcutta. During the time of her calling she described her experiences with Jesus as "so much union." Her mystical experiences of union with Christ were experienced as "love," " trust," "sweetness," and "consolation."

On December 21, 1948 now Mother Teresa entered the slums of Calcutta as a Missionary of Charity for the first time. After so much effort, petitioning, and preparation she had finally fulfilled the call of God. She had obeyed the Voice of Jesus. But suddenly, mysteriously, and painfully, that Voice suddenly went silent.

Since her death in 1997 we have learned a great deal about the spiritual journey of Mother Teresa as she worked among the poor of India. Recently, many of the private letters of Mother Teresa have been published in the book Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. These letters were shocking in that they revealed the dark spiritual journey Mother Teresa walked for so many years. As noted above, prior to the beginning of the Calcutta work Mother Teresa's mystical encounters with Christ were vibrant, powerful, and intimate. But God seemed to abandon her just as the ministry started. For the next 40 years Mother Teresa's experience with the Divine was characterized by a profound sense of God's absence. Both the depth and length of her "dark night of the soul" was startling to those who only knew her public face of faith.

To experience the profound distress of Mother Teresa during those forty years, here are some of her words:

July 3, 1959
In the darkness...

Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The child of your love--and now become as the most hated one--the one You have thrown away as unwanted--unloved. I call, I cling, I want--and there is no One to answer--no One on Whom I can cling--no, No One.--Alone. The darkness is so dark--and I am alone.--Unwanted, forsaken.--The loneliness of the heart that wants love is unbearable.--Where is my faith?--even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness & darkness.--My God--how painful is this unknown pain. It pains without ceasing.--I have no faith.--I dare not utter the words & thoughts that crowd in my heart--& make me suffer untold agony. So many unanswered questions live within me--I am afraid to uncover them--because of the blasphemy--If there be God,--please forgive me.

September 1959
Part of My Confession Today
My own Jesus,
...They say people in hell suffer eternal pain because of the loss of God--they would go through all that suffering if they had just a little hope of possessing God.--In my soul I feel just that terrible pain of loss--of God not wanting me--of God not being God--of God not really existing (Jesus, please forgive my blasphemies--I have been told to write everything). That darkness surrounds me on all sides--I can't lift my soul to God...

In my heart there is no faith--no love--no trust--there is so much pain--the pain of longing, the pain of not being wanted.--I want God with all the powers of my soul--and yet there between us--there is terrible separation.--I don't pray any longer...

Much later, forty years after beginning her ministry, Mother Teresa did begin to re-experience the presence of God. But like William James observed with Bunyan and Tolstoy, Mother Teresa did not return fully into the bliss of her first encounter with God. Mother Teresa began to see her experience of the absence of God as a form of God's presence. In this, Mother Teresa began see her experience of abandonment as a mystical union with Christ in his abandonment at Golgotha:

October 1961
No, Father [Neuner], I am not alone.--I have His darkness--I have His pain--I have the terrible longing for God--to love and not to be loved. I know I have Jesus...

Faith as the experience of "not being loved" by God. Faith as owning "darkness" and "pain" of God. It's worth dwelling on the experience of Gonxha Agnes Bojaxhiu because her story of faith greatly illuminates the discussion between Freud and James. First, Mother Teresa's story helps us see that the "sick soul" isn't unfaithful, immature, deviant, rare or dysfunctional. In fact, many of the greatest saints, living and dead, were and are "sick souls," saints of darkness. And secondly, the story of Mother Teresa shows some of the inadequacy of Freud's thesis concerning illusion, consolation and faith. No doubt, many cling to a notion of God that is comforting, childish, superficial and sweet. Many churches do avoid the harsh witness of the lament psalms. But Freud's thesis, we must also admit, has great difficulty explaining why someone would pursue a heroic life among the poorest of the poor in the service of a God who didn't love you.

The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Part 8, The Sick Soul and Freud's Error

i.

