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Why Are We Religious?
Men, Religion, and Melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, and Erikson, Donald Capps. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. 235pp. $27.50 (Hardcover)

Jerry S. Piven
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 4, Spring 1998

In Men, Religion, and Melancholia, the noted scholar and psychologist of religion Donald Capps explicates his theory that the melancholic disposition engenders and pervades the deeply religious sensibility. Capps is here interested not in just the person who is pious, zealous, or claims to be religious, but the person who struggles with religious concerns throughout his life. It is a profound melancholia, Capps argues, that contributes to the malaise and yearning for the numinous and the absolute which characterizes the homo religiosus.

Capps' approach here is unorthodox. Through close investigation of the texts and biographical accounts of four great thinkers who explored the religious psyche, William James, Rudolph Otto, Carl Jung, and Erik Erikson, Capps endeavors to educe the melancholic and religious emotions of the authors themselves. Capps reads the texts of authors writing about the religious soul as intimate reflections of their own religious strivings, and thus Capps views such texts as autobiographical.1 Rather than examining their ideas as propositions about religion or the divine, Capps explores the souls of writers who themselves struggle with religious ideas and feelings. Nietzsche asseverated that every philosophy is a confession. If such is the case, Capps' method may teach us as much about the religious soul as the texts he explores, since the ideas reflect the concerns and sufferings of their authors. As David L. Miller once said, the religion is in the language.

Capps also distinguishes his psychology of religion from many other approaches by emphasizing the role of the mother in the religious psyche. Whereas Freud and many psychoanalytic authors after him discussed primarily the Oedipal dynamics behind religious belief and struggles, Capps implicates the shadowy relation with the mother as the motivation for religious yearnings.2 Capps bases his approach on the psychoanalytic interpretation of melancholia as adumbrated by Freud, in which the melancholic is said to have introjected and inadequately mourned his lost love object. Thus the religious quest can be understood as the despondent search for the love object of infancy which one is unable to live without. If the melancholic disposition can be demonstrated in the religious sensibility, then it is indeed the influence of the mother which becomes crucial for numinous strivings.

Capps believes that each of these authors experienced the separation from their mothers as "particularly traumatic," citing the feelings of Jung as an apposite reflection of such ordeals. Jung speaks for all four when he says that he always felt mistrustful when the word love was spoken, and that the feeling he associated with woman was for a long time one of intimate unreliability.3 Jung is here describing the absence of the maternal breast, or of what Erikson would call "basic trust." Without such security, there will always be a resistance to individuation, an attempt to retain (and reattain) mother, and a perpetual feeling of loss, mournfulness, and yearning.4

Further, in melancholia, the introjected and unmourned object (imago of the mother) is blamed for the perceived abandonment, and the child thus punishes the internalized object in revenge.5 Since the object is internalized, the revenge appears as self-punitive. That is, the aggression is directed at the self since the object is located within his own psyche. So while the melancholic refuses to mourn the mother and yearns for her, he feels rage toward her as well. This manifests itself as the depression and desperate strivings of the melancholic in his search and revenge for his lost mother. Thus in Capps' view religion becomes for these authors

...the locus in which they seek what they lost in their relationships with their mothers. In turn, this recourse to religion has for them its own problems and dangers, as for all four authors there is a sense in which religion creates a "double bind": They turn to it with such need, and yet in very important ways it not only fails to assuage their pain but also adds difficulties of its own...They are men who continued to struggle with religion throughout their lives, just as they struggled with their emotions and attitudes toward their mothers.6

In other words, the personal feelings of forsakenness which characterize religious yearning are derived from the lingering sense of childhood abandonment, from the traumatic separation from mother which rendered the infant "bereft" and "dispirited." These childhood experiences become the precursor for the adult melancholic religious longing and feeling of forsakenness. Further, childhood cruelty by the mother "exacerbates the sense of forsakenness and gives religious melancholy its deeper dimensions of rage, fury, and even hate."7 It is these feelings of abandonment, withdrawal of love, and rage against cruel treatment, which therefore implicate traumatic separation from the mother in the genesis of religious melancholy.8

In addition, Capps invokes Freud's interpretation of "the uncanny" to account for the awful and numinous flood of emotion which often accompanies deeply religious experience.9 Freud proposed that the uncanny, the unheimlich, was the emotional reaction when something formerly familiar reappears in a strange and disjointed fashion. Freud speculated that the feeling of uncanniness derives from the emergence of feelings or images which have been "estranged by the process of repression."10 Hence the return of repressed images and feelings are experienced as weird and alien, uncanny, since the psyche has blotted them from consciousness out of anxiety, fear, conflict, and trauma.11 Capps proposes that the experience of the unheimlich in religious experience is therefore the eruption of the maternal object upon the emotions of the person, who thus reexperiences the oceanic inundation of numinous and engulfing emotions he once knew as an infant ensconced in maternal embrace. Such feelings also arouse the return of the terrors of traumatic separation which the psyche has sought to abolish. Subsequently, the return of the repressed in religious melancholia becomes a numinous experience of wonder, dread, and uncanny terror beholding the mysterium and tremendum of the universe.

