Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 15, No. 2. 1976
The Place of Religion in the Training of Pastoral Counselors A N N B. U L A N O V A teacher of mine once said to a class, "Do not depend on just one source of h u m a n knowledge to support your professional work in d e p t h psychology. P s y c h o a n a l y t i c theory is not even a century old and cannot possibly contain all of h u m a n wisdom." But people who are trained in a religious tradition as well as the procedures of p s y c h o t h e r a p y do h a v e access to a large source of wisdom, the wisdom gathered through the centuries by m e n and women reflecting on their experience of God. T h e s e people are professionals. T h u s they m u s t ask t h e m s e l v e s whether their openness to religious tradition affects their professional work as pastoral counselors and w h a t place religious experience occupies in their lives. We all know the horror t h a t comes from m a k i n g an idol out of the procedures involved in getting h e a l t h y - - t h e special horror of seeing m e n t a l health as t h e absolute goal in life. One cannot m a i n t a i n a decent conversation with a person who sees psychoanalytic implications everywhere and telegraphs their hidden presence with a raised eyebrow, an obvious m e n t a l cataloguing of the other person's defensive system, possible childhood t r a u m a , degree of resistance, etc. Worst of all, every h u m a n dialogue with such a m e n t a l - h e a l t h e n t h u s i a s t is p u n c t u a t e d by relSeated pauses as he notes " w h e r e m y feelings are," " h o w m y feelings are," " w h a t m y feelings are." W h e n we take our training in p s y c h o t h e r a p y as the only source a n d resource we have for wisdom, we easily fall into a t y r a n n y of m e n t a l health, setting new s t a n d a r d s of punitive j u d g m e n t against ourselves and others.1 For example, we find ourselves charting our " p r o g r e s s " on a scale t h a t stretches from " i n f a n t i l e " to " m a t u r e . " We label too quickly and too disparagingly a n y resting place in our growth as a point of " f i x a t i o n . " And some of us compulsively scan our d r e a m s on waking each morning to tally how m u c h of our m a t e r i a l is a r c h e t y p a l and how m u c h merely personal. When those of us who are t r a i n e d in religion as well as p s y c h o t h e r a p y t h i n k of Ann B. Ulanov, Th.D., is Professor in the Program of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and a psychotherapist in private practice. She is also a member of the Board of the C. G. Jung Institute of Training. Her book, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, was published in 1971, and her new book, with her husband, Barry Ulanov, Religion and the Unconscious, was published in 1975. This article was the graduation address to three classes of residents who had completed training in the Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute in June 1975. 88
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the hybrid nature of our schooling, we m a y also r e m e m b e r the simple b u t profound point t h a t health is not and c a n n o t be our first or entire c o m m i t m e n t as professionals. We know in our bones t h a t there is an i m p o r t a n t difference between being healthy and being a person who is fully alive, between being able to function and feeling real, between living without too m u c h mental distress and living with a sense t h a t life is worth while. We know how i m p o r t a n t it is to live fully engaged, present, taking all t h a t is there for us in the spirit of what Scripture calls the " a b u n d a n t life." Our ability to develop a self and to feel its reality depends without question on our psychological development. B u t what religious traditions tell us is t h a t psychological development is not enough to give us a sense of being real and fully in touch with life. Religion tells us bluntly that a "good life" is a life lived consciously in relation to God, to m y s t e r y as it comes into our own lives. T h e root meaning of religion, "to bind back strongly," suggests t h a t the root of our own religion, regardless of denomination or tradition, will still be found in those f u n d a m e n t a l experiences through which we feel t h a t God has touched us. In our book, Religion and the Unconscious, my h u s b a n d and I have called t h a t kind of event "primordial religious experience," to indicate t h a t its significance wells up from a profound depth t h a t exceeds the reach of reason and imagination, making itself u n m i s t a k a b l y known as the sense of the unknown that, for b e t t e r or worse, deeply marks our lives. ~ In primordial religious experience we have the conviction, whether positive or negative, t h a t we have been made present to ourselves through a strong sense of presence of the Unknown. For some people, this kind of experience comes in relation to other people, in the liturgy, or in an intimate personal relationship such as marriage. For others it comes through dreams, or prayers, m o m e n t s of m e d i t a t i o n or recollection. W h a t e v e r its vehicle, the