Religion: Love Affair

The willingness of many clergymen and psychoanalysts to say soothingly that religion and Freud can get along fine with each other makes no sense to bright young (29) Irving Kristol, assistant editor of the bright young (four years) highbrow monthly, Commentary. In the current issue of his magazine, which is sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, Writer Kristol suggests that the peacemakers between the two camps are talking through their hats.

One of the basic tenets of Freud’s psychoanalysis, Kristol says, was the conviction that religion is nothing but a combination of neurosis and illusion. Today, Author Kristol complains, many clergymen and psychoanalysts are trying to take over Freud’s conclusions while ignoring the premises on which they were based.

It was in the U.S., he writes, that the idea first took root that psychoanalysis and religion could somehow lie down together and live happily ever after. “In America all races and creeds live and work peacefully side by side—why should not ideas do likewise? . . . It is . . .in such a benign climate of opinion that the current love affair between psychoanalysis and religion has been, time & again, consummated. There have been bickerings . . . and the Catholic Church has shown itself to be a rather frigid partner. But, all in all, things have gone well, and the occasional Catholic reserve has been more than made up for by Protestant acquiescence and Jewish ardor.”

Psychoanalysts and the friendly clergymen, says Author Kristol, tend to talk about human happiness instead of truth: they “blithely agree that religion and psychoanalysis have at heart the same intention: to help men ‘adjust’ … to make them happy or virtuous or productive …

“Moses did not promise the Jews ‘happiness,’ nor did he say they should walk in the path of the Law because he thought it a virtuous law. The Law was true because it was divine—it was God’s Law, a revelation of man’s place in the fundamental constitution of existence … Men’s true happiness and virtue are in adhering to this truth—because it is true . . .”

Orthodox psychoanalysis and religion, says Kristol, will never agree on truth. The issue between them is simple and clear-cut. Religion asserts “that the understanding of psychoanalysis is only a dismal, sophisticated misunderstanding, that human reason is inferior to divine reason, that the very existence of psychoanalysis is a symptom of gross spiritual distress . . . Psychoanalysis, religion might say, comes not to remove insanity, but to inaugurate it.”