In The Future of an Illusion Freud's basic contention is that religious belief, being an illusion, is fundamentally dishonest about the nature of human existence.  Freud contends that this dishonesty is produced by a failure of courage.  Life, honestly faced, is too much for us.  Our experience of helplessness is too difficult to bear.  Thus, we pretend that Someone is watching out for us, that we are the center of the Universe and that we live on after death:

And thus a store of ideas is created, born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable...Here is the gist of the matter. Life in this world serves a higher purpose...Everything that happens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best that is, to make it enjoyable for us. Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces of nature. Death itself is not extinction, is not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher...In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life then in the later existences that begin after death. In this way all the terrors, the sufferings and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated.

What is needed, according to Freud, is for religious believers to grow up, to undergo an "education to reality."  This education is difficult and leaves us in a state of anxiety:

[I]t is true, [we will] find [our]selves in a difficult situation. [We] will have to admit to [ours]selves the full extent of [our] helplessness and [our] insignificance in the machinery of the universe; [we] can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. [We] will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into "hostile life." We may call this "education to reality." Need I confess to you..the necessity for this forward step?

Freud is not alone in this assessment.  As we observed in the last essay, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience  notes that many religious believers unconsciously or consciously refuse to acknowledge the most difficult aspects of existence.  Freud's analysis appears to describe these believers.  This is not to say that the joy and optimism created by "the illusion" doesn't lead to a wonderful life, psychologically and socially.  But, along with Freud, we wonder if there is something dishonest about this religious stance.  

But Freud suddenly ends his investigations as this point.  Religion, for Freud, is dishonest, an illusion, an existential narcotic and a form of consolation.  To be honest about reality is to become non-religious.  

In stark contrast to Freud in The Future of an Illusion, William James goes on with his investigations in the The Varieties.  Although James is more than willing to agree with Freud concerning the role of existential consolation, he goes on to posit a religious experience that is as "educated to reality" as Freud's non-religious stance.  Apparently, Freud did not think that existential honesty and religious faith could co-exist.  The closest Freud got to admitting that honesty and religion can co-exist comes toward the end of The Future of an Illusion:

On they way to this distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded...You know why: in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable.  Even purified religious ideas cannot escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve anything of the consolation of religion.  No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science; but then they also lose their hold on human interest.

This is a fascinating passage.  Freud admits that an abstract form of religious belief might attain "proof against the challenge of science."  But if  religious beliefs do not "preserve anything of the consolation of religion" these beliefs would "lose their hold on human interest."  But Freud never pursues the possibility that an existentially honest faith does hold immense human interest.  In the end, this is a very curious assessment by Freud and demonstrates an enormous lack of curiosity and a lack of scientific rigor.  Freud simply assumes that the only appeal of religion is existential consolation.  Stripped of this function, according to Freud, faith holds no value or interest.  

Yet Freud never investigates this claim, marshaling no evidence.  And the reason seems clear, if an existentially honest faith did exist then Freud's assessment of religious faith, while potent, would be radically incomplete.

ii.

Twenty-five years before the publication of The Future of an Illusion William James conducted the very investigation Freud walked away from.  As discussed in the last essay, in the early Lectures of The Varieties James describes his twofold typology of religious experience.  We've already discussed the healthy-minded type, the optimistic experience that manifests some of the dishonesty that concerned Freud.  But after the Lectures on healthy-mindedness James turns to the second type, a religious experience he called "the sick soul."

The sick soul experience is important for these essays as I'll argue that the sick soul represents the religious experience Freud refused to acknowledge or investigate.  That is, as James describes it, the sick soul is a religious experience that demonstrates Freud's "education to reality."  Further, this honest religious stance manifests the emotional distress that Freud claimed would be symptomatic of existential honesty.  In short, the sick soul is a form of religious experience that is not a form of consolation, illusion, or wishful thinking.  As such, the sick soul is the type of religion that Freud was sure would hold no "human interest." 

