In my never ending quest to deepen my understanding of Freud's view of religion, I just read an article that links his famous "Mourning and Melancholia" article(and later development of his thought on this issue) to the question of religion. I was so excited about the "take home" that I derived from it that I may have missed some of the fine points of the argument and I hope someone who knows more about Freud's thought can clean up my act. In the meantime, I went to a shiva minyan this morning and told someone(not the mourner) the idea I derived from the article and she found it meaningful.
(An aside : Our children teased us that our social life consisted of shiva minyans. Other kids would ask their parents what play they were seeing that night and they would ask, "Which of your friends had a parent die this week?")
Back to the article. For those who want to read it themselves, it is Amy Hollywood, "Acute Melancholia" Harvard Theological Review, October 2006, pp.381-406(it is not online)
Here goes: Freud is generally thought of as anti-spiritual, anti-religion because he allegedly reduces whatever is going on in those activities to something else. AND he makes the moral judgment that really smart people who work hard at it can do without.
But he is not a simple "reductionist" because the kinds of various and deep human needs that he identifies as the source of spiritual/religious life are not simple. In fact, religion while not strictly true, speaks to emotional truths.
While Freud had many things wrong, according to Hollywood, he also got some things "profoundly right."(p.403)
O.K. so on to "acute melancholia."
What does that have to do with the religious imagination?
According to Hollywood, in Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia" he argued that mourning was the natural, healthy response to the lost beloved "object" and that it was a slow process of detaching oneself bit by bit, learning to give it up and find suitable replacements. When the work is done, the ego is free once again to find pleasure in life. Melancholia was the refusal to detach and replace, instead internalizing the "object" and making it part of one's self. This he saw as pathological, resulting in unremitting sadness.
Later, however, he changed his mind.
He began to see that melancholia is a necessary process, not pathological but really central to the very formation of our egos. Not the unremitting sadness, but the internalizing of the lost beloved, making him or her part of one's self, not detaching. This is how a person develops their character, from the bits of others they have lost and then internalized(One starts this process with ones parents early in life....this loosing is not only about death.)
(Now we get to the unconvincing part where he zeros in on the male child incorporating the father. Freud's gender stuff is a whole other story!)
Let me be clear: from here on, the language I am using is MY language, not the author's. It is how I tried to translate what she was saying so I could explain it to someone easily. I may have erred in my interpretation.
Melanie Klein(according to Hollywood) saw all normal mourning as "melancholic" in Freud's terms. There is loss, identification and incorporation, just as in childhood one did that with ones parents as they were not physically present. When they die, the process is repeated in a different way. We don't give people up, we incorporate them. They become us.
Klein points out that each major loss we suffer requires us to rebuild that inner self with new introjects.
So... Hollywood concludes that who we are is really a complex web of others, alive and dead, whom we have now taken into ourselves. When a new loss happens, all those folks have to move around and reconstitute to make room for the new person.
Religion? We're getting there.
First of all, immortality is real.
Second, we know God through our relationships. So since these people who are lost to us are still inside us, indeed constitute us, we also have God within--always.
Third( and now I am going way beyond translation to my own leap)This is how we can understand the paradox of God's transcendence and immanance. Transcendence means(and this is how I always thought of it) that there is an object of our desire and love that is lost to us. Immanence means that this object we long for is inside us ---in the congregation of those we have loved and lost that now constitutes our selves.
Wondering how to illustrate this post....
(An aside : Our children teased us that our social life consisted of shiva minyans. Other kids would ask their parents what play they were seeing that night and they would ask, "Which of your friends had a parent die this week?")
Back to the article. For those who want to read it themselves, it is Amy Hollywood, "Acute Melancholia" Harvard Theological Review, October 2006, pp.381-406(it is not online)
Here goes: Freud is generally thought of as anti-spiritual, anti-religion because he allegedly reduces whatever is going on in those activities to something else. AND he makes the moral judgment that really smart people who work hard at it can do without.
But he is not a simple "reductionist" because the kinds of various and deep human needs that he identifies as the source of spiritual/religious life are not simple. In fact, religion while not strictly true, speaks to emotional truths.
While Freud had many things wrong, according to Hollywood, he also got some things "profoundly right."(p.403)
O.K. so on to "acute melancholia."
What does that have to do with the religious imagination?
According to Hollywood, in Freud's essay "Mourning and Melancholia" he argued that mourning was the natural, healthy response to the lost beloved "object" and that it was a slow process of detaching oneself bit by bit, learning to give it up and find suitable replacements. When the work is done, the ego is free once again to find pleasure in life. Melancholia was the refusal to detach and replace, instead internalizing the "object" and making it part of one's self. This he saw as pathological, resulting in unremitting sadness.
Later, however, he changed his mind.
He began to see that melancholia is a necessary process, not pathological but really central to the very formation of our egos. Not the unremitting sadness, but the internalizing of the lost beloved, making him or her part of one's self, not detaching. This is how a person develops their character, from the bits of others they have lost and then internalized(One starts this process with ones parents early in life....this loosing is not only about death.)
(Now we get to the unconvincing part where he zeros in on the male child incorporating the father. Freud's gender stuff is a whole other story!)
Let me be clear: from here on, the language I am using is MY language, not the author's. It is how I tried to translate what she was saying so I could explain it to someone easily. I may have erred in my interpretation.
Melanie Klein(according to Hollywood) saw all normal mourning as "melancholic" in Freud's terms. There is loss, identification and incorporation, just as in childhood one did that with ones parents as they were not physically present. When they die, the process is repeated in a different way. We don't give people up, we incorporate them. They become us.
Klein points out that each major loss we suffer requires us to rebuild that inner self with new introjects.
So... Hollywood concludes that who we are is really a complex web of others, alive and dead, whom we have now taken into ourselves. When a new loss happens, all those folks have to move around and reconstitute to make room for the new person.
Religion? We're getting there.
First of all, immortality is real.
Second, we know God through our relationships. So since these people who are lost to us are still inside us, indeed constitute us, we also have God within--always.
Third( and now I am going way beyond translation to my own leap)This is how we can understand the paradox of God's transcendence and immanance. Transcendence means(and this is how I always thought of it) that there is an object of our desire and love that is lost to us. Immanence means that this object we long for is inside us ---in the congregation of those we have loved and lost that now constitutes our selves.
Wondering how to illustrate this post....
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