hallmark of primordial religious experience is seriousness, the certainty t h a t something of basic importance for our whole life has happened. Out of this kind of experience our values and our reasons for living grow, however fuzzy those values and reasons may be, however ambiguous or undeveloped our sense of God or the transcendent may remain. Out of this kind of experience comes our sense of being a real person, really alive. Such primordial religious m o m e n t s are often the last kind of experience a patient will entrust to his or her therapist. T h e y are guarded as secrets m u c h more t h a n are sexual activities or incomes. T h e r e is in most people more reluctance to expose this kind of experience t h a n hidden faults or unlived ambitions. In such primordial experience one feels totally revealed for what one is, no more, no less. One feels confronted with all t h a t life is and has to offer to us in such moments, so t h a t how one responds m a y d e t e r m i n e the direction and dimension of the rest of one's life. We do not feel in any way t h a t we have seen all or done all or t h a t all of life can be reduced to this one m o m e n t , but r a t h e r t h a t the full vibrancy of life is contained in the present m o m e n t . We recognize the folly of believing t h a t everything is still ahead of us, the illusion of thinking t h a t sometime in the future life will show itself f u l l y - - " W h e n I grow up," or " W h e n I finish training," or " W h e n I make more m o n e y , " or " W h e n I get m a r r i e d , " or
90
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" W h e n I fall in love," or " W h e n I finally learn to take a real risk." All these rationalizations for not living in the present have fallen away. We see in one burning perception that whatever life gives is given here, now, in each present living moment. As counselors who have concern for a person's soul as well as his or her psyche, we recognize t h a t this sort of primordial religious experience feeds the underground spring of a person's life and nurtures the ability to achieve a fuller life. Hence it is of the u t m o s t practical significance in t h e r a p y t h a t a level of trust be reached between our clients and ourselves so t h a t the great story of such an event m a y be told. This kind of trust m a y take a long time to d e v e l o p - - o r no time at all. It depends less on therapeutic procedures t h a n on our own respect for this dimension of the soul, as it appears in our own lives as well as in those of others. Here is one example of this kind of experience2 A woman in her early twenties, suffering from anorexia nervosa, confided her vision of the essential connectedness of physical life. This vision compensated for the splitting of her body and psyche, so painfully manifested in the typical s y m p t o m s of her illness--rapid and severe weight loss, an obsession with food and eating, inability to sleep, a withdrawal from emotional interaction with her family, and feelings of nervoushess. She was near despair. In her vision she saw herself lying on a beach in the sun, "held in an encircling completeness of sand touching water and water touching sky." All the medieval e l e m e n t s - - e a r t h , air, fire, w a t e r - - e n c o m p a s s e d her small reality. She said t h a t in her vision she felt " c o n n e c t e d in my own body just as sky and earth and water and sun are connected around me." T h e vision held religious significance for her. She had no active belief in God, but this vision promised release from suffering and conveyed a sense of life's wholeness in contrast to the brokenness of her mind-body unit. T h e vision was a basis of hope for h e r - - a n d for me as well, ! must s a y - - w h e n her weight dropped perilously low and the struggles of her illness became most intense. People of advanced religious development m a y see such a vision as being at a beginning level of religious experience, and so it was, close to an elementary sort of nature mysticism. But the pastoral counselor knows well the need for people to build up their religion.from below, from the unconscious to consciousness, as well as to learn to receive it from above in acts of grace. From these primordial experiences comes the willingness to construct reasons for living to shape the r u d i m e n t s of a value system. It is these experiences we are bound back to at the center of our lives. If we accept them, they can provide the roots for our most civilized values, for justice and love, permitting us to do to others as we would have them do unto us. For counselors trained in religion, as well as in the ways of the unconscious, there is a special task here: t h a t of seeing and knowing t h a t the language of the unconscious is often employed in primordial religious experience, t h a t such experience invariably reaches deep into our conscious roots and includes all t h a t is undeveloped, infantile, and left out of our more civilized and m a t u r e behavior. Religion addresses itself to the "least among us," which includes precisely the least developed sides of our personalities--those fantasies of odd sexual behavior,
