How has the ‘science’ of psychology emerged as a quest to find the ‘cosmic spark’ within us?

 Today’s Post

Last week we showed how Teilhard’s seven steps of meditation can be seen in terms of Karen Armstrong’s secular search for the ‘immortal spark’: that essential agent of cosmic evolution which increases complexity which eventually manifests itself as our core.  While Teilhard inevitably takes the tone of Western religious tradition, we saw how his approach to meditation is nonetheless basically secular.

This week we will carry this one step further: to look at how meditation, the traditional religious search for self, underlies a practice entirely devoid of religious belief: psychology.

The Emergence of Psychology

The increasing depth in the way that human persons began to experience themselves in the emerging awareness of their unique human person seen in the “Axial Age” also molded the form that this thinking was taking.  In doing so, human evolution began to move from attributing the vagaries of life to supernatural agencies to attempts to understand them as natural phenomena.  This movement gave rise to the empirical approaches of science.  Initially constrained to the ‘material’ world, this approach eventually began to apply itself to the human person itself, based on clinical observation instead of religious doctrine and biblical interpretation.

Sigmund Freud pioneered this new scientific approach to understanding the human person.  He applied the new methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. He was virtually the first major thinker to address the aspect of human nature which underlies sexuality (and therefore relationships) in objective, secular terms.

In Irving Singer’s comprehensive analysis of human relationships, “The Nature of Love”, he comments,

“Like other thinkers of the time, Freud sought to explain the human condition in terms of the rationalistic concepts that science was uncovering.  He proposed a completely new lexicon and analytic approach to understand the nature of “affect”, which includes all of what we normally call feelings, emotions, sensations, “intuitive” and “instinctive” dispositions, erotic attachments, hatred as well as love, and also kinesthetic impressions of any kind.  For that job we require a totally different type of methodology.”

   Historically, some thinkers, such as Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine, had generally proposed a positive interpretation of reality, believing that what is ultimate in reality sustains, even conforms to, human ideals; while others, such as Lucretius, and Hobbes came to see the universe as neutral, even hostile, to such optimistic assumptions.  Freud falls into this second, pessimistic, category.

Singer contrasts these two perspectives, showing the duality of thinking which results from this dichotomy:

”Philosophers have often tried to reduce the different senses of the word “love” to a single meaning that best suited their doctrinal position.  To the Platonists, “real love”, being a search for absolute beauty or goodness, must be good itself; to the Freudians, love is “really” amoral sexuality, though usually sublimated and deflected from its coital aim.  The Platonist argues that even sexuality belongs to a search for the ideal, and otherwise would not be called love in any sense.  The Freudian derives all ideals from attempts to satisfy organic needs, so that whatever Plato recommends must also be reducible to love as sexuality.”

 Freud In An Oversimplified Nutshell

Freud’s thinking provided a monumental, unprecedented, and unified approach to understanding the human person and relationships.  Like Teilhard’s finding of the ‘personal core’ addressed last week, Freud understood the person as an entity possessing a certain “life force” which empowers survival and procreation and is at the center of personal being.  He saw this force, identified as ‘libido’, based on sexual instinct, as the ultimate agent of human growth.

In Freud’s thinking, the libido therefore is a manifestation of the energy that nourishes the self, and he identified the object of the libido as sexual union.  Therefore, relationships that do not lead to sexual union interrupt the flow and replenishment of libido and lead to impoverishment of the self.  As Freud saw the self as initially focused on itself, the “narcissism” at birth represents a state to which the self always seeks returning.  “Nourishing the libido” therefore requires us to maintain our narcissism which is essential to our sense of self.

Freud believed that relationships required the person to “idealize” others; it was necessary for the lover to transfer an ideal to his beloved that he has difficulty achieving within himself.  To Freud, we love that in the other person which we feel will compensate for our inadequacies, and thus we will recover the security of primal narcissism and by doing so maintain our libido.  The dependence upon relationships, in Freud’s approach, was therefore risky.  Failed relationships would undermine our libido and therefore diminish ourselves.

Further, Freud saw the force of libido as possessing an undercurrent of hate.  He therefore saw love as the mixture of ‘eros’ with “man’s natural aggressive instinct (the’ death drive’)”, which is inseparable from it. In his words,

“Eros and destructiveness are intertwined within all erotic relationships.  Love is not at the basis of everything unless you add hate to it”.

   While Freud saw love as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, the resulting relationships were potentially harmful to the person because they are predicated on a personal core which is not to be trusted.

Love is dangerous, as he saw it, because at our core we ourselves are dangerous.

While Teilhard heard a voice from the bottomless abyss from which flowed his life: “It is I, be not afraid”, Freud would have heard a different voice: “It is ego, be very afraid”.

While Freud understood the human kernel as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, its complex love/hate constitution leads to relationships which could harm the person.  Due to this underlying flaw in our basic core, he asserts, not only does love fail to solve human problems, but can cause them as well.

Thus, Freud, while pioneering the objective secular application of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position orthogonal to Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe.

The Next Post

Freud’s approach to psychiatry, like Luther’s earlier approach to Christianity, burst upon emerging Western society and immediately began to ramify into parallel but radically different expressions.  As can be seen in today’s versions of psychotherapy, American positivism has muted much of Freud’s pessimism, materialism, and misogyny.  Many of these newer approaches to psychology focus equally on the relation between therapist and patient as well as the therapist’s skill in plumbing, analyzing, and articulating the labyrinthine depths of the patient.

Next week we will examine such different approaches and explore how they can be seen as ‘secular’ versions of meditation’.