Abstract
This “mini-book” (p. xix) by the renowned British analyst Patrick Casement is unlikely to become as widely known as its comparably slim sisters—Voltaire’s Candide, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” and Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince—all of which run fewer than a hundred pages. However, this somber prediction must not detract from the fact that Casement’s Credo? is a work of great luminosity, grace, and wisdom.
All of seventy-two pages in length, the book succeeds in meaningfully addressing such profound matters as the existence of God, the pitfalls of organized religion, the nature of faith, the misleading comfort offered by the “curse of certainty” (p. 66), and the maturational nudge given by the stance of “non-certainty” (p. 57), which the author distinguishes from the cowardly indecision of “uncertainty.” The book also comments upon the clinical discourse with homo-religious and hetero-religious analysands and upon some unthought but striking similarities between psychoanalysis and religion. The remarkable thing is that the panoply of topics does not appear forced or narratively breathless. The book flows seamlessly and runs deep.
All this makes my task as a reviewer enjoyable but also difficult. Encountering a psychoanalytic book suffused with the language and imagery of Christianity, I feel inclined to underscore the distinctive Christian voice that is audible, if faintly, throughout the history, theory, and praxis of our field. In fact, I want to suggest that there exists a “Jewish psychoanalysis” and a “Christian psychoanalysis.” The former (represented by Freud, Klein, and Anna Freud) seems anchored in skepticism, stoic ethics, doubt about basic human goodness, respect for speaking, and interpretive interventions; it reflects the mentality of a persecuted minority. The latter (represented by Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip) seems anchored in credulousness, romantic ethics, doubt about basic human badness, respect for silence, and affirmative interventions; it reflects the mentally of a dominant majority. But I get scared, and think such a statement might be “politically incorrect” and get me into trouble.
Next I am tempted to focus on the topic of believing or not believing in the existence of God. But I am wary of such an approach since, in Casement’s words, “I cannot know that there is or there is not a god” (p. 47) or that “we can no more prove that God is not Man’s illusion than we can prove that God really exists” (p. 12). Come to think of it, I regard both the staunch believer and the ferocious atheist to be misled. The existence or nonexistence of God is not a subject for logical argument. And in this very spirit, I have concluded that “God is a majestic poem” (Akhtar 2009, p. 5). Here my thinking is in perfect accord with that of Casement. He takes pains to “strip faith of its dependence upon argument” (p. 12) and asserts that true faith (as distinguished from religious dogma) is “not based upon any rational certainty, but is thrown into relief as an act of courage” (p. 12).
Lest he come across as being “too soft” on religion, let me point out that Casement derides the “pomp and show” (p. 1) embroidered in places of worship, is suspicious of the “social control” (p. 2) exercised by organized religion, and shows a keen awareness of religion’s proclivity to become “a playground for primitive defenses, in particular those of idealization, splitting, projection, and denial” (p. 46). And yet Casement asserts that human beings search for “a meaning in life” (p. xvii) and longs for some “anagogic” explanation (Silberer 1914) of their existence and that of the universe. In Casement’s view, man is “afraid of his life being without purpose, and is afraid of being lost in his own insignificance” (p. 13). This existential anguish, coupled with his encounter with nature’s quirks and the sprawling invisibility of the cosmos, results in the need for a hopeful belief in a higher power, a god, some awe-inspiring solution to the riddle of life and death, or the firm hand of a guiding idea, however unmentalized or unmentalizable it might be.
Casement’s prescription to alleviate this suffering is to avoid the extremes of unbending religiosity and smug atheism, and to follow the path of “non-certainty” (p. 51). Unlike the resigned passivity of uncertainty, non-certainty is an active and “positive choice to remain, for the time being, non-certain [which] can help to keep us open to meaning that we have not yet arrived at” (p. 51). Unlike Freud, who in The Future of an Illusion (1927) sought to “prove” that God does not exist (while fervently and repeatedly bowing to God in his personal correspondence; for convincing documentation of this, see Nicholi 2002), Casement refuses to achieve closure on this matter. He proposes that “there is more freedom and richness in our not knowing than in the suffocation of some claims of sureness” (p. 66).
Casement’s next step is to juxtapose psychoanalysis and religion. Contrary to the prevalent assumption of the two being adversaries, he unveils their similarities. “In each, we are confronted by the unknown. In each, we attempt to know the unfamiliar through the familiar. In each, we may become misguided by our own imagining and misconception. In each, we find a restless wish to find answers to questions that trouble us. In each, we find an unease at not knowing” (p. 55). Overlap exists also in the institutionalized forms of the two. Thus, one religion deems itself superior or at least more correct than the other. The same is true of the attitude psychoanalysts of one persuasion have toward those holding a different viewpoint. The swords frequently brandished by people of competing religions are different only in their blood-shedding magnitude from the schisms and splits that develop between rival psychoanalytic groups.