The Place of Religion in the Training of Pastoral Counselors
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those childish wishes and fears, those stubborn needs that persist in intensity against all rational understanding. Religion helps us place in proper perspective the central emphasis in all schools of depth psychology on the developmental theory of human growth. We develop in stages, over considerable periods, to reach maturity, When mental health is taken as our primary goal, we run the great risk of idolizing developmental theory, automatically assuming that as we grow beyond our childish origins we will thankfully leave them altogether behind us, for what is later is somehow always better. Religion reminds us that this is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable nor true. The magical, childish needs and wishes that stay with us, never to be left behind, are the first and lowest elements of personality that speak to us directly of the transcendent where it has touched us directly. Whatever we call our own primordial religious experience, this is o u r vision of reality, shot through with the primitive, inferior, barely conscious material deeply caught up in our psyches. What we learn from this experience is that we cannot identify with such material but also that it cannot be left behind or rejected as outgrown. We can--and should--rearrange our way of living in relation to it to see its significance as rooting us to our origins in the depths, in the unconscious, in the nurturing soil of our origins. Prayers that are alive are full of a simple, direct, childish dependence on God that is primordial i n intensity, imbued with acknowledgment of our own small proportion in relation t o the immensity of the Spirit, and quite pleased to be connected to roots. The influence of religious training on the work of the pastoral counselor goes much further than simple recognition that the whole person includes infantile as well as mature aspects of the psyche. Our recognition of the importance of primordial religious experience comes to bear in a crucial way whenever a patient is confronted in the course of therapy with a moral choice: to choose life, life free of neurosis, or to side with neurosis against life. These moments of choice always arise through the particular small details of a person's own life situation, in the flesh of daily experience. At these points it is clear that the therapy has been sufficiently successful to bring the person to a place where there is a choice. The patient is no longer so unconsciously bound to the revolutions of a neurotic complex that he or she can only play the same record of symptomatology over and over again. Now there is the possibility of achieving a different ending. It is at this point that the distinctions between being healthy and being really alive, between functioning adequately and feeling oneself a real person, make themselves most keenly felt. Let me give a good example of what I mean. The patient was a middle-aged man fraught with mistrust. He had grown up in war-torn Europe where he had learned to cope with the emotional chaos of war by rationally cataloguing everything that happened to him. What proved to be a helpful defense against uncontrollable emotions of fear and panic in those years came to be a crippling compulsion in his adult life. Any spontaneous feeling was automatically subjected to intellectual analysis that killed the feeling. He came to a point in his therapy where he had to choose whether to go on analyzing everything to death,
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including his growing trust in his feelings about the therapy and about me, or to side with those feelings, even though they were not controlled or catalogued. He no longer had to rehearse his old defenses--tearing things apart through logical reduction devoid of h u m a n connection. He was able not to do so. At this point whether he did or did not choose not to do so depended less on his state of health t h a n on his willingness instinctively and childishly to venture into what was for him the primitive unknown as it touched him at the m o m e n t - - t h e world of feeling and tentative trust. Finally, we must stress the role of primordial religious experience in our own lives. For although we m a y see the value of respectful attention to such experience in the lives of those we treat professionally, if we do nc~ honor and a t t e n d to the life of our own souls, our therapeutic technique will have little or no h u m a n force behind it. We are faced t h e n with the question of what it means to nurture our own souls. It is helpful to keep in mind some basic distinctions between the soul and the psyche. T h e soul is our opening to the unknown, to God; the psyche is m a d e up of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of h u m a n personality. T h e soul's life requires willingness, rather t h a n intelligence or u n d a m a g e d psychological background, to be developed, the willingness both to pay attention to what happens to us and to learn from it. It is especially i m p o r t a n t t h a t we pay close attention to our primordial religious experience, to discover it, to take it seriously, to let it live in