metanexus conference next week in philadelphia

Because I am a board member, I have been asked to chair a session of the 8th annual Metanexus International Conference on Science and Religion. I have presented at several of these conferences before and I find them fascinating, if only because I get to see how very wide and varied the field of Science and Religion has become. It is unusual to find so much interdisciplinary work presented at an academic conference. Perhaps it is just Jewish studies, but my experience at the AJS has been that academic work is organized on the "silo" model. Each field has their own little world and panels will present four people from that world digging down deep into their own particular interest. People are mostly trained in the same disciplines, and they mostly investigate smaller topics(e.g. Rambam's view of Revelation.) At Metanexus, people run with the biggest possible questions and the widest of perspectives, even within a given paper.
The disadvantage of such an approach is that one may sacrifice depth for bredth. As William Sloan Coffin so memorably put it, one can go "a mile wide and an inch deep."
On the other hand, it makes for an exhilarating few days of learning, and if there is a bit of a "flake factor" that is the price one pays for pushing the envelope. As a teacher once told me, you have to go out on a limb sometimes to get the sweetest fruit. And sometimes you just fall off the tree...

So, here is the information on the panel I am chairing next Tuesday at U of Pa.

There will be four papers. Here's what I know so far:

1)Applying Relational and Contextual Reasoning(RCR)to understand human-divine relationships: Psychological, Biological and Theological Perspectives

The co-authors are a clinical psychologist from Australia and a systematic theologian from New Zealand.

The Thesis: Recent neurobiological research reinforces what psychology has known for a long time--the critical importance of attachment relationships for optimum psychological/brain development. God may function as an attachment figure. We now have psychological, biological and theological accounts of attachment relationships with God. Can we develop a "trans account?" No small pay off here. "Implications of a coordinated model of the development and functioning of an attachment relationship with God for spiritual transformation, ethical conduct and intuition of relational ontology are outlined." Whew!

2)Quest for Unity: Religious Specifics of a Universal Psychological Function written by a professor of Psychology from Belgium. The title is a translation of the French title, "Quete d'unite: Specificite religieuse d'une fonction non necessairement religieuse."

The Thesis: The need and quest for "unity" may be one of the psychological categories the study of religious experience can offer to mainstream psychology to widen our understanding of human beings. The author's understanding of the "need for unity" will go beyond Freud's "oceanic feeling" and look more broadly at religious experiences and delve deeper into the psychic explanation for the need for unity.

3)Ways of Knowing: The Scientific Study of Religiosity as Relationality, prepared by two Psychology PhD scholars , a psychiatrist trained in psychoanalysis, and a person with a b.a. in psych and an m.a. in religion.

Thesis: Scientists have dismissed as pathological or at least irrational claims by religious people to have meaningful encounters with non-human beings--God, angles, ancestors, sentient trees, etc. People all over the world clearly recognize sentience, agency, intentionality, presence and communicative abilities in a variety of other than human "persons." Perhaps personhood has been too narrowly construed in the social sciences. Martin Buber helps the authors move toward a way of understanding the "unity of knowledge" that will include the religious way of knowing.

4)Transdisciplinarity and the Development of an Integrated Model of Personhood, Health and Wellness, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, with a joint appointment in African American Studies and Religious Studies(he also teaches courses in the Social Justice track). Working to develop the "Life Sciences and Faith Community Forum of Central Virginia." His book is on Cornel West and "prophetic pragmatism"--I think I need to check that out!

Thesis: In order to construct a health care system that puts a premium on health and wellness promotion, we need to move beyond the culturally dominant model of personhood, health and wellness. We need a holistic model of health and wellness promotion and this can be achieved(simply!) by developing a)a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production; b)trans-institutional and extra-institutional community cooperation; c)a co-evolutionary relational ontology of personhood;d) a cultural-spiritual ethic of practical compassion,harmonious co-existence and social justice. (I am ready to sign up for that.)

We'll see how much wisdom can be gained from all this interdisciplinarity. I look forward to the two and a half hours of talk with all these scholars!

A New Evolutionary Perspective on Religion

A new book by Barbara King views the evolution of religion in a refreshing new way. Unlike many of the previous efforts by scientists, in particular evolutionary psychologists, to explain the origin of man's spiritual/religious behavior, King actually respects religion.

She argues that the human religiosity is best understood, referencing Martin Buber, as the deeply felt urge to belong, to connect emotionally with others. Once the big brain capable of symbol making emerges, this desire spills over into a capacity for deep emotional engagement(belongingness) with forces not visible to us.

She traces the origins of this capacity for connection, this primal need for connection, to our apelike ancestor. Evidently, 7 million years ago this African Ape line split into two, eventuating in homosapiens and our nearest evolutionary cousins, today's chimps, gorillas and bonobos.

In the apes of today(not in monkeys) we can see the building blocks of religion, first among them empathy. She argues that other animals may participate in emotional contagian but only the apes take it to the next step, empathy. Of course human beings take it further still, developing this capacity for those not of their own immediate tribe, Our abilities for cognitive empathy outstrip anything in the animal world., but are not unique divine qualities(Kant's moral law within, Kaplan's argument for a force that makes for salvation) but rather explainable by evolutionary science.

So Barbara King is not about proving that God really exists. Perhaps one might even say she is making a good argument for how human beings created(she says "evolved") God. There was no spiritual big bang. On the other hand, she defines religion in ways far more subtle and sympathetic than many scientists and gives us much to think about.

The healthy-minded and the sick soul

In class tomorrow we will discuss William James' famous distinction between two types of religious personalities--the healthy-minded and the sick soul. James uses Walt Whitman as an example of the first and Leo Tolstoy as an example of the second. Each requires his own type of religion, the once born or the twice born. Of course, these are ideal abstractions and most people fall somewhere on a spectrum between them. This is one of the most memorable themes of the Varieties and one that should give rise to an interesting discussion. Is the twice born a strictly Christian idea, and if not, what is the analogue in Judaism?

Is William James Freud Proof?

After we finish with Freud(a pitiful two weeks that could be two semesters) we move on to William James, a contemporary of Freud but an American, and see if his answers address the questions Freud raises.

Here are a couple of teaser quotations from James to get started:

First of all, there is much that Freud and James would agree upon. Here is James in a passage that Freud would have approved.

The Will to Believe, p.7

When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees howit was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference....then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream!

Varieties of Religious Experience, p.162.

Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help! (I think Freud would agree with that.)

But James wants to do battle with the "medical materialists."

The Will to Believe, p.131

Certain of our positivists keep chiming to us that, amid the wreck of every other god and idol, one divinity still stands upright, --that his name is Scientific Truth...

These most conscientious gentlemen think they have...emancipated themselves from the shackles of their subjective propensities...they are deluded....they have construct(ed)...the leanest, lowest, aridist result--namely, the bare molecular world--and they have sacrificed all the rest.