Yet the sick soul does hold human interest.  It may not be typical or the norm, but the experience of the sick soul is widely documented across religious traditions.  If so, we've encountered the very thing that Freud argued could not exist:  The religious experience that is existentially engaged and honest.

iii.

What is the experience of the sick soul?  If we removed consolation from faith what would be the remainder?  Would the resultant experience be recognizable as "religious"?

No doubt, the sick soul experience is unusual and queer when compared to what we generally take to be the "typical" or "normal" religious experience.  This is most likely why Freud dismissed the experience.  

Where the healthy-minded type tended to minimize the evil and painful aspects of experience the sick soul seeks, to quote James, "a way of maximizing evil."  More, the sick soul is convinced that "the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart."  This looks very similar to Freud's "education to reality."  The sick soul doesn't ignore, forget or dismiss evil.  Rather, the sick soul embraces evil as the "essence" of life.  Further, this evil cannot be whistled away with a happy tune; this recognition of evil is the route to meaning and authenticity.  

When James refers to "evil" he is referring to the very aspects of existence that Freud claimed were on the syllabus of reality.  For example, the evil in life isn't simply suffering.  It is, rather, the existential fragility of existence:

To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality.  Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure.  The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity.  

Again, these realizations were the very aspects of existence Freud claimed to be excluded from religious believers.  The religious "narcotic" is meant to melt away these fears and worries.  But the sick soul lives with this perplexity.  Faith for the sick soul isn't a form of forgetting or consolation.  In fact, the sick soul refuses to allow faith to hide the dark aspects of existence. A faith that did this would block the deepest route to meaning.  Faith for the sick soul doesn't deny reality.  Faith, for the sick soul, asks us to embrace and suffer with reality.  This embrace even extends to the reality of death:

Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness...In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together.  But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad.  Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction.  The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

Again, Freud claimed that the function of religious belief was to protect us from death anxiety.  Yet here, with James, we see a religious experience infused with the "infection" of death awareness.  The "negation" and "contradiction" of death are not ignored or repressed.  Rather, death saturates the religious experience.

iv.

These descriptions of the sick soul may seem odd and contradictory.  They are, certainly, if the sole function of religious belief is existential consolation.  These "contradictory" experiences are strange enough that Freud could not imagine them.  The experience Freud felt held no human interest.  But James's Lectures not only argue for the reality and ubiquity of the sick soul, he concludes his discussions by arguing that the sick soul represents the very best of religion.  In the "quarrel" between healthy-minded religion and the experience of the sick soul James casts his vote with the "morbidly" religious: 

...[W]hat are we to say of this quarrel?  It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

v.

We are now at a critical moment in these essays.  We've noted Freud's contention that religious belief in an illusion, a form of wishful thinking.  Thus, religion is dishonest, not "educated to reality," and not willing to live with the anxieties of existence.  Consequently, if such an experience were common then Freud's illusion-thesis comes under great strain.  Faith and existential honesty can co-exist.  Intriguingly, Freud doesn't investigate the possibility of this religious experience.  Apparently, he felt it either didn't exist or, if it did, it would have no psychological appeal.

And yet here, twenty-five years before Freud, was William James describing a religious experience as "educated to reality" as Freud's "mature," irreligious modern man.  Was Freud ignorant of James's work?  Or did he dismiss the reality and coherence of the sick soul?  

That is an important question because many Christians also dismiss the reality and coherence of the sick soul.  Can a life be called "religious" if it is infused with existential anxiety and doubt?  Isn't religion supposed to grant peace, comfort and solace?  No doubt religion produces these experiences for many religious believers, perhaps the vast majority.  But our narrow interest in these essays isn't theological or spiritual.  We are not concerned with the spiritual health or normative nature of the sick soul.  We are, rather, investigating the experience of the sick soul because its existence is the data point that dismantles the reductionistic ambitions of Freud's thesis.  Faith cannot be explained away as an illusion.  If the sick soul exists then religious experience is bigger than Freud realized.  The function or functions of religious belief cannot be reduced to wish, illusion and consolation.  Yes, these may be ubiquitous functions but we fend off the reductionistic attack upon faith.

