Psychoanalysis and Christian Faith
Faith, especially Christian faith, is such a vast and original field that it alone deserves a whole site to be devoted to it.
My recent research has always directed me more towards a more psychoanalytic than theological look at the Christian faith. In order to distinguish theological or philosophical research on Christianity from more analytical essays, I have therefore decided to devote a page to this particular question.
Christian fraternity
or fatherhood impossible.
This article is devoted to a psychoanalytic study on the crucial question of fatherhood. This is constantly claimed within the Scriptures and the Churches, especially in its spiritual dimension, with the figure of the priest who would have the features of a father.
However, an important element disrupts this beautiful theological construction. This element is fraternity, a Christian invention par excellence.
How can the two dimensions of fatherhood and brotherhood be compatible, especially when we see that they tend to crowd out or supplant each other? Or even when we measure the importance of this other Christian invention that is filiation, which is realized thanks to a supernatural Son, Christ, who is not a Father and has never acceded to fatherhood?
This article examines this delicate problem to show how, in my opinion, the claim of the Christian faith to spiritual fatherhood is a gesture struck with symbolic helplessness ...
Christian faith:
An experience of limits.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
I explore, in this long reflection, parts of the Christian faith. And I try to shed some light on questions that have so far often remained unanswered.
This is the case with the maternal presence in Christianity, which is generally reduced to one and the same figure, venerated almost on a par with a divinity: the Virgin Mary. But the figures of the Mother and of the maternal world are infinitely more present not only in faith, but also in the Bible and the institution of the Church. This is what we should be able to account for.
The same is true of a phenomenon like the Transfiguration of Christ in the Gospels, which remains enigmatic. But the contribution of psychoanalysis can explain the irrational or supernatural reasons.
Finally, it is the very figure of Christ that I am trying to interpret, not on the basis of the individual Jesus of Nazareth, but by questioning his almost infinite protean capacities. I have thus identified the mental register thanks to which this figure, undoubtedly the most prestigious in the religious history of humanity, has managed to perpetuate itself.
From mystical experience to community life, and from Biblical and Evangelical Revelation to expressions of faith and charitable love, this article explores, with the aid of psychoanalysis, the manifestations of Christian faith and tries to show the often unsuspected consequences ...
.jpg)
Mystical eroticism and moral virtues.
Spiritual desire: from love to hate.
It is commonplace in theology to assert that there is a radical difference between erotic love, Greek eros , and charitable love, Christian agape. The two would be semantically and theologically poles apart, so that it would be impossible to achieve agape through eros .
Yet a whole spiritually inspired literature in Christianity has claimed to explore the ways of divine love in an erotic sense. But by never taking into account an undeniable fact which poses a huge problem, namely that in no Gospel or New Testament text do the terms eros or erotic appear. This absence, which cannot be assimilated to an oversight, is sufficiently remarkable to raise questions about it.
It is with this question that this long reflection opens which proposes to go through the spiritual affects of charitable love to Buddhist compassion to show the intimate flaws as well as the fundamental ambiguities of mystical desire ...
Christ and the Buddha.
Two figures of spiritual filiation in opposition to paternal authority.
Essay on an intra-religious conflict.
If one submits to analysis the biographies as well as the personalities of these two great founders of religion, they reveal a characteristic which is common to them: namely, their opposition to paternal authority and to the Law, that it is that of their time or even Natural Law.
It is at the same time what distinguishes them from other religious figures, as what conferred a unique aura and a sacral and religious power unlike any other, both to their person and their teaching.
This article tries to understand these hidden and mysterious springs ...
Melancholy and depression:
Pathologies revealing the spiritual?
Melancholy appears as a pathology characteristic of a state of being known since Antiquity. It has taken the form of depression and depressive states in our contemporary world.
From a spiritual point of view, it says something about the loss and fall of man in this world. The author who has best studied and described it is Kierkegaard. It is therefore towards his works that I turned to understand what it was about melancholy in the Christian regime. And it is by following his brilliant intuitions that I managed to detect the hidden shadow that reigns over the minds of the melancholy ...
The desire for autonomy: from revolt to filiation
A religious and philosophical impasse.
Autonomy is a concept marked by a deep ambiguity.
Indeed, on the one hand, it is claimed by all modernity which presents it as a summit of human moral and political evolution. On the other hand, it is historically and ontologically backed by a heteronomy, but which presented itself metaphysically as the first autonomy:
namely divine autonomy.
Christianity will inherit this ambiguity and hypertrophy it.