Varieties, p. 122 The universe is a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific sect, allows for....if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists, on the life of men that lies in them apart from their learning and science...we have to confess that the part of it which rationalism can give an account for is relatively superficial.

Varieties, p.503 Religion, occupying herself with personal destinies and keeping them in contact with the only absolute realities which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history.

Varieties, p.519 The total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow 'scientific' bounds. Assuredly, the real world is of a different temperment--more intimately built than physical science allows.

And here is James when he really gets going...

Varieties, p. 519 We and God have business with each other.Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

To this last, Peter Gay claims Freud would have seen them as unintelligible.(A Godless Jew, p. 24)

Freud's antiquities

In class yesterday we discussed the fact that Sigmund Freud was known to have kept a collection of gods and goddesses(antiquities) on his desk, both in Vienna and again in London. The students were interested in this historical detail and wondered what it meant that this positivist, anti-religious reductionist was so interested in these religious artifacts from the past.

I did not know the answer to the question, so I did a little research and discovered that there is a recent book entirely devoted to this subject.

The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection By Janine Burke Random House, 344pp, $49.95

Here is an abridged review:
SIGMUND Freud was an increasingly obsessive art collector over 40 years. When the founder of psychoanalysis died in 1939, not long after fleeing Vienna for London, he had amassed more than 2000 works, mainly from Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquity, many bought on the black market, and most of which crowded his study and consulting rooms.
There is no serendipity here, of course. As Janine Burke's study reveals, Freud's deep interest in archeology and mythology segued perfectly into his excavation of the human mind. Indeed it was shortly after the traumatic death of his father in 1896, and during the subsequent research for his groundbreaking book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), that Freud's passion for collecting antiquities - really took off. "The psychoanalyst, like the archeologist," he wrote, "must uncover layer after layer of the patient's psyche before coming to the deepest, most valuable treasures."
Compulsive collecting - of artworks or any other object - is often attributed to deep insecurity or childhood longing, even trauma. Burke posits that Freud's first three years of life amid the enchanted forests of Moravia, and his family's sudden eviction from this idyllic existence because of economic constraints which, in part, she says, were the result of their being Jewish, had a deep influence on his later passion for collecting art.
In the 1860s, 50 per cent of all Jewish immigrants in Vienna came from Moravia and Bohemia. Freud, while "proudly and defiantly Jewish", chose all his life to deny the anti-Semitism of his early years, maintaining Moravia as "the ideal, the lost and longed-for home".
Burke suggests that Freud never felt completely at home in Vienna and observes that most of his antiquities were, one way or another, objects of mourning.

By the late 1930s, he could barely move for antiquities; indeed, Burke observes, he had to swing his study chair at a 90-degree angle to slide out between the desk and table, so laden were they with statues and other items. Freud's famous patient Sergei Pankejeff, the so-called Wolf Man, found this induced a "feeling of sacred peace and quiet", although to me it sounds unbearably claustrophobic, if not downright spooky.
Despite suffering travel anxiety, Freud voyaged widely in search of artefacts, especially to Paris, Florence and Rome; and as did other travellers in that golden era of journeying, he often took his collection with him. He bought several museum-standard works, such as a small bronze Egyptian statuette, Isis Suckling the Infant Horus (found by a dealer in a junk shop), which Burke believes is "the high point of his collection".
When the German army occupied Austria, and Freud, after some intensely disbelieving procrastination, decided to flee to London (four of his elderly sisters perished in concentration camps), he planned to smuggle out just two favourite works: a bronze statue of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and a tiny jade screen from the Qing dynasty. Remarkably, his entire collection eventually arrived unscathed in London, where it is now housed in the FreudMuseum.
Burke intelligently conveys the central role played by what Freud called "my old and grubby gods". Yet although Freud put aside time each day for self-analysis, he showed no desire to explore his obsession with possessing artworks any more than he wished to investigate his own sexuality or his addictive and ultimately fatal passion for cigars.
Perhaps, even for the man who invented and prescribed the intense, inner journey of psychoanalysis, some things, some inner gods and demons, were better left in the happy world of denial, unexcavated.

Is liberal religion "Freud proof"?

In class, yesterday, I tried to suggest to the students that Freud's critique of religion was not only a critique of authoritarian, orthodox faith but also of the kind of liberal religion we are the proponents of. I pointed out several passages that seemed to make this point:
Future of an Illusion, p.54
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 preserve any of the consolation of religion. No doubt if they confine themselves to belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenges of science; but then they will also lose their hold on human interest.
OR
Civilization and its Discontents,p. 21
It is still more humiliating to discover how large a number of people living to-day, who cannot but see that this(orthodox) religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. One would like to ....meet these philosophers, who think they can rescue the God of religion by replacing him by an impersonal, shadowy and abstract principle, and to address them with the warning words: ' Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!'
Or
Future of an Illusion, p.32
Where questions of religion are concerned, people are guilty of every possible sort of dishonesty and intellectual misdemeanour. Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense.
OR
Future, p. 49
Men cannot remain children forever. They must in the end go out into 'hostile life.'
OR
a letter by Freud to Princess Marie Bonaparte(quoted in Peter Gay, A Godless Jew, p.12)
The most varied drinks(are) being offered under the name of 'religion' with a minimal percentage of alcohol--really, non-alcoholic, but they still get drunk on it. The old drinkers were after all a respectable body..but to get drunk on apple juice is nothing less than ridiculous.


OUCH! I want the students to tell Freud why what they are up to is not vulnerable in any way to this critique.

By the way, Gay goes on to say that Freud lacked any respect for these applejuice people and "for Freud , to be scientific meant to be sober."(p. 17) but if one rereads his chapter one of Civilization or his letters to Romain Rolland(which I have not done but plan to!) I think one might argue with Gay's analysis. I need to look into this.

Acute Melancholia

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....

Rabbi Brant Rosen on Amalek and the Amygdala

I was thrilled to see that RRC grad and current RRA president Rabbi Brant Rosen was bringing neuroscience into his d'var torah writing. His blog, shalomrav.wordpress.com is a great resource. If any readers have written sermons or divrei torah with references to neuroscience, I would love to post them here. Now for Rabbi Rosen's d'var:


