The Road Less Traveled - SECTION III - Growth and Religion - Episodes 1 - 4

 

Episode 1:        World Views and Religion

As human beings grow in discipline and love and life experience, their understanding of the world and their place in it naturally grows apace.

Conversely, as people fail to grow in discipline, love and life experience, so does their understanding fail to grow.

Consequently, among the members of the human race there exists an extraordinary variability in the breadth and sophistication of our understanding of what life is all about.

This understanding is our religion. Since everyone has some understanding-some world view, no matter how limited or primitive or inaccurate-everyone has a religion.

This fact, not widely recognized, is of the utmost importance: everyone has a religion.

We suffer, I believe, from a tendency to define religion too narrowly.

We tend to think that religion must include a belief in God or some ritualistic practice or membership in a worshiping group.

We are likely to say of someone who does not attend church or believe in a Superior Being, "He or she is not religious."

I have even heard scholars say such things as:

"Buddhism is not really a religion" or "Unitarians have excluded religion from their faith" or "Mysticism is more a philosophy than a religion."

We tend to view religion as something monolithic, cut out of whole cloth, and then, with this simplistic concept, we are puzzled as to how two very different people can both call themselves Christians. Or Jews.

Or how an atheist might have a more highly developed sense of Christian morality than a Catholic who routinely attends mass.

In supervising other psychotherapists I rather routinely find that they pay too little, if any, attention to the ways in which their patients view the world.

There are several reasons for this, but among them is the notion that if patients don't consider themselves religious by virtue of their belief in God or their church membership, they are lacking in religion and the matter therefore needs no further scrutiny.

But the fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world.

Do patients envision the universe as basically chaotic and without meaning so that it is only sensible for them to grab whatever little pleasure they can whenever it is available?

Do they see the world as a dog-eat-dog place where ruthlessness is essential for their survival?

Or do they see it as a nurturing sort of

place in which something good will always turn up and in which they need not fret much about the future?

 Or a place that owes them a living no matter how they conduct their lives?

Or a universe of rigid law in which they will be struck down and cast away if they step even slightly out of line? Etcetera.

There are all manner of different world views that people have. Sooner or later in the course of psychotherapy most therapists will come to recognize how a patient views the world, but if the therapist is specifically on the lookout for it, he or she will come to this recognition sooner rather than later. And it is essential that therapists arrive at this knowledge, for the world view of patients is always an essential part of their problems, and a correction in their world view is necessary for their cure. So I say to those I supervise: "Find out your patients' religions even if they say they don't have any."

Usually a person's religion or world view is at best only incompletely conscious. Patients are often unaware of how they view the world, and sometimes may even think they possess a certain kind of religion when they actually are possessed by a far different kind.

Stewart, a successful industrial Engineer, became severely depressed in his mid-fifties. Despite his success at work and the fact that he had been an exemplary husband and father, he felt worthless and evil.

"The world would be a better place if I were dead," he said. And meant it.

 Stewart had made two extremely serious suicide attempts.

No amount of realistic reassurance could interrupt the unrealism of his worthless self-image. As well as the usual symptoms of a severe depression, such as insomnia and agitation, Stewart also suffered great difficulty in swallowing his food. "It's not just that the food tastes bad," he said. "That too. But it's as if there's a blade of steel stuck straight in my throat and nothing but liquid can get by it." Special X-rays and tests failed to reveal a physical cause for his difficulty.

Stewart made no bones about his religion. "I'm an atheist, plain and simple," he stated. "I'm a scientist. The only things I believe in are those things you can see and touch. Maybe I'd be better off if I had some kind of faith in a sweet and loving God, but, frankly, I can't stomach that kind of crap. I had enough of it when I was a child and I'm glad I've gotten away from it." 

Stewart had grown up in a small Midwestern community, the son of a rigid fundamentalist preacher and his equally rigid and fundamentalist wife, and had left home and church at the first opportunity.

Several months after he entered treatment Stewart recounted the following brief dream: "It was back in my childhood home in Minnesota. It was like I was still living there as a child, yet I also knew I was the same age as I am now. It was nighttime. A man had entered the house. He was going to cut our throats. I had never seen this man before, but strangely I knew who he was: the father of a girl I had dated a couple of times in high school. That was all. There was no conclusion. I just woke up fearful, knowing that this man wanted to cut our throats."

I asked Stewart to tell me everything he could about this man in his dream. "There's really nothing I can tell you," he said. "I never met the man. I only dated his daughter a couple of times-not really dates, just walking her home to her door after church youth group meetings. I did steal a kiss from her in the dark behind some bushes on one of those walks." Here Stewart gave a little nervous laugh and went on, "In my dream I had the sense I'd never seen her father, although I knew who he was. Actually, in real life I did see him-from a distance. He was the stationmaster for our town. Occasionally I would see him when I used to go to the station and watch the trains come in on summer afternoons."