From the time of modernity, this ambiguity will be transformed for the conscience of the individual into a double bind, a paradoxical injunction which obliges each one to become free and autonomous, but in a way always relative and in dependence on others, which contradicts the claim to autonomy.
Feeling of guilt and inner presence of God.
The ambiguities of mysticism.
Guilt is the main feeling that the postmodern West has been trying to escape for more than a century, in particular by denying it or reducing it to external causes, the better to triumph over it.
However, it is constitutive of the human personality. And we find it in most religions where it points to the original fault.
However, paradoxically, mystics and spiritualities, all tendencies and religions combined, have tried in their own way to evacuate this feeling, going so far as to deny what guilt specifies in the human psyche, namely the self or the self. personality.
This ambiguity is not without asking questions that this article tries to answer, by questioning the meaning of spiritual interiority and what secretly conceals the human psyche ...
Pauline thought under the scrutiny of psychoanalysis and rhetoric.
In addition to this, you need to know more about it.
In the first part of this reflection, I try to deepen the biblical notion of "sin" thanks to the psychoanalytic interpretation given by J. Lacan, in book VII of his " Seminar ". Two Bible episodes caught my attention:
- that of the " Burning Bush ", first of all, during which Moses is confronted for the first time, not with God himself who remains " hidden ", but with a particular manifestation of the divine;
- that of the conversion of Saint Paul, then, on the road to Damascus.
In both cases, it is the psychoanalytic interpretation which makes it possible to reveal the formidable presence of the deified maternal authority ...
In the second part, I try to show the importance of Greek rhetoric and sophistication in Pauline thought and epistles. I then analyze the themes of justification by faith, a real oxymoron, and the negative status of the Law according to the Apostle. And I try to unravel the subversive and transgressive aspect of the new regime of faith and love established by Christianity.
Christian faith, psychoanalysis and theologism.
Or the drifts of Christian thought.
If exegesis has ended up acquiring its scientific letters of nobility, it remains however always exposed to improbable drifts in particular on its hermeneutical side, in which it also originates historically.
The procedures of the various contemporary exegetes are thus often influenced by a hermeneutics, to say the least arbitrary, at the risk of practicing an exegetical hermeticism, but which does not say its name or mask advance. For my part, I call the theologism this process which uses the text while distorting it, and by which certain authors engage in undue extrapolations for believing ends.
In addition to this reflection, I try to understand how psychoanalysis could be reappropriated by theology to put it at the service of faith.
Such an intellectual deviation raises questions and raises the question of the morality of theology.
The effects of the "Christian superego"
Some overlooked aspects of the believing psyche.
The Christian faith has often unrecognized effects on the believer's psyche.
In this article, I explore one of the little-known parts of this psyche, which I have called the "Christian superego". And I explain how this superego can serve to erase or repress the very essence of monotheistic Revelation, as I also give an explanation to my own spiritual and intellectual motivations.
Truths of faith and psychoanalysis.
Interpretation issues.
It is easy to see that the truths of faith are not those of psychoanalysis, and vice versa.
However, it seems that Freudian psychoanalytical theory is capable of grasping what escapes both faith itself and believers.
I am working in this study to show some of these truths often invisible to the "eyes of the heart" or of faith ...
The Gospel of John.
A sophisticated gospel shot through with incestual desire.
The Gospel of John is considered one of the most beautiful texts of ancient Christian literature.
It is undoubtedly also the most mystical and theologically profound.
But a less deferential and more attentive look at what this gospel implements makes it possible to grasp what generally escapes believers' readings.
In this study, I insist on two essential points: the use of sophistry in the writing of this apparently very inspired text. And the presence of maternal desire even in the most intimate relationships that Christ maintains, whether with his mother, his disciples or the divine persons.
Christ
A figure of the imaginary.
If there is indeed a religious figure universally known for centuries, it is undoubtedly that of Christ.
Confused with the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth whom Christians have deified in the formula "Jesus Christ", which synthesizes the two elements, human and divine, to form only one, it is perpetuated over the ages without undergoing radical transformations. As if it were unalterable.
To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to attempt a non-theological approach that makes room for other less religious interpretations.
This is what I am trying to do in this study.
The psychology of the person of Jesus.
Differentiated from the image of Christ with which it is always associated, the person of Jesus of Nazareth,incidentally very human and historically attested, represents a figure that is nevertheless always ideal and idealized.
However, by scrutinizing the Gospels, which are at the origin of such an idealization, it is possible to detect character traits that not only humanize Jesus, but present him in a light that is both more ordinary and more disturbing.
This reflection, which completes the previous one, aims to highlight these remarkable character traits that are always overlooked.