Psychoanalysis, Theology, and the coming of Joel Osteen

From the Introduction of Theology, Psychoanalysis, Trauma: By Marcus Pound

Arguably [Frank] Lake was the first to understand that psychoanalysis needed to be practised within a participatory and liturgical framework—the argument of this book; yet if his work remains problematic it is not because of his liberal advocacy of LSD, but because in the end theology is subordinated to psychoanalysis and nt the other way around. For example, salvation seems to care less about God than achieving an autonomous and secure ego which is to be supplemented with supernatural 'fortitude'. God appears as the religious equivalent of a body-builder's steroids, providing extra muscle to a more general course of well-being.

Lake's problem arises because he assumes the ultimate autonomy of the secular sphere. Yet according to the work of John Milbank, the secular is not itself a given reality, a space of 'purely human' to be discovered once the cobwebs of superstition have been cleared away. Rather, the secular was imagined, discursively created through the emergent disciplines of the social sciences which are of themselves already bastardized forms of theology. Take natural law for instance. From the perspective of the political sciences natural law was no longer a means of mediating the divine, the basis of a participatory good. Instead, it was posited that humans, left to a state of nature, were self-seeking individuals whose sole motivation was the preservation of their own sphere of interest. Therefore, it was in their best interest to enter a mutual contract, curbing some of their rights at the expense of securing their sphere of influence. In this way the human subject was manifest within relations of pure immanence and the secular was constituted as a field of the formal power relations required to maintain the social order. What remained of religion was deemed utterly private, transcendent, and ineffable and as such banished from the social, thereby confirming the autonomy of the secular.
Yet as Milbank argues, theology is a social theory, one that seeks to promote mutual social relations, without being predicated upon the notion of the private individual or need to formally exercise power; but of neighbourly love, spontaneous charity, and learnt virtue; and it fails to challenge the autonomy of the secular it will inevitably be positioned by it, reduced to an immanent field of knowledge such as wish-fulfilment, or tucked away in some private ineffable realm.
It is not difficult to extend Milbank's project to psychoanalysis. After all, psychoanalysis was key in securing at the level of the individual what was posited of the social. Early interpreters of Freud such as his daughter Anna, Harry Guntrip, or Heinz Hartmann, all argued that the self was in origin a bundle of self-seeking drives, the primary expression of nature, a chaos which needed to be brought into social conformity through the rationalizing principle of the ego—the approach known as ego-psychology. And like Hobbes, man would pass from nature to society through a contractual agreement; only now the contractual agreement specifically targets the sexual relation: the ban upon incest. Moreover, like the social contract, it affords a certain compromise: one may not have exactly what one wants (i.e. the mother); nonetheless, one can always find a respectable substitute. Psychoanalysis was therefore a profoundly conservative project, aimed at helping the subject adjust to a reality defined in advance by wider secular and political thought. And it is perhaps for this reason that should theology fail to assume a meta-critical stance apropos psychoanalysis, it will inevitably be positioned by it, confined to existing social reality. Salvation will become indistinguisable from achieving a secure ego-identity, and the Church's ability to speak out against wider political and economic injustice will be seriously compromised.