Insanity and Divinity

Studies in Psychosis and Spirituality

John Gale, Michael Robson, Georgia Rapsomatioti, John Gale, Michael Robson, Georgia Rapsomatioti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135045425
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

How close is spirituality to psychosis?

Covering the interrelation of psychosis and spirituality from a number of angles, Insanity and Divinity will generate dialogue and discussion, aid critical reflection and stimulate creative approaches to clinical work for those interested in the connections between religious studies, psychoanalysis, anthropology and hagiography.

Bringing together an international range of contributors and covering many different types of religious experience, this book presents its theme in three parts:

Psychoanalysis, belief and mysticism

Anthropology, history and hagiography

Psychology, psychosis and religious experience.

Each section includes discussion of the hinterland between madness and religious experience from the perspective of a number of religions, autobiographical accounts of those who have experienced a psychosis in which spirituality played a key part and a comprehensive review of the position of psychology research into the meaning and function of spirituality in relation to the psychoses.

Insightful, enlightening and wide-ranging, Insanity and Divinity is ideal for clinicians, academics and chaplains working in clinical settings.

Part 1

PSYCHOANALYSIS, BELIEF AND MYSTICISM

No more than Freud does Lacan underestimate the religious belief to which he does not adhere. What can be done today with this weighty history, if one rejects giving the illusion of repressing it? The West has for three centuries been concerned with the question of what to do about the Other.

(Michel de Certeau 2006: 60)

INTRODUCTION TO PART 1

Fragments of madness and delusion

John Gale

Psychoanalysis and the psychoses

Although a well-established distinction between neurosis and psychosis is found even in Freud's earliest texts – for example, in his correspondence with Fliess – psychoanalysis has not developed as complex or extensive a system of classification of mental disorders as has psychiatry. This is because its interests have been narrower and directed principally towards the distinction between the clinical structures of the perversions, the neuroses and the psychoses.

Within … [the psychoses] psycho-analysis has tried to define different structures: on the one hand, paranoia (including, in a rather general way, delusional conditions) and schizophrenia; on the other, melancholia and mania. Fundamentally, psycho-analysis sees the common denominator of the psychoses as lying in a primary disturbance of the libidinal relation to reality; the majority of manifest symptoms, and particularly delusional construction, are accordingly treated as secondary attempts to restore the link with objects.

(Laplanche and Pontalis 1980: 370)

Psychoanalytic approaches to psychosis abound, the most notable probably being those of Bion (1967), Fromm-Reichmann (1960), Giovacchinin (1979), Klein (1930, 1948, 1975), Lacan (1993), Lucas (1992, 2009), O'Shaughnessy (1992), Rosenfeld (1966), Segal (1957), Sohn (1985) and Yorke (1991).¹ These have oscillated in their self-understanding but almost without exception argue for an alternative or at least an addition to biological psychiatry. While much has been written of the increasing value of pharmacological treatments for the psychoses within the conceptual model of a medical illness, it is equally well documented that biological and genetic explanations do not exclude other factors that may have a role to play in the onset and development of psychosis (Andreasen 1999; Cullberg 2006; De Waelhens and Ver Eecke 2001; Hartmann et al. 1984; Kendler and Diehl 1993; Mortensen et al. 1999; Mosher, Gosden and Beder 2004; Tienari 1992).

Freud and the web of belief

Freud's interest in religion was something that persisted throughout his life. He considered religion – all religion, including Judaism and Christianity – an illusion. With the publication of Moses and Monotheism in 1939, he characterised Christianity as the most severe kind of illusion, ‘blending into the madness of delusion’ (Gay 2006: 644).

