Peter Rollins's Blog, page 22

The Meaning of Life (with Elliott Morgan)

Recently the comedian Elliott Morgan had me on Happy Hour for a little interview about my work. Elliott is an amazing guy who I love, so it was great to be on his show. Enjoy!

Shelter50 Fundraiser

I’ll be hanging out with my friends at Shelter50 for a couple of days. If you are free and live in the area, come on over to a fundraiser with me at 7pm. There is a $20 cover. The address is 602 St. Andrew St. Rapid City, SD 57701

The Grim Reaper Also Bears Gifts: Some Thoughts on Love, Longevity and the New Year

 

Recently the comedian Pete Holmes interviewed me for his podcast You Make it Weird. Holmes is a great interviewer and the conversation traversed many themes, one of which was the thorny subject of death. We didn’t dwell there too long, but I chatted with him about how a world with death is no doubt painful, but that a world without it would be even worse.

I’m not going to reflect here about how death is part of the biological life cycle, but instead want to touch on how it is a part of our subjective life.

To understand this we need to begin by bringing to mind how death brushes up against us many times in our life. For instance, when lovers separate, friends part or children grow.

Each of these signals the death of certain connections, and they can scar us deeply.

In the aftermath of such things we might devise all manner of strategies designed to protect us from feeling the sting again. We might hide away in hobbies that we can control, make oaths with the gods, or vow never to be vulnerable again.

Indeed, when someone says to a person they have just fallen in love with, “I wish this moment would last forever,” we can hint at a very understandable fear of the end that is nestled in the beginning. They want the euphoria, to continue without end.

But such an desire has its dark side.

Take the example of marriage proposals taken at the very point when the relationship is crumbling. This is a common, though rarely talked about phenomenon. While many people get married as a way of marking genuine love, there are times whenever people make this commitment as a way of repressing the collapse of what they once had.

Facing the end becomes so terrifying that they find themselves doing anything to deny its reality.

Of course, there are lots of other reasons that people decide to stay in a relationship where the feelings have died. For instance, someone might be concerned about her children, financial prospects or social standing. Indeed many couples who have come to accept the death of their romantic love, find ways to transition into a different type of relationship that allows them to live together as friends.

One of the strategies that some of us employ to protect ourselves from the trauma of death involves never really embracing life in the first place. When we view a castle, all we see are the ruins that it will one day be.

If one person defends against death by ignoring the reality that the structure decays, another defends himself by refusing to see the beauty the structure currently has.

What is truly difficult for us all is to embrace the castle, while acknowledging the reality of its decay. Not so that we despair, but so that we might both be able to better appreciate what we currently have and be able to bear the pain of eventual loss.

Entropy happens.

In our relationships as much as in spinning solar systems.

We can’t wall ourselves off from death without finding ourselves walled in by it.

Too many of us hold onto things that have long since turned to dust. Held captive by a memory, oppressed by a fear of endings, locked down by anxiety over the unknown.

But sometimes we need to make peace with death, and realise that the grim reaper also bears gifts.

The New Year is often a time where we think about what we want to do next in our lives, but it can also be a time when we symbolically let some things go. Taking time to accept what is already dead, to lay our wreaths and observe a wake. Asking ourselves what needs to be laid to rest for life to spring forth again.

Building Future Church: A Clinic for Practitioners

The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology are partnering with The Well to host an afternoon clinic. You’re invited to join us for a dynamic, practical discussion centered around building future church in each of our unique contexts. Feel free to come with questions, struggles and frustrations that you would like to discuss and wrestle with. This afternoon clinic will involve instruction as well as situation specific conversation.

For more information, click here

If God is Dead; Nothing is Permissible: Some Thoughts on Secularism

Dostoyevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov once claimed, “if God does not exist, then everything is permissible.” This famous line captures the common wisdom that the death of a supreme authority enables people to live in a freer way. Without an external sovereign authority offering prohibitions people can throw off their shackles and construct their own reality.

It can initially seem surprising then that Lacan gave his own spin to this saying by teaching that the death of God can actually mean that nothing is permitted. In this claim he is not only questioning the idea that the loss of an external soverign power means freedom, but he is also playing off a line in the Bible where Paul claims, “for me all things are permissible, but not all things are helpful.”

Not only is Lacan saying that the death of God doesn’t rid society of certain prohibitions, he goes further by saying that the death of God can lead to an even more oppressive type of prohibition.

To understand what this might mean we should begin by briefly describing an evolutionary myth Freud created to make sense of some of his findings in the clinic. The story involved going back to the very beginnings of civilization and imagining how human society took shape. In Moses and Monotheism he wrote of how humans lived together in a primordial pack held together via the leadership of a father/master figure. This powerful master created and enforced various laws that everyone needed to obey, laws that worked for the master’s own benefit and ensured his power.

This master controlled all the sexual relations of the primordial horde, ensuring the satisfaction of his own lusts at the expense of others.

