A couple of models that Freud develops regarding the structure of the psyche, various dimensions
of the psyche, and then we wanted to ask ourselves, what would he as a good atheist from his adolescence
have to say about the origin of religion, then, using his tools?
Now, in his correspondence with this Lutheran pastor, he acknowledges that all these psychoanalytic
tools are neutral tools.
They're not made to analyze religion or no, or culture or no, coming out with conclusions.
They're made to help the psychoanalyst heal the neurotic and the psychotic.
So, just as he as an atheist can use them to analyze and sort of expose religion, so
the man of faith can use them to analyze dimensions of religion and also expose atheism.
So there's this fun game.
But what does he do with his categories to conclude, as he's already done, atheistically?
Does anyone have any ideas who's a good Freudian?
No one wants to attempt something from what we went through about everything we went through.
Yes, precisely.
And you hear this, it's quite a familiar slogan, it's just a father image, a father projection.
His analysis goes this way, it's in one of his, this is in The Future of an Illusion,
and this is 1927, one of his early works.
So, he says, what is sort of the basic experience of the little baby, and also of the child
in the earliest years?
It's of dependence, of absolute fragility and dependence.
The baby cannot manufacture and produce the food that it needs, the warmth, the affection,
etc.
These all come from without.
And from these huge figures there, mama and daddy, who seem to be sort of immense and
omnipotent and all-powerful and all-knowing.
They tell me what I should do and what I shouldn't.
They provide all the things I need.
So absolute dependence, and for this dependence responds mommy and daddy.
So, and life is tough, and life is frightening and dangerous, and so in the middle of the
night the baby wakes up and frightened, frightened, calls for daddy, etc.
So what happens as a rather fragile psychic, fragily psychic person grows up?
The world's just too much for him, the world is threatening and frightening, so he calls
out for daddy, basically.
He needs the comfort of daddy, for strength, for love, for support, for encouragement.
And daddy is no longer around, and this is even more terrifying, this is all on the unconsciousness.
So there's this kind of infantile regression, and you cry out and daddy doesn't come.
So there's this projection of the daddy figure into the heavens, so I'll have an omnipotent,
all-present, all-powerful, all-loving daddy.
And then again I feel comforted, strengthened, etc.
So it's basically a projection mechanism of my daddy image, this is it.
So our father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread, etc.
Freud will say at all these points, aha, look, this sort of thing.
And God our protection, God our support, God who loves us, God who punishes us, all this
is simply a projection of the first experiences of the baby regarding daddy.
Freud says that the daddy image is ambiguous, it's the loving, supporting, strengthening,
protecting image on the one hand, but it's this huge figure who can get angry, who can
give you a slap, etc.
So at the same time it inspires love and fear, and these are the basic religious emotions.
Rudolf Otto in his analysis of the holy says that holy is at the same time attracts and
frightens.
Moses wants to go towards the burning bush, but he also wants to flee, this sort of thing.
Again, Freud just says, aha, just his little baby wants to go towards daddy who's all love,
but is afraid he might get that slap again.
So now this is the first explanation of Freud of religion.
Freud was continually sort of focused in, worried about this universal phenomenon of
religion, so he kept coming up with new theories, each not be a denial at the last, but a kind
of a development, a nuancing, etc.
Is this clear, this one?
So as I say, you'll often hear this as a kind of a slogan from high school kids, etc.
It's nothing but a father projection.
This is a powerful, powerful challenge to us that we're going to have to work through
with a certain intellectual and moral and spiritual honesty.
But it's one of the most radical challenges to faith that there's been around.
It's not a historical or philosophical or sociological, it's psychological.
That is, it's saying it's all just a subjective phenomenon, it's a neurosis.
Thus for Freud, all religion is neurosis, because it's an unhealthy response to a problem.
The person feels frightened, feels threatened, feels anxious.
The healthy way to develop this would be to analyze what is the threat, what is the problem,
analyze very rationally, what can I do about that, etc.
Is it an economic problem, is it that someone doesn't like me, is it that the competition
in this company is too rough for me, what is it?
The rational way would be to go down and be very specific about the problem and then analyze
my own resources and work it out.
But the neurotic person says, oh, I'll pray to God, I'll make a novena to God, and God
will get me through, sort of thing, big daddy sort of in the sky.
So this is the first theory.
Are there any questions?
I hope no one's convinced by this, but we'll wait until we get through all the theories
and then sort of discuss them.
Now, in his later writings, he comes up with a mechanism that's much more complicated, tied
into the Oedipus theory.
We went through the Oedipus theory at a certain age, four, five, or six.
I want to kill my father, and I feel tremendously attached to my mother.
Now, Freud says, note this, and note the tremendous guilt feelings it creates at the unconscious
level.
And then, especially as the kid works through it and interiorizes the father's morals.
So there he was, willing, and in his will, actually killing his fantasy at the unconscious
level, actually killing his father.
So he's a, how do we say it, a patricide, does that word exist in the English language?
Patricide.
Not to mention the whole thing with the mother sort of thing, which is also rather a naughty
business.