Capps thus presents four authors writing about the awesome, terrifying, and numinous tribulations of religious experience and crisis. Capps believes he has adequately demonstrated that in each case a melancholic disposition derived from inadequate mourning of the lost mother of infancy has engendered his deep and abiding religious concern. Capps concludes that "the religious disposition emerges from the sense that something has been lost, perhaps irrevocably and irretrievably."12 Religion is therefore the uncanny eruption of repressed feelings derived from the trauma of separation and the quest to regain mother, which can be seen in the hypermoral and self-punitive consciousness as well as the experience of yearning for a lost and unseen world which characterize religious melancholia.13 All of which, Capps believes, can be traced back to the disappointments these authors each had in their mothers.14

By way of commentary, I'm not sure that Capps takes adequate account of the cultural factors cited in support of his thesis. For instance, Capps enjoins solid evidence in support of the brutal child-rearing tactics during Otto's infancy. However, this same evidence would seem to imply that all children of that time would have become melancholic or worse. If that is the case (and I am open to it), then one really has to make a careful distinction between Otto's infancy and that of other children, unless one is willing to propose that all of them became deeply religious. To put it another way, there is nothing in Capps' analysis which would distinguish the factors motivating Otto's religious melancholy from the souls of the other boys of his time, since the evidence merely draws attention to the common influences of infancy. Capps does this to infer Otto's diagnosis of melancholia on the basis of trauma he might have experienced. But if everyone experienced the same trauma, what makes this child different from any other child? Either the traumas every child experienced were not the essential factors, or every child became melancholic and profoundly religious.

It might also be objected that the feelings of abandonment, punishment, or yearning experienced by the religious are directed at a father god rather than a divine mother. Indeed, Judaism and Christianity are both concerned with the wrath of a punishing and abandoning god, while tender feelings of nurturance characterize Mother Mary. It is the father who claims vengeance as his own, and who forsakes his son (in both the psalms and the gospels). In order for Capps' argument to make sense one must account for this disjunction. If one argues that the rage expressed by Job is really anger toward the abandoning mother,15 one must invoke the psychological mechanism of displacement to resolve the ostensible contradiction.

Capps accounts for this by claiming that conventional (paternalistic) religion "helps him get on with his life by teaching him that God is a Father and that if he continues to be a "good boy," this Father God will not only not punish him but will reward him for his goodness." And therefore, what appear as Oedipal conflicts actually mask the "real distress" over his traumatic separation from mother.16 Indeed, to carry Capps' argument further, it might be argued that the hostility toward the father is essentially a displacement of matricidal impulses, even an attempted disidentification from mother, and the striving to implore salvation from the father with whom one identifies after separation from mother. Such an identification may be seen as an attempt to deny one's true yearning for the lost mother of infancy. Indeed, resentment against the father and his cruelty might even be seen as overdetermined Oedipal rage and the cruelty of the paternal interloper and punisher.

However, it is unclear why this must be the case should such an argument be attempted. Is it not possible to experience depression, feelings of abandonment, rage and hostility at the punishing or abandoning father? Capps' argument rests on the assumption that melancholia must derive only from the dynamics of unmourned attachment to the mother, introjection, and object rage delineated by Freud. It is clear from the biographies of the authors concerned that they experienced significant struggles with their fathers. It is not as clear that they were actually melancholic or that they experienced infantile trauma over maternal cruelty or separation.

Indeed, in the case of Erikson the melancholy is described by Capps as "unacknowledged."17 Erikson expressed no rage toward his mother, but only sympathy. Apparently Capps believes that one who expresses no animosity toward his mother must be concealing a deep hatred and pathology. This means that if a person focuses on an issue, it cannot be because evidence is abundant and substantiates the argument, but because one must be hiding or evading something else. It also means that sympathy or any other conscious emotion cannot ever be taken for anything but a defensive reaction. In both cases, there are no circumstances under which the manifest motive cannot be hiding a more sinister purpose and pathology. It is a catch-22. There is no evidence, but the absence of evidence is taken as evidence of deception.18

Capps seems to believe that any evidence of childhood struggle is evidence enough to infer a melancholic personality, and equally that any nostalgia, reverie, or ostensible pursuit of a symbolic mother substitute must indicate traumatic separation and once again melancholia.19 The diagnosis is evidence of the occurrences cited to support the diagnosis. Thus the argument is circular, and both the diagnosis of melancholia and its inherently maternal basis are suspect.