Amalek and the Amygdala

In this week’s Torah portion, Parashat Beshallach, the newly liberated Israelites do battle with their arch-enemies, the Amalekites. After the Israelites emerge victorious, God tells Moses:
Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: “I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven!” (Exodus 17:14)
At first glance this seems like a bizarre statement. Why would God want to blot out the memory of Israel’s enemy? Wouldn’t it make more sense for God to say, “Never forget Amalek!” (In an even more puzzling version of this verse, we will later read in Deuteronomy 25:19: “…you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”)
“Eytz Hayim: Torah and Commentary” offers this explanation:
Blot out the memory: that is, blot out their name, wipe them out.
This “zero-sum” view, sadly, completely misses the central imperative of these verses. Total eradication of the enemy is not the point here. Indeed, the Torah makes it clear that Amalek can never and will never completely be destroyed (see 17:16: “The Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages.”) Even a cursory review of this text will reveal that it is less concerned with Amalek per se than with the power of collective memory.
This is the essential concern of the Amalekite episode: what will the memory of this traumatic event do to the Israelites? Will it transform them into a fearful people, gripping them so tightly that they will see Amalek at every turn in their journey? Or will they be able to rise above, to liberate themselves from its poisonous effects?
It is notable that the two references to Amalek in the Torah occur immediately after the Exodus from Egypt (Exodus 17: 8-17:16) and immediately before the Israelites’ entrance into the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 25: 17-25:19). This suggests that their ability to become a truly free people is directly related to their wherewithal to free themselves from the power of this terrible collective memory. While Israel must remain vigilant, the new nation must not be born into fear.
There is, quite simply, a profound difference between being a vigilant people and being a fearful people. This lesson has resonated powerfully for the Jewish people as we have confronted a variety of “Amaleks” throughout our history. Sadly, it is even more resonant for the post-9/11 world in general. In this age of 24 hour news reports and color-coded terror alerts, it could be said that our collective fear response has been activated to an all-time high.
When we respond to the world with nothing but our own fears, then Amalek will have indeed succeeded. But when we honestly come to grips with the power fear wields over us, we will come to know the true meaning of liberation.
Postscript: Neurological research indicates that “fear memory” has a dramatic power over the human condition. Like other animals, our brains store away fearful memories and re-experience them in powerful ways when we feel threatened. This “fight or flight” impulse is a very basic survival mechanism, conditioned in our brains from birth. The part of our brain that processes fear, the amygdala, creates a steady output of stress hormones when stimulated, inducing a state of hypervigilance. The amygdala can often override the thinking brain - when this occurs, reasoned memory takes a back seat to fear memory.
Dr. Marc Siegel, who has reported extensively on the post- 9/11 “epidemic of fear”, writes that the key to controlling our fear is letting go of the illusion that we can control our enemies - and instead to put our fears in their proper place:
To be sure, individual citizens can’t control or defeat terrorists in this country or any other, and it’s this feeling of helplessness and uncertainty that compounds what terror achieves. Even so, what we can control is our perspective and our understanding of the world.

Cell Theory, 1506

Freud and the Uncanny

I have been struggling with what to assign from Freud in my Psychology and Religion course. I could teach a whole semester just on him! I am likely settling on an essay entitled, "The Uncanny," although it is not usually the work chosen to represent Freud's view of religion. Freud's major ideas about the origins of religion are usually derived from The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism. Based on those books, it is generally agreed that Freud saw worshipping God the Father as an outgrowth of the Oedipal conflict, and he judged it an immature and cowardly resolution. The most heroic way to encounter the frustrations of life--among them the ambivalence of sons toward their fathers--is to face them boldly and to do without illusions like a father in heaven whom one can appease. This idea, with its androcentric view of life being only one of multiple problems, is no longer taken to be the key to unlock all of life(to put it gently.)

What is left of Freud's basic contention is that life is full of pain and civilized life full of necessary repression and that religious ideas are compensation for those too weak to "take it like a man."(It should be pointed out that, in Freud's view, all religions are illusions but some are more illusory than others. In his last book, Moses and Monotheism, Freud argues that there is a great deal more to be admired in the Jewish version than the Christian.)

There is a huge literature dealing with all this and relating it back to sexism, antisemitism, heterosexism and how those three intermingle in fascinating ways.

Freud did also acknowledge a second source of religion , that of the "oceanic feeling"(Civilization and its Discontents, Chapter One) and a desire to return to that sensation of eternity. Freud agrees many people have such experiences and that they can provide the energy that is then channeled by religious institutions. Freud confesses(boasts?) that he could not discover that oceanic feeling in himself. Again, however, it is an immature move to indulge one's nostalgia for such such an early phase of ego-feeling.

The essay that I want to look at, "The Uncanny" is widely read by people interested in literature. It is as a contribution to aesthetics that Freud presents the work. He notes that people like to study what we find beautiful, but less often examine what we find uncanny, that is the english word for what in German Freud calls "unheimlich."

Since linguistics is so much a part of his argument, unheimlich is a better way to carry on the discussion. All of us know when we feel "spooked" --something makes us uncomfortable in a vaguely scary way---a weird coincidence, the sense that something that we thought dead is alive(or vice versa), ghosts, spirits, etc. Freud wants to analyse that feeling of the unheimlich by examining clinical evidence, literary evidence and linguistic evidence. I found the article challenging and exciting. I also learned that it would relate to two issues of great interest to the students--gender and Freud's Jewishness. Most important, it points to(but doesn't actually come out and state) a far more ambivalent(if not positive) attitude toward religion than is usually attributed to Freud. Obviously, I did not figure all this out myself! I was led to this essay by the work of Diane Jonte-Pace in a book entitled, Speaking the Unspeakable: Religion, Misogyny, and the Uncanny Mother in Freud's Cultural Texts. I also saw some interesting connections to evolutionary psychology and brain science(not made by Freud or by Jonte-Pace, but I think they are valid connections.) Anyone read the essay and want to comment?

Spirituality,Religion and Morality: Theories of Mind, Theories of Brain

Spirituality, Religion and Morality:
Theories of Mind, Theories of Brain

Men go forth to wonder at the height of mountains. the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the course of the stars... and they pass by themselves without wondering. --Confessions of Saint Augustine

Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer
Spring 2007
nancykreim@comcast.net
215-438-8885

RATIONALE:

Reconstructionist rabbis are both consumers and providers of psychological and spiritual care. A psychological theory carries with it explicit and-- more often -- implicit assumptions regarding human nature, the ultimate context of human experience, and the best way to craft a life. Becoming aware of these assumptions and their relationship to one another allows one to become critical of them, to re-examine ones own fundamental beliefs, and to evaluate programs of psychological, spiritual and psycho-spiritual care.

In recent decades, the human sciences are being transformed by the impact of biology on the study of human behavior. Psychology, a field at the intersection of social science and biological science, is an excellent arena to study that shift.

Finally, the question of the relationship between science and religion is once again a hot topic in the public sphere. The popularizers of an evangelical scientism are raising questions that were discussed long since by the classic theorists, arguably with more nuance and profundity. After learning about new developments in brain science, we will want to revisit the writings of Freud, James and Jung and explore their continued relevance.

OUTCOMES:

At the end of the semester, students will be able to

1)explain the views of Freud, James and Jung on religion in a nuanced way.

2)have an educated layperson’s grasp of how developments in brain science impact the human sciences, be a more careful consumer of media reports on relevant scientific developments and ask intelligent questions of scientists.

3)have a point of view on the issues of the relationship between science and religion.