Freud went on to write of how the community conspired together to kill the father. They planed this act of rebellion so as to break free from the tyranny of the father and enjoy open sexual relations.

They succeed in killing the master, but the surprising result is not more freedom. Instead the community experiences guilt over the murder and sets about memorializing the dead master. In doing this, the community internalize the prohibitions that were once externally imposed. Instead of entering into a freer, more sexually liberated community; they end up becoming their own oppressors, setting up rules to regulate their actions.

The point of the story was to make sense of a common scene in the psychoanalytic clinic, namely the neurotic who is not freed from the strict prohibitions of their parents when those parents die, but who continue to experience those prohibitions when the parents are nowhere to be seen. What one finds is that the individual has internalized the demands, making them a part of their subjective life. It is no longer the actual parent who is judging them, they are judging themselves from the perspective of the dead parent. The prohibition thus persists as a shadow on the inner wall of the individual.

To illustrate the difference between these, Žižek has contrasted two types of parent. The first tells their protesting child that they have to go and see their granny. The unwilling child experiences this as an external demand being imposed in order to limit her freedom.

But then there is the “enlightened” liberal parent who, instead of making an oppressive demand on the child to visit granny, attempts to guilt the child into going,

“Granny loves you, you really should go. You wouldn’t want to be selfish, would you?”

In this second case the child doesn’t just have to go to see their granny, but actually has to internalize the demand and make it their own. In the first the child can maintain a sense of inner protest by fighting against the authority figure, but in the latter they become their own oppressors. They have to go, and they have to like it.

Interestingly, the latter can be more oppressive than the former, because there is nowhere you can escape the gaze of the parent. In the former, one can transgress when the parent isn’t looking, while in the latter the gaze is always present like Bentham’s famous Panopticon. Indeed Žižek has even drawn out an interesting theological reading of the command, “you shall have no other gods before me.” Here he shows how this can be read as God saying, “You can have gods, but just be discreet, don’t do it where I can see.” This is analogous to the relationship where a couple say, “we can have affairs, just don’t talk about it.” In other words, the external authority always allows for a minimal space of transgressive maneuver.

This is why Žižek makes the point of saying that the first act of the revolutionary today is to cut against themselves, for we have become willing participants in our own oppressive systems. Systems that are even more pervasive now that secular society prides itself on being free of some divine sovereignty. We are not being forced to find meaning in consumerism, for example, we have internalized this message for ourselves. We can’t look at some external authority that must be overcome. That authority dwells within us even when we experience it bearing down on us (e.g. when we experience the oppression of our own desire to purchase products).

For Lacan, the death of a sovereign authority doesn’t lead to freedom, for the law that is externally imposed is internalized so that it becomes even more oppressive (at a more basic level this can be described as something which marks the very creation of our ego, but we won’t go into that here).

This can help us understand why Radical Theologians are skeptical of modern secular humanism. For the freedom often claimed by humanists can be seen as anything but freedom.

One may no longer believe in an all seeing eye watching everything, for example, but we might find no problem embracing the proliferation of surveillance technology. Our society may tacitly embrace a militarized police force, clandestine Government agencies, black hole prisons etc. even though they provide the same limits that religion once played. The external divine authority has been replaced with a sovereignty that is structurally the same, but has been internalized into the society’s unconscious. We not only are forced to live in it, we are encouraged to enjoy, defend it and constantly feel it. We are asked to embrace our oppression.

In analytic terms, an individual neurotic does not need to simply embrace the death of the parents in order to free themselves from a potentially oppressive regime, they need to find freedom from the parents law as it has been integrated into their subjectivity.

The complex move that has to be made here is for the internalized dead parents to realize that they are dead. What this means is that our own subjective system of prohibitions has to confront its own non-existence.

A person can easily say something like, “My dad disapproved of me doing X, but now he’s dead he can’t judge me” while still finding themselves feeling deeply guilty when doing X. The internal structure needs to experience it’s own death. Something Lacan referred to as the moment in which we confront the non-existence of the Big Other.

This is why people like Zizek remain interested in Christianity, for in their radical reading they see something much more shocking than the secular proclamation of God’s non-existence. Instead they see the fundamental Christian move as involving both the internalization of the death of God (the Crucifixion as subjective experience), alongside the experience of this internal God discovering its own impotence (“Why have you forsaken me”).

This theological shock therapy corresponds to what we might call the psychoanalytic cure. In the cure the individual not only intellectually comes to terms with the death of the external authority, but is freed from the internalized form of that authority (the super-ego) through experiencing that authority confrontating its impotence. This opens up a different way of living that can be described as a love that fulfills/abolishes the law (Resurrection life in theological terms).

The individual who has broken free of sovereignty (in both its substantial sacred and shadowy secular form), is able to live a life of love in which their acts arise from an experience of joy rather than internal coercion.