So here's this tremendous guilt feeling in me at the unconscious level.
And in us, in a later work, which is published posthumously, I think, at 39, the year of
his death, Moses and Monotheism, Freud starts applying his psychoanalytical categories to
whole phenomena, such as the Jewish religion, and the whole thing, he was Jewish of background.
So he's fascinated with this.
And he comes up with this rather astonishing theory.
The hero of Judaism is clearly Moses, who convinces Israel to embrace monotheism and
leads Israel out of Egypt.
So Freud comes up with this theory that Moses was really an Egyptian, and he rather heroically
leads Israel, this group of sort of slaves and dumb people, out of Egypt and makes them
into a people.
He is their father.
Moses our father, like often, Abraham our father, et cetera.
Now as on an individual basis, so there's a collective sort of unconsciousness, not
in human sense, but the people hate this father.
There's always this ambivalent feeling towards father and mother of hate, love.
So at a certain point, they're so angry they kill Moses, and then they repress this
in their collective unconsciousness and project him as this great hero.
Why doesn't he get into the promised land with them?
Because he's killed and sort of left alone in the way.
Then they exalt him to the skies afterwards with this tremendous guilt feeling.
So this is Freud's theory of the Old Testament, and he reconstructs the history of Israel through
his psychoanalysis and reading the texts that he has in his book, he says, it must be that
Moses was Egyptian.
Moses, at a certain point, became a very clear father figure for Israel, created the country.
We often say, George Washington, the father of our country.
So Moses, the father of Israel, then Israel kills Moses, forgets this, obliterates this
memory, and says simply that he died of old age but couldn't get into the promised land
sort of thing.
The whole theme of Israel, Israel who kills the prophets sort of thing, and Moses is the
prophet.
But still there's this whole guilt feeling unconsciously in Israel, and it builds up,
it builds up in intensity until towards the first years, it's a tremendous thing.
This guilt feeling in Israel at the unconscious level, and it's tremendous.
So here comes this Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who deals with this.
If you've got this, you see Israel is guilty of patricide, Israel killed Moses.
Now someone has to pay the debt for this.
What is the debt for patricide?
The debt is capital punishment.
So someone has to pay this debt of capital punishment, and this is Jesus.
So the Christian religion for Freud is quite as much a creation of Paul as of Jesus.
This is a theory that comes through other exegetes in the early 1900s, but it's in
Freud in the psychological category.
So Paul creates this theology that Jesus through his death is some kind of substitute for Israel
for this tremendous guilt of Israel of killing its father.
Now each of us has this tremendous Oedipus complex guilt in us.
Each of us wanted to kill our own father.
Now who's going to satisfy us for this?
So again, it's Jesus.
Jesus, the Paschal Lamb, who's immolated for us, who substitutes for us, who pays the price.
So this is his second theory of the origin, not just of religion in general, but specifically
of Judaism and of Christianity.
So here he can do an analysis of the specifics of the cross image and the sacrificial and
the mass, et cetera, et cetera.
So this is his second theory, and with these two, he presumes to say that he has in some
sense, though he acknowledges the shortcomings of these theories, he has accounted for the
religious phenomenon.
In his earlier work, Future of an Illusion, he has pages where he enters into a debate
with the believer.
He says, why do you believe?
And he lets the believer speak and give his whole case, and then he gives his response.
And it's sort of interesting.
And it's a kind of a little text of atheistic understandings of how a believer would justify
his faith, and then atheistic responses to this.
He says, what does the believer normally respond, either consciously or also unconsciously?
Every believer is unconsciously challenged with the challenge of not believing, and so
he defends the first argument, Freud says, is our ancestors, our fathers, believed.
And this is the whole super ego thing.
I've got to believe, because Daddy and Mommy believed, they sent me to church, this sort
of, you don't remember the hymn, Faith of Our Fathers, Living Still, in Spite of Dungeon,
Fire, and Sword.
So I can't possibly not believe, because it would be like spitting on the grave of Daddy
and Mommy and Grandfather and Grandmother and all the pioneers of this great nation,
et cetera, et cetera.
I'm committed to this belief as I'm committed to my family.
So this is the first argument in favor of believing.
The second argument is, if you go back to the sacred texts of our fathers, you find
all these miracles and wonders and works effected by God in their history, and this proves it
was true.
They weren't just wildly believing, but it was confirmed in their history by miracles
and wonders, et cetera.
If you read Our Fathers of the Desert, it's a constant, this sort of thing.
So naturally we believe.
And the third argument is that there's really no argument.
It's beyond reason, and Freud cites Tertullian, I believe, because it's absurd.
It's more on the level of experience, of religious experience that's transrational.
So these are the three arguments he offers, and then he feels he just goes down and knocks
them down.
Our fathers and our ancestors, he says, well, if you look at all the things our ancestors
believed, they believed a whole mountain of things that now, happily, in the scientific
age we no longer believe, that the earth was flat, and that fairies and goblins inhabited
the forests, and that you can cure influenza by putting weird potions under the bed, et
cetera.
All these things.