us. Unlike the body and the psyche, which grow automatically when the necessary conditions for growth obtain--food, shelter, h u m a n relationships--the soul does not grow without open, conscious consent and willing participation on our part. The soul develops only so far as we are willing to go with it, whether gladly or grudgingly. We see the aptness of the old-fashioned names for the processes involved in developing the soul--religious discipline and spiritual exercises. The soul requires deliberate feeding and organized effort to develop. Unlike the body or the psyche, the soul's life can be taken up and advanced at any time in our lives; it is less subject to the confining exigencies of the aging process. As we get older, certain physical possibilities are successively closed to us. We cannot, for example, take up a career in dancing in middle-age. Some schools of depth psychology turn away prospective patients past the age of forty, because they think we are t h e n too old to reach back into our infantile memories. T h e life of the soul, however, is f u n d a m e n t a l l y different: it can always be renewed; it makes its claims on us right up until the end of our lives. As an example I quote the dream of a 91-year-old woman who consciously wanted only to be released from life. A dream she had, however, pointed to work still to be accomplished. She d r e a m e d she was at an artist's house looking at his paintings in his gallery. She came to one e m p t y wall where no painting was hung. It was clear t h a t the painting to be hung there was not yet finished. It was also clear t h a t she was the painter of t h a t picture. If a soul's life is not nurtured, the resultant problems are large and serious, all the more so if we have been analyzed. We suffer, for example, not so m u c h from
The Place of Religion in the Training of Pastoral Counselors
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repression of lively instinct as from failure to emerge into life a n d to t a k e hold of it passionately. We do not seethe now with repressed contents, stoutly defended against. We are afflicted rather with a pallidness, a failure to come forth. If the soul does not emerge, we find ourselves getting along well enough with others, particularly if we have h a d some t h e r a p y to e d u c a t e us a b o u t our own projections and unconscious a s s u m p t i o n s ; b u t we do not love; we cannot go to love with the proper intensity of feeling. I n s t e a d we hold b a c k from the good in w h a t e v e r form it comes, dreading it rather t h a n welcoming it, fearing r a t h e r t h a n greeting the a b u n d a n c e of life t h a t is now possible for us. If the soul does not emerge, we m a y get over such p r o b l e m s as those t h a t come with depression b u t suffer instead a restriction to the life of consciousness. We are no longer open to the flow of the unconscious that, like water, keeps fertile and m o i s t the ground of all our conscious concerns. We m a y have a secure life b u t never the c e r t a i n t y t h a t we are living in h a r m o n y with our own particular destiny, faithful to the way t h a t is ours and ours alone. W i t h o u t the soul we m a y not c o n t a m i n a t e other people with our projections and unlived life, but still we fail to offer positive alternatives to the malaises and evils so present in c o n t e m p o r a r y times. We c a n n o t seem to find the new ways to correspond to grace t h a t our new life and the world's require. Our i m a g i n a t i o n s fall into desuetude. We develop no new a p p r e h e n s i o n s of m e a n i n g . We merely reflect passively what we see around us. To be a counselor with the resources of religious tradition a n d d e p t h psychology is to have access to the resources t h a t feed b o t h soul a n d psyche. Really to use these resources is to b e c o m e tough, c a p a b l e of living events with direct simplicity and facing people with a simple directness. T h u s we not only recover our own counsel, b u t come also to p a r t i c i p a t e - - i n I s a i a h ' s w o r d s - - i n the life of the " W o n d e r f u l Counselor." At the point of c o m p l e t i o n of training for the role of pastoral counselor, then, it is a p p r o p r i a t e to t h i n k of the concrete ways in which we m a y nurture our souls and enlarge our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the discipline of p s y c h o t h e r a p y . M a k i n g ourselves open to the U n k n o w n as it a p p r o a c h e s a n d touches us is not an a u t o m a t i c process. It will not h a p p e n without our willing consent and participation. But with firm a c c e p t a n c e and clear participation, it will h a p p e n a n d it will go on h a p p e n i n g . Of that, we can be sure. References
1. For discussion of "the tyranny of mental health" in relation to Christian faith, see Ulanov, A. B., "The Two Strangers," Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 1973, 28 (4). 2. Ulanov, A. and B., Religion and the Unconscious. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1975, chapter I. 3. All clinical examples are taken from my practice as a psychotherapist unless otherwise stated.
