Wisdom from the Couch. Jennifer Kunst
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many lifetimes.
Throughout my professional life, I have been engaged in a personal journey of trying to make peace in and with myself. This has not always been easy, for I came to my work as a psychoanalyst along an unusual path. I grew up in a family that had deep religious roots in the mainline Protestant Christian church. For many years, Christian faith has been a guiding star for me, leading me with an ever-deepening desire to be a more thoughtful, balanced, and loving person. It has inspired me to follow a professional path of helping other people, with the twists and turns in the road leading me to training first as a clinical psychologist and then as a psychoanalyst. The religious roots of my path to psychoanalysis are unusual because many psychoanalysts are atheists and most hold the view that religion is something of a crutch for people who cannot face reality squarely.
I was fortunate, however, to grow up among what I call “thinking Christians.” Questions, doubts, searching, and deliberation were an essential part of the culture of my religious upbringing. I am grateful for it because I know that this is not the case for many people who are raised in traditional religious families. Even when my path took me in a more evangelical direction at Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary, I was able to become connected with bright people of deep faith who practiced what David Dark calls “the sacredness of questioning everything.”1 This depiction may be surprising, as conservative Christian schools such as Wheaton and Fuller have the reputation of being narrow- and closed-minded. Sometimes that reputation is deserved, although it is not always the case. While faculty and students choose to be guided by a code of faith and conduct, there is still room to question, to search, and, above all, to think.
As I look back on my experiences, those settings were something like a modern monastery for me. Within the self-imposed boundaries of those commitments, there was a home base from which to explore. Many a classroom discussion or late-night coffee session found us challenging our faith at the frontiers. I have tried to keep that spirit alive as an adjunct professor at Fuller Seminary and in all my work in the years that have followed my work there.
With that said, I also must admit that I have experienced many frustrations with my Christian faith. It has not always been a source of peace, and has even been a source of disappointment, grief, and agitation. I continue to wrestle with its many imperfections and contradictions—both in its theology and in the ways in which the faith is practiced in organized, institutional religion. I have had to wrestle with the commonly held Christian beliefs that the Bible contains everything essential for life and the idea that Jesus is the only way to salvation. I think these are awfully narrow ways of viewing God and leave so much out of the equation. I believe there is a bigger life and a bigger God out there, and I have tried to have the wherewithal to look outside of my religious culture to see what other people are doing in their search for a meaningful life, even in their search for God. Along the way, I have had to make peace with the limitations of my personal faith, as well as the faith of my upbringing and my culture, seeking to cherish and build on the enduring truths while at the same time forgiving the limitations and failures.
I am grateful for the ways in which my work as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst has broadened my thinking, largely through in-depth exposure to people with a wide range of life experiences. For the first ten years of my career I worked at Patton State Hospital, where I conducted and supervised therapy with criminally insane patients—mentally ill men and women who had committed violent crimes such as rape and murder. During those days, I tried to walk a mile in the shoes of people whose paths were sometimes beyond my imagination—people from other races and cultures, poverty, violence, addiction, crime, severe mental illness, and a host of other contexts so far from my own.
Both then and now, as a psychoanalyst in private practice, I have intentionally put myself in situations that will burst my bubble. In particular, I often engage in conversations that challenge me to empathically understand people who operate with an entirely different value system from my own—people who have a different attitude toward honesty, fidelity, work, achievement, relationships, family, and the like. I have worked hard to become the kind of therapist who can set being judgmental aside (as much as one can) and be guided by real and genuine curiosity. How did this person get here? How does this way of thinking, believing, or behaving hold together in his or her mind? How does it work for him? What does it cost her? It is a privilege to be granted access to the life of another. I am given the unique opportunity to see another person’s life from the inside—an experience that grows me, widens my understanding of the human condition, and helps me question my own assumptions and commitments.
I love my work immensely, but if you think being a psychoanalyst is a picnic compared to being a Christian, think again! Training in a psychoanalytic institute has been likened to being a member of a religious institution2—where it is Freud rather than Moses who brought the tablets down from the mountain. No deeply held belief system is immune from being turned into or misused as a fundamentalist creed. As a result, I have discovered that I must make peace with my psychological and psychoanalytic theories too—biased as they are, like religion, by the lens of the pioneers who themselves had limitations, blind spots, and agendas. But I shall be ever grateful for Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and those who developed their ideas about the life of the mind, the profound influence of unconscious forces, and the techniques that can bring about real, substantial transformation in the lives of those who seek it.
Taking it one step further, I have had to make peace with the limitations of the actual practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis—to face the reality that there is only so much that can be done to bring about change within myself and within my patients. I have had to face the disillusionment of my youthful fantasies that we are all created equal and are capable of becoming anything we wish to be. Experience shows that, together with the possibilities of real change, there are also real limitations. I present this sobering reality to my patients and students by suggesting that the kind of change one can expect in a successful, long-term analysis is like changing the course of a ship about ten degrees. While it is a modest, not radical, shift, it will take you in a completely different direction.
I think of myself as something of a hybrid in my professional peacemaking journey, trying to blend two systems of thought into a whole where the marriage of Christian faith and psychoanalysis works for me. However, as in any marriage, there are times when it is uncomfortable and challenging. I know that for some people, this mix is like oil and water. Like many of you, I mingle at the dinner party where these topics come up and, soon enough, the arguing and bad feelings begin. There is a way in which I wish to dodge the conversation, but it is something that I care about deeply and so I must push through my own resistances to grow, make a change, and find a new way.
By laying this foundation, I hope to offer a context for the ideas that are to come. Make no mistake—this is not a book about the integration of religion and psychoanalysis. It is a book about the basic principles of psychoanalysis that can be applied to anyone interested in living a more peaceful, fulfilling life. Since I come to psychoanalysis along the path of Christian spiritual practice, my approach may resonate in a particularly harmonious way with those from a similar background. But this is a book for any seeker, religious or not, who is willing to reflect upon his or her life with seriousness and to dig deeper into truths that transcend religion and, in some ways, even transcend psychoanalysis. I believe that the deepest truths have no culture, no religion, and no creed. Deep truths speak to all people and can be applied to all people—and these are the truths that I am going to share in a simple, accessible way.
In order to get to these deeper truths, I will have to strip them of their packaging. I will reduce them to their simplest components. I will try to avoid jargon. I hope to leave the ivory tower. I will have to stray from orthodoxy. I will have to question assumptions. I will play with ideas rather than rigidly uphold them. In an effort to reconcile and make something new, I must challenge what has been long established and perhaps even taken for granted. Unintentionally, I will offend. I will step on people’s toes. I will touch and examine a few sacred cows. It can’t be helped.
Some people relish that kind of revolutionary attitude, but that is not really my style. And so, I will make every attempt to share my ideas with humility