Now, why should we cling to this one thing of Big Daddy in heaven, and when we have happily
moved beyond all these other superstitions and myths and errors, et cetera?
So he's quite, I wish I had brought a future of an illusion, I might next time.
This is essentially his argument, the second argument about the wonders and miracles.
He says, obviously, if you look at these texts, they're not that convincing.
All of the great religions have these wonders of Muhammad is carried up into heaven, and
Buddha has all these miracles, et cetera.
It's a constant theme of the miracle of the wise holy man, but it's just not that convincing
to anyone who wants proof in some sort of rigorous, modern, scientific way.
The third thing about, I believe, because it's absurd, this is bordering dangerously
on the irrational me, and because of some experience, you can't convince anyone else
because of your experience.
The scientist doesn't say, I have had an experience, so please believe the validity
of my experiment.
He has to lay down the process he went through, the verification process, et cetera, and then
he tries to convince you on a serious, rational level.
He's not going to talk about believing because it's absurd or deep experiences sort of thing,
so that's his thing.
He's got these theories, which he thinks explains the very origins of all of religion, and specifically
of the Jewish and Christian.
Then he goes through this kind of debate, and he thinks he wins that, so there he is.
So, as I say, this has had a tremendous influence on modern man and woman.
It's hard to go through high school even now, or college, without coming to terms with this
sort of challenge in one way or the other, and it's inside of each of us in some way,
somewhere we've heard something about father projection or this sort of thing.
So, how to answer this, how to respond to this?
Are there any comments?
Does anyone want to become the apologist?
The first fathers were great apologists against all the attacks against Christianity.
What would, suppose someone quite concretely comes here and is in all an anguish and has
been believing but has heard all this and doesn't know what to make of it and wants to
talk it out.
This can very much happen, very well happen.
What kind of rational framework would he use?
Well, his framework is psychoanalytical categories.
In a descriptive sense?
A logical sense?
There were various empirical disciplines.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Yeah.
This is a key question.
And you'll notice here, I think he's been doing two things in these last three arguments
I was posing.
He was just doing the average rationalistic atheist and argumentations without any reference
to psychoanalysis at all.
And there, as White mentions, these arguments are no more, I mean no believer comes up with
these arguments for faith.
And so, these arguments aren't that convincing.
I don't argue for my faith in Jesus Christ because of my ancestors believing in Jesus
Christ sort of thing.
Or if I do, I nuance it much more profoundly than what he's doing, this sort of thing,
and the miracles, et cetera.
So, there's that page which isn't that convincing.
White is very, so Freud really shouldn't do that sort of thing.
He should either speak using exclusively his analytical categories or he should write his
atheistic tracts.
This was no case of a specialist trespassing outside of his own field to express opinions
on subjects about which he had no authority.
This was at some point in there.
He says he shouldn't be doing this.
So, then the other series of arguments, so this series I think we can say are not that
convincing, these last three arguments.
No one's going to say, I believe because it's absurd.
Or if they do, they're going to nuance it pretty profoundly and go into something about
experience that's more than just subjective emotionalism and experience that's in some
way potential to everyone.
Now, the other set of analyses was working through his categories of this mechanism of
projection, father projection, et cetera.
And there he's saying, and here you would have to grant he's not proved anything.
This is the thing.
He's trying to say, I'm trying to propose a theory of the origin.
But if you say you haven't proved it, and why can you say this?
Because this same mechanism of projection occurs again with the patient and the analyst.
The patient very often projects his own father image on the analyst.
Indeed, in any therapy, this does happen.
Now, this does not prove that the analyst doesn't exist.
This is the point.
So it's one thing to say there's this mechanism going on.
It's another to say this proves that God does not exist.
It doesn't prove anything of the sort.
Just as he might say that Mary is a mother projection.
He says this.
Jung turns it around.
But I had a loving mother.
She was protecting.
And now every day I pray, hey, oh, Mary, for her grace.
You know, she protects me.
That there's some kind of referral here.
This could well be, in many people, Mary our mother.
But this doesn't prove that there wasn't historically a mother of Jesus sort of thing.
So it's one thing to say that, subjectively, these mechanisms might be operative in believers.
And it's quite another thing to say, I have thus proven that there is no God, which he hasn't at all.
Is this clear to everyone?
So there is a very basic flaw in his reasoning, if he wants to assume that he's come up with some sort of
rationalistic syllogism to demonstrate that God isn't there.
What he is implicitly saying is, I think, in every case I've come up against in religion,
the projection has been so strong and total to make me suspect that there's no one up there in the clouds
except this father projected from him.
But he already felt that before he had gone into us.
We had seen that he was an atheist already in his adolescent years.
So of course he would not assume there was anything up there other than the projection.
So it's a kind of a vicious circle.
But he has in no way proven the existence or no of God.
He has suggested that often our image of God is conditioned by our own experience of our father.
And I think most would now accept this.
White has a whole thing on this.
I don't know if this is answering.
That is your language of phenomenological, et cetera.
I think this is later.
He would say through rigorous psychoanalytic analysis,
I have accounted for the origin of religion.
