The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience: Chapter 9, Freud vs. James

Having come to the end of Parts 1 and 2 of The Varieties & Illusions of Religious Experience it's time to take stock before moving into contemporary psychological research. Plus, having finished articulating James's view of the religious experience we should give Freud a fair shot at James before moving on.

i.
In Parts 1 and 2 I have set up a kind of debate between Sigmund Freud and William James regarding the function of religious belief. In Part 1 we discussed Freud's deflationary analysis of religious belief. Freud claims that religious belief is an existentially consoling illusion. I call Freud's analysis deflationary as it attempts to "explain" faith by positing an underlying mechanism, a mechanism that is more concerned with providing solace than in engaging and confronting the "facts" of reality in any honest way. We've noted that Freud can be parried on logical grounds. Our motives for belief don't logically dictate their accuracy. But some motives tend to produce more truthful outcomes than others. Openness to evidence, for example. That is, although Freud might agree that his analysis of faith doesn't have any logical bearing on God's existence, Freud would be in a very strong position to claim that faith wasn't epistemologically virtuous. Freud could contend that religious belief doesn't possess the habits of mind that tend to produce truthful outcomes (e.g., open-minded, curious, evidence-driven, hypothesis-testing, etc.). More, if Freud is correct, the religious believer's need for consolation and solace trump any honest investigation concerning man, God and our place in the universe. Intellectually speaking, the religious mind is compromised by the religious illusion. Needs for consolation will trump intellectual honesty.

As Part 1 concluded Freud appeared to hold a strong hand. Perhaps religious belief was an illusion. But in Part 2 we encountered the work of William James. Interestingly, James is willing to admit along with Freud that religious belief can function as a form of consolation. The healthy-minded believer willfully refuses to endorse the most existentially difficult aspects of reality. The healthy-minded embrace Freud's illusion. But in contrast to Freud, James goes on to posit an existentially honest religious stance. James calls this stance the "sick soul" because there is a price to pay for existential honesty. Both Freud and James agree that the price is melancholy and angst. In the biblical witness this experience is complaint and lament.

No doubt this is a peculiar religious stance. Our stereotypical notions of "religious believers" are that they are deeply consoled by their belief. But there appear to be religious believers who don't seem to be consoled. Or, at the very least, existential consolation isn't the motive for faith. These believers place a premium on existential honesty. They wish to be "educated to reality" as Freud recommended. Thus, these sick souls appear to possess the epistemic virtues which are lacking in the healthy-minded. Since consolation isn't the driving need for the sick soul they seek an honest confrontation with life. And if that confrontation proves difficult then so be it. The sick soul will not retreat into pat and comforting religious platitudes to avoid the pain of existence. The pain is primary. It is not be be repressed or denied just to make us feel better about God or the human predicament. If God is wicked, the sick soul is willing to consider the possibility. Such investigations are not out of bounds. And considering such a possibility is no joy. But joy isn't really the point. Illusion isn't the motivation.

Now Freud might ask at this point: Why go through these contortions? Why not just give up believing in God? Wouldn't it be easier? Isn't the fact that you are clinging to some form of faith evidence that, deep down, you are still holding onto hope? Isn't that hope providing a sliver of comfort? The merest thread of the security blanket?

Just grow up!, Freud would say. Let go of the thread! Don't worry about burning that last bridge. You don't, in the end, need it.

No doubt much of what Freud, and those who speak for him, would say is true. For many people this is the road out of faith. A slow decline, exhaustion and a final letting-go. And maybe the end wasn't even a conscious act. One day on the way to work you just notice you don't really believe anymore.

But it is curious fact that many religious believers are willing to endure so much torment to hold onto a thin thread that provides very little by way of comfort. These believers are not exhausted by faith. The are passionate and energized by it, even if tormented. The hope of comfort seems not to be what is keeping the thread from breaking. The inner economy of their experience, so much turmoil with so little solace, seems to mitigate against that assessment. Something else, something other than consolation, must be animating the religious experience.

What might that something be?

No definitive answer can be given. And answer to that question will likely vary from heart to heart. But, as a first response, I think William James again proves helpful on this score.

The most widely read part of The Varieties of Religious Experience is James's Lectures on Mysticism. For James, the mystical is a primal encounter with the divine. It's an ontological encounter. As noted in Chapter 5, James considers primal, first-hand religious experience to be the root and foundation of religion. Belief, theology and organized religion is constructed in the wake of these experiences. Belief, in this view, is just words, the linguistic structures we create to capture and communicate our experience.

