Corbett review for Kindlings3
1 Jan 2011
SYMPTOMS, SYMBOLS, SIGNS
The Religious Function of the Psyche
Lionel Corbett
Routledge 1996 (2005)
978-0415144018
In the middle of no particular night I awake from a dream whose indefinite but charged images make it difficult for me to fall back asleep. Later that week, those images and the uncomfortable feelings they aroused come back to me on several occasions, disturbing me at prayer and then again during Meeting for Worship. Not knowing what to make of them, I make an effort to push them away, to the back of my mind, but I am left with a vaguely scandalised sense of being encroached upon by emotions that I do not wish to own and for which I have no name.
In a word, I suffer.
Dreams, fantasies, illnesses, phantom illnesses, neuroses, silences, memories, unaccountable reactions and aversions…Where do they come from and how do we, how should we, fit them into our lives? Are they valuable, authentic expressions of our spiritual lives, if not the sources thereof? Or are they odds with our spiritual lives— distractions from it, obstacles, even threats, to it? To even ask this question, mustn’t we already have a notion of spirituality at the ready, and doesn’t having such a notion imply that we feel there is some portion of existence which is unspiritual or non-spiritual, though we might deny that possibility in principle?
In The Religious Function of the Psyche, Lionel Corbett puts the case for a spirituality grounded in suffering and a psychology which seeks not to remove suffering but instead to illuminate it. The illumination of suffering leads to the production of meaning, which not only makes suffering bearable but allows our real selves to emerge. Why our real selves should have to ‘emerge’ at all, and why especially by means of this via dolorosa, psychology cannot explain.
Does Corbett’s idea of spirituality fit my own? How is it different from the standard views of psychotherapists—who seek to alleviate mental suffering—and of those charged with our spiritual development? (a distinction that Corbett contests)
I’ll start with me, since starting with one’s own experience is recommended for Quakers. I suppose I do have a fuzzy-round-the-edges concept of the ‘spiritual’ and have had one for as long as I can remember, one that really hasn’t changed very much over time. ‘Spiritual’ is what people should be; it has to do with the supernatural and it’s about being good. I seem to have received this notion, more or less ready-made, as a cultural product, from no one in particular, though specific individuals (my parents foremost, I’m sure), some known to me only through their words, have shaped it this way and that. And I also have an equally vague notion of the unspiritual to stand against it. Since this prejudice for the supernatural and morally good has, so far as I’m aware, always been with me, it no doubt, at least in my case, precedes reflection, determines reflection and generally goes unreflected on. I can easily see how this might lead me to prejudge naturally arising, psychological material as spiritually inadmissible. Dreams, for instance, can contain images of beauty and sensations of liberation or solace that feel spiritual in some way, and their pure otherworldliness, their distance from the mundane, might lend them that supernatural tinge which also connotes spirituality, but they are unlikely to forcefully represent goodness—evil, chaos, filth, absurdity and distress are, in my experience, the more frequent nocturnal visitors and I suffer on account of the latter not only in my dreams but on my waking recollection of them. So I would not be disposed to incorporate dream work into my spiritual practice.
This state of affairs is reinforced at the social level, Corbett explains, when religion says to psychology “yes, fine, please get these neuroses, which are mostly traceable to regrettable accidents of childhood, out of our way so that we may lead the newly healthy adult forward, and upward, to the higher values that he/she is destined for.” Equally, when psychology says to religion, “there is no higher meaning to what our patient is experiencing, and his/her cure—if he or she is religious— will be accomplished, in part, through a realisation of that fact” a similar kind of censorship and hierarchisation of experience ensues.
The key to rectifying this situation lies in a re-definition of the object of psychology/theology that repairs their split – the genuinely regrettable accident, here—from one another and allows Corbett to establish the role of the religious psychologist and the field of religious psychology: spiritual experience is psychological (psychic) experience. They are one and the same. This does not mean that they must be approached in the same way by the theologian as by the medical practitioner— and they will not be, insofar as the former sees fit to speculate on the ultimate origins of spiritual experience— but only that they can be, because their field of endeavour is the same.
Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the most obvious exemplifications, the main activities, of psychology and religion are respectively therapy and worship. How might we align these under the equivalence that Corbett proposes? We needn’t provide definitions of therapy and worship to show that they’re different, or even how different, from one another. The object, as in the ‘aim’, of therapy is not the ‘aim’ of worship, or could only construed to be so if we are ready to content ourselves with vague discursive correspondences (I mean those stemming from certain shared terms and phrases — ‘healing’, for instance— which ultimately obscure important dissimilarities). But if we think of the object less as the problem to solve or the aim to attain, and instead think of it more simply as the central matter dealt with, attended to, or contemplated, then it is less easy to distinguish between the two disciplines, using the latter term in a very broad and loose sense. In this sense of the central matter, the object of both is the manifestations of the psyche/spirit. And both proceed by granting attention— and with attention, value— to those manifestations, which is to say to that which is of the spirit— that part of life and death which is of the spirit, without defining spirit— and around which meaning coalesces. What could be simpler than this, that “religion means attention to the manifestations of the psyche, its images and affects” (3)? Simple but hardly self-evident, and heretical from the viewpoints of certain parties within the church and the psychiatric profession. Corbett asks that we grasp and keep hold of this fundamental principle behind the many divisions that come later, in the application, as it were, and whether these divisions be of the sort we should recognise as real and useful or as merely apparent and even detrimental. For “(t)he real problem…is not to define a relationship between psychology and religion, or to talk about an interface— here the words make them sound separate— but to directly appreciate the sacrality of the psyche.” (71) Kindlers might pause here to consider the ways we (as individuals, as Quakers, as Quaker individuals) conceive of how we come nearer to God and what our waiting in silence is like, and whether this harmonises with Corbett’s notions of attention and appreciation.
Given how things presently stand between psychology and religion in their professional guises, the first task, from the religious depth psychologist’s standpoint, is reparative: the psychology that has traditionally followed Freud in pathologising all religious experience needs to open itself to the full scope of human life. The second task is to stake psychology’s claim on the provinces that religion has traditionally considered theirs and theirs alone. For religions have traditionally pathologised great swathes of (psychic) experience, whether as sin or heresy, and proclaimed religion the sole remedy. Both sides have lain claim to the same problematic areas of human experience but simultaneously disallowed those areas by describing them — even when they admit their inevitability (or even their necessity in accordance with a soteriological scheme) — in terms which render them somehow anomalous within the normative vision of humanity or humanity-with-divinity they uphold and are upheld by. Psychology says “this patient is in the grip of a religious mania (or any other complex, really, which is causing suffering) from which psychology can deliver him, and for which we tacitly blame our progenitor and rival, religion.” Religion says “this sinner is in the grip of his own psychology, which is God-given but obnoxious to God and from which God alone can deliver him. Under such a diagnosis, prognosis and command, clearly religion alone holds out some hope of deliverance.” Neither has yet found the courage to accept personal experience in its totality, yet “no concept of divinity that is not the result of personal experience will ultimately hold sway” (2). No surprise then that we do this ourselves, having internalised these societal prejudices, often ignoring or suppressing “narcissistic difficulties, which are synonymous with a personal self…in the service of a spiritual goal.” (63) We would leap over the frequently painful irruptions of the spirit in order to attain a pre-fab spirituality which could never prove other than sterile for we who have no right to it.
But with the respectful appreciation of the sacrality of the psyche accomplished, neither discipline need fear the other as that which would explain the other away or subsume it; and in the absence of that fear, neither need assert its status as the master discourse. This does not imply that either psychology or religion can remain unchanged by this realisation which is, in fact, a revelation (under which, in fact, Corbett suggests that the therapist becomes pastor and pastor, shaman). Assertions by the church, for instance, that make it indispensable to any relation between humankind and God are clearly no longer inarguable and may not even be tenable; nor can psychology or psychiatry hold to techniques which insulate it from the unconscious. (208)