He wouldn't use the term phenomenological, which is a philosophical term.
Pardon me?
Yeah.
He wrote this God and the Unconscious years ago.
And Jung was so delighted with it that he wrote the introduction to it,
which is an interesting essay.
Jung's in here.
Jung's essay is also printed in that.
Let's see if I can find that.
But this is the basic point.
The other point is that Freud himself.
OK, I found various quotes.
First, let's go back and get it.
That those three arguments about faith of our fathers, et cetera,
that has nothing to do with psychoanalysis.
The arguments such as they are have nothing to do with the findings of psychoanalysis,
or indeed with anything else about which Freud could claim to speak with greater
authority than anybody else.
They seldom rise above the level of the popular tracks of Victorian rationalism.
So far as psychoanalysis is concerned, the untruth of religion is assumed,
not proven.
So that sets these last three arguments aside.
What then were the findings of psychoanalysis about religion?
Most of the future of an illusion is an elaboration of theories already quoted.
God, in short, is at bottom an exalted father,
a fantasy substitute for the actual and never wholly satisfactory parent,
a projection to compensate for infantile sense of helplessness.
There is little in that, apart from the language, that is strikingly new.
Jews and Christians for thousands of years have cheerfully sung the psalm verse,
when my father and mother forsake me, the Lord taketh me up.
So White says we quite acknowledge that our basic models of God are father and
mother, but we project beyond them.
God is faithful even when the mother and father are not.
Our father who art in heaven, etc., would be meaningless to us had we no
knowledge or experience of fathers who are on earth.
It is neither new or startling that genetically religious relationships
grow out of parental relationships.
My rapport with God grows out of my knowledge of my own father.
There's no problem with this.
This is just the way we're built.
Just as my rapport with everyone else on earth grows out of my primordial rapport
with my mother and my father.
And this doesn't prove that the others don't exist.
And again, throughout my life, I might have various father projections
and mother projections and older brother projections,
but that doesn't prove that it's all, as he says, abnormal and erotic.
Oaks grow from acorns, but we do not ordinarily think of an oak
as a substitute for an acorn.
That is to say, we have a fuller, mature experience of others that is a
development of our primordial experience with father and mother.
But that doesn't mean that these later experiences are somehow sick.
And so also, our relationship with God is a kind of an oak grown out of our
acorn first experience of paternity.
But that has nothing to do.
Now, it may well be true, and here is where we can use Freud positively.
It may well be true, as we said this morning, that my experience of God
is conditioned negatively by my own experience with my own father.
So one way to enrich and sort of broaden my experience of God is to go
into the apophatic.
God is father, but not with all those limitations of my earthly father.
He doesn't get mad irrationally.
He isn't nervous, and he doesn't get tired, and all these things.
So this is a very healthy kind of monastic ascetic to purify our model
of God the father, being aware that we are certainly conditioned by that
primordial experience positively, but also negatively.
So that's the basic dialogue with Freud, I think.
What can we come out positively from Freud?
Then you can do a whole psychoanalysis of Freud.
This is very fun to turn the books on him, and there have been all sorts
of this being done by also very qualified psychoanalysts.
Ernst Jones, also Jung, insisted that Freud was very neurotic indeed.
But we mentioned at the beginning, Freud, father of psychoanalysis,
and he very much felt this.
And there's one famous photo of him with all his disciples who will turn out
to be the great psychoanalysts after him.
He is the great father, and yet we'll see this loving relationship with Jung
who was 20 years his younger, and it was quite clearly a kind of a father-son.
And then Jung broke away, and Freud was furious.
Freud said, you still live in your Oedipus complex.
You want to kill me?
And Jung turned this around and said, you still have this father projection.
You think you're my father, and you want to hold me down as your little child.
You don't want me to be...
So in psychoanalysis, you can always do this.
You can always...
So if he says that all religion is neurosis, you know, this father projection,
we can just turn the tables and say all atheism is neurosis,
is this failing to get beyond the Oedipus complex, the killing my father.
Freud wants to be the father, and he's terrified that there might be
some other father around.
He's terrified that it might be Moses, so he has to get him killed off.
Yeah, this is at the age of five or six, and at an unconscious level.
What is happening?
Tolling the bell.
Dead fathers.
No, he says at the unconscious level.
Now this is discussed, many accept it in one term.
Jung will turn it around and say in some sense it's true,
but on a much deeper level of wanting to go through a new birth spiritually.
Jung spiritualizes everything Freud does.
Freud has everything on sort of a sexual level, and Jung spiritualizes.
But he says, I do get to the point when I want a new rebirth as my own person,
and this involves, in some sense, moving.
It's the kind of a Jesus and Nicodemus thing,
must I enter into the womb a second time sort of thing.
So there's a kind of rebirth apart from my father and mother sort of thing.
So these are some of the things relative to Freud.
He has very modest phrases with this.
In his dialogue with his Lutheran ministry, he says this is only a partial theory,
and I can't pretend this explains the whole thing,
and that you can use this against me as much as I use it against you,
this sort of thing.