Something clicked in my mind. I too as a child had spent lazy summer afternoons watching the trains go by. The train station was where the action was. And the stationmaster was the Director of the Action. He knew the distant places from which the great trains were coming to touch our little town and the faraway places to which they were going. He knew which trains would stop and which would roar through, shaking the earth as they went. He worked the switches, the signals.

He received the mail and sent it off. And when he was not doing these wonderful things he sat in his office doing something more wonderful: tapping on a magical little key in a mysterious rhythmical language, sending messages out to the whole world.

"Stewart," I said, "you have told me that you're an atheist, and I believe you. There is a part of your mind that believes there is no God. But I am beginning to suspect that there is another part of your mind that does believe in God-a dangerous, cutthroat God."

My suspicion was correct. Gradually, as we worked together, reluctantly, striving against resistance, Stewart began to recognize within himself a strange and ugly faith: an assumption, beyond his atheism, that the world was controlled and directed by a malevolent force, a force that not only could cut his throat but that was eager to do so, eager to punish him for transgressions. Slowly also we began to focus on his "transgressions," mostly minor sexual incidents symbolized by his "stealing a kiss" from the stationmaster's daughter.

Eventually it became clear that (among other reasons for his depression) Stewart was doing penance and figuratively cutting his own throat in the hope that by so doing he could prevent God from literally cutting it.

Where did Stewart's notion of a vicious God and a malevolent world come from?

How do people's religions develop?

What determines a person's particular world view?

There are whole complexes of determinants, and this book will not explore the question in depth. But the most important factor in the development of the religion of most people is obviously their culture.

If we are European we are likely to believe that Christ was a white man, and if we are African that he was a black man. If one is an Indian who was born and raised in Benares or Bombay, one is likely to become a Hindu and possess what has been described as a pessimistic world view.

If one is an American born and raised in Indiana, one is more likely to become a Christian than a Hindu and to possess a somewhat more optimistic world view .

We tend to believe what the people around us believe, and we tend to accept as truth what these people tell us of the nature of the world as we listen to them during our formative years.

But less obvious (except to psychotherapists) is the fact that the most important part of our culture is our particular family.

The most basic culture in which we develop is the culture of our family, and our parents are its "culture leaders."

Moreover, the most significant aspect of that culture is not what our parents tell us about God and the nature of things but rather what they do-how they behave toward each other, toward our siblings and, above all, toward us. In other words, what we learn about the nature of the world when we are growing up is determined by the actual nature of our experience in the microcosm of the family. It is not so much what our parents say that determines our world view as it is the unique world they create for us by their behavior.

"I agree that I have this notion of a cutthroat God," Stewart said, "but where did it come from? My parents certainly believed in God -they talked about it incessantly-but theirs was a God of Love. Jesus loves us. God loves us. We love God and Jesus.

Love, love, love, that's all I ever heard."

"Did you have a happy childhood?" I asked.

Stewart glared at me. "Stop playing dumb," he said. "You know I didn't. You know it was miserable."

"Why was it miserable?"

"You know that too. You know what it was like. I got the shit beaten out of me. Belts, boards, brooms, brushes, anything they could lay their hands on.

There wasn't anything I could do that didn't merit a beating.

A beating a day keeps the doctor away and makes a good little Christian out of you."

"Did they ever try to strangle you or cut your throat?"

"No, but I'm sure they would have if I hadn't been careful."

There was a long moment of silence. Stewart's face became extremely depressed. Finally, heavily, he said, "I'm beginning to understand."

Stewart was not the only person who believed in what I have come to call the "monster-god." I have had a number of patients with similar concepts of God and similarly bleak or terrifying notions as to the nature of existence. What is surprising is that the monster-god is not more common in the minds of humans.

In the first section of this book it was noted that when we are children our parents are godlike figures to our child's eye, and the way they do things seems the way they must be done throughout the universe.

Our first (and, sadly, often our only) notion of God's nature is a simple extrapolation of our parents' natures, a simple blending of the characters of our mothers and fathers or their substitutes.

If we have loving, forgiving parents, we are likely to believe in a loving and forgiving God. And in our adult view the world is likely to seem as nurturing a place as our childhood was.

If our parents were harsh and punitive, we are likely to mature with a concept of a harsh and punitive monster-god.

And if they failed to care for us, we will likely envision the universe as similarly uncaring.

The fact that our religion or world view is initially largely determined by our unique childhood experience brings us face to face with a central problem: the relationship between religion and reality. It is the problem of the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Stewart's view of the world as a dangerous place where he would get his throat cut if he wasn't very careful was perfectly realistic in terms of the microcosm of his childhood home; he lived under the domination of two vicious adults. But all parents are not vicious and all adults are not vicious. In the larger world, the macrocosm, there are many different kinds of parents and people and societies and cultures.

