A Psychoanalytic Call for Peace Between Believers and Non-believers

by Robert Langs, M.D.

          Four highly visible and prominent authors (S. Harris, D. Dennett, R. Dawkins, and C. Hitchens) have recently penned books that attack religion as a sham and the belief in the existence of a transcendental God as more or less delusional. Believers have tended to respond by pointing out first, that God has a divine plan and acts in mysterious ways, and second, that these writers show considerable ignorance regarding, and misrepresentations of, religious beliefs. As suggested by Harold Bloom, the outcome of this rancorous debate is that only the already convinced are convinced.

          As a psychoanalyst who has developed a new, adaptation-centered paradigm of psychoanalysis and thus a new view of human life, I want to offer an olive branch to both sides of this conflict. It is based on the insight that coping with death and the three forms of death anxiety it evokes—predatory (the fear of being attacked or killed), predator (the guilt-ridden need for punishment by death for harming others), and existential (the fear of one’s personal mortality)—are the fundamental challenges for all of humankind. Uniquely, we meet these threats using two distinctive adaptive systems of the emotion-processing mind, one that is attached to conscious awareness and the other without such a link. The activities of this deep unconscious system are encoded in narratives such as dreams and daydreams. Comparing the reactions of these two systems to the same death-related events we find that conscious responses tend to be muted, infused with denial, and poorly thought out, while deep unconscious reactions tend to be brutally candid, exceedingly wise, and based on grim images of destruction, devastation, and horror.

          Relevant to the effort to make peace between believing and non-believing combatants, clinical observations of patients’ unconscious efforts to cope with traumatic incidents indicate that there are two basic types of individuals. The first group will consistently encode a series of grim themes that validly reflect the most forbidding meanings of a given trauma and its frightful impact on them. In contrast, the second group will either fail to remember a dream or will report a dream that is bland and without the terrifying imagery that one would expect in light of the trauma with which they are dealing. Both responses are ways of shutting off access to their always terrifying deep unconscious perceptions of the trauma at hand. Furthermore, the narrators will always generate strong themes in response to the least trauma and the non-narrators will always react with mild or absent imagery. There are, then, two very different, rather fixed, archetypal ways of coping unconsciously with the death anxieties aroused by a death-related trauma.

          We can apply these findings to believers and non-believers when it comes to the existence of a supernatural God. Both the belief and disbelief in a transcendental God are, at bottom, psychological ways of dealing with death and its attendant anxieties. Depending on how it is utilized, each approach may be either adaptive or dysfunctional. Each has been successful in bringing peace to many individuals and is responsible for peaceful respites for societies and nations. But each also has spawned madness, violence, and war. Given that a person's adaptive preferences, which are consciously and unconsciously motivated and sustained, tend to be almost set in stone, trying to change this preference is a pointless and generally unfeasible task. Extremely difficult and seldom feasible. This means that there are strong reasons to find ways to enhance the efforts of both secularists and those of faith to cope with their death anxieties, which in turn means that it is unwise and unnatural to try to disassemble belief systems related to the existence of God.

           There is, I think, a moral to this story. Both believers and non-believers ultimately are trying to cope with life and its relentless nemesis, death. Each group has, on the basis of many forces unknown to them, come up with an adaptive solution that is reflected in part in their thoughts about the existence of God. But surely, no one can or should tell another person how to go about resolving their death anxieties nor should they decide for them the role that religious beliefs should play in these efforts. One answer does not and cannot fit all. An individual's chosen mode of trying to cope with death anxiety should be respected and every effort made to improve its chances of success through insights into the needs that are satisfied by these convictions.

          Only a joining of forces based on a deep understanding of the positions of those on both sides of this debate and a combining of resources and understanding can help us to ameliorate the power, often evil and destructive, that death holds over our lives. A familiar phrase captures my message: United we conquer, divided we fall.

Robert Langs, M.D. is the author of 45 books on issues pertaining to human emotional life, including the recently published Beyond Yahweh and Jesus: Bringing Death’s Wisdom to Faith, Spirituality, and Psychoanalysis.