4)read texts of psychological theory(and certain other texts as well) with certain questions in mind(see list below)

5) evaluate psychological, spiritual and psycho-spiritual practices as well as theories of pastoral care in terms of the ideas in this course.

6) examine their own fundamental beliefs in light of the ideas we studied.

7) creatively communicate these ideas to Jewish adults in a way that yields wisdom for their lives.




BACKGROUND:

Stephen Jay Gould famously taught that science and religion could exist companionably because they are “non overlapping magesteria (NOMA). “Science covers the empirical realm: what the universe is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). Religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value.” While arguably this idea makes sense for some fields of science, it applies poorly to the human sciences, in particular psychology. What is the nature of human beings? What is a soul? What is spiritual experience? How free is free will? How do we understand illness and healing, both physical and mental? How can people be happier? Are moral judgments just a matter of taste? How can we become more conscious and compassionate people? How can we achieve life abundant—whatever that means?

For the classical theorists of mind we study in the first part of the course, this is territory that has already spurned a secondary literature, some of which we will also examine. When we come to more recent developments in psychology, brain research, we are dealing with ideas that have scarcely begun to be acknowledged, let alone dealt with, by religious thinkers. Here we are out on the edge of this field, empowered to try our hands at creative religious responses to rapidly increasing challenges and insights.

The goal of this exploration is neither to adapt our religious thinking to different psychological insights nor to critique psychological systems in terms of the “truths” of “Judaism.” Rather, it is to enter into a vigorous critical dialogue between various psychologies and Jewish thought with the goal of acquiring insight on how to live.

WRITTEN REQUIREMENTS:

This course requires 5 pages of writing throughout the first half and 3-5 pages of writing during the second half.

* During weeks 2-6 students are asked to read the assigned material with the following questions in mind and to bring to class a brief reply to one of the questions. (One page double-spaced).
1) Who is the author and how does his/her biography, particularly in regard to religion, influence what is written?
2) According to this theory, why are human beings spiritual? Religious? Moral?
3) What is the relationship between spirituality, religion and morality?
4) What are the deep metaphors?
5) What are the explicit and implicit assumptions the theory makes regarding
the innate nature of human beings and what we can reasonably expect of ourselves?
6) What are our obligations?
7) What is happiness? Is it possible? What thwarts happiness? What is wholeness/optimum health?
8) What is the presumed metaphysical horizon of human life? What kind of world do we live in and what is its ultimate context? (Browning) How does one characterize the context or power against which or [an afterthought?] with which one plays out the human drama? What does this Other require?(Dittes)
9) What is the author’s stance toward organized religion: critic, advocate or reformer?
10) How would women’s studies and/or gender studies critique this theory?
11) What is the understanding of myth, ritual and dreams?
12)What are the political/social implications of this theory?
13)What aspects of Jewish theology(theologies)are congruent or incongruent with these ideas ? Where are the points of contact and of conflict?
14)Does the author have an explanation for the pain and suffering in life?
15)How does this theory contribute to the reader’s own search for insight into the challenge of composing a meaningful life?

*During Weeks 7-12, students are asked to select one of the weeks and prepare a brief d'var torah jumping off from the material in the week’s readings.(the d'var need not relate to the portion of that week, nor indeed, to any Torah portion in particular)

* Week 13: students are asked to come to class prepared to discuss a psychological, spiritual or psych-spiritual practice that has been meaningful to them with reference to the questions used in the first half of the course. No writing is necessary.



-Required Books:

Don S. Browning and Terry D. Cooper, Religious Thought and the Modern Psychologies (second edition, 2004) Fortress Press. (There are many copies available of the first edition, but there have also been many changes so you need the second edition.) PB

The first edition of this book pioneered a broader and deeper critique of psychological theories and practices. Informed by hermeneutical theory, Browning's widely acclaimed work drew attention to the ethical and even religious assumptions underlying psychology and has been deeply influential in psychology, pastoral counseling, and practical theology.—From a review



Steven Rose, The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow’s Neuroscience, Oxford Press, 2005, PB

Steven Rose has hacked through all the hype to tell us how far science has really come in explaining the human mind, how far it will probably go in the future, and what the consequences for all of us might be. ---From a review


Recommended:

John Horgan, The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication and Explanation, Touchstone, 1999, PB

In this rich, irreverent, thorough and entertaining tour of mind science, Horgan makes complicated lines of research accessible and compelling.—From a review

Don S. Browning, Christian Ethics and the Moral Psychologies. Eerdmans, 2006

This book embodies the highest level of interdisciplinary thinking in the conversation between psychology, philosophy, ethics and theology. –From a review




PART ONE: The Classic Theories : Spirituality, Religion, Morality and the Mind


I. Introduction : The Questions of This Course
Metaphors, Obligations, Horizons
Browning, Chap 2 REQUIRED TEXT
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live By(selections) INFOSERVE
http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html
Philip Rieff, “Psychological Man,” Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, pp.353-357
HANDOUT in CLASS




II. Freud (1)
The Future of an Illusion, HAND OUT
Civilization and its Discontents, HAND OUT
Browning, Chap 3 REQUIRED TEXT
View portions of PBS Film: The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud with Dr. Armand Nicholi TBA


III. Freud(2)
"The Uncanny" HAND OUT
Ernest Becker, Denial of Death, selection HAND OUT

IV William James

Varieties of Religious Experience, excerpts HAND OUT

“The Will to Believe”(excerpts) HAND OUT

V. James con’t
A chapter of your choice(this book can be found on line in its entirety through Google but it is also widely available second hand for a song and there are multiple copies in the library that can be borrowed.)


Carol Zaleski, “Willam James, Varieties of Religious Experience,” First Things, March 2000 INFOSERVE
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0003/articles/james.html


Optional:
Charles Taylor, Why William James Still Matters
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_5_129/ai_84817525/print
Charles Glock and Phillip Hammond, Beyond the Classics? Essays in the Scientific Study of Religion, Harper, 1973, pp.291-349

VI. Jung
Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, selections HANDOUT
Browning, Chapter 7 REQUIRED TEXT
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Chapter 5 HAND OUT
Martin Buber HAND OUT




PART TWO: Spirituality, Religion, Morality: Theories of Brain

VII. Introduction to Neuroscience

Steven Rose, Chapters 6 and 8

Sharon Begley, Religion and the Brain, Newsweek, May 7, 2001 INFOSERVE
https://notes.utk.edu/Bio/greenberg.nsf/0/e938e40271ec394c85256a4a00626175?OpenDocument&Click=

Andrew Newberg, Neuroscientific Study of Spiritual and Religious Phenomena INFOSERVE
http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/printer_friendly.asp?ID=9468

Jerome Groopman, “God and the Brain,” The New Yorker, 2001 INFOSERVE
http://www.jeromegroopman.com/godbrain.html

VIII. Brain/Mind/Soul—Free Will?

Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby, Chapters 7 and 8 HAND OUT