And he keeps coming back to religion with this kind of nervous, troubled spirit.
So there is something very interesting happening there.
What can we learn positively?
I think to be aware of this immense dimension of the unconsciousness,
be aware, again, of the fragility of the human person.
It teaches an earnest compassion for the human person.
You judge a little less severely.
One of our theologians in college, he was a Protestant theologian and married,
and he had kids.
He says it's really quite difficult when you have babies,
and they scream in the middle of the night, and they're very clever,
and they put mama against daddy and daddy against mom, et cetera.
You have these moments of real anger sort of thing,
and you can understand people who sometimes, you know,
you read horror stories about mothers killing their children, et cetera.
He says you can almost come to understand this sort of thing
if you've been through some bad nights with babies who won't shut up, et cetera.
But we are very fragile psychologically,
and I remember the very early years here.
What was the name of the cook?
What?
No?
No?
There was a cook that at a certain point just went around the bend,
and he was extremely kind and extremely genteel, et cetera.
And one morning in refectory, he was just singing to himself, and he had gone.
And now he's very healed, and he's in a religious order, et cetera.
But just to say we shouldn't be shocked by this.
We're much more fragile than we might imagine,
and there's all sorts of pressure inside of us, this sort of thing.
So I think going through this kind of Babylonian fire of Freud,
there is this dimension.
There's this awareness also of possibilities of things like guilt complexes,
an immense area inside each person of guilt.
And to be careful not to exploit this.
As in the past, sometimes it might have been exploited.
Miserable sinner, sort of thing.
Also the whole thing about Jesus substituting for my great guilt,
the angry God who wants someone to pay for that.
Someone's been killed, and Jesus pays the price, sort of thing.
There is a morbid approach to Christianity.
There's a morbid approach to Catholicism.
Be very careful here.
We want a healthy faith.
So be very careful here.
I came across an old devotional tract on Jesus on the cross,
and first you meditate on the left wound and all the blood coming out of that,
and the sins for which that is compensation,
and then the right foot wound and all the blood and gore.
There is a kind of a morbid thing.
And then masochistic.
This is another great psychoanalytical category.
That is, I find satisfaction and sexual realization through pain,
through my own pain.
And then there's the whole sadistic counterpart to that.
I find it through inflicting pain on others.
But one Freudian said, all of religion is simply masochism.
That is, I've got to suffer.
I've got to pay the penalty for all my sins.
I'm a miserable sinner,
and nothing will sufficiently pay for the depth and profundity of the horror of my sin.
So the discipline and all this sort of thing.
Now, there is an authentic way of understanding all this,
but there's also a sick way.
So to have the eye of discernment we now know about,
there is indeed a neurosis of masochism.
And there's a neurosis of sadism.
And to have the eye that is able to distinguish the authentic sense of sin,
of hemphos, of compunction sort of thing,
from a sick, being sort of dominated by a super-ego that's destructive sort of thing.
Question from audience.
Jung has some things on this.
Able is.
Well, just basically in us there's this id, you see.
There's this violence.
And I'm very angry.
You know, life is rough and I feel frustrated.
My id would just like to be God sort of thing.
And I'm not.
And I have to put up with this setback and that setback.
So there's all this violence inside of me.
Of Nazism.
It's just kind of a massive group sadism towards the Jews, for instance.
And there's all sorts of lots of masochism around.
Going off to die for your country sort of thing.
The rat race. Running the rat race.
Well, I'm sort of, at least I'm keeping up with the Joneses.
There's also quite a bit of masochism and sadism.
Again, a certain kind of Catholic devotionism.
If you see the films of Fellini, he came up out through Catholic colleges.
And he said he remembers still.
He's deeply, basically a deeply Catholic believer.
But he still has all these problems.
He was a little boy and he would walk down these Catholic boys' schools
with all these paintings of martyrs.
And here's Saint Agatha with her eyeballs in a tray.
It's this sort of thing.
And here's Our Lady with all these swords sticking out of her.
All this sort of thing.
And it's just left a, it can be traumatic for some people.
And if you read some of the martyrs and St. Lucy and her breasts cut off
and all these things on the grill.
There is St. Lawrence tied up there and all the arrows in him.
This sort of thing.
Is that Lawrence? No, it's not.
It's a nasty.
This sort of thing.
Anyway, there is a kind of a morbid thing in religion and out of religion
because it's a need.
It's a sick.
Pardon me?
Oh.
Ooh.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Ideology, one way of explaining it, is trying with one little limited theory
to explain everything.
And at a certain point I'm aware that it's a limited theory
and I'm pushing reality into this.
Then I get angry.
Hitler wants to explain that the Jews really are responsible
for all the problems of Germany.
And he knows this ain't true, really, on the unconscious level.
You get all the prejudices here.
You know, the dirty niggers.
Or the Jews.
Or all this sort of thing.
Women.
There's a saying of the Desert Fathers.
The women are really a cause of lots of the Christians' problems.
This is a little ideological.
And Sister Benedicta talking about who was it who branded Satan.