ROCKLAND HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY ROCKLAND RESEARCH INSTITUTE OBANGEBURG, NEW YOBK 10962
The Place of Religion in the Training of Pastoral Counselors A N N B. U L A N O V A teacher of mine once said to a class, "Do not depend on just one source of h u m a n knowledge to support your professional work in d e p t h psychology. P s y c h o a n a l y t i c theory is not even a century old and cannot possibly contain all of h u m a n wisdom." But people who are trained in a religious tradition as well as the procedures of p s y c h o t h e r a p y do h a v e access to a large source of wisdom, the wisdom gathered through the centuries by m e n and women reflecting on their experience of God. T h e s e people are professionals. T h u s they m u s t ask t h e m s e l v e s whether their openness to religious tradition affects their professional work as pastoral counselors and w h a t place religious experience occupies in their lives. We all know the horror t h a t comes from m a k i n g an idol out of the procedures involved in getting h e a l t h y - - t h e special horror of seeing m e n t a l health as t h e absolute goal in life. One cannot m a i n t a i n a decent conversation with a person who sees psychoanalytic implications everywhere and telegraphs their hidden presence with a raised eyebrow, an obvious m e n t a l cataloguing of the other person's defensive system, possible childhood t r a u m a , degree of resistance, etc. Worst of all, every h u m a n dialogue with such a m e n t a l - h e a l t h e n t h u s i a s t is p u n c t u a t e d by relSeated pauses as he notes " w h e r e m y feelings are," " h o w m y feelings are," " w h a t m y feelings are." W h e n we take our training in p s y c h o t h e r a p y as the only source a n d resource we have for wisdom, we easily fall into a t y r a n n y of m e n t a l health, setting new s t a n d a r d s of punitive j u d g m e n t against ourselves and others.1 For example, we find ourselves charting our " p r o g r e s s " on a scale t h a t stretches from " i n f a n t i l e " to " m a t u r e . " We label too quickly and too disparagingly a n y resting place in our growth as a point of " f i x a t i o n . " And some of us compulsively scan our d r e a m s on waking each morning to tally how m u c h of our m a t e r i a l is a r c h e t y p a l and how m u c h merely personal. When those of us who are t r a i n e d in religion as well as p s y c h o t h e r a p y t h i n k of Ann B. Ulanov, Th.D., is Professor in the Program of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and a psychotherapist in private practice. She is also a member of the Board of the C. G. Jung Institute of Training. Her book, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, was published in 1971, and her new book, with her husband, Barry Ulanov, Religion and the Unconscious, was published in 1975. This article was the graduation address to three classes of residents who had completed training in the Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute in June 1975. 88
The Place of Religion in the Training of Pastoral Counselors
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the hybrid nature of our schooling, we m a y also r e m e m b e r the simple b u t profound point t h a t health is not and c a n n o t be our first or entire c o m m i t m e n t as professionals. We know in our bones t h a t there is an i m p o r t a n t difference between being healthy and being a person who is fully alive, between being able to function and feeling real, between living without too m u c h mental distress and living with a sense t h a t life is worth while. We know how i m p o r t a n t it is to live fully engaged, present, taking all t h a t is there for us in the spirit of what Scripture calls the " a b u n d a n t life." Our ability to develop a self and to feel its reality depends without question on our psychological development. B u t what religious traditions tell us is t h a t psychological development is not enough to give us a sense of being real and fully in touch with life. Religion tells us bluntly that a "good life" is a life lived consciously in relation to God, to m y s t e r y as it comes into our own lives. T h e root meaning of religion, "to bind back strongly," suggests t h a t the root of our own religion, regardless of denomination or tradition, will still be found in those f u n d a m e n t a l experiences through which we feel t h a t God has touched us. In our book, Religion and the Unconscious, my h u s b a n d and I have called t h a t kind of event "primordial religious experience," to indicate t h a t its significance wells up from a profound depth t h a t exceeds the reach of reason and imagination, making itself u n m i s t a k a b l y known as the sense of the unknown that, for b e t t e r or worse, deeply marks our lives. ~ In primordial religious experience we have the conviction, whether positive or negative, t h a t we have been made present to ourselves through a strong sense of presence of the Unknown. For some people, this kind of experience comes in relation to other people, in the liturgy, or in an intimate personal relationship such as marriage. For others it comes