From this perspective one can say that traditional forms of religion function as a type of external prohibitive authority structure while modern society tends to exhibit an internal prohibitive authority structure. In contrast to both of these, radical communities (like ikon and ikonNYC) are attempts to deconstruct sovereignty in its external and internalized ways so that a different type of life can emerge. Something that is captured beautifully in the saying, “There was once an Englishman so brave, not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn’t even afraid of them.”

One can still talk of a type of sovereignty in this third space, but it functions in a significantly different way. To understand this we need only think of parents with a newborn child. The parents might say, “our child is the most beautiful person in the world.” However they don’t mean this in some objective way. It is a truth they affirm while knowing that it is a truth told from their subjective standpoint, a truth without objective foundation. This is why they don’t say, “our child is average looking.” For, again, this would be an attempt at objectivity. The parents are caught up in love for the infant and would sacrifice so much for the child. But the sacrifice is not felt as an oppressive demand. It is joyously affirmed and arises from their love. It is this type of joyous commitment to the world arising from love that is opened up in the death of sovereignty in its sacred and secular forms.

Forgotten, but not Gone: Racism and the American Unconscious

This is reproduced from an article I wrote for Theology of Ferguson.

Walk around a graveyard and you’re likely to see the phrase “gone, but not forgotten,” etched onto a few tombstones. These words capture the idea that the departed remains in the thoughts of those left behind. It is also a phrase that hints at what it means to mourn, for to mourn the lost involves remembering them. Holding them in our mind despite the pain of the loss. When we turn away from mourning we turn away from remembering. In our pain we attempt to “forget.” The remembering is a burden too heavy to bear. Instead, we dedicate a large amount of psychic energy to the task of pushing the memories from our conscious mind so that we might be able to continue with business as usual.

The problem however, as most of us know, is that such attempts never quite succeed. The forgetting never amounts to flushing out. The unpleasant feelings might disappear from our conscious horizon, but they return to us in the form of distracting and often destructive symptoms.

In this way, the one we love is forgotten, but not gone. They remain with us in a spectral form as a type of mischievous poltergeist, disrupting the smooth running of our daily life. What we try to let go of doesn’t let go of us.

This idea of the “forgotten, but not gone,” brings us squarely into the surreal territory of the unconscious. That liminal space where the terrible truths we hide from ourselves return in insidious ways.

Symptoms can usually be managed to some extent. We learn to work with them, navigate them, ignore them, or deny them. But there are times when they become so painful and destructive that we can no longer tolerate them.

When they become too oppressive we seek to rid ourselves of their excessive dimension. A process that is profoundly difficult, for it turns out that we are deeply invested in that which is causing us pain. What one discovers is that our symptoms are not really the problem but, rather, are solutions to a problem. The symptom is what erupts precisely because we don’t want to face something that we imagine to be even worse. To deal with a symptom we need to look at the monster that birthed it. When faced with that possibility many of us choose to stick with the symptom rather than tackle it’s source, turning to things like drugs, religion, and work to manage it.

To understand the symptom let us take the clinical case of a young man who was going through a difficult divorce. As part of his agreement with his former partner he went to her house each Thursday to look after the children. However, a problem arose when he forgot to visit the children for three weeks in a row. Stress at work, illness, and forgetfulness were all given as reasons for the failure. Each of these were potentially legitimate, yet the question had to be asked as to whether something was being said in the forgetfulness. In short, whether it was a symptom of something. After all, it was pointed out that he was not in the habit of forgetting appointments made with friends and colleagues, even though they meant less to him than his children.

On the third occasion he forgot about his duties, his ex-partner asked, “Why are you doing this to your children, do you want them to hate you?” A statement that hit him as significant. In a moment of subsequent reflection he came to consider whether the answer might actually be “Yes,” that he actually did want his children to hate him. Part of this individual’s work involved facing up to a deep-seated sense of guilt and self-hatred that, while ignored in daily life, erupted in destructive acts designed to make other people react negatively to him.

By denying the reality of this unpleasant truth, the truth found a way to speak in unpleasant ways.

It’s often only when a symptom gets so bad that we finally become willing to tackle what it veils/unveils. An act that takes us on a torturous journey through a labyrinth full of dead-ends, demons and hidden traps.

It’s not simply individuals who have symptoms. Families can also exhibit them. Take the example of a couple in a troubled relationship, but who pretend that everything is fine. On the surface the relationship might look picture perfect, yet, on closer inspection, the truth finds ways to speak.

Perhaps there are a plethora of pictures on social media showing how happy and fulfilled they are. A few pictures might be normal, but the sheer volume of new ones every week comes across as somehow excessive and contrived. Or maybe one of the children is acting out in school, or the husband is always working or the wife spends all her free time chatting to people on her computer. There can be good reasons for all of these things, reasons unrelated to the relationship. But they might also be symptoms of an unaddressed problem. Perhaps the truth about an unspoken affair, or an unrecognized resentment connected to a past indiscretion.

