The
Metaphor
of
Change
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IN HIS masterful play, Man and Superman, George
Bernard Shaw turned the classical images of heaven and hell upside
down. He described hell as a place of complete
satisfaction, where all desires are freely fulfilled. Personal responsibility
had no place in hell. It did in heaven, though, a place for the “masters
of reality,” and curiously enough the place where souls were free to
go when they finally got sick of
hell.
This is a provocative
metaphor. Being a metaphor, though, it is not to be taken literally in a
metaphysical
sense.[1]
But it is a good metaphor for how we live our life
in this world. It is also a metaphor that I can’t help but agree
with, for through my daily life in San Francisco I am constantly aware that
there has to be more to life than hedonism and exhibitionism.
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This concept
of “a hell that you can leave when you get sick of it” aptly describes
psychological change as well. Many people cling to their own psychological
“hell,” no matter how painful it may be, because the discipline
of health is even more fearful. But eventually, if
they catch only a glimpse of
sorrow
for the mess they’re in, they can get sick of it all and decide to cross
over to “reality.” |
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Knowledge
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Therefore, though an
atheist, not a theologian, Shaw nevertheless made a brilliant discovery:
a spiritual life is also a practical life. Yet such practicality does not
depend on knowledge so much as understanding.
Too many persons
today, however, concern themselves with knowledge, whether it be intellectual
or carnal, and in doing so they sidestep the concept of understanding. Why?
Because understanding involves “standing under something,” and
that something is the law—not the local penal code, but the law of lack
and limitation, the agony of being itself, as it stands on the brink
of redemption through divine love. All the pages of knowledge flap uselessly
in the swirling gusts that blow along that ridge. |
Not
Knowing
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Every child born into
this world is born into a pre-existing social world of language, science,
technology, art, literature, and so on. But even more profound than the mystery
of the sum total of all this factual information is the mystery of the
child’s own body. The child finds itself literally at the mercy of
biological processes—eating, vomiting, defecation, urination, bleeding,
reproduction, and death—that it can neither control nor comprehend.
And so the child will feel—rightly so—that the world
“knows” something that he or she does not know. Right from the
beginning, then, the child is located in a profound emotional space of
“not knowing” and feeling “left
out.”
Moreover, when
children are criticized and humiliated by others, the children will want
to figure out what happened—to know what happened—so as
to avoid further feelings of humiliation.
It’s an
awkward and uncomfortable place to be. And so we all devote considerable
energy to overcoming the feeling of “not knowing.” We might seek
out intellectual knowledge through formal education. We might engage in
scientific research. We might join country clubs, gangs, cults, cliques,
or any other social organization that purports to offer some secret
“knowledge.” We might search through myriads of pornographic images
hoping for the special privilege of seeing what is usually kept hidden. We
might seek out “carnal knowledge” through the body of another person
and attempt to locate the psychological agony of our bodily mystery
in the pleasure—or pain—of the other. Or we might create
our own fantasy worlds—with thoughts and
images of eroticism, heroism, revenge, or destruction—in which we can
“figure it out” on our own so as to possess the power and recognition
we so desperately crave.
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Knowing—that
is, anticipating—what might happen next is a characteristic defensive
desire of children in dysfunctional families. After all, if they can guess
an irrational parent’s next move, they might be able to avoid an ugly
family scene.
To such children,
then, it’s a loathsome thing to admit, “I don’t
know.”
This explains
why, if you offer some piece of information to a person who grew up in a
dysfunctional family, his or her response will likely not be a simple
“Thank you” but will be a quickly retorted “I
know!” |
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The
Veil
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However much we might
desire it, all the “knowledge” in the world is nothing but a thin
veil that hangs over the dark anguish of helplessly “not knowing.”
Standing before the veil, suspecting the secret truth
of our “not knowing,” we feel confused, disgusted, weak, useless,
and deceived.
