Critical Discussion of the Bible and Psychoanalysis

The Bible, which is of course the central holy text of the Christian faith, contains numerous figures who from an everyday perspective could perhaps be classified as abnormal. As the discipline of psychology has come into maturity in modern times, at least some psychoanalysts have tended to pick up on this point and focus on these figures from the Bible. The essay will begin by providing a general overview of the state of the discourse in this regard. Then, it will provide two case studies of psychoanalysis applied to biblical figures: the first will be the prophet Jeremiah, and the second will be Jesus of Nazareth itself. From this point, the essay will make the argument that there would seem to be a theological disagreement between the psychological picture of human nature provided by the Bible on the one hand and the psychological picture of the same provided by psychoanalysis. 

State of the Discourse

To start with, it is worth pointing out that psychology is a secular discipline, and that psychoanalysis is a secular professional part of this discipline. Therefore, a premise that must be understood is that here is that the figures in the Bible can be treated as any other human being can be treated; they are not immune from being objects of psychoanalysis simply because of their religious status. Rather, the basic point would be that psychoanalysis can get to the bottom of human nature, the figures in the Bible were human, and the figures in the Bible are thus fair objects for the practice of psychoanalysis. This is a basic premise that must be made clear, because without an acknowledgement of this premise, none of the following discussion would even be possible. 

With this stated, it can now be pointed out that the perspective of psychoanalysis on the Bible is an essentially critical one. This follows from the basic fact that according to the religious perspective, the figures of the Bible are not to criticized or challenged in any way—whereas conducting such a critique is indeed the very purpose of the existence of psychoanalysis. The precedent of this kind of inquiry was set by none other than Sigmund Freud himself, primarily in his work Moses and Monotheism. He suggests in this work, for instance, that the monotheistic, father-like God of Israel primarily emerged as a result of complex guilt feelings that the Israelites developed toward Moses. This is characteristic of the psychoanalytical approach to biblical figures: rather than taking the affirmations of the figures as a priori valid, psychoanalysis seeks to understand and explain the deep psychological reasons for figures in the Bible may have acted and believed in the ways that they did.

Psychological evaluations of figures in the Bible can even extend to God himself; and when the evaluation is carried out from a secular perspective, the conclusions are often less than pleasant. For example, Dawkins has infamously suggested that "the God of the Old Testament is . . . a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak," not to mention a "megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully" (51). Of course, in order to make such an assessment, both lay commentators and psychoanalysis would need to forget that they are speaking about a figure who is supposed to be God; and in general, they would have to forget that God himself is in fact considered to be indisputably real within the worldview of the Bible. This thus sets up a basic potential nexus of conflict between the Bible on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other. This will be explored further below. 

Case Study 1: Jeremiah

The Bible itself makes it quite clear that Jeremiah suffered from what psychoanalysts would ordinarily call depression. As Jackson has written: "the noble Jeremiah, known as the weeping prophet, because he was so ill-treated by evil Israel, gave way to the pangs of depression and cursed the very day of his birth" (paragraph 8). If someone today declared that it would have been better if he had never been born, then this would almost certainly be taken as a sign that the person in question is afflicted with depression. Within the context of the biblical world, however, the matter becomes more complex, due to the simple fact that Jeremiah believed himself to be acting on a divine mandate: that is, his "depression" would not have been an intrinsic problem but rather a more or less reasonable response to a highly stressful and often intolerable social state of affairs. 

From the perspective of psychoanalysis, however, it cannot be simply accepted that God exists, or that he calls prophets to speak in his name. Therefore, the diagnosis of depression for Jeremiah would need to be buttressed by the diagnosis of some form of schizoid disorder. As Heschel has made clear, this is the attitude that psychoanalysis has usually been compelled to take with respect to all the prophets in general (498-523). This is because Jeremiah, along with all the other prophets in the Bible, made the extravagant claim that they were in close contact with the Lord, and that their emotional responses were fully justified on the basis of the objective visions that they saw. Such a claim must either be accepted on its own terms, or else essentially rejected a manifestation of serious madness. Psychoanalysis, being psychoanalysis, cannot accept the metaphysical claims of the prophets on their own terms; rather, the claims must be interpreted through the prism of the worldview underpinning psychoanalysis itself. That prism does not allow for a concept such as (say) divinely inspired prophecy. 

Case Study 2: Jesus

The controversial nature of the evaluation of psychoanalysis of Jeremiah and the prophets can be seen to reach something of an apex when it comes to the figure of Jesus himself. This is because, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, it would be difficult to conclude that Jesus was anything other than a kind of suicide by proxy. As Iyer has written: "The most insightful comment they can make on your destiny is that you were a suicide by proxy: that you were on the same page as a depressed adolescent who pulls a toy gun on the cops, with the sincere hope of getting shot" (595-596). Moreover, it would also be necessary to accept the idea that Jesus was a paranoid schizophrenic: after all, the man called himself God, and believed that he was here to save the world. If any person said such things today, the diagnosis of psychosis would be almost immediate; and from the perspective of psychoanalysis, there would be no justification whatsoever for treating Jesus as anything other than an ordinary man. 

