The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 7, The Sick Soul and Freud's Error

i.

In The Future of an Illusion Freud's basic contention is that religious belief, being an illusion, is fundamentally dishonest about the nature of human existence.  Freud contends that this dishonesty is produced by a failure of courage.  Life, honestly faced, is too much for us.  Our experience of helplessness is too difficult to bear.  Thus, we pretend that Someone is watching out for us, that we are the center of the Universe and that we live on after death:

And thus a store of ideas is created, born from man’s need to make his helplessness tolerable...Here is the gist of the matter. Life in this world serves a higher purpose...Everything that happens in this world is an expression of the intentions of an intelligence superior to us, which in the end, though its ways and byways are difficult to follow, orders everything for the best that is, to make it enjoyable for us. Over each one of us there watches a benevolent Providence which is only seemingly stern and which will not suffer us to become a plaything of the overmighty and pitiless forces of nature. Death itself is not extinction, is not a return to inorganic lifelessness, but the beginning of a new kind of existence which lies on the path of development to something higher...In the end all good is rewarded and all evil punished, if not actually in this form of life then in the later existences that begin after death. In this way all the terrors, the sufferings and the hardships of life are destined to be obliterated.

What is needed, according to Freud, is for religious believers to grow up, to undergo an "education to reality."  This education is difficult and leaves us in a state of anxiety:

[I]t is true, [we will] find [our]selves in a difficult situation. [We] will have to admit to [ours]selves the full extent of [our] helplessness and [our] insignificance in the machinery of the universe; [we] can no longer be the centre of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence. [We] will be in the same position as a child who has left the parental house where he was so warm and comfortable. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children forever; they must in the end go out into "hostile life." We may call this "education to reality." Need I confess to you..the necessity for this forward step?

Freud is not alone in this assessment.  As we observed in the last essay, William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience  notes that many religious believers unconsciously or consciously refuse to acknowledge the most difficult aspects of existence.  Freud's analysis appears to describe these believers.  This is not to say that the joy and optimism created by "the illusion" doesn't lead to a wonderful life, psychologically and socially.  But, along with Freud, we wonder if there is something dishonest about this religious stance.  

But Freud suddenly ends his investigations as this point.  Religion, for Freud, is dishonest, an illusion, an existential narcotic and a form of consolation.  To be honest about reality is to become non-religious.  

In stark contrast to Freud in The Future of an Illusion, William James goes on with his investigations in the The Varieties.  Although James is more than willing to agree with Freud concerning the role of existential consolation, he goes on to posit a religious experience that is as "educated to reality" as Freud's non-religious stance.  Apparently, Freud did not think that existential honesty and religious faith could co-exist.  The closest Freud got to admitting that honesty and religion can co-exist comes toward the end of The Future of an Illusion:

On they way to this distant goal your religious doctrines will have to be discarded...You know why: in the long run nothing can withstand reason and experience, and the contradiction which religion offers to both is all too palpable.  Even purified religious ideas cannot escape this fate, so long as they try to preserve anything of the consolation of religion.  No doubt if they confine themselves to a belief in a higher spiritual being, whose qualities are indefinable and whose purposes cannot be discerned, they will be proof against the challenge of science; but then they also lose their hold on human interest.

This is a fascinating passage.  Freud admits that an abstract form of religious belief might attain "proof against the challenge of science."  But if  religious beliefs do not "preserve anything of the consolation of religion" these beliefs would "lose their hold on human interest."  But Freud never pursues the possibility that an existentially honest faith does hold immense human interest.  In the end, this is a very curious assessment by Freud and demonstrates an enormous lack of curiosity and a lack of scientific rigor.  Freud simply assumes that the only appeal of religion is existential consolation.  Stripped of this function, according to Freud, faith holds no value or interest.  

Yet Freud never investigates this claim, marshaling no evidence.  And the reason seems clear, if an existentially honest faith did exist then Freud's assessment of religious faith, while potent, would be radically incomplete.

ii.

Twenty-five years before the publication of The Future of an Illusion William James conducted the very investigation Freud walked away from.  As discussed in the last essay, in the early Lectures of The Varieties James describes his twofold typology of religious experience.  We've already discussed the healthy-minded type, the optimistic experience that manifests some of the dishonesty that concerned Freud.  But after the Lectures on healthy-mindedness James turns to the second type, a religious experience he called "the sick soul."

The sick soul experience is important for these essays as I'll argue that the sick soul represents the religious experience Freud refused to acknowledge or investigate.  That is, as James describes it, the sick soul is a religious experience that demonstrates Freud's "education to reality."  Further, this honest religious stance manifests the emotional distress that Freud claimed would be symptomatic of existential honesty.  In short, the sick soul is a form of religious experience that is not a form of consolation, illusion, or wishful thinking.  As such, the sick soul is the type of religion that Freud was sure would hold no "human interest." 

