From Renewal, Society of Christian Psychology
V. Ellsworth Lewis, Ph.D.
A Royal Road to the Christian Unconscious?
Transversing the Holy Roman Empire, roughly in the form of a cross borne eastward, were the Via Regia and the Via Imperii. Regia ran from coastal Spain to Moscow. Imperii ran from the Baltic Sea southward to Rome. During the Dark Ages, the emperor assured voyagers safe passage over these routes through vast stretches of chaos. When Freud published his seminal work on dream interpretation, he called dreams the via regia to the unconscious. Dream interpretation is not in itself unbiblical. Joseph and Daniel interpreted dreams that Pharoah and Nebuchadnezzar could not understand. On the other hand, dream interpretation in the Bible appears to be special and prophetic, not general and psychoanalytic. More broadly, it is doubtful whether the scriptures supply us with an explicit concept of the unconscious in the modern sense. Christians may be reluctant to travel any royal road (be it paved with dreams or other cobblestone) into psychic territory that they find categorically suspect. And yet, some notion of an unconscious is sneakily omnipresent in the scriptures: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” We see in a mirror dimly (I Cor 13:12), with hardened hearts (Heb 3:8) and constricted bowels (II Cor 6:12). We are lost (Luke 19:10) and living in darkness (Luke 1:79). If all that were not enough, “whoever finds his life (psyche) will lose it” (Mat 10:39).
If the psychotherapeutic journey over the via regia is to be a Christian pilgrimage, we must begin with the unconscious. Yet the very notion of the Un-conscious is less like a North Star than a black hole – less a matter of what is visible than a matter of what is gravitational. [Ed A1] The unconscious is that which, while completely out of sight, pulls us off course and takes us where we did not (consciously) wish or intend to go. We cannot anticipate the unconscious … we only account for precisely that fraction of it that has become conscious. Looking backwards, we can speak of how something unconscious became conscious, as Freud did when he learned about himself from his own dreams. And we can perhaps describe how it feels to pass from unconsciousness into consciousness. It is as though one must walk the Via Regia backwards.
Does Christian psychology have a working theory of the unconscious that sits comfortably within or beside its theology? Does the working theory yield a margin of freedom to gain insights more experiential than doctrinal, by methods more phenomenological than exegetical? I dare say that most Christian training programs lack such theory and method, and that the lacuna implicitly shapes the boundaries of most pastoral and Christian counseling. Specifically, it produces an affinity for cognitive and positive psychology, both of which offer wide berth for the insertion of doctrinal solutions to rationally crystallized problems.
While anti-doctrinal beliefs may be catalogued and considered subconscious, this yields only a shallow concept of the unconscious. The Christian unconscious thereby becomes the pool of all doctrine (i.e., those truths which are presumed to be knowable, known, and clearly expressed) that are misunderstood, disbelieved, not yet taken to heart, or not yet put into action. In its harsher version (which is not uncommon enough), the lies we still believe are presumed to be the chief (or even the exclusive) cause of suffering. “The [doctrinal] truth will set you free.” In most training programs in Christian counseling, doctrinal truths coexist with practical wisdom (e.g., dysfunctional beliefs) and scientific findings, but the rational basis of therapy remains intact. Bad ideas are replaced by better ideas, bad habits by better habits.
The cognitive-behavioral rain, be it secular or Christian, falls mainly on the plain of ordinary consciousness. In either case, the implicit message can be “When you quit believing the lie, the lie quits hurting.” Furthermore, if lies and truths can be made fully conscious simply by being articulated, then it is a short skip to supposing that suffering flows from conscious resistance to the truth. If affliction springs simply from refusal to “turn to the Lord” or “believe his Word,” then compassion evaporates in exasperation. Without a vigorous theory of the unconscious, we rouse the spirits of three ancient, famously ineffective, counselors: Eliphaz, Bildad, & Zophar. Positive psychology cannot be the exclusive vehicle of a Christian approach to psychology without leading to this impasse. Truth must have qualities that are not grasped by pure reason.
I submit, as a via imperii to the Christian unconscious, Kierkegaard’s theory of despair in The Sickness Unto Death (1849). The book is subtitled “a Christian psychological exposition for … awakening.” Fifty years before Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Kierkegaard suggests that, most of the time, Christians are asleep! The sickness unto death (despair) involves the failure to grasp that the self, though “given” in an eternal sense, is temporally experienced only rarely—only when “relating itself to itself [while it] rests transparently in the power that established it.” Since this “relating” is an act, it is invariably interrupted, and must be repeated over and again. Thus, despair is not only the default condition of fallen humanity, but the default condition of every Christian.
The capacity for despair is, paradoxically, a divine gift, an “infinite advantage.” It makes faith possible. For Kierkegaard, this “relating” activity is the very definition of faith, and is therefore “the formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out.” Self is more verb than noun, and there is mortal danger in taking the self for granted (i.e., objectively). Put differently, the Christian self (and per Kierkegaard, “Spirit is the self.”) falls asleep and lies unconscious except when polarities such as mind and body are simultaneously seen as undergirded by God. “The human self … in relating itself (e.g., mind) to itself (e.g., body) relates itself to another.” Self is awakened by vital connection with the Word made Flesh for us and in us. There is a phenomenological aspect to such awakening so hard to describe that even Kierkegaard points to it in terms of its antithesis, despair.
Despair, like dreaming, is not in itself insight. It becomes a path to insight only by way of an encounter, a cooperative interplay that is more art than science. For Freud, cooperation with the client involves nudging free associations followed by nudging interpretations, validated finally by freedom where freedom was absent. For Kierkegaard, the cooperation with the reader involves a via negativa that is even more complex. His entire opus must be viewed as dragging us away from seeing the self objectively. Out of one eye, God sees us eternally and objectively, but we become our eternal selves only momentarily—only when seeing ourselves concretely and subjectively. Seeing ourselves historically (in time) or objectively (e.g., in terms of virtue or character) is always a form of unconsciousness and despair. Seeing ourselves as nakedly contemporaneous with Christ, body and soul in this moment, is awakening. The patibulum (crossbar) of the cross comes from the Latin word for open, exposed, vulnerable, accessible. Can we carry it?
Turning now from the via imperii back to the via regia, at the crux of the Holy Cross, we see that the Freudian royal road is transformed. Dreams are indeed a guardian of sleep, but dreams are just one aspect of a grand disguising of everything unconscious; this includes not only the Freudian (psychosexual) unconscious, but the Jungian unconscious, the broader relational (e.g., transpersonal, transgenerational) unconscious, and the traumatic unconscious. The stipes (vertical beam) of the cross includes everything the Word-made-Flesh re-members for us. But the personal awakenings occurs in moments—precisely in instants when we subtract our abstracted train of cognitions, our conceptualized histories and projects, and come to our senses. This requires embracing sub-rational experiences (e.g., visceral sensation, associated images, and dreams) as significant encounters not only with self, but with Spirit. We meet the Christ who is in us. And in doing so, we move away from what we see and know (what we call objectivity). Rather, we follow Him—the indwelling Savior who tells us “Your body is My temple; this is My body.” How could this be realized except by faithfully moving toward interoception (awareness of body and space) and imagination (the images that arise from such awareness)? As we do so, interoception and imagination slowly give rise to insight. As we learn to “present our bodies” to God, our minds are gradually transformed as well.
[Ed A1]Very nice!