To develop a religion or world view that is realistic-that is, conforms to the reality of the cosmos and our role in it, as best we can know that reality-we must constantly revise and extend our understanding to include new knowledge of the larger world. We must constantly enlarge our frame of reference.

We are dealing here with the issues of map-making and Frequently (but not always) the essence of a patient's childhood and hence the essence of his or her world view is captured in the "earliest memory." Consequently I will often ask patients, "Tell me the very first thing that you can remember." They may protest that they cannot do this, that they have a number of early memories. But when I force them to make a choice of one, the response will vary in flavor from "Well, I remember my mother picking me up and carrying me outside in her arms to show me a beautiful sunset" to "I remember sitting on the floor of the kitchen. I had wet my pants and my mother was standing over me waving a big spoon in the air and screaming at me." It is probable that these first memories, like the phenomenon of screen memories, which they so often are, are remembered precisely because they accurately symbolize the nature of a person's early childhood. It is not surprising, then, that the flavor of these earliest memories is so frequently the same as that of a patient's deepest feelings about the nature of existence. transference, which were discussed at some length in the first section.

Stewart's map of reality was accurate for the microcosm of his family, but he had transferred that map inappropriately into a larger adult world, where it was grossly incomplete and hence defective.

To some extent the religion of most adults is a product of transference.

Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents, and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then, that the world of humanity is so full of conflict.

We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived.

Bryant Wedge, a psychiatrist specializing in the field of international relations, studied negotiations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and was able to delineate a number of basic assumptions as to the nature of human beings and society and the world held by Americans which differed dramatically from the assumptions of Russians. These assumptions dictated the negotiating behavior of both sides. Yet neither side was aware of its own assumptions or the fact that the other side was operating on a different set of assumptions.

The inevitable result was that the negotiating behavior of the Russians seemed to the Americans to be either crazy or deliberately evil, and of course the Americans seemed to the Russians equally crazy or evil.

We are indeed like the three proverbial blind men, each in touch with only his particular piece of the elephant yet each claiming to know the nature of the whole beast.

So we squabble over our different microcosmic world views, and all wars are holy wars.

Episode 2:        The Religion of Science

Spiritual growth is a journey out of the microcosm into an ever greater macrocosm.

In its earlier stages (which is all this book concerns itself with) it is a journey of knowledge and not of faith.

In order to escape the microcosm of our previous experience and free ourselves from transferences, it is necessary that we learn.

 We must continually expand our realm of knowledge and our field of vision through the thorough digestion and incorporation of new information.

The process of expansion of knowledge has been a major theme of this book.

It will be recalled that in the previous section love was defined as an extension-that is, an expansion- of ourselves, and it was noted that among the risks of love was the risk of moving into the unknown of new experience.

And at the end of the first section on discipline it was also noted that the learning of something new requires a giving up of the old self and a death of outworn knowledge.

To develop a broader vision we must be willing to forsake, to kill, our narrower vision.

In the short run it is more comfortable not to do this-to stay where we are, to keep using the same microcosmic map, to avoid suffering the death of cherished notions.

The road of spiritual growth, however, lies in the opposite direction.

We begin by distrusting what we already believe, by actively seeking the threatening and unfamiliar, by deliberately challenging the validity of what we have previously been taught and hold dear.

The path to holiness lies through questioning everything, In a very real sense, we begin with science.

We begin by replacing the religion of our parents with the religion of science.

We must rebel against and reject the religion of our parents, for inevitably their world view will be narrower than  that of which we are capable if we take full advantage of our personal experience, including our adult experience and the experience of an additional generation of human history.

There is no such thing as a good hand-me-down religion. To be vital, to be the best of which we are capable, our religion must be a wholly personal one, forged entirely through the fire of our questioning and doubting in the crucible of our own experience of reality.

As the theologian Alan Jones has said:

One of our problems is that very few of us have developed any distinctive personal life. Everything about us seems secondhand, even our emotions. In many cases we have to rely on secondhand information in order to function.

I accept the word of a physician, a scientist, a farmer, on trust.

I do not like to do this. I have to because they possess vital knowledge of living of which I am ignorant.

Secondhand information concerning the state of my kidneys, the effects of cholesterol, and the raising of chickens, I can live with.

But when it comes to questions of meaning, purpose, and death, secondhand information will not do. I cannot survive on a secondhand faith in a secondhand God.

There has to be a personal word, a unique confrontation, if I am to come alive.

So for mental health and spiritual growth we must develop our own personal religion and not rely on that of our parents.

But what is this about a "religion of science"?

Science is a religion because it is a world view of considerable complexity with a number of major tenets.

Most of these major tenets are as follows:

the universe is real, and therefore a valid object for examination;

it is of value for human beings to examine the universe;

the universe makes sense-that is, it follows certain laws and is predictable; but human beings are poor examiners, subject to superstition, bias, prejudice, and a profound tendency to see what they want to see rather than what is really there; consequently, to examine and hence understand accurately,

it is necessary for human beings to subject themselves to the discipline of scientific method.