It is worth reiterating the radical disjunction of interpretations that is now beginning to emerge, when considering the perspective of the Bible on the one hand and the perspective of psychoanalysis on the other. According to the Bible, Jesus purposefully came to this world in order to sacrifice himself, with the intention of thereby redeeming the whole human race. According to psychoanalysis, Jesus would be more or less the same as a person who willfully goes and stands in front of a train, insofar as he knew his course of actions was going to get him killed but decided to go on pursuing that course all the same. There would seem to be no convergence, or point of contact, between these two perspectives; rather, what one sees emerging is an absolute disparity of visions. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, this would simply imply that the Bible is irrational. However, this may not be the whole story. It is worth delving deeper into the nature of this conflict in greater depth. 

A Theological Dispute

On the basis of the discussion thus far, the argument can now be made that the conflict between the Bible on the one hand and psychoanalysis on the other is essentially theological in nature. That is, the conflict is not one of rationality and irrationality, but rather one occurring between the worldviews of two different religious structures. This can be readily seen if one understands that one of the basic premises of psychoanalysis is that the claims made by people like Jeremiah and Jesus in the Bible cannot be taken literally, at face value, on their own terms; rather, they must be explained in terms of the secular psychodynamics occurring within the minds of the characters in question. Nothing could be further from biblical thinking. When the Bible says that Jeremiah was a prophet of the Lord, it means quite exactly that; it means that there is a God, and that Jeremiah was speaking with him. And of course, the question of whether there is or is not a God is a religious one, having little to do with science per se. Psychoanalysis would thus seem to adhere to the religious postulate that the God of the Bible cannot be real on his own terms, and that he must rather be explained in terms of secular psychodynamics. This puts psychoanalysis at essential and irreducible odds with the Bible. 

This problem can be seen even more clearly in the materialist psychiatry that eventually superseded the practice of old-fashioned psychoanalysis. As Szasz has made quite clear, modern psychiatry proceeds according to a mode of thought that is more religious than it is scientific in nature, insofar as psychiatry tends to make moral judgments on the basis of behaviors rather than medical judgments on the basis of verifiable bodily pathology (87). Moreover, this kind of psychiatry is premised on the materialist philosophical assumption that only the body is ultimately real, and that the mind is fully reducible to the brain. Nothing could be further from the biblical vision of the world; and this makes conflict well-nigh inevitable.

This discussion cannot reach a conclusion regarding whether psychoanalysis or the Bible has vision of reality. What can be suggested, however, is that each perspective is in a position in which it can only diagnose the other. From the perspective of psychoanalysis, the prophets of the Bible must be understood as exhibiting the symptoms of severe psychopathology; from the perspective of the Bible, on the other hand, psychoanalysts themselves must be understood as blasphemers and heathens who are incapable of opening their hearts to the revelations of the Lord. Of course, it is possible for Christians to incorporate the insights of psychoanalysis into their own thought, or for psychoanalysts to also have their own personal religious faiths. At the paradigmatic level, though, there would seem to exist a serious conflict of worldviews, undergirded by a serious disagreement regarding original premises about what can and cannot properly be called real. This conflict is ultimately a theological one, insofar as the assumption of psychoanalysis that certain key concepts phenomena within the Bible cannot be real is itself thoroughly religious in nature—whether or not psychoanalysis itself is willing to accept this fact in a direct and forthright manner. 

Conclusion

In summary, the present essay has consisted of a critical discussion of the relationship between the Bible and psychoanalysis. A major conclusion that has been reached over the course of this discussion is that there exists a religious conflict between the worldview of the Bible on the one hand and the worldview of the Bible on the other. According to the Bible, the inspired prophets, culminating with Jesus himself, are authoritative examples of a kind of perception that is above normative perception; according to psychoanalysis, normative perception is equivalent to sanity, which means that several of the key figures of the Bible must have been insane. It is easy to see why conflict would naturally follow from this kind of standoff. 

Works Cited

The Bible, NRSV. New York: HarperOne, 2009. Print. 

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books, 2008. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Moses and Monotheism. New York: Vintage, 1955. Print.

Heschel, Abraham J. The Prophets. New York: Harper Perennial, 2001. Print. 

Iyer, Sethu A. Testament: An Invitation to Lucid Romance. Austin: CreateSpace, 2016. Print. 

Jackson, Wayne. "The Christian and Depression." Christian Courier. n.d. Web. 3 Jul. 2016. 

Szasz, Thomas. "The Myth of Mental Illness." The American Psychologist 15.2 (1960): 113-118. Web. 27 Jun. 2016. <www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/terrace/w1001/readings/szasz.pdf>.