This distinction between belief and experience is important in evaluating the debate between Freud and James. Specifically, Freud's focus is on belief, the mental and linguistic constructs we create. Freud's argument is that we spin these linguistic structures to create emotional outcomes. That is, we "believe" things to feel more comfortable in facing life and death.

James's account is different. James's focus is on experience. Belief emerges from an ontological encounter that we need to represent to ourselves. We need to tell a story about what happens to us. Belief, in this account, isn't a means of coping. It is, rather, much more empirical and data-driven. I don't spin linguistic webs to console myself (although I can certainly do that) I am, rather, in an explanatory mode. Trying to come to grips with what has happened to me.

I'd like to suggest that one way of thinking about the contrast between the wishful believer (per Freud) and the sick soul (per James) is to ask how beliefs originate and function in relation to religious experience. If beliefs originate to handle emotional needs then Freud's diagnosis seems accurate. That is, emotional needs become more important than truthfulness in belief formation and adjustment. In the end, belief adoption and revision is adjudicated on the basis of how it all makes me feel.

In contrast, I think the sick souls are those whose beliefs are adopted to make their experience of reality coherent. From the very beginning emotional issues are marginalized. The goal is to get things right, experientially speaking. This doesn't mean the subsequent beliefs are "truthful" or "accurate." At the end of the day no one really knows the answers to those questions. But the motivation is honestly confronting experience, not existential consolation. In fact, this confrontation with experience might be deeply painful. Regardless, the goal is to make sense of my reality. Which means that, for the sick soul, the experience of God must somehow be reconciled with the experience of evil, an experience the biblical witness calls "lament."

The point here is that the thread of faith can be robustly maintained by an honest confrontation with reality. The sick soul isn't simply "holding on." They are, rather, trying to integrate two powerful yet conflicting experiences. They cannot simply "move on" because these experiences define the selfhood of the individual. The struggle isn't due to a willful hold onto an "illusion," but a struggle in the process of "making sense." This stance very similar to what motivates the best science, the search for agreement between our linguistic structures and our experience of the world.

ii.
It is time to summarize and move on. I have set up a debate between Freud and James regarding the nature of religious experience. The central question of the debate is this: Is religious belief an illusion? Freud (and those who deploy his ideas) answer in the affirmative: Religion is an existential drug, a narcotic, the "opium of the people." James, by contrast, offers a more nuanced answer. James agrees that religious belief is often engaged in consolation. But James also posits an existentially honest religious experience, an experience he calls the sick soul. If Freud is correct religious belief reduces to illusion. The account is deflationary and reductionistic. But if James is correct Freud's analysis only applies to a subset of the religious experience. In arguing for the varieties of religious experience James is claiming that religious experience is larger, more diverse and more complex than Freud realized. Freud is, in the end, only explaining a piece of religion. Much has escaped him.

In short, it is now clear that the sick soul plays a critical role in this debate. That is, the sick soul is the Freudian counter-example. A test case. It's the black swan for Freud's theory. It is the religious experience that shows Freud's theory to be incomplete.

And to clarify, the goal isn't to show that Freud was wholly wrong. Rather, the sick soul demonstrates Freud's theory is limited and narrow. Schematically, in Venn diagrams, we might frame the debate like this:

The existence of the sick soul experience helps us choose between the two models. If the sick soul is a psychologically coherent experience we prefer James's model on the right. but if the sick soul doesn't exist then Freud's model in The Future of an Illusion is attractive.

As repeatedly noted in these chapters, Freud and James's are offering rival empirical claims about human psychology. It should be possible to test the models using the tools of social science. Up until this point the argument has been waged theoretically. But can laboratory science actually test these complex psychological dynamics? How could we possibly know if a person was using faith as an existential defense mechanism, as a means of consolation?

Somewhat surprisingly, in the 1990s techniques were developed in experimental psychology that, for the first time, allowed psychological researchers to test existential dynamics in the laboratory. That is, existential defense mechanisms are now being routinely manipulated and assessed in psychological laboratories throughout the world. The advent of these techniques has caused a sensation in the psychological community and they are now revolutionizing many areas of psychological research. These developments have important implications for the Freud/James debate. For the first time since the publications of The Future of an Illusion and The Varieties of Religious Experience we now have the empirical tools to test the rival theories of Sigmund Freud and William James. Answers to many of the most interesting questions concerning the function of religious belief are now coming to light.