Things can continue along the same track as long as no-one brings up what the given symptom is standing in for. Many relationships exist like this for years, never bringing up the unpleasant truth for fear of a crisis. Not realizing that the crisis is already there, lurking in the midst and making its presence felt in a variety of destructive ways. The couple might attempt to fix the manifest issues, but unless they address what those issues express, this will end up being little more than a game of whack-a-mole, with a new symptom erupting every time a previous one is “dealt with.”

To take yet another step back from the individual we can also speak of religious and political systems possessing symptoms. Take the example of a state that has a large problem with homelessness. When confronting the situation it’s all too easy to concentrate on helping those who live on the street reintegrate into society. In this way homelessness is viewed as an anomaly that can be dealt with by attempting to get people back into the system that they feel alienated from. But this is to treat homelessness in abstraction (abstracting it from the conditions which create and sustain it), rather than understanding it as a symptom. This ensures that any acts to alleviate the problem are conservative in nature, i.e. seeking to conserve the existing socio-political order by simply integrating people back into it.

In contrast to treating such things in abstraction, psychoanalysis provides a space where individuals become sensitive to listening to that which is damaging them. An opening is created where one can be confronted with ones own repressed truth. This confrontation is not about healing any more than the point of playing football is physical fitness. But just as fitness might well come from playing football regularly so a form of positive transformation can result from learning to be sensitive to the discourse of the unconscious.

The more unhealthy a society the more it will repress it’s unpleasant truths, and the more it does this, the more this truth will erupt in monstrous ways. What the society attempts to forget will find ways to speak. And while we are quite adept at ignoring this speech, there will be times when it becomes all but impossible to close our ears.

At times like this we hit upon a moment of explicit crisis. And here the word “crisis” is particularly apt, at least if we take seriously how the word is written in Chinese. For there the word is comprised of two characters, one signifying danger and the other opportunity. At these moments where we cannot remain deaf, a fleeting opportunity presents itself, an opportunity for substantive change.

In light of this, how might we understand the horrific shooting of Michael Brown by Police Officer Darren Wilson? Can this be seen as a monstrous eruption of a repressed truth? What we see in Michael Brown’s tragic death is the exposure of a reality that the political system has invested great energy attempting to forget: that racism is still prevalent.

This racism is no longer explicit in the way it once was. Yet what has been hidden from direct view hasn’t gone away. It has simply diffused itself throughout the cultural edifice in such a way that it becomes difficult to point out exactly where it is or who is to blame for it.

In contrast to a world where we can point to some explicit racist organizations or individual slaveholders, we now inhabit a situation where the violence of racism has penetrated into the very soil of our most hallowed institutions. While a dysfunctional system creates dysfunctional individuals (who need to be held to account), there aren’t a few rotten apples who can be taken out of the basket to make everything better. The rot has permeated the whole orchard, ensuring that more far reaching action is ultimately required. Indeed, in many ways the indictment and imprisonment of Darren Wilson might have been a preferred outcome for the socio-political constellation, for then an individual could be made to carry all the blame for what is a systemic issue. Wilson should be held accountable for his actions, but not because he is the sole problem, but rather because he was an actor who expressed the reality of a deeper and more pervasive problem. A situation not unlike the one in Abu Ghraib, in which the individual soldiers abusing prisoners needed to be placed within the wider military complex that encouraged and even sanctioned it.

Like an organism, political systems seek a type of order and are thus threatened by the explosive eruptions of symptoms that expose their disavowed brutality. Because of this they employ all manner of tactics to manage and manicure such outbursts. In contrast, the true political dissident engages in the difficult process of keeping the truth on the surface. Something we witness first hand in the Ferguson protests, in chants like “Black lives matter,” and “hands up don’t shoot,” and in viral campaigns such as #iftheygunnedmedown.

These protestors can’t work within the given system because the event of Michael Brown’s death exposes how there is a disease within the system itself. Because of the size and extent of the problem many commentators are pessimistic about the possibility of change. And the truth is that change is incredibly hard. However, it is possible.

To take one pertinent example, the police force that was established in Northern Ireland in 1922 was finally disbanded in 2001 as part of a multi-party peace agreement. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was largely viewed as structurally sectarian (engaged in one-sided policing and collusion with Loyalist paramilitaries). Firing a few high ranking administrators, or weeding out some corrupt police officers wouldn’t be enough. The system itself needed a fundamental reconfiguration. As part of the Good Friday Agreement it was agreed that the RUC would be replaced by a new force: the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI). This move was signaled a commitment to both replacing the highly militarized RUC and to representing the Catholic community. Today all the major political parties in Northern Ireland support the PSNI (with Sinn Féin giving full acceptance in 2007 as part of the St Andrews Agreement).

In many ways what happened in Northern Ireland through the Good Friday Agreement was inconceivable only a few years before it was signed. But there came a point whenever the suffering caused by The Troubles had become so bad that the pain required to face the issues and make a change became preferable to continuing on the same road.