The essence of this discipline is experience, so that we cannot consider ourselves to know something unless we have actually experienced it; while the discipline of scientific method begins with experience, simple experience itself is not to be trusted; to be trusted, experience must be repeatable, usually in the form of an experiment; moreover, the experience must be verifiable, in that other people must have the same experience under the same circumstances.

The key words are "reality," "examination," "knowledge," "distrust," "experience," "discipline."

These are words we have been using all along.

Science is a religion of skepticism.

To escape from the microcosm of our childhood experience, from the microcosm of our culture and its dogmas, from the half truths our parents told us, it is essential that we be skeptical about what we think we have learned to date. It is the scientific attitude that enables us to transform our personal experience of the microcosm into a personal experience of the macrocosm.

We must begin by becoming scientists.

Many patients who have already taken this beginning say to me: "I'm not religious. I don't go to church. I no longer believe much of what the church and my parents told me. I don't have my parents' faith. I guess I'm not very spiritual."

It often comes as a shock to them when I question the reality of their assumption that they are not spiritual beings. "You have a religion," I may say, "a rather profound one. You worship the truth. You believe in the possibility of your growth and betterment: the possibility of spiritual progress.

In the strength of your religion you are willing to suffer the pains of challenge and the agonies of unlearning. You take the risk of therapy, and all this you do for the sake of your religion.

I am not at all certain it is realistic to say that you are less spiritual than your parents; to the contrary, I suspect the reality is that you have spiritually evolved beyond your parents, that your spirituality is greater by a quantum leap than theirs, which is insufficient to provide them with even the courage to question. "

One thing to suggest that science as a religion represents an improvement, an evolutionary leap, over a number of other world views, is its international character.

We speak of the worldwide scientific community. And it is beginning to approach a true community, to come considerably closer than the Catholic Church, which is probably the next closest thing to a true international brotherhood. Scientists of all lands are able, far better than most of the rest of us, to talk to each other. To some extent they have been successful in transcending the microcosm of their culture. To some extent they are becoming wise.

To some extent. While I believe that the skeptical world view of the scientific-minded is a distinct improvement over a world view based upon blind faith, local superstition and unquestioned assumptions, I also believe that most of the scientific- minded have only barely begun the journey of spiritual growth. Specifically, I believe that the outlook of most scientific- minded people toward the reality of God is almost as parochial as the outlook of simple peasants who blindly follow the faith of their fathers.

Scientists have grave difficulty dealing with the reality of God.

When we look from our vantage of sophisticated skepticism at the phenomenon of belief in God we are not impressed.

We see dogmatism, and proceeding from dogmatism, we see wars and inquisitions and persecutions. We see hypocrisy: people professing the brotherhood of man killing their fellows in the name of faith, lining their pockets at the expense of others, and practicing all manner of brutality. We see a bewildering multiplicity of rituals and images without consensus: this god is a woman with six arms and six legs; that is a man who sits on a throne; this one is an elephant; that one the essence of nothingness; pantheons, household gods, trinities, unities.

We see ignorance, superstition, rigidity.

The track record for belief in God looks pretty poor.

It is tempting to think that humanity might be better off without a belief in God, that God is not only pie in the sky by and by, but a poisoned pie at that.

It would seem reasonable to conclude that God is an illusion in the minds of humans-a destructive illusion-and that belief in God is a common form of human psychopathology that should be healed.

We have a question: 

Is belief in God a sickness? 

Is it a manifestation of transference-a concept of our parents, derived from the microcosm, inappropriately projected into the macrocosm? 

Or, to put it another way, is such belief a form of primitive or childish thinking which we should grow out of as we seek higher levels of awareness and maturity?

If we want to be scientific in attempting to answer this question, it is essential that we turn to the reality of actual clinical data.

What happens to one's belief in God as one grows through the process of psychotherapy?

Episode 3:        The Case of Kathy

Kathy was the most frightened person I have ever seen.

When I came into her room that first time she was sitting on the floor in the corner muttering what sounded like a chant.

She looked up at me standing in the doorway and her eyes grew wide with terror.

She wailed and pushed herself back into the corner and kept straining against the walls as if she wished she could push herself through them. I said, "Kathy, I'm a Psychiatrist. I'm not going to hurt you." I took a chair, sat down at some distance from her and waited. For another minute she continued to push herself into the corner. Then she began to relax, but only enough to start weeping inconsolably.

After a while her weeping stopped and she began to chant to herself again. I asked her what was wrong. "I'm going to die," she blurted out, hardly pausing to interrupt the cadence of her chant. There was nothing more she could tell -me. She continued to chant. Every five minutes or so she would stop, seemingly exhausted, whimper for a few moments, and then resume her chanting. To whatever question I asked she would respond only with "I'm going to die," never breaking the rhythm of the chant. It seemed that she felt she might be able to prevent her death by this chanting and could not allow herself to rest or sleep.