Going forward our concern will be with this fundamental disagreement between Freud and James concerning the existence and an the nature of the sick soul.  In the essays to come we will review data that sheds light on this debate, ultimately seeing how this debate is playing out in modern psychological research.  In the end, we'll be able to answer, as best we can, who wins the Freud/James debate concerning the nature of religious experience.  

Will it be illusions or varieties?

The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Part 7, Illusion or Varieties?

One of intriguing aspects of The Varieties of Religious Experience is the typology that James proposes and describes in the early chapters.  This typology will prove important for the direction of these essays and how we might approach a Freudian critique of religious faith.

The typology of religious experience proposed by James is a distinction he makes between the "healthy-minded" religious believer and the experience of the "sick soul."  In this essay we will compare the healthy-minded religious believer with Freud's description of religious consolation as described in The Future of an Illusion.  Although there are clear distinctions between Freud's formulation and James's description of the healthy-minded experience, we'll discover some key areas of agreement between Freud and James regarding the role of consolation in religious experience.

i.

In Lectures IV and V of The Varieties William James describes what he calls a religion of healthy-mindedness.  James begins the lectures with a discussion of the relationship between religion and happiness.  Obviously, the two are related.  Freud and Marx, as we have noted, approach this relationship cynically.  The "happiness" religion provides is illusory.  James, in contrast to these thinkers, is more willing to see positive aspects in the association between religion and happiness.  James also observes how many non-religious ideas or passions create happiness.  James gives the example of being in love or committed to a great cause.  In the grip of these passions the soul is filled with a transcendent happiness and euphoria that cannot be preoccupied with pain or even death.  Joy saturates the soul.  Religion is like this kind of love or passion and it is one of the greatest of human experiences.  Finally, James also notes that optimism tends to be an effective coping strategy in life.  The optimistic tend to take more risks and enjoy new adventures.  As a consequence, they succeed a great deal.  And, even if they fail, they bounce back very quickly.  Not a bad way to live if you can manage it.

This experience of joy, optimism and happiness is what predominates in the healthy-minded religious experience.  It is why James uses the word "healthy" as a descriptor.  The healthy-minded religious believer, either by force of will or personality, adopts a positive stance toward existence.  To quote some from James:

If, then, we give the name of healthy-mindedness to the tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good, we find that we must distinguish between a more involuntary and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involuntary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immediately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as good.

Systematic healthy-mindedness, conceiving good as the essential and universal aspect of being, deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision...

The deliberate adoption of an optimistic turn of mind...

This religion directs [a person] to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist.

The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good...

Naturally, some of us recoil at this religious experience. We see a kind of superficiality and naivety about the healthy-minded religious experience. How, we might ask, is it possible to live continually in a happy state?  How can one ignore or deny the evil and painful aspects of existence? How could such a religious stance be truthful about life?

Before we answer those questions we need to note that James spends a great deal of time defending the healthy-minded experience. Much of Lectures IV and V document the vibrancy and well-being witnessed in the lives of the healthy-minded religious believers. Perhaps you know someone so consistently and unperturbedly happy and optimistic. In short, James is never one to snort at a slice of human experience that seems to work for so many people. Just because we can't understand it doesn't make us the experts.  In fact, James warns against sideline judgments from academic types such as myself:

The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable" type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.

ii.

In The Future of an Illusion Freud contended that religious belief was an illusion, the function of which was to protect us from a crushing sense helplessness in the face of Nature, Fortune and Death.  For Freud, religious illusion was a form of immaturity, a failure of courage.  Rather than facing the facts bravely and as a mature adult, we cling to a wish rooted in childhood.  In short, for Freud it was time for religious believers to grow up:

...religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase, just as so many children grow out their similar neurosis.