It’s impossible to tell right now what will happen in the aftermath of the Michael Brown shooting and failure to indict Darren Wilson. These events might be a significant milestone in the abolition of structural racism, or those in power might use all the means at their disposal to repress the cry for justice that we currently hear. In the latter case more black peoples blood will be shed, more black peoples lives will be ruined and more black peoples hopes will be crushed.

This is what makes the actions of the protestors so vital and prophetic.This is why we must join them and call for change. For they are attempting to expose the horrible truth of racism to all of us who would rather ignore it and get on with our lives. They are fighting to keep this truth in front of our noses until we can no longer bear it and join the emancipatory struggle.

Sadly, the reality is that it will likely take more suffering before enough of us are willing to act. We might need to be confronted again and again with the implicit racism that has been diffused throughout our prison system, police service, and judiciary.

Most of us not directly affected by the racism in America, or those of us who have benefited from it, don’t want to face the difficult questions that the events in Ferguson bring up. But, if we close our eyes, ears and hearts to what is going on we condemn ourselves. If we turn from the truth that is being glimpsed today in Ferguson we will continue to walk the path of damnation, but if we face it squarely and allow it to break us, the truth may set us free.

 

How to Hate Yourself Without Knowing it

As you might have noticed, I’ve recently been writing on the theme of defence mechanisms as they operate in individuals and groups. I want to continue this trajectory by looking at another common defence (I’m keen to write about some of the more productive defences, particularly Sublimation, but that will have to wait a little longer). In a paper entitled “The Taboo of Virginity” Freud coined the term “narcissism of small differences.” This basically refers to that well-known experience in which we get angry and frustrated with individuals or groups who actually appear very similar to us.

The paradigmatic example, of course, is family. Indeed there’s a long list of comedies that play explicitly on how the narcissism of small differences plays out between parents and their children, or among siblings. This is a popular trope because most of know what it is to get disproportionately angry with something silly like the way our dad eats his soup, or the way our mum taps her fingers. But rather than ask why we get profoundly angry by such things we tend ignore them as much as possible. Not realising that they could be speaking to us about an issue that might, if addressed, make our lives a little more bearable and those relationships a little deeper.

The word “narcissism” is used to describe this conflict because the person who we find annoying is operating as a reflected image of ourselves. In them we are confronting/constructing/critiquing ourselves in some way.

This defence is hinted at when we reserve our greatest anger for that which appears closest to us. For instance, we might know someone who pours out attack after attack against what they themselves actually appear to be (white, male, female, British, American etc.). They strangely attack what mostly closely resembles their own actions, ethnicity, and/or temperament. Often what a person attacks is so close to what they themselves are that it is all but impossible to tell the difference between them and what they ridicule. What we bear witness to in such comedic scenes is actually an individual projecting onto some other an anger that speaks of a repressed, unresolved truth about themselves. The other who is being attacked is actually being used as a means of deflecting a truth about the attackers own feelings about themselves.

We can see this play out in a well-known joke by Emo Philips. Bearing in mind that jokes are often funniest when they reveal to us an obvious truth that we know but don’t acknowledge, it is interesting to note that the Ship of Fools website voted it to be the funniest religious joke of all time,

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, “Don’t do it!” He said, “Nobody loves me.” I said, “God loves you. Do you believe in God?”

He said, “Yes.” I said, “Are you a Christian or a Jew?” He said, “A Christian.” I said, “Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me, too! What franchise?” He said, “Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?” He said, “Northern Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”

He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist.” I said, “Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region.” I said, “Me, too!”

Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?” He said, “Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.” I said, “Die, heretic!” And I pushed him over.

What we see here is the narcissism of small differences expressed in an extreme way. Yet reality can often mimic satire in a disturbing way. After all, we know that people are often killed for expressing insignificant religious differences.

In Northern Ireland there are a huge variety of Presbyterian churches resulting from split after split over the smallest of disagreements. There are Non-subscribing Presbyterians, Free Presbyterians, Reformed Presbyterians and Evangelical Presbyterians among others. This constant separation from the heretic marks an issue within the Protestant church more generally. Something that stands in sharp contrast to the Catholic Church, which has remained broadly united over time. A contrast that was interestingly replicated in the paramilitary groups associated with Protestantism and Catholicism in N. Ireland. While the IRA remained largely united throughout The Troubles, the Loyalist “Protestant” paramilitaries split into multiple, often antagonistic, groups (UDA, UVF, UFF, LVF etc.).

The narcissism of small differences is also something prevalent, even endemic, in leftist groups. Often a small difference of emphasis, conceptualisation, or even tone, is blown up into an issue that evokes an outburst of disproportionate anger, frustration, ridicule or defensiveness.

This frenetic fighting/splitting from those who only differ from us in small ways can speak of an inability to deal with internal conflict. As the Irish comedian Dylan Moran once said, “war is the inability to have conflict.” In other words, it is what we do when we can’t face sitting in the same room with another, confronting the antagonism, and working it through.