Steven Pinker, How to think about the Mind, Newsweek INFOSERVE
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_09_27_newsweek.html



“Neuroscience and the Soul,”Wooodstock Theological Center, 1998 INFOSERVE
http://woodstock.georgetown.edu/publications/report/r-fea53a.htm



“Natural Born Dualists: A Talk with Paul Bloom,” Edge.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html

“Is Science Killing the Soul?” Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, Edge.
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge53.html


Review of Schwartz and Begley, “The Mind and the Brain,” First Things, 2003

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0305/reviews/dembski.html

Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, pp. 183-220 INFOSERVE

Reread: Rose, pp. 154-157






IX.Evolutionary Origins of aggression, altruism, spirituality and religion

Paul Bloom, Descartes’ Baby, chapters 4 and 5 HANDOUT

Rose, pp. 94-105
Horgan, “Darwin to the Rescue,” Chapter 6

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate, chaps 14 and 15

“Is God in our Genes?” Time Magazine, October, 2004
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,995465,00.htm

Optional: Steven Pinker, “The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion”
http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/2004_10_29_religion.htm


X. Healing the Mind: Modulating the Mind—Mending, Enhancing, Manipulating?

Steven Rose, Chapters 9 and 10

Optional: The President’s Council on Bio-ethics, 2003,
“Beyond Therapy” INFOSERVE
http://bioethics.gov/reports/beyondtherapy/




XI. Spirituality, Religion and Health INFOSERVE
http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/printer_friendly.asp?ID=9387

Sidney Callahan, “ A New Synthesis: Alternative Medicine’s Challenge to Christianity”
http://www.parkridgecenter.org/Page170.html

XII. The Next Big Thing? Ethics in a Neurocentric World

Steven Rose, Chapter 11 and 12

The Scientific Study of Spiritual Transformation
Guest: Professor Sol Katz, University of Pennsylvania
Discussion:

Freud, James and Jung Revisited

How do the thinkers from the first half of the course look in light of the second half?



XIII. Mussar, Spiritual Direction and Beyond

Students will select either a psychological, spiritual or psycho-spiritual practice or a self-help book that has been meaningful to them and be prepared to discuss it in terms of the ideas of this course.

Some examples: Mussar, Spiritual Direction, Landmark Forum, Twelve Steps, Re-evaluation Counseling (“co-counseling”) Meditation, Course in Miracles, The Road Less Traveled

Alternatively…

Students can select one of the topics below to write about:


a. Ken Wilber: Transpersonal Psych/Integral Psych

Jack Crittenden, What is the Meaning of “Integral”?
http://www.integralinstitute.org/
Duane Bidwell, “Ken Wilber’s Transpersonal Psychology: An Introduction and Preliminary Critique,” Pastoral Psychology, Vol 48, number 2, 1999


b. Martin Seligman: Positive Psychology

Martin Seligman, “Positive Psychology,” Metanexus Online
http://www.metanexus.net/metanexus_online/printer_friendly.asp?ID=2627
See week 4-6 Infoserve

Steven Pinker, Martin Seligman, “Debating Human Happiness,” Slate, Oct 18, 2002
http://www.slate.com/?id=2072079&entry=2072402 SEE WEEK 4-6 INFOSERVE


c. Buddhism and Therapy

Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker
Patrick Kearney, “Why Meditation is not Psychotherapy”

http://www.buddhanet.net/crazy.htm See Week4-6 Infoserve

d. Humanistic and Existential Therapy
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning
Erich Fromm, You shall be as Gods
Joshua Loth Liebmann, Peace of Mind
Andrew Heinze, Jews and the American Soul, pp. 267-290

e. Constructive Developmental Psychology
Robert Kegan, “There the Dance is,” HAND OUT
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, Chapter Two
Don Browning, Christian Ethics and the Moral Psychologies,
pp.41-47; 68-70



PRE-TEST

Off the cuff, why do you think human beings are spiritual? Religious?
Moral?

What are the psychological, spiritual or psycho-spiritual practices/therapies you have experienced as a consumer?

Which one has felt the most congenial to you philosophically? The least?
Which has been the most helpful?

Is your view of human nature fundamentally positive, negative or other?

Do you believe we are “obligated” as human beings? How so?

Do you think you are a monist or a dualist?

If monist, are you a materialist or an idealist?

Do you find the above two questions foolish?

Going into this study, how would you define happiness?

How would you define fulfillment?

Do you see the ultimate context of life as one that is hospitable to this fulfillment?

Are there moral absolutes?

In what way has your study of Judaism contributed to your understanding of the questions of psychology?

In what way do you think you are or are not a Kaplanian in your theological views?

Do you anticipate that this course will change any of your thinking?

Dreams

I was reading an article on neuroscience that said that it is possible to not only figure out THAT someone is thinking, but even--in a crude form--WHAT they are thinking. Neuroscientists predict that ability will become more refined as time goes on. On the other hand, while it is possible to ascertain THAT someone is dreaming, it appears to be completely impossible to figure out WHAT they are dreaming and that does not appear to be something that will change.
I find that really interesting!!!

N.Y. Times Magazine Year in Ideas

For the last six years, in December the New York Times Magazine has been publishing a round-up of the most interesting/important new ideas of the previous year. This year, there were 74 new ideas. I was interested to see that, with all the new inventions and technology being developed, ten of the new ideas were from the realm of psychology--and a great many of them from neuroscience. Just to add to the impression that this is really a "hot" topic, Deborah Solomon's weekly interview was of a "neuropsychiatrist."
I could not find the article free of charge on the web, but I did find a list of previous Times' great ideas of the year--and a lot of them were about psychology as well!

Here's one I found interesting...

Darwinian Literary Criticism
By D. T. MAX


For many years, literary study has been divided among various arcane philosophies, from deconstruction to postcolonialism. The next hot theory comes not from France or Slovenia but from American laboratories -- by way of evolutionary theorists like E. O. Wilson and Steven Pinker. According to Joseph Carroll, a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and its foremost practitioner, ''Literary Darwinism seeks to understand the way literature is produced by human nature and reflects human nature -- basic human motives like mating, parenting, gaining social status, acquiring resources.''

Here's how it works. Take the ''Aeneid,'' as David Barash of the University of Washington did in a recent article. In Barash's hands, the ''Aeneid'' is no longer Virgil's attempt to mythologize the founding of Rome. Nor is it a prefiguration of Christianity. It's about a virile man trying to make sure his genes are passed on. How else to explain why Aeneas abandons the older Dido in Carthage? Or the warm welcome Aeneas and his Trojan crew receive from Eryx, a relative otherwise unknown to him? Or the repeated emphasis on events Aeneas himself will not live to see, on the ''fame and fate of his son's sons''? Understanding Darwinian drives, Barash argues, helps us understand what really motivates literature's most famous characters. Similarly, Robin Fox of Rutgers University has argued that ''Madame Bovary'' and ''Anna Karenina'' should be viewed centrally as narratives of ''sexual competition'' involving the humiliation of a ''dominant older male.''