For Freud, this process of "growing up" means that we become "educated to reality."  We give up our religious illusions and learn to bear the heavy burdens of existence:

Thus I must contradict you when you go on to argue that men are completely unable to do without the consolation of the religious illusion, that without it they could not bear the troubles of life and cruelties of reality.  That is true, certainly, of the men into whom you have instilled the sweet--or bitter-sweet--poison from childhood onwards.  But what of the other men, who have been sensibly brought up?  Perhaps those who do not suffer from neurosis will need no intoxicant to deaden it.  They will, it is true, find themselves in a difficult situation.  They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence.  They will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable.  But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted.  Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into "hostile life." We may call this "education to reality." Need I confess to you that the sole purpose of my book is to point out the necessity for this forward step?

What we see in Freud's description of religious illusion is the refusal to face the difficult aspects of existence.  Interestingly, Freud's description mirrors James's description of the healthy-minded religious experience.  As James asserts, in a way that echos Freud, the healthy-minded believer "settle[s] his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist."

This correspondence between Freud and James goes further.  Although James is much more willing to consider the positive aspects of the healthy-minded stance, and the healthy-minded experience has much to recommend it, James ultimately expresses concerns about the healthy-minded stance.  Interestingly, James expresses very Freudian concerns.  For example, although the healthy-minded might try to ignore evil and death this willful forgetting doesn't eliminate the reality of death.   The grim reaper is still there even if we pretend he's not: 

Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet.

Further, by trying to "minimize evil" in our minds we fail to live life deeply and authentically:

Now in contrast with such healthy-minded views as these, if we treat them as a way of deliberately minimizing evil, stands a radically opposite view, a way of maximizing evil, if you please so to call it, based on the persuasion that the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart.

Thus, James recommends "turning our backs" on the healthy-minded experience.  We need to accept, along with Freud, that in facing pity, fear and helplessness (a word shared by both Freud and James) a more profound view of life becomes available:

Let us then resolutely turn our backs on the [healthy-minded] and their sky-blue optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, "Hurrah for the Universe! -- God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world." Let us see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.

In the end, the healthy-minded stance seems like a patch job, a band-aid.  It cannot sustain us when true suffering overwhelms us:

The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

Consequently, James reaches a conclusion very similar to both Freud and Marx:

In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transient sadness or a momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anesthesia.

For Freud it was a narcotic.  For Marx, an opiate.  For James, an anesthetic.  

iii.

In sum, it is my contention that the description James gives of the healthy-minded religious experience is very similar to the account given by Freud in The Future of an Illusion.  Although James is much more willing to grant positive features to healthy-mindedness he does, in the end, make summary judgments that are Freudian in substance.  The healthy-minded experience is "quasi-pathological," an "anesthesia"; it fails to "open our eyes to the deepest levels of truth"; it is not "profound" enough to penetrate to life's "essence" because it "ignores," "forgets" and "minimizes evil." 

So Freud and James see eye to eye on this score.  But here is the important difference, a difference that will dominate our discussion from here on out.  Having described this religious experience Freud stopped.  He had, in his opinion, finished his work.  He had described the totality of the religious experience.  It was, as we've noted, an experience of wish and consolation.  Interestingly, James agrees with Freud on all this.  Only, and here's the critical issue, James goes on.  James's typology is only half done.  That is, in stark contrast to Freud, to describe religious experience as a form of narcotic or anesthetic is only, for James, describing a slice, one part of the religious experience.  Freud obviously thought his account was comprehensive.  James disagrees.  And within this disagreement lies the key to a response to Freud.  That is, if religious experience is bigger than Freud realized his characterization of religion-as-wish is limited and incomplete.  Freud failed to notice the varieties of religious experience.   

That is the essential disagreement.  On this issue the whole debate turns.  Is religion solely an illusion?  Or are their varieties of religious experience?