The Kenotic Cure

I spent thirteen years as a hospice chaplain before becoming a psychotherapist. My earlier training was in theology and music, and I have often wondered whether the two have more in common than either would like to admit. Both can make something beautiful out of suffering. A familiar hymn may give expression to a sorrow that cannot otherwise be spoken, while a prayer can hold together feelings that would seem contradictory in ordinary conversation. Yet I began to notice how easily consolation became another expectation. The dying person was supposed to find peace, the grieving spouse was encouraged to forgive, and the faithful believer was expected to demonstrate the hope that others needed to see. The language of faith could become a way of listening, but it could also prevent someone from saying what they most needed to say. I became especially interested in how someone could confess a great deal about their suffering while remaining unable to acknowledge something of the experience itself.

Peter Rollins approaches this difficulty in Insurrection through Kierkegaard's portrait of the suffering poet. The poet's anguish becomes beautiful music, and the audience is moved by what it hears. Yet their admiration conceals a terrible wish, that new suffering might befall the poet so they could continue enjoying his song. I recognize something of this arrangement in the ways religious suffering can become a testimony. A person admired for extraordinary faith may find little room to acknowledge doubt, while someone celebrated for forgiveness may become ashamed of their anger. The recognition may be sincere, but the person begins depending upon the image through which others have learned to love them. Eventually, the beautiful story becomes difficult to relinquish, even when it can no longer accommodate what the person has been trying to say.

Religious belonging complicates this problem because faith rarely develops independently of the people through whom it is learned. The songs, prayers, rituals, and expectations of a community become part of how someone recognizes themselves. You may have learned to become the good daughter, faithful husband, obedient child, or dependable member of a congregation long before you could consider what those identifications meant. Questioning an expectation may therefore feel like betraying someone you love, particularly when the distinction between belonging to God and belonging to a religious community has never been entirely clear. The problem is not necessarily that your beliefs are mistaken, but that their preservation may have become inseparable from your ability to remain recognizable to yourself and the people whose love has shaped your life.

Freud takes up the psychological significance of identification in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. He begins with Gustave Le Bon's description of the psychological group as a provisional being, a formation in which otherwise distinct individuals acquire a collective psychological unity. Le Bon was interested in how someone might feel and act differently when incorporated into a crowd, while Freud pressed the question of what binds the individuals together. His discussion of the church and the army becomes especially interesting because the group is sustained through emotional attachments and identification with a common ideal. The individual does not merely agree with the beliefs of others. Something of their experience of themselves becomes organized through the authority of the ideal and their relationships with those who share it.

Le Bon's provisional being describes the collective formation, but I am interested in what happens to the individual who depends upon that formation for the assurance of being somebody. A religious community offers more than fellowship or theological certainty. It may provide the language through which someone knows what to desire, whom to love, and how to understand their sacrifices. The uncertainty of one's own position becomes easier to bear when the community offers a recognizable identity. Yet this assurance can become precarious when the ideal must be defended in order for the person to remain recognizable to themselves. Someone who leaves the community may provoke disproportionate anger, especially when their departure raises the possibility that sacrifices once understood as necessary were not inevitable. The person who remains may find the other's freedom threatening because it calls into question the image through which their own life has become meaningful.

The problem often appears in the ordinary intimacies of marriage and family, particularly through sacrifices that have acquired the force of unwritten contracts. A husband may believe that years of work, provision, and fidelity have established his devotion. He loves his wife and has made real sacrifices, yet he becomes resentful that she does not respond with the affection or sexual desire he believes he deserves. She may remember their life differently, perhaps recalling decisions made without her participation or long periods of emotional distance. His sacrifices become an accusation, while her refusal to provide the expected recognition becomes evidence that his goodness has gone unrewarded. Their intimacy suffers under an agreement neither may have realized they were making.

I have begun to think of this difficulty as a sin of righteousness. The problem is not that goodness or sacrifice is undesirable, but that an ideal of goodness may conceal aggression that is difficult to confess. A devoted parent may resent a child's independence after having surrendered so much for the family. Someone admired for generosity may become furious when their efforts go unnoticed. Religious commitments can give these resentments moral authority, making an ordinary disappointment feel like a violation of something sacred. The person is not simply hurt by another's refusal. They become convinced that their sacrifices have established what the other person owes, and they may find it difficult to recognize the demand concealed within what they continue to call love.

Sexuality reveals this contradiction with particular force. Someone may spend years attempting to remain pure, only to discover that marriage has not made desire any more predictable. A spouse may remain faithful while experiencing attraction elsewhere, or continue loving someone toward whom they also feel considerable resentment. The management of guilt can become an entire religious life when confession provides temporary reassurance without opening the experience to further consideration. The person admits a forbidden thought, receives forgiveness, and returns to the same anxiety, perhaps with renewed determination to become who they believe they ought to be. What remains unexplored is why this particular desire has become so threatening and what the struggle against it has come to accomplish.

The analyst hears confession differently. The interest is not limited to what the person admits but extends to what remains disavowed in the telling. Someone may confess resentment toward a spouse while insisting they have never wanted anything in return for their sacrifices. Another may describe someone else's sexuality with unusual disgust, repeatedly explaining that they are not judgmental, not envious, or certainly not attracted to what they condemn. Negation can provide a way for something unacceptable to enter speech while the person continues refusing to recognize it as their own. A projection can become a confession, although not every accusation is a projection and not every denial conceals its opposite. The analyst becomes interested in why this particular accusation or declaration of innocence has become necessary, allowing the person's associations to disclose something that a direct challenge might only compel them to defend.