through dreams, or prayers, m o m e n t s of m e d i t a t i o n or recollection. W h a t e v e r its vehicle, the hallmark of primordial religious experience is seriousness, the certainty t h a t something of basic importance for our whole life has happened. Out of this kind of experience our values and our reasons for living grow, however fuzzy those values and reasons may be, however ambiguous or undeveloped our sense of God or the transcendent may remain. Out of this kind of experience comes our sense of being a real person, really alive. Such primordial religious m o m e n t s are often the last kind of experience a patient will entrust to his or her therapist. T h e y are guarded as secrets m u c h more t h a n are sexual activities or incomes. T h e r e is in most people more reluctance to expose this kind of experience t h a n hidden faults or unlived ambitions. In such primordial experience one feels totally revealed for what one is, no more, no less. One feels confronted with all t h a t life is and has to offer to us in such moments, so t h a t how one responds m a y d e t e r m i n e the direction and dimension of the rest of one's life. We do not feel in any way t h a t we have seen all or done all or t h a t all of life can be reduced to this one m o m e n t , but r a t h e r t h a t the full vibrancy of life is contained in the present m o m e n t . We recognize the folly of believing t h a t everything is still ahead of us, the illusion of thinking t h a t sometime in the future life will show itself f u l l y - - " W h e n I grow up," or " W h e n I finish training," or " W h e n I make more m o n e y , " or " W h e n I get m a r r i e d , " or
90
Journal of Religion and Health
" W h e n I fall in love," or " W h e n I finally learn to take a real risk." All these rationalizations for not living in the present have fallen away. We see in one burning perception that whatever life gives is given here, now, in each present living moment. As counselors who have concern for a person's soul as well as his or her psyche, we recognize t h a t this sort of primordial religious experience feeds the underground spring of a person's life and nurtures the ability to achieve a fuller life. Hence it is of the u t m o s t practical significance in t h e r a p y t h a t a level of trust be reached between our clients and ourselves so t h a t the great story of such an event m a y be told. This kind of trust m a y take a long time to d e v e l o p - - o r no time at all. It depends less on therapeutic procedures t h a n on our own respect for this dimension of the soul, as it appears in our own lives as well as in those of others. Here is one example of this kind of experience2 A woman in her early twenties, suffering from anorexia nervosa, confided her vision of the essential connectedness of physical life. This vision compensated for the splitting of her body and psyche, so painfully manifested in the typical s y m p t o m s of her illness--rapid and severe weight loss, an obsession with food and eating, inability to sleep, a withdrawal from emotional interaction with her family, and feelings of nervoushess. She was near despair. In her vision she saw herself lying on a beach in the sun, "held in an encircling completeness of sand touching water and water touching sky." All the medieval e l e m e n t s - - e a r t h , air, fire, w a t e r - - e n c o m p a s s e d her small reality. She said t h a t in her vision she felt " c o n n e c t e d in my own body just as sky and earth and water and sun are connected around me." T h e vision held religious significance for her. She had no active belief in God, but this vision promised release from suffering and conveyed a sense of life's wholeness in contrast to the brokenness of her mind-body unit. T h e vision was a basis of hope for h e r - - a n d for me as well, ! must s a y - - w h e n her weight dropped perilously low and the struggles of her illness became most intense. People of advanced religious development m a y see such a vision as being at a beginning level of religious experience, and so it was, close to an elementary sort of nature mysticism. But the pastoral counselor knows well the need for people to build up their religion.from below, from the unconscious to consciousness, as well as to learn to receive it from above in acts of grace. From these primordial experiences comes the willingness to construct reasons for living to shape the r u d i m e n t s of a value system. It is these experiences we are bound back to at the center of our lives. If we accept them, they can provide the roots for our most civilized values, for justice and love, permitting us to do to others as we would have them do unto us. For counselors trained in religion, as well as in the ways of the unconscious, there is a special task here: t h a t of seeing and knowing t h a t the language of the unconscious is often employed in primordial religious experience, t h a t such experience invariably reaches deep into our conscious roots and includes all t h a t is undeveloped, infantile, and left out of our more civilized and m a t u r e behavior. Religion addresses itself to the "least among us," which includes precisely the least developed sides of our personalities--those fantasies of odd sexual behavior,