Satan appeared as a woman to this father of the desert who was a blacksmith.
So he just took one of his, what you would call his burning rings,
and poked it in her face.
And she ran away screaming.
And Sister Benedicta raises the possibility if his father was a little neurotic.
If I understood her, just sort of punched some sort of authentic woman
in the face with a ring.
But anyway, the basic point is human fragility.
And we can ruin anything.
We can even ruin religion with sickness.
And there have been sick Catholics.
There have been sick Protestants, sick Jews.
So you've got to be careful there.
Things like the Hare Krishna cult, etc.
You want to see that whatever happens is the result of as mature, free person as possible.
And not just, again, some compulsive drive.
Other comments, questions?
So, now we can move on to a much more positive approach to the experience of religion.
That is Carl Jung.
And again, the basic slogan of Freud is all religion is neurosis.
And the basic slogan of Jung would be all religion is psychic health.
All atheism is neurosis.
So Jung just turns everything right upside down.
Jung is extremely popular now in certain theological circles.
He's very strong at Berkeley.
If you go into the Berkeley Theological Union there,
if you go into the bookstore, there's an immense section of Jung.
Also here, you've got, as I say, 18 volumes either by Jung or on Jung.
He's extremely fascinating.
Jung died in 1961.
So he's very much our contemporary.
You have lots of his books here, lots of his best books here.
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousness.
There's also delightful essays in here.
Basically, a series of essays.
And he writes in quite a, I think, clear way.
Here's Psychology and Religion.
He was fascinated by religion.
And Transformation, Symbolism, and the Mass, for instance.
Very interesting essay.
And it makes you appreciate, I think, the Mass and liturgy
forward to Introduction to Zen Buddhism.
The Psychology of Eastern Meditation on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
There's an interesting answer to Job.
Something on the Trinity.
A psychological approach to the Trinity.
So he's a fascinating person.
Here we get very much into a serene dialogue.
And he's always wanted this dialogue.
He said he was very much against the modern atheism.
And he says this kills the human person's psychic health.
So we've got to band together.
We psychotherapists and theologians and spiritual people
and work together in favor of the full human person.
His father lost the faith.
And he, as a young man, born in 1875,
tried to help his father refine the faith.
Eight of his relatives were ministers in the Lutheran religion.
He studied medicine.
He is a doctor at Universal Basil.
Then he encountered Freud in 1907.
It was an incredibly brilliant encounter.
And they just talked for hours.
They just went together, again, like father and son.
Freud, 20 years his elder.
And for seven years, he was fully dedicated
to the psychoanalytic movement of Freud.
And indeed, for four years, he was the president
of the International Psychoanalytic Commission.
So he was considered by Freud as Freud's great successor.
Freud was preparing for his passing on.
And it should have been Jung.
Then Jung started having problems with Freud's theory.
And he started battling him here, there, there.
We'll see some of the points where he differs from.
In a certain point, there was just a very, very violent break.
And with mutual accusations and bitterness
and mutual psychoanalyzing, this sort of thing.
And it really got quite bitter.
But he's very much on our side.
Now, there's another way of reading him.
Some say, no, he's not on our side.
He's even more dangerous than Freud.
He's an eclectic, syncretistic thinker.
And he reduces everything to the subjective.
And certainly, he's got some theories that are not very orthodox at all.
So we have to be a little careful here.
We'll see this towards the end.
Some even ask whether he believed at all
or whether he was just playing his psychotherapy games, etc.
But people who know him best say he was a profound believer.
He is a little syncretistic.
He's interested in Tibetan Buddhism and Catholicism
and Zen Buddhism and the whole thing.
Are you people tired?
Should we take a break or move on?
Shall we move rapidly into Jung?
Some first categories of Jung that are interesting.
Now, for instance, he came up with a basic distinction,
extrovert, introvert.
You've heard this, for instance.
Someone's an extrovert.
Someone's an introvert.
You've heard these?
Now, this is his basic.
He says, you encounter people and you sort of intuit
that they fall into two basic types.
There's a more.
There's a less.
There's also a bit of both in each of us.
But there's really someone who's quite clearly extrovert
and quite clearly introvert.
The extrovert, he gives a very technical definition of these.
We probably have a vague.
But there's, remember, there's all this libido,
psychic energy in us.
Now, it's got to go somewhere.
Now, for the extrovert, it fundamentally goes outside
to the objective world, and it finds its fulfillment there.
I love parties.
I love meeting people.
The extrovert is the type, if he enters into a crowded room,
he says, great, and he starts going around
and shaking hands.
Don Innocenzo Guido, if you remember.
Now, he was fairly extrovert.
He loves people.
He loves talking and things.
The introvert, he's got all this same psychic energy.
He directs it inward to inward problems,
inward profundities, inward depths.
So if he comes in, there's lots of people.
He's very timid, and he just goes out,
and he goes off to his room and opens a book
or meditates or something.
So you have these two types, outer-directed, you can say,
and inner-directed.
And again, every person is both types.
There's a little of each in both of us.
There's two types here.
