'This short book gathers a whole lifetime’s evaluation of feelings about people and God.' Photo: Book cover of Credo? Religion and Psychoanalysis, by Patrick Casement
Credo? Religion and Psychoanalysis, by Patrick Casement
Author: Patrick Casement. Review by Neil Morgan
What is the relationship between our emotions and our spiritual life? In this short book, an eminent psychoanalyst describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and religion in his life.
For a long time religion has been a sort of anathema in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud agreed with Friedrich Nietzsche that religion was ‘a continuous suicide of reason’. He saw religion as a weak-minded retreat from harsh reality, and its demystification as a necessary human therapy. His zeal was grounded in his belief that religion was an infantile neurosis, stultifying human development. He ends The Future of an Illusion (1927) by quoting Heine: ‘We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows’.
There is evidence, however, that this attitude is changing. Credo? is not technical, but a plain and honest account of a well-known analyst’s personal engagement with his profession and his thoughts on religion.
Patrick Casement graduated in anthropology and theology and for some time felt drawn to the priesthood. But a personal crisis engulfed him in his twenties and he was appalled by the church’s insensitive response to it. Changing direction, he went on to train as a psychotherapist, and then as a psychoanalyst. His first book, On Learning from the Patient, became a bestseller in psychotherapy. It appeared on all sorts of reading lists in the helping professions.
Four years after Casement graduated, a different sort of earthquake occurred within the Anglican Church: John Robinson published Honest to God. Robinson chafed at images of God as an old man in the sky. He wanted to move towards more difficult descriptions, such as Tillich’s depiction of God as the ground of being. Many practicing Anglicans found this hard to grasp, or plainly heretical.
But Casement does not embroil himself in academic theology. He says, ‘I didn’t want to be diverted by books. That was never going to be my way’. He concentrates on the internal and personal. He describes his journey from young student to older psychoanalyst, and his confrontation with trauma, as described, and with life-threatening illness along the way. Now in his mid-eighties he has worked his way to a position he calls being devoutly agnostic. It reminds me of R S Thomas, the poet, who also wrote painfully about the paradoxical idea that God makes a difference to the world by virtue of absence.
This short book gathers a whole lifetime’s evaluation of feelings about people and God. What impresses is the author’s capacity (greatly appreciated in Quaker worship, of course) to remain open to experience, rather than foreclosing matters with answers. He sums up (echoing Hamlet to Horatio) with ‘We need to acknowledge that there really could be more in life that we can know, or understand… Maybe there is also something to celebrate in this.’ I recommend this thought-provoking read.