War and “denominational” splitting are intimately intertwined. For instance, we might find ourselves attacking someone on Social Media then shutting ourselves off from them, only to later attack them again in a never-ending cycle of repetition. Both the fight and the separation are linked by the fact the object addressed is both repulsive and seductive to us. It is a disturbing mirror image that we want to smash, yet find mesmerising. This defence is effective in the short term. Both the outburst of anger and act of separation can make us feel better about ourselves, but it’s ultimately ineffective and so must be engaged in again and again (often with diminishing effect).

There are, of course, any number of legitimate reasons for anger and for separating ourselves from other groups or individuals. In my work I’m often dealing with people who are attempting to discern whether they should leave a given organisation or stay i.e. whether their leaving signals an inability to deal with conflict, or whether the differences are significant enough to make staying actually problematic (after all it is common for people to stay in abusive situations when it would be better for them to leave). It’s key here to remember the term “small differences.” We are speaking here of the situation in which people are patently fighting against what they are.

In religious terms the difference between legitimate and illegitimate separation might be illustrated in the difference between Luther breaking from the Catholic Church contrasted with a tiny inter-denominational split reminiscent of Emo Philip’s joke.

The question of whether to stay in a given situation or leave is a very real one for many of us. Just yesterday I exchanged messages with a friend who works within a religious organisation that she finds herself in conflict with. She has even gotten into trouble a few times for entertaining what the institution judges to be dangerous theological ideas. In our communication she expressed a want to work out whether she was staying in an abusive situation that would ultimately damage her, or whether what she was experiencing might be a healthy conflict that could generate positive institutional change.

Of course, in such situations the direction is often decided for us. Another friend was recently fired from her job at a religious seminary. She had begun to ask questions about the stance of the organisation and was reading books judged to be bad. While she wanted to stay and operate within the tension, the leadership finally “asked” her to leave. One of the things they said to her was, “we want you to be released into your fullest potential.” This woman knew the institution well and suspected that this was a lie similar to what a manager might say to make himself feel better when firing an employee. But she was also aware of the psychoanalytic idea that the truth is often spoken in a lie. While they may have just wanted to get rid of her, their act may well be the very thing she needed to continue her journey with fewer constraints.

We may be a victim of someone else’s narcissistic defence, but we might also be the one using it. If we find ourselves often in conflict with those who are closest to us (in relationships, political movements, or religious organisations) it can be helpful to reflect upon whether this actually reflects something that one, or both, parties are failing to address.

By facing the underlying issues we open up the possibility of either reconciliation or engaging in a healthy separation. But failure to address them means being condemned to a never-ending cycle of aggressive retreat and return.

Of Course I’m Happy, I’ve Got Hundreds of Pictures to prove it

It’s well known that one of the defence mechanisms favoured by addicts is Denial. The stereotypical example is that of the alcoholic who says, “I’m not an alcoholic, I could give up drinking anytime I want.”

Indeed the prevalence of this defence in addiction is one of the reasons why the first thing you do at an AA meeting is act against it by claiming that you are an alcoholic.

This is so well known today that a slightly uncanny experience can arise if a friend ever asks if you’re an alcoholic. Because alcoholics who’re not dealing with the issue will tend to say “no,” the problem arises concerning how to respond. After all, if you say “no” you’re answering in exactly the same way as the alcoholic in denial. Things get even worse if you then go on to say, “but I’m really not.” Because then your friend can respond by saying, “yep, that’s exactly what an alcoholic would go on to say.”

So what is the difference between an honest denial of some reality and the defence mechanism of Denial? Before approaching an answer to this it’s important to point out that working out the difference in practice is a lot more difficult than understanding the difference in principle.

In therapeutic situations the therapist must be careful to avoid thinking they understand the other person better than that person understands themselves. The therapists job involves asking probing questions and listening carefully to the speech of the analysand so that the analysand might come to know whether or not they are in denial themselves.

Of course the therapist might suspect Denial is in play, but they can’t know for sure and must avoid thinking that they do. It’s so easy for us to impute motives onto other people when the reality is often much more complex than we allow. With that said, we can create some fictional examples in order to get an idea of how denial works as a defence.

Basically the difference between an honest denial and denial as a defence mechanism is hinted at in the strength and repetition of the claim. Someone who isn’t an alcoholic doesn’t walk around telling themselves and others that they aren’t. If someone asks, they will just say no and not think much more about it. In contrast, someone with a drinking problem will tend to say they don’t at the drop of a hat. For example, a man might be at a party where there isn’t much alcohol and so volunteer to go out and buy some. As he gets his coat he might say in passing, “not that I’m an alcoholic or anything, I just fancy a little drink.”

Such acts are not designed primarily to convince other people, but to convince the one making the claim. A strategy that involves spending a huge amount of psychic energy.

One starts to suspect Denial when the claim is repeated time and again without any real need or justification.

A different example might be the case of a couple putting up happy pictures of themselves on Facebook. A few images that present them enjoying life likely hint at a good and happy relationship. But if new smiling images appear every week, with regular status updates about how great life is, something starts to seem amiss. The sheer strength and repetition of images/updates starts to look like a symptom (a symptom being an act that covers over an unpleasant truth).