In an age in which science now holds the glamour spot in academia -- Derrida is out, the M.I.T. Media Lab is in -- literary Darwinism is an understandable development. And you can see why literary critics would search for a science to undergird their impressionistic endeavor.

But just when I was getting excited about how important all this is, I scrolled down to the last great idea(in alphabetical order)only to read

Women Are Just as Jealous as Men
By SUSAN DOMINUS


hen it comes to betrayal, the tradition goes, men fear sexual infidelity (think of Othello or his fellow paranoiac, Leontes), whereas women fear abandonment (consider Penelope or that pathetic French lieutenant's woman). According to evolutionary psychologists, all these archetypes reflect some basic caveman economics: a man, it is said, must keep a careful watch on his woman lest he end up hunting and gathering for the offspring of some other man's gene pool, but a woman can forgive indiscretions as long as her mate cares enough to return to her and the little ones back at the cave.

This year, some prominent psychologists have challenged those assumptions (and dozens of previous studies) about pining women and seething, controlling men with new evidence that suggests sexual jealousy is an equal-opportunity obsession. David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University, administered a questionnaire asking subjects which would be more upsetting: to learn that their partner had cheated on them or that their partner had fallen in love with someone else. And while the subjects were answering, he gave them a string of numbers to memorize and recall. With the addition of this so-called cognitive load -- a technique that aims to bypass complex pro-con reasoning and cut to the gut response -- the gender discrepancy that previous researchers had found disappeared altogether. Several other prominent studies being published this year produced similarly gender-neutral results: when deprived of the chance to weigh the long-term effects or to guess what response might be the more appropriately feminine, women proved just as brutishly possessive as men.

The findings are interesting in and of themselves, but they also have implications for some basics of evolutionary psychology. For one thing, it weakens the supposed link between sexual jealousy and parental uncertainty. (Women may have their own problems, but at least they know their children are their own.)

happiness

Robert Nozick offers the following thought experiment. If a genie offered you the option of living in perfet, sublime happiness the rest of your life, would you agree if
--you had to be asleep from now on
--had to give up 30 i.q. points
--had to give up a uniqe talent
--one of your siblings was never born
--one of your children was never born
-- you were turned into a pig

carol gilligan and rachel adler

Carol Gilligan's 1982 book, In a Different Voice:Psychological Theory and Women's Development(Harvard University Press)was a classic almost from the moment of publication. Gilligan believed that something might have been missed by developmental psychologists who built their theories after studies of the lives and thoughts of boys and men. She was particularly interested in the work of her own mentor, Lawrence Kohlberg, who, building upon Piaget's cognitive development theory, had created a six stage model of moral development. Her contribution, however, went well beyond the work of Kohlberg's and had implications for developmental theories such as Erik Erikson's and others.
Gilligan's work has provoked a great deal of criticism from feminists who are angered by the potential harm to feminist interests in the idea that women and men are fundamentally different, a concept known as gender essentialism. Others have pointed out that Gilligan herself is limited in her theorizing as the girls and women she studied were from a small,elite, culturally limited sample of humanity.
Gilligan staunchly defends herself against these misunderstandings of her work. As Gilligan wrote in 2001, the title of her book was deliberate, " In a Different Voice"--not "In a Woman's Voice." Readers who have criticized Gilligan for introducing gender essentialism have failed entirely to see her point. In Feminism in the Study of Religion: A Reader, Gilligan reminds her critics that in the introduction to her book she had tried to clearly state that she was not suggesting an essential gender distinction, but simply pointing out, as an empirical observation, what was lost by defining the normative using only a sample of males.
From the introduction:

The contrasts between male and female voices are presented here to highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex."(p. 124)
The important point is that Gilligan herself was not making any claim about the biological origin of these voices or their consistency across different cultures, something her critics have often chided her for. Rather, her insight about the limitations of research on men and boys could equally be applied to the limitations in basing psychological theory on research subjects who are exclusively middle class or exclusively Christian.
The relevance to psychology and religion should be clear. Whenever a psychological theory defines human nature, one ought to be on guard. Whose human nature? Gilligan looks at issues like justice vs. care or separation vs. connection and wonders why certain ways of seeing become the normative ones. We might look, as she did, to the gender biases of the author and the choice of subjects he/she has studied. We might also look to the religious ideas that shape the way a person might think about what it means to be human. One of the best pieces describing a rabbinic Jewish "anthropology," is Rachel Adler's wonderful piece,Rachel Adler, “A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Others,” Tikkun, Vol 6, #3

Here is Clark Williamson discussing this thesis of Adler:
We recur to the Pirke Aboth, where, five paragraphs after our prior quote, Joshua ben Perahyah says: "Provide thyself with a teacher and getthee a fellow-disciple [student]..." In a later development of this tradition of studying Torah with one another, The Teachings of Rabbi Natan say: "a person should set himself a companion, to eat with him, drink with him, study Bible with him, study Mishnah with him, sleep with him, and reveal to him all his secrets, secrets of Torah and secrets of worldly things." Rachel Adler argues that this rabbinic text describes a distinctively Jewish kind of intimacy: the study- companion relationship, that of the chaverim.The chaverim do not simply study texts;the structure of their relationship and the nature of its boundaries present a Jewish model for the relation between the self and the other.

In it, people experience each other as wholes, not as fragmented beings.Companionship is physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Chaverim study together by questioning one another. They question lovingly and love questions. Such an understanding of boundaries seems to lie at the heart of Paul's theology. The root of chaver means to join together at the boundaries. Boundaries define the shape and extent of an entity, and distinguish between what is inside and what is out.They maintain its integrity and keep it from dribbling out into everything else. Being "joined together at the boundaries" is the kind of relationship reflected in Paul's approach to boundaries--that they should be transcended without being destroyed. God's gracious love overflows boundaries and requires its recipients not only to love God in return, but to love the neighbor and thestranger as we love ourselves. Some boundaries are like the Berlin Wall--fronted by land mines, topped with barbed wire, guarded by machine guns. Others serve to facilitate interaction with the environment. Adler points out that a cell membrane, for example, is part of the living substance of the cell. It is the perimeter at which the cell works out its reciprocity with other cells--the relations that maintain its life within its context. This Torah of self and other grounds our capacity to be chaverim and our capacity to create tzedek, justice-as-righteousness, to embody the Torah of self and other in a social matrix that allows all human beings to flourish. This understanding of boundary as elastic and semi-permeable, that both defines theself and requires bonding with the other, points to the reality of mutual interconnectedness.Such communion attests that we inhabit a single context, and within that context we live deeply within one another's boundaries. The only way to in/habit is to co/habit. The fantasy of the impermeable self or religious boundary is a snare and a delusion.

carl jung

Here is a video with a live interview with Jung. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4156341151105688636&q=carl+jung&hl=en
We will also study the work of Carl Jung. I have always had a negative reaction to Jung and anything Jungian, but in fairness I had not actually read any actual Jung for about twenty years. I decided to do a brief "analysis" of why I was so negative about his work, and then try to tackle it again with fresh eyes.
I quickly remembered why I did not like the guy. Here is a brief passage from Philip Rieff(The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 1966) that I had read quite a few times before reading Jung .