From her husband, Howard, a young policeman, I obtained the minimal facts. Kathy was twenty years old. They had been married for two years. There were no problems with the marriage. Kathy was close to her parents. She had never had any psychiatric difficulty before. This was a complete surprise. She had been perfectly fine that morning. She had driven him to work. Two hours later his sister called him.

She had gone to visit Kathy and had found her in this condition.

They had brought her to the hospital. No, she had not been acting strange lately. Except maybe for one thing. For about four months she had seemed quite fearful of going into public places. To help her Howard had been doing all the shopping in the supermarket while she waited in the car. She also seemed to be afraid of being left alone. She prayed a lot-but, then, she had done that ever since he had known her.

Her family was quite religious. Her mother went to mass at least twice a week. Funny thing-Kathy had stopped going to mass as soon as they were married. Which was just fine with him. But she still prayed a lot. Her physical health? Oh, that was excellent. She'd never been hospitalized. Fainted once at a wedding several years ago. Contraception? She took the pill. Wait a minute. About a month ago she told him she was stopping the pill. She'd read about how it was dangerous or something. He hadn't thought much about it.

I gave Kathy massive amounts of tranquilizers and sedatives so that she was able to sleep at night, but during the next two days her behavior remained unchanged: incessant chanting, inability to communicate anything except the conviction of her imminent death, and unremitting terror. Finally, on the fourth day, I gave her an intravenous injection of sodium amytal. "This injection is going to make you sleepy, Kathy," I said, "but you will not fall asleep. Nor will you die. It will make you able to stop chanting. You will feel very relaxed. You will be able to talk with me. I want you to tell me what happened the morning you came to the hospital."

"Nothing happened," Kathy answered.

"You drove your husband to work?"

"Yes. Then I drove home. Then I knew I was going to die."

"You drove home just as you do every morning after you drop your husband at work?"

Kathy began to chant again.

"Stop chanting, Kathy," I ordered. "You're completely safe. You're feeling very relaxed. Something was different about the way you drove home that morning. You are going to tell me what was different."

"I took a different road."

"Why did you do that?"

"I took the road past Bill's house."

"Who's Bill?" I asked.

Kathy started chanting once more.

"Is Bill a boyfriend of yours?"

"He was. Before I got married."

"You miss Bill a lot, don't you?"

Kathy wailed, "Oh, God, I'm going to die."

"Did you see Bill that day?"

"No."

"But you wanted to see him?"

"I'm going to die," Kathy replied.

"Do you feel that God is going to punish you for wanting to see Bill again?"

"Yes. "

"That's why you believe you're going to die?"

"Yes." Once more Kathy started chanting.

I let her chant for ten minutes while I collected my thoughts .

Finally I said to her, "Kathy, you believe you are going to die because you believe you know the mind of God. But you are wrong. Because you do not know the mind of God. All you know is what you have been told about God. Much of what you have been told about God is wrong. I do not know everything about God, but I know more than you do and more than the people who have told you about God. For instance, every day I see men and women, like yourself, who want to be unfaithful, and some are, and they are not punished by God. I know, because they keep coming back to see me. And talk with me. And they become happier. Just as you will become happier. Because we are going to work together.

And you are going to learn that you're not a bad person. And you're going to learn the truth-about yourself and about God. And you will become happier, about yourself and about life. But now you're going to sleep. And when you awake you will no longer be afraid that you're going to die. And when you see me tomorrow morning again, you will be able to talk with me, and we will talk about God and we will talk about yourself. "

In the morning Kathy was improved. She was still frightened and unconvinced that she would not die, but no longer certain that she would. 

Slowly, on that day and for many, many days thereafter, her story emerged, piece by piece. During her senior year in high school she had had sexual intercourse with Howard. He wanted to marry her and she had agreed. Two weeks later while at the wedding of a friend, the idea suddenly came to her that she did not want to get married. She fainted. Afterward, she was confused as to whether she loved Howard. But she felt that she had to go through with the marriage because she knew she had already sinned by having premarital relations with him, and this sin would be magnified if she did not consecrate their relationship in marriage. Still, she did not want children, at least not until she felt more certain that she loved Howard.

So she started on the pill-another sin. She could not bear to confess these sins and was relieved to stop going to mass after they were married.

She enjoyed sex with Howard. Almost from the day of their wedding, however, he lost interest in her sexually.

He remained an ideal provider, buying her gifts, treating her deferentially, working a great deal of overtime, not allowing her to have a job. But she almost had to beg him for sex, and the sex they had every two weeks was about all there was to relieve her unremitting boredom. Divorce was out; that was a sin, unthinkable.

Despite herself Kathy began to have fantasies of sexual infidelity.