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The brilliant
French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, in The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis, tells the story of a competition
between two ancient painters, Zeuxis and
Parrhasios.[2] Zeuxis receives acclaim for painting grapes so life-like
that even the birds who try to peck at them are fooled. In his pride, Zeuxis
then goes to look at the work of Parrhasios. But Zeuxis sees only a veil,
and so he asks to see the painting that Parrhasios has hidden behind the
veil. Well, Parrhasios’ painting was the veil. It was so well
done that it fooled even the master of deceptive painting himself. Hence
Lacan points out that if you want to deceive someone, present him with a
“veil,” something that incites him to ask what is behind
it. |
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With all of our
knowledge hanging like a deceptive veil over the agony of being, we stand
helplessly under the law of lack and limitation. In this wretched state,
therefore, we have only one hope: to understand the soul. |
Loss
Of
Soul
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Psychologically speaking, to paraphrase
Lacan,[3] soul is
something—alien to the
mundane—that empowers us to bear what is intolerable and lacking in
the human
world.[4]
In this modern
world, though, much of our society has lost its sense of soul. In the collective
desire for diversity it’s all too easy to misunderstand life by confusing
the fraud of acceptance with the truth of tolerance, the fraud of pride with
the truth of holiness, and the fraud of sensuality with the truth of
love.
And with the
loss of soul many of us today have also discarded the concept of
sin—that is, that functional narcissism in all of us which serves
the self, rather than others. So, instead of making life’s decisions
according to personal responsibility, we make decisions according to personal
convenience. Anything today seems to be acceptable if it looks, well,
“hot.” And yet sin—in its psychological sense—is what
blinds us to the realization that there’s more to life than what the
world shows us. As such, sin pulls us away from true love and sucks
us down into the hedonistic mire of narcissism. And there, in that foul
netherworld, soul is lost. Sin may be convenient, but it’s just not
practical.
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The great theologian
Saint Augustine of Hippo, in north Africa, said that “Sin is the punishment
of sin.” This makes perfect sense if you understand that the human world
is nothing but a mass of psychological
defenses—pride, anger, competition, social status, take your
pick—which protect us in our blindness, the blindness that results from
an ignorance of soul. All defenses originate in childhood as ways to assist
survival, but carried on unconsciously into adulthood
those same defenses—the ones that once protected us—lead us into
nothing but the repeated punishment of psychological
and social dysfunction.
Don’t
misunderstand this. We are all basically good. But goodness takes work—lots
of work. Hard work. And self-restraint. For without our restraining the
pride
of self and its defenses,
true
love, the most exquisite and pure love imaginable, remains invisible.
Along the path of least resistance—the path of sin, the easy way, the
way to hell—love is nowhere to be seen, for it remains banished behind
the thorny hedges of psychological defenses.
And what is true love, if not to give of yourself to save others—even
those who hate you— from their blindness? |
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Meaningful
Direction
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So, just as sin is the
punishment of sin, hell, the place where responsibility and discrimination
are absent, is its own punishment. It is startling to realize that the two
most powerful diseases of the modern age—cancer (unrestrained reproduction
of certain cells) and AIDS (indiscriminate destruction of the body by its
own immune system)—should be such potent metaphors: our social
“dis-ease” is that of irresponsible growth and a lack of
discrimination.
Although most
cases of AIDS and some forms of cancer are directly related to personal behavior,
when someone gets cancer or AIDS we are all responsible. The tragedy here
is that culture has the capability of “infecting” its individual
members with defensive ideals that have lost any sense of meaningful
direction.
And so we, as
individuals, would do well to pay attention to sin today while remembering
that crossing the barrier between sin and spirituality is a simple matter
of personal choice, with complete freedom to go in either direction.
Psychology, at least in the U.S., has too often been preoccupied with the
pursuit of
happiness,[5]
and it has missed the point about helping individuals understand life and
find a personally meaningful—and practical—sense of
direction.[6]
Psychology in itself cannot offer any meaning to
life,[7]
but it can help individuals disentangle themselves from the snare of illusory
social
identifications that keep us trapped in blindness and pull us backwards
into
self-destruction.
I can offer no
“proof” of God, nor can I prove that souls exist or that spirituality
is anything more than a figment of our imaginations. But look at it this
way: If you value spirituality, what do you have to lose? Mediocrity. What
do you have to gain? Everything.
But the proof
of love is simple:
Gustato spiritu,
desipit omnis
caro.[8]
(Once
I taste of the spirit, all carnal things become
meaningless.) |
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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Notes:
1.
The real hell is a truly horrifying place because it is, literally, the
defilement of true love. St. Teresa of Avila,
who had a vision of hell, wrote that she would be willing to suffer the pain
of several deaths if it would prevent anyone from going there. See St.