Freud was familiar with the work of the biblical scholar Wellhausen whose analysis of the structural problem of Genesis and the dating of the Pentateuch, published in 1883 and 1885 respectively, had completely transformed Old Testament studies.² Wellhausen's work was continued by a series of other scholars³ and was generally accepted in Germany by the time Freud came to write Moses and Monotheism, the first third of which appeared in German in Imago and in English in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. However, for an historical foundation to his thesis Freud relied not on the firm scholarship of Wellhausen but on a monograph published in 1922 by Ernst Sellin entitled Mose und seine Bedeutung für die israelitisch-jüdische Religionsgeschichte. He could not have made a worse choice. Freud had originally planned the book as an historical novel and Peter Gay suggests that he would have done well to have kept to his original plan. Sellin's argument, which was founded on dubious textual emendations, had not been well received by biblical scholars. But Freud took Sellin's thesis to an extreme and added to it a series of suppositions which, as is widely known, were unanimously rejected or ignored by biblical scholars, historians of religion and anthropologists alike (e.g. Albright 1957; Hyatt 1940; Wallace 1983). This was not because they were shocked or offended by his attack on religion – although it did inspire reactions of that kind as well – but because it was devoid of serious historical method and because of the way he used historical data, much of which was doubtful, basing his arguments on ethnological assumptions that were already outdated. Neither did Freud's earlier study of the foundations of religion in Totem and Taboo (Freud SE 1913) stand the test of time. Based on the work of the semitic scholar Robertson Smith, it contrasted primitive religion and rationality. Freud concluded that totemism was akin to neurosis (Wallace 1983). From its publication, anthropologists demonstrated its inadequacy and implausibility (Gay 2006) and later on the whole concept of totemism itself came to be seen as a mirage, an idea which leads nowhere (Wilcken 2010). Like hysteria, which emerged possibly not by coincidence around the same time, totemism was destined to vanish from the intellectual horizon within less than a hundred years.

The only real surviving interest in Freud's study of religion lies in the light it throws on his own psychological struggle with his father and with Jewish identity – something he could not shake off by not being religious – a point that is brought out clearly by Yerushalmi (1991) in his authoritative book, Freud's Moses.

Psychosis and the scars of the fall

The body, unlike the physical organism, is constructed, ‘carved up and made visible by language’ (Apollon, Bergeron and Cantin 2002). That is to say, our conception of the body is built up through the complex structure of signifiers that together combine to give us our understanding of what a body is. This imaginary construction is partly made up from the way we see ourselves in the mirror, our understanding of the way others look at us and the things they say about how we look. Thus, the act of seeing – what in French is known as le regard (the gaze or, more generally, perception itself) – looking at and being looked at, is integral to the formation of the mental image of body. The power of the eyes is an important theme in many Greek texts, as the gaze was thought to create an opening through which the soul could be reached. Thus Xenophon warns that the young, when they are the object of desire, are more dangerous than scorpions for they do not need to come into contact, like an insect, to inject their poison but can drive a person mad merely with a look (Xen. Mem. I. iii.12–13). Similarly, it was in the force of sexual desire that Augustine saw the ‘stigmata [literally, the scars] of the Fall’ (Foucault 1985: 138). Psychoanalysis shares with religion this conviction that appearances, which set desire in motion, are deceptive. They masquerade as something they are not and lure us into a mere semblance of the truth.

It was Jung who, in 1908, in the library of the Berghölzli, drew Freud's attention to Schreber's autobiographical account of his psychosis, which he had referred to the year before in his study of dementia praecox. Jung was arguably always more interested in madness than Freud but over the next few years the two great men were to discuss Schreber's memoires frequently (McGuire 1974). When Freud read the case he was already preoccupied with paranoia and here was a baroque example, liberally peppered with neologisms.