She thought perhaps she might rid herself of these if she prayed more, so she started to pray ritualistically five minutes every hour. Then Howard noticed and teased her about it. So she decided to hide her praying by doing it more in the daytime when Howard was not home, to make up for not doing it in the evening when he was. This meant she had to pray either more frequently or faster. She decided to do both. She prayed now every half hour, and in her five minutes of praying time she doubled her speed. The fantasies of infidelity continued, however, and gradually became even more frequent and insistent. Whenever she went outside she looked at men. That made things worse. She became fearful of going outside with Howard, and even when she was with him, she became frightened of public places where she might see men.

She thought perhaps she ought to return to church. But then she realized that if she returned to church she would be sinning if she did not go to confession and confess her fantasies of infidelity to the priest. This she could not do. She again doubled the speed of her praying. To facilitate this she began to develop an elaborate system in which a single chanted syllable stood for an entire particular prayer. This was the genesis of her chanting. In a while, perfecting her system, she was able to chant a thousand prayers in a five-minute period.

Initially, while she was so busy perfecting her chanting, the fantasies of infidelity seemed to abate, but once she had the system down pat they returned full force. She began to consider how she might actually carry them out. She thought of calling Bill, her old boyfriend. She thought of bars she might go to in the afternoon. Terrified that she might really do this, she stopped taking the pill, hoping that the fear of getting pregnant would help her in resisting such acts. But the desire kept growing stronger. One afternoon she found herself starting to masturbate. She was horrified. That was perhaps the worst sin of all. She'd heard of cold showers and took one as cold as she could stand. It helped her until Howard came home. But the next day it was all back again.

Finally, that last morning, she gave in. After dropping Howard off at work she drove directly to Bill's house. She parked right in front. She waited. Nothing happened. No one seemed to be home. She got out of the car and stood leaning against it .in a seductive pose. "Please," she pleaded silently, "please let Bill see me, please let him notice me." Still nothing happened. "Please let someone see me, anyone. I've got to fuck someone. Oh, God, I'm a whore. I'm the Whore of Babylon. 0 God, kill me, I've got to die." She jumped in the car and raced back to the apartment. She got a razor blade and went to cut her wrist. She could not do it. But God could. God would. God would give her what she deserved. He would put an end to it, an end to her. Let the vigil begin. "0 God, I'm so scared, I'm so scared, please hurry, I'm so scared." She began to chant, waiting. And that was how her sister-in-law found her.

This story was elicited in its entirety only after months of painstaking work. Much of this work centered around the concept of sin.

Where did she learn that masturbation is a sin?

Who had told her it was a sin?

How did her informant know it was a sin?

What made masturbation a sin?

Why is infidelity a sin?

What makes a sin?

 And so on, and so on. 

I know of no profession more exciting and more privileged than the practice of psychotherapy, but at times it may be almost tedious as the attitudes of a lifetime are methodically challenged one by one in all their particulars. Often such challenge is at least partly successful even before the whole story emerges. For instance, Kathy was able to tell me about many of these details, such as her fantasies and her temptation to masturbation, only after she herself had begun to question the validity of her guilt and her conception of these acts as sins. In raising these questions it was also necessary that she question the validity of the authority and wisdom of the whole Catholic Church, or at least the church as she had experienced it.

One does not take on the Catholic Church easily. She could do so only because she had the strength of an ally in me, because she had gradually come to feel that I was truly on her side, truly had her best interests at heart and would not lead her into evil.

This "therapeutic alliance," such as she and I had slowly constructed, is a prerequisite for all successful major psychotherapy.

Much of this work was conducted on an outpatient basis.

Kathy had been able to be discharged from the hospital a week following her sodium amytal interview.

But it was only after four months of intensive therapy that she was able to say in regard to her notions of sin, "I guess the Catholic Church sold me a bill of goods."

At this point a new phase of therapy was begun, for we began to ask the question: How was it that this had happened?

Why had she allowed herself to buy this bill of goods, lock, stock and barrel?

How was it that she had not been able to think more for herself and had not until now challenged the church in any way?

"But Mother told me I should not question the church," Kathy said.

And so we began to work on Kathy's relationship with her parents. With her father there was no relationship. There was no one to relate to. Father worked; that was all he did. He worked and he worked, and when he came home it was to sleep in his chair with his beer. Except on Friday nights. Then he went out for his beer. Mother ran the family. Alone, unchallenged, un-contradicted, unopposed, she ran it. She was kind but firm.

She was giving but never gave in. Peaceful and implacable.

"You mustn't do that, dear. Good girls don't do that." "You don't want to wear those shoes, dear. Girls from nice homes don't wear those kind of shoes." "It isn't a question of whether you want to go to mass, dear. The Lord wants us to go to mass." Gradually Kathy came to see that behind the power of the Catholic Church lay the enormous power of her mother, a person so softly yet so totally domineering that it seemed unthinkable to defy her.

But psychotherapy seldom goes smoothly. Six months after she had left the hospital Howard called one Sunday morning to say that Kathy was locked in the bathroom of their apartment chanting once again.