Teresa of Avila, “The Book of Her Life.” In The Collected Works
of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume Two, trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez
(Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1980), ch. 32, no. 6:
“From this experience [the vision
of hell] also flow the great impulses to help souls and the extraordinary
pain that is caused me by the many that are condemned. . . .
It seems certain to me that in order to free one alone from such appalling
torments I would suffer many deaths very willingly.”
2. Jacques Lacan,
“The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.” Edited by
Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1981). See p. 103 and pp. 111-112.
3. Jacques Lacan,
“A Love Letter.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine
Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York:
W. W. Norton [paperback], 1985). See p. 155:
“And yet I fail to see why the fact
of having a soul should be a scandal for thought—were it true. If it
were true, the soul could only be spoken as whatever enables a being
. . . to bear what is intolerable in its world, which presumes
this soul to be alien to that
world. . . .”
4. Please note
that the psychological meaning of “soul” is one thing, whereas
the theological meaning (and welfare) of the soul is a matter for
religion, which can be a transcendent step above spirituality. That is, some
spirituality, in its aspiration for a “oneness” with the universe,
often inadvertently becomes a oneness with sin as well. Religion, if its
spirituality seeks a moral responsibility to the divine, can transcend moral
relativism. Sadly, though, some individuals make their religious practices
into mere intellectualism lacking in spirituality.
5. Jacques Lacan,
“The signification of the phallus.” In Écrits: A
selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). See p.
287:
“In any case, man cannot aim at
being whole (the ‘total personality’ is another of the deviant
premises of modern psychotherapy), while ever the play of displacement and
condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks
his relation as as subject to the signifier.”
6. “Wait
a minute,” you say, “the motto of this country is In God We
Trust. America is a spiritual country.” Well, we can wonder about
that. How can the pursuit of “happiness”—with its narcissistic
hunger for aggressive political hostility and sniping, angry and hateful
protest, violent video games, competitive sports, erotic entertainment, obesity,
drugs, gambling, social rudeness, exploitation of the underprivileged, abuse
of the environment, and institutional hate crimes against unborn
children—be spiritual?
7. Lacan, at least,
did not attempt to subvert religion like Freud, nor did he try to
“psychologize” religion like Jung and Rank. Lacan simply respected
the fact that psychoanalysis could say nothing meaningful about religion.
See “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the
Freudian unconscious.” In Écrits: A selection (Alan Sheridan,
Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1977, p. 316:
“We [psychoanalysts] are answerable
to no ultimate truth; we are neither for nor against any particular
religion.”
8. I found this
quote in The Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross, Book
Two, Chapter 17, no. 5. (The English translation is my own.) Saint
John refers to it as “a frequently quoted spiritual axiom.” Saint
Bonaventure, in his Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum attributes
the quote to Pope Saint Gregory the Great (see Opera Omnia S. Bonaventurae,
Ad Claras Aquas, 1882, Vol. 1, p. 254), though the quote may actually have
its origin in a letter (Epistle 111) by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
Additional
Resources
Lacan:
Lacan Related Papers provides links to numerous
Lacan-related papers.
The Lacanian School
of Psychoanalysis in the San Francisco Bay area, offers training
in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The San Francisco
Society for Lacanian Studies provides lectures and information
about Lacanian psychoanalysis.
St. John of the
Cross:
JUAN DE
LA CRUZ
The Collected
Works of St. John of the Cross
Miscellaneous:
Agnosticism,
Atheism, Humanism, & Secularism
Chastity –
In San Francisco? — psychological healing and
spiritual direction in the Roman Catholic mystic tradition.
Institute for the
Psychological Sciences — offers graduate training in clinical
psychology that is grounded in spiritual values.
Miscellaneous
Theology and Spirituality Topical Index Page — includes
topics on Angels and Demons (e.g., Angels, Demons, and Evil);
Anthropology (e.g., Soul, and Sin); Eschatology (e.g., Heaven,
and Hell)
Moral
Theology — includes topics on Morality, Absolutes,
and Relativism; Ethical Issues; and The Good and Virtuous
Life.
The
Psychology of Atheism — offers some interesting psychology
(but leads to no real answers).
Related pages within A Guide to Psychology
and its Practice:
Death—and
the Seduction of Despair
Fear
Forgiveness
Identity and
Loneliness
Questions and Answers
about Psychotherapy
Sexuality and
Love
Spiritual
Healing
Terrorism and
Psychology
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