Putting Institutions on the Couch: Psychosis, Perversion and Neurosis in Religion

For some time now I’ve been drawn toward the area of structural psychopathology. One of tools I’m finding insightful is the diagnostic system used by Lacanian psychoanalysts. Unlike the DSM, where one can get lost in the ever expanding forest of new “disorders,” Lacanian’s make use of a foundational system that isolates three fundamental positions that reflect the underlying way an individual deals with lack,

Foreclosure (Psychosis)

Disavowal (Perversion)

Repression (Neurosis)

These three positions have further subdivisions, and the ways that they actually manifest themselves is as varied and complex as the human who exhibits them.

I won’t be offering an overview of these three positions in this post, but if you’re interested, there’s an excellent book by Bruce Fink called A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

My interest, largely inspired by the work of Slovoj Zizek, involves putting this conceptual matrix to work as a means of helping to diagnose, and formulate remedies for, destructive political/religious structures.

Take the example of a psychotic structure like paranoia. Paranoia refers to a thought process in which the individual is locked into a delusional and irrational framework.

It is manifested in symptoms that include deep feelings of persecution, a tendency to distrust others, the making of false claims and the attributing of evil intentions to random people or events. Intense suspicion, mistrust and hypersensitivity are found alongside a hyper-vigilance that seeks any and all details that might solidify the persecutory delusion of the individual or confirm an existing bias.

Those suffering from paranoia are generally very easily offended, quick to divide the world into good and bad, hold tightly to any perceived wrongdoing against them and exhibit an often overwhelming sense of personal rights. The totalising logic found with those suffering from paranoia can be characterized in the following way,

All doctors are out to get me

But this doctor has gone out of her way to help you

She’s just doing that to fool you

The individual will often go to extreme lengths to solidify their delusion. As a result paranoid individuals will tend to exhibit an obsessive commitment to observing people they take to be a threat, expending vast amounts of energy looking for anything that might confirm their narrative or be taken as a slight.

Unlike neurosis, which is linked to feelings of doubt, psychosis (like paranoia) is characterized by a strong sense of certainty.

One of the reasons why this behavior can be so destructive for the individual lies in the fact that their symptoms make it difficult for them to make and sustain healthy relationships. They often remain single, have few friends, and break relationships over small disagreements. Beneath the paranoia one often finds a person who is suffering from deep anxiety, childhood trauma, depression and a sense of helplessness.

To give a concrete example, I have an acquaintance who exhibits an acute sense of paranoia. This manifests itself in the fact that figures of authority are generally distrusted and seen as hostile. The result has been destructive for both her (when going for cancer treatment she moved around various doctors, believing they were patronizing her, hiding information, or wishing her ill) and her children (she has removed them from various schools, believing that the teachers were persecuting her kids). Anyone attempting to challenge her, including her closest family members, are taken to be part of a grand conspiracy against her and viewed with suspicion. The result, as you might expect, has been a life increasingly marked by isolation and withdrawal from others.

An important theorist in helping us understand paranoia is Melanie Klein, whose insights into the way that a Paranoid-schizoid position is evidenced in infants is invaluable.

Currently I have a strong interest in how communities inhabit psychotic, perverse and neurotic positions. In terms of the example above concerning paranoia, it is easy to think of fundamentalist communities, but we also see it in communities forged around promoting and protecting conspiracy theories like the Apollo 11 mission being a fake. Here a group exhibits all the hallmarks of individual paranoia: certainty, distrust, false claims, attribution bias, isolation, delusion etc.

By reflecting on literature dealing with psychopathology we can become better at identifying, responding to, and helping communities that are engaged in destructive behavior.

For instance, to approach a community that exhibits a psychotic position as if it were neurotic, can be counterproductive. When dealing with a neurotic, an analyst must help them listen to their unconscious. They do this by subtly introducing the neurotic to the reality that they are communicating things that they are not aware of. For example, one might listen to a neurotic talk about the anger he feels toward his partner. At a key point the therapist might intervene in the discourse to suggest that the anger might actually reflect a frustration he has with his dead father. If this is a productive interpretation, the analysand will feel a moment of insight that leads to the opening up of new material. The neurotic was communicating something in his anger that he wasn’t really aware of, yet somehow also knew (because he recognized it when it was suggested). This is repression in action: the pushing out of consciousness something unpleasant or traumatic.

In contrast, someone with a psychotic structure doesn’t, strictly speaking, have an unconscious to confront. For the unconscious is produced by repression. The psychotic means what they say. There is no hidden meaning, no secret uncertainty or ambiguity. To try and get someone who is psychotic to experience ambiguity of meaning can actually lead to a psychotic break. When this happens the ambiguous other meaning is felt to be something threatening that is coming from the outside (rather than something that is a part of them).

A leader within a psychotic structure won’t find much success in trying to introduce doubt and ambiguity. Indeed this will likely be read as a threat to the structure, and the individual will soon get in trouble.

In closing it is worth making a couple of additional points. Firstly, while we might think that all psychotic structures are bad, this is not the case. There are plenty of fundamentalist communities that are not destructive. They exhibit things like certainty, isolation, and a tendency to view the world as hostile. But have found ways to mitigate against the destructive symptoms that often accompany psychosis (Amish communities might be an instructive case in point). Secondly, being within a psychotic, perverse or neurotic structure doesn’t mean you reflect that at a subjective level. It simply means that you are placed/have placed yourself in a position that encourages certain actions associated with those positions.

In the coming year I’ll be coming back to these themes both in the blog and in my next book.

Image by Nami-Tsuki