Upon my instructions he persuaded her to return to the hospital, where I met them. Kathy was almost as frightened as the first day I saw her. Once again Howard had no clue as to what had set it off. I took Kathy into her room. "Stop chanting," I ordered, "and tell me what's the matter."

"I can't."

"Yes, you can, Kathy."

Hardly catching her breath in between her chanting, she suggested, "Maybe I can if you give me the truth drug again."

"No, Kathy," I replied. "This time you're strong enough to do it yourself."

She wailed. Then she looked at me and resumed her chanting.

But in her look I thought I detected anger, almost fury, at me.

"You're angry at me," I stated.

She shook her head as she chanted.

"Kathy," I said, "I can think of a dozen reasons why you might be angry at me. But I don't know unless you tell me.

You can tell me. It will be all right."

"I'm going to die," she moaned.

"No, you're not, Kathy. You're not going to die because you're angry at me. I'm not going to kill you because you're angry at me. It's all right for you to be angry at me."

"My days are not long," Kathy moaned. "My days are not long. "

Something about these words sounded strange to me. They were not the words I would have expected. Somehow they seemed unnatural. But I was not sure what to say except to repeat myself one way or another.

"Kathy, I love you," I said. "I love you even if you hate me. That's what love is. How could I punish you for hating me, since I love you, hating and all?"

"It's not you I hate," she sobbed.

Suddenly it clicked. "Your days are not long. Not long on this earth. That's it, isn't it, Kathy? Honor your mother and your father that your days may be long on this earth. The Fifth Commandment. Honor them or die. That's what's happening, isn't it?"

"I hate her," Kathy muttered. Then louder, as if emboldened by the sound of her own voice saying the dreaded words,

"I hate her. I hate my mother. I hate her. She never gave me ... she never gave me ... she never gave me me. She never let me be me. She made me in her image. She made me, made me, made me. She never let any of me be me."

Actually, Kathy's therapy was still in its early stages. The real day-to-day terror still lay ahead, the terror of being truly herself in a thousand little ways.

Recognizing the fact that her mother had totally dominated her, Kathy then had to deal with why she had allowed this to happen. Rejecting her mother's domination, she had to face the process of establishing her own values and making her own decisions, and she was very frightened. It was much safer to let her mother make the decisions, much simpler to adopt her mother's values and those of the church. It took much more work to direct her own existence.

Later Kathy was to say, "You know, I wouldn't really trade places for anything with the person I used to be, yet sometimes I still long for those days. My life used to be easier then. At least in a way."

Beginning to function more independently, Kathy confronted Howard with his failure as a lover. Howard promised he would change. But nothing happened. Kathy pressed him.

He began to get anxiety attacks. On my urging, when he came to me about these, he went to another psychotherapist for treatment. He started to deal with deep-seated homosexual feelings, against which he had defended himself by his marriage to Kathy. Because she was very physically attractive he had regarded her as a "real catch," a prize the winning of which would prove to himself and the world his masculine competence. In a meaningful way he had never loved her.

Having come to accept this, he and Kathy most amicably agreed to a divorce. Kathy went to work as a saleswoman in a large clothing store. With me she agonized over the innumerable small but independent decisions she was required to make in connection with her job. Gradually she became more assertive and confident. She dated many men, intending eventual remarriage and motherhood, but for the time being enjoying her career. She became an assistant buyer for the store.

After terminating therapy she was promoted to buyer, and most recently I heard from her that she had moved to another, larger firm in the same capacity, and was quite pleased with herself at the age of twenty-seven. She does not go to church and no longer considers herself a Catholic.

She doesn't know whether she believes in God or not, but will tell you frankly that the issue of God just doesn't seem a very important one at this point in her life.

I have described Kathy's case at such length precisely because it is so typical of the relationship between religious upbringing and psychopathology.

There are millions of Kathys.

I used to tell people only somewhat facetiously that the Catholic Church provided me with my living as a psychiatrist.

I could equally well have said the Baptist Church, Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church, or any other.

The church was not, of course, the sole cause of Kathy's neurosis. In a sense, the church was only a tool used by Kathy's mother to cement and augment her excessive parental authority. One could justifiably say that the mother's domineering nature, abetted by an absentee father, was the more basic cause of the neurosis, and in this respect too Kathy's case was typical.

Nonetheless, the church must share the blame. No nun in her parochial school and no priest in her catechism class ever encouraged Kathy to reasonably question religious doctrine or in any way whatever to think for herself. There was never any evidence of concern on the part of the church that its doctrine might be over-taught, unrealistically rigid or subject to misuse and misapplication.

One way of analyzing Kathy's problem would be to state that while she believed wholeheartedly in God, the commandments and the concept of sin, her religion and understanding of the world was of the hand-me-down variety and badly suited to her needs.

She had failed to question, to challenge, to think for herself. Yet Kathy's church-and this also is typical-made not the slightest effort to assist her in working out a more appropriate and original personal religion.