Yet the sick soul does hold human interest.  It may not be typical or the norm, but the experience of the sick soul is widely documented across religious traditions.  If so, we've encountered the very thing that Freud argued could not exist:  The religious experience that is existentially engaged and honest.

iii.

What is the experience of the sick soul?  If we removed consolation from faith what would be the remainder?  Would the resultant experience be recognizable as "religious"?

No doubt, the sick soul experience is unusual and queer when compared to what we generally take to be the "typical" or "normal" religious experience.  This is most likely why Freud dismissed the experience.  

Where the healthy-minded type tended to minimize the evil and painful aspects of experience the sick soul seeks, to quote James, "a way of maximizing evil."  More, the sick soul is convinced that "the evil aspects of our life are of its very essence, and that the world's meaning most comes home to us when we lay them most to heart."  This looks very similar to Freud's "education to reality."  The sick soul doesn't ignore, forget or dismiss evil.  Rather, the sick soul embraces evil as the "essence" of life.  Further, this evil cannot be whistled away with a happy tune; this recognition of evil is the route to meaning and authenticity.  

When James refers to "evil" he is referring to the very aspects of existence that Freud claimed were on the syllabus of reality.  For example, the evil in life isn't simply suffering.  It is, rather, the existential fragility of existence:

To ascribe religious value to mere happy-go-lucky contentment with one's brief chance at natural good is but the very consecration of forgetfulness and superficiality.  Our troubles lie indeed too deep for that cure.  The fact that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity.  

Again, these realizations were the very aspects of existence Freud claimed to be excluded from religious believers.  The religious "narcotic" is meant to melt away these fears and worries.  But the sick soul lives with this perplexity.  Faith for the sick soul isn't a form of forgetting or consolation.  In fact, the sick soul refuses to allow faith to hide the dark aspects of existence. A faith that did this would block the deepest route to meaning.  Faith for the sick soul doesn't deny reality.  Faith, for the sick soul, asks us to embrace and suffer with reality.  This embrace even extends to the reality of death:

Back of everything is the great spectre of universal death, the all-encompassing blackness...In short, life and its negation are beaten up inextricably together.  But if the life be good, the negation of it must be bad.  Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction.  The breath of the sepulchre surrounds it.

Again, Freud claimed that the function of religious belief was to protect us from death anxiety.  Yet here, with James, we see a religious experience infused with the "infection" of death awareness.  The "negation" and "contradiction" of death are not ignored or repressed.  Rather, death saturates the religious experience.

iv.

These descriptions of the sick soul may seem odd and contradictory.  They are, certainly, if the sole function of religious belief is existential consolation.  These "contradictory" experiences are strange enough that Freud could not imagine them.  The experience Freud felt held no human interest.  But James's Lectures not only argue for the reality and ubiquity of the sick soul, he concludes his discussions by arguing that the sick soul represents the very best of religion.  In the "quarrel" between healthy-minded religion and the experience of the sick soul James casts his vote with the "morbidly" religious: 

...[W]hat are we to say of this quarrel?  It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.

v.

We are now at a critical moment in these essays.  We've noted Freud's contention that religious belief in an illusion, a form of wishful thinking.  Thus, religion is dishonest, not "educated to reality," and not willing to live with the anxieties of existence.  Consequently, if such an experience were common then Freud's illusion-thesis comes under great strain.  Faith and existential honesty can co-exist.  Intriguingly, Freud doesn't investigate the possibility of this religious experience.  Apparently, he felt it either didn't exist or, if it did, it would have no psychological appeal.

And yet here, twenty-five years before Freud, was William James describing a religious experience as "educated to reality" as Freud's "mature," irreligious modern man.  Was Freud ignorant of James's work?  Or did he dismiss the reality and coherence of the sick soul?  

That is an important question because many Christians also dismiss the reality and coherence of the sick soul.  Can a life be called "religious" if it is infused with existential anxiety and doubt?  Isn't religion supposed to grant peace, comfort and solace?  No doubt religion produces these experiences for many religious believers, perhaps the vast majority.  But our narrow interest in these essays isn't theological or spiritual.  We are not concerned with the spiritual health or normative nature of the sick soul.  We are, rather, investigating the experience of the sick soul because its existence is the data point that dismantles the reductionistic ambitions of Freud's thesis.  Faith cannot be explained away as an illusion.  If the sick soul exists then religious experience is bigger than Freud realized.  The function or functions of religious belief cannot be reduced to wish, illusion and consolation.  Yes, these may be ubiquitous functions but we fend off the reductionistic attack upon faith.

Going forward our concern will be with this fundamental disagreement between Freud and James concerning the existence and an the nature of the sick soul.  In the essays to come we will review data that sheds light on this debate, ultimately seeing how this debate is playing out in modern psychological research.  In the end, we'll be able to answer, as best we can, who wins the Freud/James debate concerning the nature of religious experience.  

Will it be illusions or varieties?