The personal myths of Jungian psychology have little enough in common with the classical language of faith, and nothing whatever to do with the language of modern science. Because it offers no criteria of validity other than the therapeutic experience of conviction, Jungian theory amounts to a private religion and an anti-science....Jung developed a fresh rhetoric of spirituality , without the bother of churches or the imposition of consequential ethics. His therapy was a theogonic process: the gods remade to populate a charming cosmos full of interesting people(e.g. the Anima) in which no ego need feel lonely. God-making nowadays is no small miracle.

Well it is no surprise I did not warm to his writing. But I know many smart and thoughtful people who have found Jungian therapy compelling, and I have read in my neuroscience books that Jung may not have been so off the mark with his collective unconscious as people once that. It is definitely time to have another look.

Some intriguing quotations from his autobiography("automythology")Memories, Dreams and Reflections:

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and therefore is equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable--perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth. and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that God is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. (MDR,340)

A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some image of it--even if he has to confess his failure.(MDR, 302)

It is important and salutory to speak of incomprehensible things.(MDR,300)

The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself (MDR, 358)

james

My course will begin with William James. You can read the entire book on line at http://www.psywww.com/psyrelig/james/toc.htm
among many other sites. Or you can buy a copy for under $5.00 in any used bookstore or online. I recommend buying a copy!
*********
I recently recommended it to a scientist/atheist friend of mine who read it and said, "It was a fascinating account of many people's experience, but what was his point?" I have to admit, I was stumped as there was no way I could recite the propositions that James puts forth about religion in this amazing book.
Perhaps that is the reason that all the psychology and religion books I read begin with a chapter on James but then don't seem to build upon his theories --there is no system based on them, nor a school that follows them.
I learned by reading an essay in Glock and Hammond, Beyond the Classics(1973) that my friend's question was a good one and my lack of an answer was not for lack of having read and loved this classic text.
The title of James' book(the text of his Gifford Lectures) is instructive. It is about varieties, plural. And it is about experience, not theory. James would not want to leave behind a system or to create a school of thought, at least not a school of thought about religion. According to the essay in this book, what we get from James' Varieties is a spirit in which to study religion. To simplify: he opposed any orthodoxy, be it that of an organized religion or that of a reductionist social scientist. His book was an argument against both.
Here are the opening lines of the essay:
The coordinators of this volume ask me to discuss the “central propositions” of The Varieties of Religious Experience. How William James would hoot at the assignment ... Thought,least of all James’s, has no center; thought, least of all James’s, cannot be captured bypropositions. Thought, most of all James’s is a living flow. (p. 291)
Jews reading James often get as far as his definition of religion( “the feelings,
acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend
themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” -Lecture
II, 1902) and call it a day. But this is a mistake.

freud

What to teach rabbinical students in two sessions on Sigmund Freud? One obvious point of interest is Freud's biography, particularly his identity struggles as a Jew. There is a fairly extensive secondary literature on this topic and it makes for fascinating reading. In particular, one can check out work by Sander Gillman, Jay Geller and Daniel Boyarin. A really interesting element is the way gender studies sheds light on and intersects with an exploration of Freud's Jewishness. The key person to see for the gender critique is Judith van Herick.

On the other hand, I was convinced by James Dittes, a professor at Yale in the Divinity School and the Psychology Department, that the most relevant and important legacy of Freud, at least for those entering the clergy, is Freud's wisdom, shared toward the end of his life, on how to live.

Dittes has an essay in which he outlines Freud's "homily."

He writes, "These are the tools and premises, the theorems and the strategies with which one negotiates the daily adventures and risks of life...how to tolerate reality, how to survive and, yes, even how to aspire to an abundant life."

Dittes finds this teaching primarily in Civilization and its Discontents(1930) and Moses and Monotheism(1938). Toward the end of his life, Freud wrote less and less about the ideas he is most famous for--the Oedipus complex,etc. Rather, he began to write about the "big questions."

Some people teach Freud's view of religion by having the class read The Future of an Illusion(1927) but Dittes argues that this is a mistake. Why have the class argue about Freud's "adolescent critiques of conventional religion" when "he poses such vibrant and robust, if unsystematic, alternatives?"

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud wrote that there is a "spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable, a navel as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown."(Standard Edition, Vol 4, p.111)

Here is a film of Freud, age 81, actually speaking(the only audio recording he ever made)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGsjQ_0l54

mussar and mirror neurons

Mussar and Mirror Neurons

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
---V.S. Ramachandran

Last year, I began a new “spiritual practice.” When I came home the first night, I said to my husband, “Where has this been all my life?” It was like meeting my bashert, finally, after all these years. Why? All my life I have wanted something spiritual, something psychological, something ethical and something Jewish. I also am an extrovert. I tried practices both spiritual and psychological and this one seemed to have been waiting for me.

The word Mussar has many meanings, but as I am using it here, it is the revival of a 19th century spiritual practice that emerged at the cusp of medieval and modern period of Jewish history in Lituania(maybe that is it! I have ancestors from there.) Using medieval texts but playing with idea like the unconscious and speaking both to traditional Jews and those seduced by the enlightenworld, Mussar in the 19th century was the creation of Rabbi Israel Salanter and his followers. At the close of the 20th century, the practice began to see a revival. The branch of the revival I know is through the work of Rabbi Ira Stone.

The teaching of Rabbi Stone is powerful and feels like an adequate statement of what I would call my “faith”(as opposed to a reasoned out belief.) But if I am going to have faith in something(and I am) this is as close as perfect to me. “God leaves a trace, in the face of the other. The other commands us to bear his burden.” There is a great deal more to be said about mussar and its practice, Rabbi Stone’s theology, and many other matters, but for now I want to pause and ask some questions suggested to me by neuroscience.

How do we know that the other has a mind and it is like ours? How do we know what the other’s burden is ? How do we come to feel it is our duty to bear it or even share it? What makes us think their problem has anything to do with us? Presumably, something is going on in my body(mostly but not entirely located in my brain) that is making all this happen.


Since neuroscience offers to tell us where and how our brains are executing the various functions we know them to be executing, it would be interesting to see if brain science has anything to say about what might be going on in all this, on the level of analysis in which it specializes.(On another level, it could be God’s plan, but the neuroscientists are agnostic about that level—or at least should be.)

