Of God and Psychotherapy

As a psychiatrist in practice for more than 40 years, I have come to know many people with a depth and transparency that does not exist in any other relationship. Even among those with whom we are most intimate, therapists need to preserve a certain privacy (if not mystery) to maintain our relationships. Stripping another person of his or her psychological depth is useful only in a psychotherapeutic context, and even then we must tread very carefully. Like mariners, psychotherapists know well the benefits and risks of scraping the bottom of a boat.

Patients present themselves to psychotherapists with certain symptoms and/or psychological issues. Commonly, this initial presentation (there are many subtle variations) is the outermost layer of an individual’s psychological problems. Just beneath it, there often bubbles mild, chronic dissatisfaction and confusion fed by a less-mature self that permeates the person’s life. André Malraux (1968), the French novelist, told the story of a country priest who had heard confessions for many decades. The priest summed up what he had learned about human nature in two statements: “First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks . . . [and second], there is no such thing as grown-up person” (p 1). These two observations are very closely related, if not one and the same: Those who have “not grown up” remain chronically susceptible to psychological conflicts. It is on these psychological conflicts that long-term psychoanalytic therapy focuses (Karasu, 2003, p. x).

If one continues scraping away at the psyche, one will arrive at the layer that confounds all á-la-mariners bottom scrapers: psychoanalysts, priests, ministers, rabbis, gurus, and Zen masters. This layer, the one from which nothing more can be scraped away, reveals ultimate existential questions: “What is the meaning of all this?” “What is the purpose of my life?”

Religious true believers do not pose such questions because the answers are found in the questions; these answers range from “mu” (meaning “you’ve asked the wrong/unanswerable/not applicable” question) in the East to “the purpose is to serve God” in the West. In more puzzling moments, a faithful person is reconciled with “God knows!” Doubts, cognitive dissonance, ambivalence, and serious inquiries are left unindulged and kept in check by family and congregation.

Others continue to search for an alternative life philosophy. That search, an ontological passion, is inherent in man and has been described differently throughout history. As Rabbi Harold Schulweis (2010) surmised, for Plato, it was a yearning for an Idea; for Stoics, it was a drive for wisdom; for Augustine, it was a longing for truth; for Spinoza, the amor dei intellectualis, and for Hegel, it was the passion for an Absolute (p 16).

As for psychotherapists, we have agreed and disagreed with Freud that God is a communal delusion, and we have been religious, atheist, spiritual, dismissive, or silent, but always remain somewhat unresolved. Predicate theology offers a resolution to our dilemma by offering an intelligible alternative— an alternative ladder— asserting a “divinity of attributes,” i.e. “gods of attributes” that transcend gods of subjects and gods of objects.

The concept of predicate theology has its origin in the 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1890) who said, “Not the attribute of divinity but the divineness . . . of the attribute, is the first true Divine being” (p 21). Schulweis (2010), who was primarily interested in theodicy, i.e., reconciling the evil and the moral ideal of God, liked Feuerbach’s call for this inversion of the religious concept and made it a proper subject of theology—what he called Predicate Theology (pp. 128-129). There are predicates that are common to all religions, i.e., love, compassion, goodness, and honesty, which form the essence of a divinity of attributes.

Expressed or not, God and religion are ever-present subjects in treatment as they are inevitable in people’s lives. Religion addresses the affiliative needs of individuals and includes an entire gamut of cognitive, affective, moral, aesthetic, celebratory, as well as mystical and liturgical values vital to the fabric of life. God addresses the needs of people for the divine that are equally vital for confirming, validating, grounding, and reassuring those values and providing meaning for their lives. While psychotherapists remain neutral to patients’ religious views and are silent in regard to their own beliefs, they need a transcending philosophy about religions and gods as a potential therapeutic medium.

Psychotherapy is an instrument for remediation of psychological deficits and conflict resolution, as well as an instrument for growth and self-cultivation. In fact, psychotherapy is the finest form of life education. All of this is done without psychotherapists’ playing a teacher, a minister, a priest, a rabbi, an imam, or a Buddhist monk, but by being familiar with what they know and more.

That “more” is about understanding “the attributes” of gods and religions as they serve the all-too-human needs of believing and belonging. It is about the distillation of common psychological, sociological, moral, and philosophical attributes of religions, and the recognition that the attributes themselves are faith and God. Attributes that serve the affiliative needs define faith, for example, belonging is faith; attributes that serve the divine needs define God, for example, compassion is God. It is not that God is love, but rather that love is God; it is not God is mercy, but it is mercy is God; it is not God is truth, but the truth is God. In short, the attributes of God are Gods themselves.

The attributes of religion and God are separate but highly intertwined. Attributes of religion pull us down to earth, and their purpose is to civilize humanity. Attributes of God pull us up to the heavens, and their purpose is to make humans godly. In tandem they make us soulful and spiritual beings, and they provide meaning to our lives. These grounding predicates of God and religion also offer a remedy for the common cognitive dissonance between organized religion and our need to be true to ourselves.

What matters most, says philosopher Ronald Dworkin (2013), is the “. . . conviction that there is, independently and objectively, a right way to live (p 155).” That is what the phrase attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson “ . . . all churches are churches of one member” (1994, p. 292) must mean. Those who have recovered from their primitive innocence need to formulate their ideas of God and religion, regardless of their affiliation with a religious community. One may need to resonate emotionally with the God of his or her religion, but intellectually need to transcend all its dogma and cultivate a personal concept of divinity free from any theological structure. Such an enlightened person achieves enduring equanimity by striving to own the attributes of Gods—to be godly. This is equally true for psychotherapists as it is for their patients.