The cases are all plausible, but the evidence itself often indicates alternate hypotheses, and the qualities Capps adduces in support of the maternal matrix of religious melancholia do not ineluctably point to melancholia or to the maternal matrix. Again, it is not clear that every one of them was melancholic. Further, I would suggest that while Capps does indeed cite evidence indicating the possibility of a melancholia derived from maternal struggles, this evidence is not always as palpable as he would like to believe. Since there is abundant evidence that these authors experienced Oedipal trauma, and since the religious struggles described here all focus on conflicts with the father, it is questionable whether every case of melancholic religious struggle must be a displacement of maternal conflict.

Unfortunately, when evidence is lacking, Capps resorts to straw arguments which only confuse the case. For instance, Capps interprets Erikson's interest in the borderline between disciplines as a possible reflection of borderline disorder and therefore unwitting expression of Erikson's own identity disturbances and unstable self-images. Such an inference conflates conceptual arenas.20 It confuses the use of the word "borderline" for a confession of psychopathology. It says nothing about Erikson's attempt to integrate different modes of inquiry or explanation, it is not a refutation of Erikson's argument, and it is no indication of Erikson's mental condition. Indeed, Capps assessment of Erikson's project seems dismissive from the outset, since he starts off by describing it as Erikson's "will to believe."21 If Capps intends to argue that psychiatry and religion are irreconcilable, it would be far better to do so on purely rational and empirical grounds. While this may seem like a point of relatively minor significance, it also indicates Capps' general willingness to twist meanings to fit his agenda.

Capps is an intriguing and imaginative thinker. The examination of maternal influence on religious ideas, and the dynamics of separation trauma and melancholia as precursors to religious experience are highly suggestive and potentially useful ways of examining religious ideas and feelings. Through Capps' analysis we derive a fuller understanding of the religious ideas of the authors he examines, of the minds of the authors themselves, and of the complex human psyche and imagination. Capps does argue by inference and speculate in places where more evidence or other sources of evidence would be useful. He tends to assume that enumeration of speculative inferences strengthens his case, whereas it only means that the study becomes increasingly hypothetical. These problems cannot be dismissed. Nevertheless, this book is provocative, stimulating, and worth reading for those interested in the psychology of religion.

1. Cf. Capps, xii, 2.

2. Cf. Ibid., 1. There have been other attempts to integrate pre-Oedipal dynamics and the relation with the mother, as by Winnicot, M.D. Faber, and Chasseguet-Smirgel, for examples, but these seem to be in the minority.

3. Ibid., 6.

4. It should be noted that Capps is not attempting to blame mothers for all the sufferings of their children. He is merely stating that certain people have traumatic experiences which render them melancholic, and that such experiences derive from the relationships they had with their mothers.

5. I say here that the mother is blamed for the "perceived abandonment" because children frequently experience feelings of abandonment without actual neglect by the mother. This in no way discounts actual abandonment.

6. Capps, 7.

7. Ibid., 8.

8. Ibid., 9.

9. Ibid., 17-21.

10. Ibid., 19.

11. Strangely enough, this aspect of the uncanny seems virtually unspoken. It is not just that one reexperiences images and feelings from the unconscious, but that the repression itself indicates the disjointed nature of the reexperience. The examples used to characterize the uncanny - ghosts, a severed hand, etc.Ñare not merely returning once-familiar images, but erupting phantasies. Trauma and conflict motivated the repression, and it is that which renders the emergence of the image a distortion of the original experience. Not just the severed hand or ghost is frightening simply because it was once familiar, but the fear and dread which frightened the individual into repressing the memories account for the uncanny nature of the experience. The image itself is a distorted expression of the original dreadful experience which motivated the repression in the first place.

12. Capps, 205.

13. Ibid., 206.

14. Ibid., 208-10.

15. Ibid., 9.

16. Ibid., 17.

17. Cf. Ibid., 199.

18. A psychoanalytic approach might indeed look for lacunae, avoidances, displacements. But the mere absence of rage, for example, or the focus on a particular issue, are in no way indicative that such distortions are instantiated. The practice of attributing conflict, denial, and deception in every case where evidence is lacking is characteristic of irresponsible psychoanalysis. Whenever one disagrees, one is accused of resistance. Whenever one feels no rage, one is accused of rage. In such cases, as indicated, there are no circumstances under which the hypothesis can be proved wrong. It is a serious problem. Evidence in psychoanalysis consists in more than mere absences.

19. One must therefore indict every person who misses the bliss of infancy or the play of childhood, who muses nostalgically over his mother, who searches for a lover, who is nationalistic or ideological, who loves the ocean, or who imagines peace, an afterlife, Avalon, or any other symbolic womb, as inherently melancholic. These are all cases of incomplete mourning, perhaps, but not all of them display the symptoms of melancholia. Hence before Capps infers from Erikson's musings on childhood, for example, that he is melancholic, maybe he should make critical distinctions and acquire genuine evidence.

20. Capps, 161.

21. Ibid., 161.

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