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those childish wishes and fears, those stubborn needs that persist in intensity against all rational understanding. Religion helps us place in proper perspective the central emphasis in all schools of depth psychology on the developmental theory of human growth. We develop in stages, over considerable periods, to reach maturity, When mental health is taken as our primary goal, we run the great risk of idolizing developmental theory, automatically assuming that as we grow beyond our childish origins we will thankfully leave them altogether behind us, for what is later is somehow always better. Religion reminds us that this is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable nor true. The magical, childish needs and wishes that stay with us, never to be left behind, are the first and lowest elements of personality that speak to us directly of the transcendent where it has touched us directly. Whatever we call our own primordial religious experience, this is o u r vision of reality, shot through with the primitive, inferior, barely conscious material deeply caught up in our psyches. What we learn from this experience is that we cannot identify with such material but also that it cannot be left behind or rejected as outgrown. We can--and should--rearrange our way of living in relation to it to see its significance as rooting us to our origins in the depths, in the unconscious, in the nurturing soil of our origins. Prayers that are alive are full of a simple, direct, childish dependence on God that is primordial i n intensity, imbued with acknowledgment of our own small proportion in relation t o the immensity of the Spirit, and quite pleased to be connected to roots. The influence of religious training on the work of the pastoral counselor goes much further than simple recognition that the whole person includes infantile as well as mature aspects of the psyche. Our recognition of the importance of primordial religious experience comes to bear in a crucial way whenever a patient is confronted in the course of therapy with a moral choice: to choose life, life free of neurosis, or to side with neurosis against life. These moments of choice always arise through the particular small details of a person's own life situation, in the flesh of daily experience. At these points it is clear that the therapy has been sufficiently successful to bring the person to a place where there is a choice. The patient is no longer so unconsciously bound to the revolutions of a neurotic complex that he or she can only play the same record of symptomatology over and over again. Now there is the possibility of achieving a different ending. It is at this point that the distinctions between being healthy and being really alive, between functioning adequately and feeling oneself a real person, make themselves most keenly felt. Let me give a good example of what I mean. The patient was a middle-aged man fraught with mistrust. He had grown up in war-torn Europe where he had learned to cope with the emotional chaos of war by rationally cataloguing everything that happened to him. What proved to be a helpful defense against uncontrollable emotions of fear and panic in those years came to be a crippling compulsion in his adult life. Any spontaneous feeling was automatically subjected to intellectual analysis that killed the feeling. He came to a point in his therapy where he had to choose whether to go on analyzing everything to death,
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including his growing trust in his feelings about the therapy and about me, or to side with those feelings, even though they were not controlled or catalogued. He no longer had to rehearse his old defenses--tearing things apart through logical reduction devoid of h u m a n connection. He was able not to do so. At this point whether he did or did not choose not to do so depended less on his state of health t h a n on his willingness instinctively and childishly to venture into what was for him the primitive unknown as it touched him at the m o m e n t - - t h e world of feeling and tentative trust. Finally, we must stress the role of primordial religious experience in our own lives. For although we m a y see the value of respectful attention to such experience in the lives of those we treat professionally, if we do nc~ honor and a t t e n d to the life of our own souls, our therapeutic technique will have little or no h u m a n force behind it. We are faced t h e n with the question of what it means to nurture our own souls. It is helpful to keep in mind some basic distinctions between the soul and the psyche. T h e soul is our opening to the unknown, to God; the psyche is m a d e up of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of h u m a n personality. T h e soul's life requires willingness, rather t h a n intelligence or u n d a m a g e d psychological background, to be developed, the willingness both to pay attention to what happens to us and to learn from it. It is especially i m p o r t a n t t h a t we pay close attention to our primordial religious experience, to discover it, to take it