Like the alcoholic in denial, the couple aren’t necessarily trying to dupe other people, rather they are likely attempting to dupe themselves.

Because people engage most strongly in defence mechanisms when things are particularly bad, a frenzy of happy pictures can often appear right when things are actually at their worst in the relationship. The strength and repetition thus hints at a last ditch attempt to cover over a repressed crisis the couple haven’t faced.

Indeed it’s common for people to get engaged at the point when their relationship is at its most unhealthy. This doesn’t, of course, refer to all such acts, and somethimes the structure that marriage offers can provide the holding that a couple need to work things through. But it’s not uncommon to hear people say, “we were either going to break up or get married.”

Many proposals happen at the very point when everything is on the rocks, as this provides a way for the person proposing to avoid confronting the reality of the dysfunctional relationship and potential loneliness (if the other person accepts such a proposal then they too are likely engaged in a similar strategy of avoidance). At this point the truth is most in danger of exploding onto the surface and thus extreme defences comes into play.

As I explored in the previous post, I’m interested in how communities employ defence mechanisms to deny unpleasant realities. In that post I explored the phenomenon of Splitting and touched on its use in Religious institutions, but here I’d like to briefly consider Denial.

Take the example of a religious community where the preaching continually returns to the sinful hedonism of the world beyond its walls. Imagine that this isn’t some isolated sermon, but rather exists as a common and recurring motif. In addition to the Sunday sermons there might even be prayer groups about the evils of sexual promiscuity, teachings on the selfishness of society and regular claims to the tone of, “thank God we’re not like them.”

In such situations one can find that the community is actually denying an unpleasant truth about its own hedonism. For instance, it’s not unusual to find the churches that most preach against consumerism to be the ones that most embrace consumerism. It is quite common to hear such a message in mega-churches that have large industries dedicated to selling books and religious paraphernalia. These churches often model themselves on the experience of a shopping mall (with coffee shops, entertainment, large lobbies filled with casual seating, and excessive set pieces). They might even have production studios where they create high quality sermon products and employ people dedicated to creating adverts for expensive retreats. Indeed the pastor might dress in expensive clothes and model themselves on successful CEO’s or rockstars.

Indeed I recently attended a well known church that has the look and feel of a rock concert. After the band the speaker got up and started by saying, “I heard that last week Jonny Depp was in church. Turned out it wasn’t him, but let me tell you that there is someone bigger than Jonny Depp here… Jesus!” The crowd erupted in applause. The implication, of course, is that stars are important people, and Jesus is a superstar. The strange thing however was that much of the service (particularly in some adverts they had for events) emphasized the idea that everyone is equally valuable. Indeed the very name of the church references the idea that everyone is a tiny fragment of a picture, all having their place. If the church openly claimed that rich and famous people were more important than others, then they would be owning up to their seeming values. But this was not the case and so the preachers slip started to look like it revealed a repressed truth. Again however it must be said that this might not be the case. There was enough going on to make one want to ask questions, but who knows what those questions would turn up. As I am not part of the community I was not in a place to ask those questions.

The point here is not to make a judgement on what some churches are doing, but to show that some churches are making a judgement against themselves. However the judgement is being denied and projected out onto others because it is too unpleasant to directly address. The bizarre thing for those on the outside looking in, is working out how the church can actually be oblivious to the fact that the very thing they are condemning is what they are obsessively engaged in.

Alternatively, you might have a church that doesn’t engage in what they condemn. But, if the condemnation is constant, then one has to wonder whether the reason is more to do with lack of resources or courage to accept what one wants, than a moral stance. Take the example of a small church that constantly talks about how it isn’t about the numbers. If this claim is made once or twice we would have no reason to doubt its sincerity. But if it is said all the time then one has to wonder whether the real repressed fantasy is of having a huge church with thousands of people.

An interesting exercise for individuals and communities might involve reflecting for a few moments on whether there are things that we are constantly denying and, if so, whether that denial actually signals some unpleasant truth that we need to address.

Giving Birth to Angels and Demons: On Fundamentalism and Splitting

The term “defense mechanisms” refers to a range of strategies that an individual engages in so as to protect themselves from a painful or unpleasant truth about themselves. Numerous defense mechanisms have been identified over the years and we all engage in a variety of them at different times in our lives. While the term is often used in a negative way, it is important to realize that defense mechanisms are neither good nor bad in and of themselves. Indeed they provide an important service in our lives. After all, there are times when it’s not possible or beneficial for us to face a difficult reality.

Take the example of a lady who has an overbearing and unreasonable manager. Over time she might become very frustrated and angry with this authority figure, an anger that she is unable to directly express in work for fear of losing her job. In situations like this the anger might get redirected at a friend. This is an example of displacement, and is something that most of us do from time to time. If this woman’s friend is understanding, and the relationship is strong, she will be able to absorb the anger until the woman is able to acknowledge that the outburst was really a reflection of a difficult work environment. When this happens, she will be able to apologize to her friend and work through the situation, perhaps by looking for another job.