The questions about the other and about our knowing that other, feeling the other’s pain, resolving to bear the burden,etc. have been around for centuries. Today, medicine, psychology, philosophy and biology are talking to each other about them. And sitting at a place of honor at the table these days is the neuroscientist. Sometimes they even invite a theologian, but not always.

Our questions about the "other" are discussed in neuroscience under the topic “mind reading” which is not an occult practice but something most people do all day long. We assume that other people have minds and are thinking and feeling in ways analagous to our own.IF you think about it, that in itself is quite remarkable! This is the foundation of the next step, moral behavior(“If I would not like this done unto me, I should not do it unto them”) or, to take it further, altruistic behavior("his pain is my pain, and were I to bring him to a state of joy it would bring me there as well.")

There is a lively and quite nuanced debate in the neuroscience world concerning mind reading which I will try to summarize as clearly as possible, recognizing I am radically over simplifying. I will divide a few warring schools of thought into two(understanding that some scholars offer hybrid approaches,etc).

First, there is the school of thought that sees this through the lens of RATIONAL THOUGHT. It’s ancestors are Kant. Child as scientist, Lawrence Kohlberg. We begin as self centered little creatures, a bundle of inate wants and needs and urges(for food mostly) and as our brains develop, we start to learn to think. We have theories about the world which are refined as we grow. When we get to about 3 or 4 we can think about thinking, and conceptualize the thought that we might have held an idea in the past that is not true. We then take the next step and begin to impute such thought to others. Eventually we learn to take their role in our considerations of behavior, helped along by our societies rewards and punishments. In Kohlberg’s view, if we develop really far(and not everyone does), we can actually think about our society critically and transcend conventional thinking, universalize and become like John Rawles, able to think through a moral issue not even considering our place in the story but entirely from a position above the fray(one might say, although he doesn’t) from God’s position.

Obviously, there are some implications to this way of thinking about the relevant brain activity related to mussar. It draws a clear line, as mussar does, between humans and animals. What needs to be quarintined as we get smarter and thus more moral is a concern with ourselves and only our perspective(that’s the way a very young child thinks of these things, but when we get older we learn to think in terms of the other.) This is the place of the ego in this system, and it must be set aside. What keeps us from following through on all the good thoughts we have(assuming we have moved up the ladder well) is our animal instincts for food, pleasure, sex, etc that keep us focussed more on ourselves.

The view that is arising as a competitor is very new and still controversial, although it is being discussed in neuroscience circles and taken seriously outside them by philosophers who care. It is congruent with a different stream of philosophy, not Kant so much as . It is based on empirical observation followed by theory—the theory(which still needs much testing) is called Simulation Theory.

Before ever taking a picture of the inside of a human brain, scientists noticed:

*Monkeys watching a human eat(while having their brains photographed) had the same brain cells fire as when they themselve ate

*Babies cry when they hear human crying but not when they hear other noise of the same intensity and volume.

*Children under two can be deeply distressed when they see others in distress, and respond with appropriate caring behavior, even though in theory(see above) they don’t really understand that the other person has a mind and can think and feel. At least, not consciously.

*We watch a movie and cry, without consciously thinking about it and determining “I imagine that woman in the movie is sad. I would be. I will now cry.”Actually, if we thought about it, we would realize she is just an actress and we would not cry.

The idea began to emerge that empathy, seemingly a pretty high achievment, may be hardwired, and not something we learn if our cognition gets good enough. One of the other pieces of evidence for this line of theory is the existence of a class of people known as psychopaths. A true psychopath can do any of the cognitive tasks of perspective taking, and does them often, the better to manipulate people. But there seems to be a “missing piece” and somehow other’s distress simply doesn’t seem to distress them in the least, even when they caused it. Could we locate the process in others that seems to be missing in their brains?

In what seems to be an opposite problem, there are people diagnosed as autistic(or on the Asperger spectrum) who appear to have empathy for others but seem to lack the ability to read other’s minds or even the faces(the way the average person does). They don’t “get” social cues, and run into more or less difficulty in life(depending upon where they are on the spectrum). It seems like the process is derailed at some point, or gets sluggish and they do not accurately read others. And how does it help us understand the way our brains allow us to find the trace of God in the face of the other.

It is time to open the brain up, as neuroscientists can now do.
Here is what they discovered:

*Neurons for walking that light up when one sees someone else walk.

*Neurons for pain that light up when one sees someone else in pain.

*Neurons that allow us to read faces, especially anger and disgust. FaBER(Face based emotion recognition)

*A certain, distinct part of the brain is clearly activated when we smell a disgusting odor. When shown a film of someone getting a whiff of something disgusting(and registering it on their face), that very same area is seen to be activated.
*As Bruce Wexler put it, “Contagian is at the heart of emotion.”

They believe there are multiple neuron systems in the brain called mirror neurons.
These neurons are there in infants(the crying baby) and are there in monkeys(they were first discovered in monkeys.)
Does this mean monkeys and infants are moral? No. But they are empathic and we are empathic beyond our ability to even be aware of it(this is below consciousness).

These mirror neurons evolved for a reason, presumably because animals who could read other animals (and later early humans) had a better survival rate and could live to reproduce. We now put those mirror neurons as the basis of social interaction. This intuitive, gut connection to other’s emotions is not full blow empathy, yet it gives our choice to bear the burden of the other a richer, thinker, less theoretical basis.

Altruism, the highest ethical moment, may not have much to do with that thinking brain at all(how can rational thought get us to be completely without egoism). Self-sacrifice, the hyperbolic standard of mussar(and of Christianity) may only be explained by the possibility of mirroring joy from another’s joy. (Some have commented that they appreciate this research because it finally explains why people get so much from watching pornography.)


As Dr. Rizzolatti put it, “mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking.” You know how someone is feeling because in a way you are feeling it too. You quite unconsciously and intuitively to some extent “bear their burden”

If people do such a good job of “feeling othes pain” and are naturally so empathic, why don’t they act on it more ? Our smart selves get in the way. The most abstract, non –animal, non-native part of us gets involved and gets us off track.

So here is a thought. Perhaps the yetzer ha tov and yetzer ha ra need to be thought of differently than we have.
Some of the Mussar texts from the past imagine a material and a physical realm. In brain science it is all physical, but at the highest levels of thought, there is a kind of “emergence,” some way in which the brain pulls it all together that is not visible to any imaging device and might be called “spiritual”.

The yetzer ha ra is often thought of as our animal nature, the part that needs to be “tamed” and “directed” by our highest “spiritual” thoughts. ( In fairness, Mussar, building on the rabbinic notions, did not do the kind of “splitting” that Christianity with its full fledged dualism engaged in. The urges were seen to have both good and bad elements, and the physical was never demeaned.) Nevertheless, mussar does tend to locate moral life in what distinguishes us from animals and what emerges as we develop into grown ups.

What if the yetzer ha tov is our unconscious and the...to be continued