This changes how righteousness might be heard in the consulting room. Someone who insists that they would never treat another person cruelly may be speaking sincerely, but the declaration may also invite curiosity about what has made the insistence necessary. A person preoccupied with another's selfishness may be struggling to acknowledge their own wish to be cared for, while someone who continually condemns sexual impurity may find it easier to recognize forbidden desire elsewhere than to consider their own. The analyst need not announce the hidden meaning of the accusation or treat every moral conviction as evidence of an unconscious wish. What matters is the possibility that the person's righteousness has become involved in the very experience they are attempting to disavow. Their confession may reveal less through the wrongdoing they admit than through the innocence they insist upon preserving.

This is where I would like to put God on the couch, although the God I have in mind may be the image of one's own righteousness. I am not suggesting that psychoanalysis can establish or disprove the divine. Rather, I am interested in how someone may construct an image of God that reflects the ideals through which they have learned to recognize themselves, then encounter those ideals as though they originated in God's will. The person who understands love through sacrifice may imagine a God who demands continual self-denial. Someone whose goodness depends upon sexual purity may become preoccupied with a God who scrutinizes desire, while another whose religious identity has developed through obedience may experience disagreement as an offense against divine authority. The graven image becomes troubling because it provides the reassurance the person seeks: that the righteousness through which they understand themselves is also the righteousness God requires.

The prohibition against graven images offers an interesting theological metaphor for this difficulty. The idol need not resemble a statue, nor does it always appear as an object someone consciously worships. It may take the form of a certainty that God's will has already been made known through the values, judgments, and expectations by which the person understands themselves. Once the ideal acquires this authority, questioning it becomes almost indistinguishable from questioning God. A parent may experience a child's independence as rebellion against divine order, while a spouse may interpret disagreement as a failure of religious duty. The person may be unable to recognize how much of their own desire has become invested in the authority they attribute to God.

The danger becomes more disturbing when the image also guarantees the person's innocence. Someone may insist that they are not cruel, only faithful, while participating in the humiliation or exclusion of a person whose life threatens their religious ideals. Their aggression can be attributed to obedience, righteousness, or the defense of something sacred, allowing them to disavow what might otherwise become difficult to acknowledge. Freud's account of group identification helps us consider how an individual's relationship to conscience may be altered when a shared ideal acquires extraordinary authority. The person may remain convinced of their goodness precisely because the aggression has been authorized by the position through which they belong. What appears to be devotion may also involve the projection of their own hostility onto an image of God who seems to require it.

Peter Rollins offers a theological provocation in The Fidelity of Betrayal, asking whether faithfulness to Christianity might sometimes require betraying the familiar forms through which religious identity has been preserved. I want to carry that question into my developing account of Imago Psychotherapy, although the psychoanalytic distinction is my own. The betrayal that interests me is not necessarily a betrayal of God but the betrayal of an ideal that has become an idol. Someone may discover that a parent's expectations are not identical to divine commands, or that the recognition of a congregation has become more necessary than the faith it claims to sustain. The image of the faithful believer may have become so important that even an honest question feels like disobedience, particularly when the person fears losing the relationships through which their faith first became meaningful.

The psychoanalytic imago is not simply a false picture that can be replaced with a healthier one. It concerns the images through which someone has learned to recognize themselves within relationships. The good child, devoted spouse, and faithful believer may each embody commitments that remain meaningful, yet the image can acquire such authority that ordinary contradictions become intolerable. What I have begun calling imago dissolution concerns the possibility that an image might lose some of its necessity without requiring the person to abandon the relationships through which it developed. A spouse may acknowledge resentment without ceasing to love, while a believer may question religious authority without treating the question as an abandonment of God. Someone who has relied upon condemning another person's sexuality may become capable of encountering their own desire and aggression without requiring someone else to carry what remains difficult to acknowledge.

The Christian language of kenosis provides an unexpected conversation with this possibility. In the Christ hymn of Philippians, divine status is not exploited for advantage, and the movement of self-emptying complicates the familiar association between identity and authority. Yet kenosis cannot become another demand placed upon someone whose religious life has already required excessive sacrifice. A person expected to remain obedient may need to discover a capacity for refusal, while someone who has used righteousness to exercise authority may need to relinquish the guarantee that their goodness entitles them to another's submission. What matters is not the amount of self that can be surrendered but the possibility that an ideal no longer needs to govern everything the person is permitted to experience.

I return to Kierkegaard's poet because someone who has become known for a beautiful song may find it difficult to imagine what it would mean to stop singing. The believer whose suffering has become a testimony may be attached to the recognition accompanying the story, even after the story has ceased to contain what they need to say. The analytic listener does not need to offer a more reassuring account of faith or encourage the person to exchange one religious identity for another. There may be something worth hearing when the familiar language falters, particularly when confession begins to reveal what the person has spent years attempting to deny. The uncertainty may involve grief, since questioning an ideal can place valued relationships at risk, but it can also open an experience that is no longer entirely determined by the image.

The kenotic cure, if the phrase has any usefulness, concerns the loosening of this necessity rather than the production of a better self. Religious commitments may remain, and the sacrifices through which a life has developed need not be dismissed. Yet someone may begin to discover that goodness does not establish a claim upon another person's desire, that belonging does not require the condemnation of someone who differs, and that no image can guarantee the innocence of everything undertaken in its name. Putting God on the couch means becoming curious about the graven image through which one's own righteousness has been made to appear divinely guaranteed. What initially feels like the betrayal of faith may become a painful encounter with an ideal that has prevented the person from experiencing faith without the continual obligation to prove who they are.