A remedy to such bitter bifurcations is to adhere to the principle of non-certainty and remember that answers are the offspring of an open-minded and questioning attitude, not the children of certainty and arrogance. Hope may come also from subscribing to what Casement calls the Resurrection Principle (p. 62). He illustrates this idea by invoking the life-death-life sequence in the rhythms of nature. “Out of the dying of autumn and the seeming lifelessness of winter, we are greeted by the new life of spring. There is no doubt that this touches something deep in the human spirit and is celebrated right across the spectrum of human experience: from the gardener or farmer to the poet, and from the painter to the mystic” (p. 22). Extrapolating this observation to the ebb and flow of psychic life, Casement declares that “we need to be able to tolerate the ‘death’ of what we may formerly have regarded as essential to our well-being, or seen as fundamental to our ways of thinking or existing. We may then find that, beyond the death of what we had previously clung to, we may become newly open to much we had not until then even contemplated” (pp. 62–63); he wonders about the “strange fact that some of the most productive episodes in [his] life have emerged from the lowest of times” (p. 61). “Even the blackest of times,” he writes, “do not have to be unproductive” (p. 63).
Now there are many ways to grasp what underlies such phenomena. In the “classic” view, “improvement” during or after suffering has been regarded as a post-punishment release from the clutches of a harsh superego and the resulting diminution of guilt leading to greater creativity. To wit, Freud admitted that he found a “moderate amount of discomfort necessary for intensive work” and that he had “to be somewhat miserable in order to write well” (quoted in Jones 1953, pp. 345–346). A slightly different but overlapping version is offered by the Italian philosopher-psychoanalyst Gemma Corradi Fiumara (2015), who advocates the need for “self-desecration” (p. 117), the renunciation of erstwhile valued self-representations, for psychic growth. In Casement’s manner of thinking, the rebirth after loss of self (or its parts) resembles the resurrection of Christ. To put it in a paraphrased Winnicottian language, this is the “survival of the subject.”
Although Casement does not mention them explicitly, we can discern many illustrations of such life-death-life sequences in our profession’s evolution. For instance, the “death” of a one-sided and narrow definition of the “analyzability” concept has led to a richer way of assessing suitability for analytic treatment, a way that takes into consideration variables that originate within the analyst (e.g., old age, health status, convictions regarding gender issues, limits of sociopolitical empathy). Similarly, the shift from deploying a purely intrapsychic “one-person psychology” as an explanatory model has created space for using an “interpsychic” two-person psychology (Bolognini 2015, pp. 57–80) to understand clinical material. These examples embody Casement’s resurrection principle. The “death” of one thing becomes the “birth” of another. Similar and perhaps far more dramatic examples can be given from the reform movements in various religions.
This brings us to the concluding passage of Casement’s small but magnificent book. This passage, characteristically, ends not on a clear answer to the riddles at hand but on a question. “Where then lies the Truth we may be looking for, in religion and psychoanalysis? Can it be in the answers? Or, might it more often be found in questioning?” (p. 68).
In thus distilling Casement’s main points, I have not had the opportunity to comment on how deeply personal his book is (revelations of his psychiatric hospitalization, his facing sexual advances by a priest, his cancer diagnosis) and how suffused it is with the Christian idiom (baptism, communion, the cross). But perhaps it not only a mere lack of “opportunity” but something else that has led to my avoidance of these two strands in Casement’s narrative. I think I have not wanted to get into the personal issues due to my distaste for “wild analysis” and have hardly remarked on the Christian iconography because of my unfamiliarity with the pertinent scriptures. Like Freud, who called himself a “godless Jew” (letter to Oscar Pfister, cited in Gay 1988, p. 599), I am an “unbelieving Muslim,” and even Casement, who is so steeped in religious metaphor, refers to himself as a “Christian agnostic” (p. 47). Each of these self-assigned identities reveals a paradox: one can maintain belonging to one’s religious group without submitting to its deity. Casement has brought this to our attention in a manner that is forceful but not didactic, emotional but not sentimental, and exquisitely spiritual but not religious.
Having received an unearned gift of such elegance and power fills my heart with gratitude. But I do not know how to express it. Is this glowing book review enough? Should I send a personal note of thanks to Patrick Casement (whose work I have long admired)? Will it be more appropriate to thank Anne Adelman, one of JAPA’s book review editors, for sending this wonderful little book my way? Or, for the pleasure of reading this book and for the multitude of thoughts it has mobilized, should I simply thank God?