Don Bruno, who's not here, he has the delightful theory
that all our debate in theology of the difference
of the hermitage and the synobium
and the mystical fathers and all the rest of it,
it's just basically a difference of introverts tend
to gravitate towards the hermitage
and extroverts towards the monastery, and that's it.
And as far as supernatural grace or divine illuminations,
it's basically extroverts and introverts,
which is an interesting theory.
I think St. Teresa once said she wanted also extroverts
in her Carmels.
That is, if you get just exclusively introverts,
it can be a little dangerous.
Oh, indeed.
Also Don Pedro.
Oh, yeah.
Also Don Luigi Letza, who might come here.
He's very much, he's lived all his life in the monastery.
I think he's quite clearly an introvert.
You'll see it.
So you get these.
But generally, the idea of solitude, the cell, silence,
et cetera, these are things that an introvert
would naturally plug into.
Again, just on quite a natural level.
In the world, introverts tend to become librarians.
Not all introverts are librarians, but it can be.
This is a classical way that the introvert
finds a place in work.
And extroverts can be disc jockeys or hostesses.
This can be very helpful in counseling people.
I remember that the early years here were very illuminating,
but there was this one person who was quite clearly extrovert,
and he had this thing about getting into reclusion.
He had to, and it was very cruel that this appears.
So they finally let him go in, and he lasted about a week,
and then he came out and went out all the way.
But it is particularly difficult for an extrovert,
clearly, to be a recluse.
It can happen with all sorts of graces,
but it would certainly be more difficult
at the natural level.
Then he goes into another interesting distinction
of four types of intuitional, sensational thinking
and feeling.
Then he says all four of these are in all of us also,
and all of us have an intuitional dimension
and a sensation dimension.
But there's a more or less.
Some people are particularly one or the other.
For instance, the thinking is the rationalistic,
let's analyze this, let's be logical.
It's typically men's approach to a problem.
There's some problem, let's measure out the options,
et cetera.
My brother is extremely, he was a math major, for instance,
this sort of thing.
He had to take an inventory of everything in his cabin,
so he ended up measuring things.
And so he said, one chair, 10 inches by 15 by,
and this is his approach.
This is this approach.
If you can only get it down into numbers,
you've got a hold of it sort of thing.
The feminine is the feeling.
Now this is not what we sometimes mean by,
this is, Jung says, related to values.
I feel he's a very fine person.
Well, she's charming, isn't she?
Now this can, you get two women together
and how they normally talk, often it gets into,
does he seem more serene to me this time?
Yes.
And then his wife isn't.
I like her dress, and this sort of thing.
This is all on the feeling level, you see.
And it can drive men badly, because they
want to talk about business and this sort of thing.
But you have men who do that other sort of thing.
But there are two approaches.
One has to do with interpersonal values.
I think so-and-so is a little gloomy these days, et cetera.
And the other is, might not even
notice that interpersonal.
It's just logical, rational.
We've got a problem.
We've got to solve it.
There's a job to be done.
Go do it, sort of thing.
And I'm not worried about your feelings.
The sensational, the sensation, is dealing with reality,
especially on the experiential feeling touching.
You get this type of football players
or people who just like a can of beer,
and they like to watch the TV set, and this sort of thing.
And they're not too worried about higher things,
or they're just basic people.
And they can be very good people,
but they want a good, thick steak,
and they want this sort of thing.
That sort of thing.
Presumably, there's not that many around,
newcomer, really, because, but in the city,
you find this sort of person.
They just, pardon me?
Well, but that would, to him, that would be intuitional.
They like the good, this is more on just the basic level.
That's more on the, this is also, other than beauty,
but on the deeper level.
For instance, Beethoven, I think, is clearly intuitive.
Where you're in contact with the deeper harmonies of life,
and the deeper, this guy just wants a good beefsteak,
or a can of Coors, sort of thing.
And again, there's lots of people like this in the world,
and some place like this is a little particular,
because there are probably not that many around,
but good, solid.
They keep the economy.
Yeah, steelworkers type.
They live in a supermarket.
Jung says, the sensation deals with external reality
by the senses.
Simple matter of fact, elementary.
The intuitional perceives the unconscious levels.
He's the man of visions.
He's the poet, a Dante, or Blake, or this sort of thing.
And also the contemplative, on the natural level.
We're always on the natural level,
but the person who, at the sunset, will just go off.
At Berkeley, there's this young Franciscan,
and he just goes out in the day
and communes with the birds in the sunsets, et cetera.
That's all intuitional.
Poetry, sort of thing.
And then you get into the combinations.
I think Beethoven is clearly a introvert, intuitional.
He had a rough time dealing with people,
and he'd go off in his room
and plug into these deeper intuitions of beauty
and harmony, et cetera.
Kissinger, I think, is clearly an extrovert thinker.
He loves people, and he solves things logically.
And so a Mrs. Carter, for instance,
she went off to Cambodia.
She was profoundly moved by the sick, et cetera.
I think she's an extrovert feeling.
So you can go all the way.
A football player is probably an extrovert sensationalist.