In this example the friend, who might know that the woman is in a stressful situation, takes the anger on board, knowing that it is not an indication of some problem in their relationship, but stems from something else.

This is a perfectly understandable and acceptable defense mechanism, although it requires stable friendships that are able to bear the weight of the displacement (without such stability the anger might get repressed and come out in even more destructive ways). A serious problem only arises if we hold so strongly to the defense that we refuse to look at the real reason for our anger and continue to scapegoat the wrong person. Over time this will destroy relationships and isolate us.

Not all defense mechanisms are equal. Some are generally considered more problematic (denial, regression, disassociation etc. ) and others more healthy (sublimation, compensation, assertiveness etc.). But none of them can be written off entirely and all of us use multiple combinations at different times of our lives (although we will tend toward the same ones over time).

One of the interesting things about defense mechanisms is the way that communities also employ them. Take the example of Splitting. In splitting a community that is unable to deal with its own anxiety and doubt breaks the world into two broad camps: us and them. One side is seen as good and the other as bad, one as right and the other as wrong.

The word “fundamentalist” is often used to describe communities that employ this defense in a strong and unyielding way. But the problem is that the very term “fundamentalist” allows us to distance ourselves from the times when our own communities engage in the same activity (after all, we rarely use the term to describe ourselves).

If we find ourselves in a group that regularly creates a world of simple oppositions, then there’s a good chance we’re engaging in a defense against some unpleasant and painful internal reality. This is not always a bad or inappropriate thing. Take the example of a man who has just gone through a difficult breakup. In order to protect himself from the pain of his own involvement in the split he might paint a two-dimensional picture of the situation in which he is an innocent victim and she is an evil, calculating villain.

As part of his defense, the man might talk to a close friend about how bad his ex is. This is an understandable reaction in the immediate aftermath of a breakup, as it provides a way to avoid the full force of the pain the split has caused.

In situations like this a good friend might allow the man to vent his anger without challenging or confirming what is said. Then, at an appropriate moment, his friend might venture to say something very simple that changes the tone of the conversation and helps the man see that his anger is actually covering over a range of painful feelings that he ultimately needs to work through.

If this intervention is successful, the man will gradually be able to develop a more well rounded perspective, accept what happened and perhaps see things from his ex-partners perspective. All of which might lead to a type of mutually beneficial reconciliation. However, if this doesn’t happen, he will likely remain bitter and find it difficult to forge healthy relationships in the future.

At this point it’s worth bearing in mind two additional points. Firstly, the man might actually have legitimate reasons for his anger, so that what appears to be splitting is in fact a perfectly legitimate expression of anger. Or, secondly, he might have a legitimate reason to be angry, yet still be engaged in splitting. In this latter situation it can be hard to discern the defense mechanism from the background noise of the legitimate grievance, for when a defense actually coheres closely with the reality of a situation it becomes hard to isolate.

Taking the time to understand how defense mechanisms work is useful, not simply for the sake of individual therapeutic work, but also when engaged with communities. Becoming sensitive to how defenses operate in groups can not only help us to develop healthier communities, but also to become more sensitive to how others might engage in simplified worldviews, not because they are evil and stupid, but because they are attempting to protect themselves from potentially difficult realities.

By becoming more sensitive to how this happens in our own contexts, as well as learning ways that can help expose what is being denied, we can potentially become better equipped to help others as they struggle to avoid their inner demons. A difficult job, for it’s always easier for us to impute defenses onto others rather than find them in ourselves.

As in the example of the young man above, judging whether our group is engaged in a defense like splitting can be difficult. Especially in situations when there is a legitimate grievance. There are numerous times when anger is justified and warranted. Indeed there are also times whenever the defense of splitting is useful. However the reason for attempting to sound defenses out in our communities comes down to understanding how, over time, attachment to a given defense becomes self-destructive and self-defeating.

God is Undead, Seattle, WA

The dead have a habit of returning in spectral form, disturbing the flow of our lives and disrupting our best laid plans. Indeed within the secular world, the God proclaimed dead by Nietzsche continues to haunt us in strange ways. The theorist Lacan was particularly sensitive to this reality and claimed that we should now change the cry “God is dead,” to “God is unconscious.” For although God has been banished from the consciousness of contemporary society, this figure still inhabits society as strongly as ever. In this seminar Peter will explain these ideas and outline an insurrectionary vision of Christianity that aims squarely at exorcising this spectral figure.

Contrary to what we witness in the actual existing church, Peter will argue that the radical Christian is the one who claims that the atheism of todays religious despisers isn’t atheistic enough, and that the scandalous message of the Gospel is that freedom from the sovereign God, in all its manifestations, is possible.




God is Undead: Addressing Psychosis and Perversion in Religion
Seattle School of Theology and Psychology
7 – 9
$15 Students
$25 Regular