It would appear that churches generally, if anything, favor the hand-me-down variety.

Because Kathy's case is so typical and others like it are so common in their practice, many psychiatrists and psychotherapists perceive religion as the Enemy.

They may even think of religion as being itself a neurosis-a collection of inherently irrational ideas that serve to enchain people's minds and oppress their instincts toward mental growth. Freud, a rationalist and scientist par excellence, seemed to see things in  roughly this light, and since he is the most influential figure in modern psychiatry (for many good reasons), his attitudes have contributed to the concept of religion as a neurosis.

It is indeed tempting for psychiatrists to view themselves as knights of modern science locked in noble combat with the destructive forces of ancient religious superstition and irrational but authoritarian dogma.

And the fact of the matter is that psychotherapists must spend enormous amounts of time and effort in the struggle to liberate their patients' minds from outmoded religious ideas and concepts that are clearly destructive.

Episode 4:        The Case of Marcia

But not all cases are like Kathy's by any means. There are many other patterns, some also quite common.

Marcia was one of the very first of my long-term-therapy cases. She was a quite wealthy young woman in her mid-twenties who sought my attention because of a generalized anhedonia.

While she could not put her finger on anything wrong with her existence, she found it inexplicably joyless. Certainly she looked joyless. Despite her wealth and her college education she looked like an impoverished, bedraggled and aged immigrant woman. Throughout the first year of therapy she invariably dressed in badly fitting clothes of blue, gray, black or brown, and carried with her an enormous, filthy and ragged carpetbag of similar hue.

She was the only child of intellectual parents, both highly successful University Professors, both socialists of a sort who believed that religion was "pie in the sky by and by."

They had made fun of her when, as a young adolescent, she had attended church with a girl friend.

By the time she entered therapy, Marcia agreed with her parents wholeheartedly.

At the very beginning she announced, somewhat proudly and stridently, that she was an atheist-not a namby-pamby atheist but a real one, who believed that the human race would be much better off if it could escape from the delusion that God existed or even might exist.

Interestingly, Marcia's dreams were chock-full of religious symbols, such as birds flying into rooms, their beaks holding scrolls upon which obscure messages were written in an ancient language.

But I did not confront Marcia with this aspect of her unconscious. Indeed, we did not deal at all with issues of religion at any time throughout the two-year course of her therapy. What we primarily focused on at great length was her relationship with her parents, two most intelligent and rational individuals who had provided well for her economically but were extraordinarily distant from her emotionally in their intellectually austere way. In addition to their emotional distance, both of them were also so highly invested in their own careers that they had little time or energy for her. The result was that while she had a comfortable and intact home.

Marcia was the proverbial "poor little rich girl," a psychological orphan. But she was reluctant to look at this.

She resented it when I suggested that her parents had significantly deprived her, and she resented it when I pointed out that she dressed like an orphan. It was just the new style, she said, and I had no right to criticize it.

Progress with Marcia in therapy was painfully gradual, but dramatic.

The key element was the warmth and closeness of the relationship that we were slowly able to construct with each other, which contrasted with the relationship she had had with her parents.

One morning at the beginning of the second year of therapy Marcia came into her session carrying a new bag. It was but a third the size of her old carpetbag and was a riot of bright colors.

Thereafter about once each month she would add a new piece of color-bright oranges, yellows, light blues and greens-to her wardrobe, almost like a flower slowly unfolding its petals.

 In her next-to-Iast session with me she was musing about how well she felt and said, "You know, it's strange, but not only has the inside of me changed; everything outside of me seems to have changed too. Even though I'm still here, living in the same old house and doing some of the same old things, the whole world looks very different, feels very different. It feels warm and safe and loving and exciting and good. I remember telling you I was an atheist.

I'm not sure I am any more. In fact, I don't think I am.

Sometimes now when the world feels right, I say to myself, 'You know, I bet there really is a God. I don't think the world could be so right without a God.' It's funny. I don't know how to talk about this sort of thing. I just feel connected, real, like I'm a real part of a very big picture, and even though I can't see much of the picture, I know it's there and I know it's good and I know I'm a part of it."

Through therapy Kathy moved from a place where the notion of God was all-important to a place where it was of no importance. Marcia, on the other hand, moved from a position where she rejected the notion of God to one where it was becoming quite meaningful for her. The same process, the same therapist, yet with seemingly opposite results, both successful.

How are we to explain this?

Before we attempt to do so, let us consider yet another type of case.

In Kathy's case it was necessary for the therapist to actively challenge her religious ideas in order to bring about change in the direction of a dramatically diminished influence of the God-concept in her life.

In the case of Marcia the concept of God began to assume an increased influence, but without the therapist ever challenging her religious concepts in any way. Is it ever necessary, we may ask, for a therapist to actively challenge a patient's atheism or agnosticism and deliberately lead the patient in the direction of religiosity?

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