So you get into these various combinations,
and it's interesting, and it's useful for counseling.
You probably don't, again, put an extrovert sensationalist
in a hermitage sort of thing, this sort of thing.
Even this is very difficult in a strict.
You see, this is all plugged into interpersonal,
and it sort of degenerates again into gossip
and this sort of thing.
But the feeling person can be very important in a synopium
of the introvert, of intuitional.
You can have some around, but the whole synopium is that.
It's not really a synopium sort of thing.
So you have these different categories.
And now much of psychic healing for him, for Jung,
is to activate all of these in all of us.
We sometimes are completely plugged out
to our sensation side,
just not even aware of our body sort of thing.
So that can be good therapy,
or get back in contact with feeling.
Some people are too calculating.
So someone who has to handle people,
that he can rediscover his feeling dimension.
This is very important.
Or someone who's just all sentimental
and weeps over the problems of others, etc.
She has to plug into her, or he,
the thinking dimension, this sort of thing.
So you want to get your act together.
Much of Jungian psychoanalysis,
as Asagyori psychosynthesis,
will be to reintegrate these components into harmony.
That's the basic approach.
Now, we've got...
we'll be going into a mandala later,
but we already have a kind of a mandala there.
A mandala is a symbol
that represents various components,
maybe of the universe,
or maybe of my inner psychic life.
And I try to reintegrate them
into some sort of whole,
some sort of harmony.
If I put a circle around this, say,
I want to discover the intuitional dimension in me,
the caesarean,
and I want to give them a kind of organic unity.
But I want to have a hierarchy.
I want to put first place to the intuitional.
And I want to balance it.
This would be, for me, a mandala.
Then, meditating on this, reflecting on this,
deep within, this healing process
is, to some extent, beginning.
This is a mandala, a Christian mandala
that I sort of like,
but we'll see this later.
Jung is very big on mandalas.
They express visually what he wants to do
in his psychotherapy.
That is, give us a center,
give us a focus,
and also a circumference,
so we're not going in all directions.
The chaotic person is the person
who just has no circumference
and has no center.
Uncentered, off-balance,
sort of thing we say to people.
So, once you can get your own mandala,
then you're on your way.
Now...
When you have the mandala,
do you then meditate on the image itself?
Yeah, you can.
The mandala comes from Tibetan Buddhism,
and it's a meditation technique.
We'll see some mandalas.
This is sort of...
So you meditate your mandalas,
and then it was discovered in the West,
and especially through Jung,
and rediscovered, etc.
And Asajjoli makes a great thing.
The cross is a basic mandala.
We don't think of it,
but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
He himself notes how the cross is a mandala.
It's the four corners of the universe,
up, down, east, west, centered.
Then you get into more complicated crosses
that are more clearly mandalas.
You could put a circle around
of the celtic cross and this sort of thing.
Now, if you meditate this,
our whole thing of meditating the cross
is to get our inner act together,
so to speak.
Overcome distraction, being torn apart.
Get centered again on Christ, sort of thing.
And meditate the interior cross, etc.
So really, it's much more than just
getting out and opening a scene,
what relates to what.
Just get a little fire going.
He encourages this meditation.
Oh, very much.
There's a whole series of paintings.
His patients did.
And he analyzes their psychic progress
as they are able to come more and more
to terms with their inner psychic life
through a more and more harmonious mandala.
So this is one person who keeps working at it
and comes up with very, very beautiful
harmonious mandalas.
There's a whole section here on oriental mandalas,
this sort of thing.
Mandalas are very big today.
Now, I think they're fun.
This is an oriental.
This is a Tibetan mandala.
Now, there's all elements of the cosmos
of Tibetan mythology here.
And it's also the inner cosmos.
There's things that correspond here.
There's the basic triad that's already in St. Paul,
and then it's in the Eastern Fathers,
and William of Cythera picks it up.
The anima, animus, and corpus,
the spirit, soul, and body.
Do you remember that?
But I like this mandala, for instance.
It's Trinitarian, clearly,
and it has the cross and et cetera in it.
But this can express the objective salvation mystery
of Trinity and Christ,
and it can also express different components of my life.
I have my spirit, my mind, and my body.
William of Cythera has a lovely thing
about getting these three components into harmony,
and the body under the mind,
and the mind under the spirit,
and the spirit under God,
centered on Christ.
St. Bonaventure has a whole thing about the cross symbolism,
and the whole cosmos is a cross,
and each person is a cross, et cetera.
But here you can have your four components or dimensions,
or you can have your more transcendent
and your more horizontal.
You can do all sorts of things with this.
And meditate on Christ, or God,
being your circumference and your center,
your deepest center,
my deepest center is Christ.
So it's one way to get beyond the merely verbal
or merely rational ideas into a deeper intuitional,
and it can nourish prayer.
Well, we've gone to other comments.
We might pick up Jung and his model of the psyche
next time then.
Remember Freud's,
or Jung modifies this quite a bit,
and all sorts of fascinating additions,
and opening the way to a much more affirmative thing
on religion, faith, et cetera.