Jung had been studying the Schreber text since it first appeared in 1903 under the title Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken. In 1911, three years after he had first read the book, Freud wrote up his study of the Schreber case, masterfully, suggesting that the cause of Schreber's psychosis was a crisis of sexuality (Freud SE 1911). Although Jung disagreed strongly, there is an interesting comparison to be made between the case of Schreber and that of one of Jung's famous patients, Emile Schwyzer (1862–1931). Like Schreber, there was a strongly religious component to his psychosis. Schwyzer, whom Jung began treating in 1901, had believed himself to be God and like Schreber had bizarre sexual delusions. In Schreber's theory of the universe, his messianic calling demanded that he transform himself into a woman. Schwyzer saw himself as the object of interest to perverse fashionable ladies, who visited him dressed as men in order to confuse him. Schwyzer felt an obligation to distribute his semen, since otherwise the world would perish, and believed he was able to determine the weather. When asked how he did this, he replied that the sun had a gigantic phallus, and if he looked at it with eyes half shut and moved his head from side to side he could make the phallus move, and that was where the wind came from and, by extension, the weather (Bair 2004). The sun also featured in Schreber's delusions. The similarity between Schreber and Schwyzer was not missed on Jung's one-time patient and later gifted research assistant, Johann Honegger. Honegger, having at Jung's bidding recorded Schwyzer's delusional speech verbatim and collected his drawings, presented an analysis of the material at the 2nd International Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg in March 1910. The paper was not well received and soon afterwards Honegger became psychotic himself and tragically committed suicide.

Notes

1 With the exception of Lacan, these approaches have been usefully summarised by R. Lucas (2001), Managing psychotic patients in a day hospital setting, Psychosis (madness), ed. P. Williams, pp. 65–77, London: Institute of Psycho-Analysis. See also A.-L. Silver, B. Koehler and B. Karon (2004), Psychodynamic psychotherapy of schizophrenia. Its history and development, Models of Madness, ed. J. Read, L.R. Mosher and R. Bentall, pp. 209–22, London and New York: Routledge.

2 Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) was a notable biblical critic and orientalist. He was professor of Old Testament studies at Greifswald and later professor in semitics at Marburg and Göttingen. In many ways he followed the lead of E. Reuss and devoted most of his life to ‘higher’ criticism, as it was known; that is, the critical study of the literary methods and sources used by the Old Testament authors, in distinction to textual or ‘lower’ criticism. In later years he devoted himself to the critical study of the New Testament and upheld the priority of Mark over Q, its composite nature and its original Aramaic form, although he made no attempt to illustrate his observations of Aramaic construction or usage from available sources. Nevertheless, many of his conjectures were, in the learned opinion of Matthew Black, brilliant. See M. Black (1957), An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wellhausen's philological analysis of texts laid down many of the lines for the later development of Formgeschichte or ‘form criticism’, which attempts to assess the historicity of texts by a study of their structure. See J. Wellhausen (1878), Die Geschichte Israels, Berlin: Reimer, and (1885) Die Komposition des Hexateuchs und der historischen Bücher des Alten Testaments, Berlin: G. Reimer.

3 Notably by K. Budde (1850–1935) at Strassburg and Marburg; by C.F. Burney (1868–1925), by G.B. Gray (1865–1922) at Oxford, and C.C. Torrey, and later A.J. Wensinck, who emphasised the Aramaic background of the Gospels. For a good summary, see Black (1957), pp 1–12.

Abbreviation

Xen. Mem.

Xenophon. Memorabilia. Oeconomicus. Symposium. Apologia, trans. E.C. Marchant and O.J. Todd (1997). Loeb Classical Library 168. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Bibliography

Albright, W.F. (1957). From the Stone Age to Christianity. Monotheism and the Historical Process. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Andreasen, N.C. (1999). Understanding the causes of schizophrenia. New England Journal of Medicine 340(8): 645–7.

Apollon, W., Bergeron, D. and Cantin, L. (2002). After Lacan. Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious, ed. R. Hughes and K.R. Malone. Albany: State Univer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• The Book Series of the International Society for Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the editors
• About the contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1 Psychoanalysis, belief and mysticism
• Part 2 Anthropology, history and hagiography
• Part 3 Psychology, psychosis and religious experience
• Glossary of Lacanian terms
• Index