seriously, to let it live in us. Unlike the body and the psyche, which grow automatically when the necessary conditions for growth obtain--food, shelter, h u m a n relationships--the soul does not grow without open, conscious consent and willing participation on our part. The soul develops only so far as we are willing to go with it, whether gladly or grudgingly. We see the aptness of the old-fashioned names for the processes involved in developing the soul--religious discipline and spiritual exercises. The soul requires deliberate feeding and organized effort to develop. Unlike the body or the psyche, the soul's life can be taken up and advanced at any time in our lives; it is less subject to the confining exigencies of the aging process. As we get older, certain physical possibilities are successively closed to us. We cannot, for example, take up a career in dancing in middle-age. Some schools of depth psychology turn away prospective patients past the age of forty, because they think we are t h e n too old to reach back into our infantile memories. T h e life of the soul, however, is f u n d a m e n t a l l y different: it can always be renewed; it makes its claims on us right up until the end of our lives. As an example I quote the dream of a 91-year-old woman who consciously wanted only to be released from life. A dream she had, however, pointed to work still to be accomplished. She d r e a m e d she was at an artist's house looking at his paintings in his gallery. She came to one e m p t y wall where no painting was hung. It was clear t h a t the painting to be hung there was not yet finished. It was also clear t h a t she was the painter of t h a t picture. If a soul's life is not nurtured, the resultant problems are large and serious, all the more so if we have been analyzed. We suffer, for example, not so m u c h from
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repression of lively instinct as from failure to emerge into life a n d to t a k e hold of it passionately. We do not seethe now with repressed contents, stoutly defended against. We are afflicted rather with a pallidness, a failure to come forth. If the soul does not emerge, we find ourselves getting along well enough with others, particularly if we have h a d some t h e r a p y to e d u c a t e us a b o u t our own projections and unconscious a s s u m p t i o n s ; b u t we do not love; we cannot go to love with the proper intensity of feeling. I n s t e a d we hold b a c k from the good in w h a t e v e r form it comes, dreading it rather t h a n welcoming it, fearing r a t h e r t h a n greeting the a b u n d a n c e of life t h a t is now possible for us. If the soul does not emerge, we m a y get over such p r o b l e m s as those t h a t come with depression b u t suffer instead a restriction to the life of consciousness. We are no longer open to the flow of the unconscious that, like water, keeps fertile and m o i s t the ground of all our conscious concerns. We m a y have a secure life b u t never the c e r t a i n t y t h a t we are living in h a r m o n y with our own particular destiny, faithful to the way t h a t is ours and ours alone. W i t h o u t the soul we m a y not c o n t a m i n a t e other people with our projections and unlived life, but still we fail to offer positive alternatives to the malaises and evils so present in c o n t e m p o r a r y times. We c a n n o t seem to find the new ways to correspond to grace t h a t our new life and the world's require. Our i m a g i n a t i o n s fall into desuetude. We develop no new a p p r e h e n s i o n s of m e a n i n g . We merely reflect passively what we see around us. To be a counselor with the resources of religious tradition a n d d e p t h psychology is to have access to the resources t h a t feed b o t h soul a n d psyche. Really to use these resources is to b e c o m e tough, c a p a b l e of living events with direct simplicity and facing people with a simple directness. T h u s we not only recover our own counsel, b u t come also to p a r t i c i p a t e - - i n I s a i a h ' s w o r d s - - i n the life of the " W o n d e r f u l Counselor." At the point of c o m p l e t i o n of training for the role of pastoral counselor, then, it is a p p r o p r i a t e to t h i n k of the concrete ways in which we m a y nurture our souls and enlarge our u n d e r s t a n d i n g of the discipline of p s y c h o t h e r a p y . M a k i n g ourselves open to the U n k n o w n as it a p p r o a c h e s a n d touches us is not an a u t o m a t i c process. It will not h a p p e n without our willing consent and participation. But with firm a c c e p t a n c e and clear participation, it will h a p p e n a n d it will go on h a p p e n i n g . Of that, we can be sure. References
1. For discussion of "the tyranny of mental health" in relation to Christian faith, see Ulanov, A. B., "The Two Strangers," Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 1973, 28 (4). 2. Ulanov, A. and B., Religion and the Unconscious. Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1975, chapter I. 3. All clinical examples are taken from my practice as a psychotherapist unless otherwise stated.
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