Icons and the Healing Power of Religion

Review of Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, The Jov of All Who Sorrow: Icons of the Mother of God in Russia (Traditsiya Pochitaniva Ikon Boeomateri V Rossii Glazami Amerikanskoyo Psikhoanalitika). Moscow: Ladomir Publishing House, 2005. Bilingual in English and Russian, ISBN-10: 5944510390; ISBN-13: 978-5944510396, 352 pages, $57.00.

The Joy of All Who Sorrow is a visually beautiful book, containing twenty-eight colorplate illustrations of icons and related photographs, that provides a wealth of information regarding the worship of icons of the Mother of God in Russia. In addition to reviewing its history and theology, Rancour-Laferriere presents his empirical observations of icon veneration. While this descriptive scholarship is of considerable interest, the author’s approach to psychoanalytic interpretation is problematic in many respects.

In The Future of An Illusion (1927), Freud distinguishes between illusion, a belief that, while neither validated nor invalidated scientifically, is accepted as true because one wishes it to be so, and delusion, a belief that is embraced despite the fact that it is known scientifically to be false. Although in Future he describes religion as illusion, only three years later, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud abandons this distinction, without explaining his reasons for doing so, and refers to religion as delusion. Since the existence of God, defined in the orthodox sense as an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent supernatural being, can be neither proved nor disproved by science, both theism, the claim that God exists, and atheism, the claim that God does not exist, are grounded in subjective feeling rather than objective evidence. In redefining religion as delusion, Freud himself embraces illusion.

Interpretations of the “God” signifier in non-supernatural, metaphoric, or virtual terms, as in demythologizing, “religionless,” existentialist versions of Christianity, are, of course, outside of the domain of this argument, which only applies to the question of the existence or non-existence of a supernatural God.

Rancour-Laferriere proudly embraces reason and scientific empiricism, approaching the study of icon veneration like a cultural anthropologist, referring to his field notes and offering a chart in which he distinguishes and counts the various gestures he observes venerators making before icons: “Table I. Selected Veneration Sequences. C – lights candle; X – makes sign of the cross; В – bows before icon; P – falls prostrate before icon; N – kneels before icon; К – kisses icon; F – taps forehead against icon; – transition to another act; – pauses between acts; W – walks away from icon.” At the same time, the author declares himself an atheist, perhaps conflating atheism and agnosticism, as is very common today, and fails entirely to address Freud’s inconsistency with respect to religion as illusion or delusion.

Rancour-Laferriere uncritically accepts Freud’s untenable distinction between art and religion in which, while artistic illusion merely embellishes reality, religion falsifies it. For Freud (and Rancour-Laferriere), art is an adaptive, creative sublimation, while religion is relegated to the status of a maladaptive, defensive maneuver. Though literalistic, fundamentalist religion fits this model, it ignores non-literalistic, adaptive, and creative religious forms. Censorship of art and literature reflects the failure of many to recognize the illusory nature of art. While Freud recognizes the virtual nature of art, he fails to appreciate virtuality when it comes to religion. Furthermore, he fails to distinguish the forms of religion—infantile and mature—and that it too can be seen as paradox, rather than simply as a literalistic representation of reality. His erring against religion and in favor of art biases his subsequent investigations. (See Donald L. Carveth and Sophia E. Forster, “Christianity: A Kleinian Perspective,” Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychoanalyse 7, 2 [Fall, 1999], pp. 187-218.)

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So dogmatic is Rancour-Laferriere with respect to his equation of psychoanalysis and atheism, and so closed to the possibility of creative, sublimated, and virtual forms of religion, that when he encounters a religious analyst he is convinced he cannot really be a psychoanalyst at all. “This man was clearly an Orthodox believer, and so I felt obliged to conclude that he was not also a ‘psychoanalyst.’ At least he had not taken his psychoanalytic knowledge to the point of applying it to his own world-view.”

While Rancour-Laferriere, following Winnicott, appears sympathetic toward the human need for illusions, arguing that “Religion falls away only naturally-if it falls away at all-and only in those who are ready for a new and different set of illusions,” one suspects such sympathy is more a matter of lip service than of substance, for he fails to raise the question of the illusory, or religious, nature of Marxist and Freudian atheism. His own embrace of atheism and a kind of positivism displays the dogmatism, the either/or thinking, the lack of nuance and subtlety that characterize the true believer. Although one cannot know without having had the opportunity to psychoanalyze the author, at times one wonders whether he clings to this substitute dogma as a distancing defense against a profound attraction to the religious illusions he dissects.

Rancour-Laferriere writes insightfully about the functioning of icons “as a kind of supplementary superego within the context of the peasant hut. To sin in their presence was to experience a greater sense of guilt, or shame, than to sin in their absence.” Later in the text, pondering the psychology of yet another analyst who is also religious in some sense, the author finally manages, despite his bias, to raise the crucial question, “Can religious belief itself promote mental health?” Since there is “art therapy,” “dance therapy,” “poetry therapy,” and so forth, why not “icon therapy” or “religion therapy?” In raising this question, Rancour-Laferriere seems unaware of the extensive literature that, without in any way denying the pathological potentials of religion, at the same time demonstrates the role it often plays in promoting psychological survival, healing, and wellbeing. But, he concludes reductively, even if it can promote healing, it does this on a delusional, basis: “Icon therapy is real, even though it depends on a delusion, namely, the collective-endorsed delusion of presence.”

As might be expected, Rancour-Laferriere’s discussion of the central role of images of the Mother of God, more specifically of the Mother and Child, in the matrifocal culture of Russia mostly reduces the psychology involved to childishness: “the one who venerates an icon of the Mother of God is regressing to an infantile, pre-Oedipal position where there was still a belief in the omnipotent maternal object.” Although he describes the religious person’s capacity to regress in this way as “a great gift” that “makes the anxieties and pains of adult life more bearable,” it is nevertheless regressive, infantile, magical, and ultimately masochistic. “One of the undeniable attractions of the Mother of God to her Russian venerators is that she suffers. In this she resembles the venerators themselves, who most often approach her in time of need, that is, when they themselves are suffering.” He goes on to write that “Psychoanalytically put, Christ and his mother share the feature of moral masochism, for they are both represented as voluntarily suffering victims, as willingly humiliated slaves.”

Although the Christian narrative, imagery, and symbolism of self-sacrifice can certainly be employed in masochistic ways, it is as if the author can only conceive of the willing acceptance of pain and even death for the sake of others as pathological. He appears to lose sight of the willing endurance of pain by mothers in childbirth and the sacrificial suffering we all accept on behalf of our children, our loved ones, even our countries. In fact, psychological health requires acceptance of the unavoidable suffering that is a part of the human condition; it entails, as Bion understood, revisiting and reversing the decision that lies at the root of neurosis: the decision to avoid existential pain. The way out of neurotic suffering is the acceptance of the non-neurotic, existential suffering it evades.

Unlike Rancour-Laferriere, Freud understands the necessity for self-sacrifice. He regards the renunciation of primitive instinct as a requirement of becoming a civilized adult; and he celebrates the sacrifice of narcissism in favor of object love: “for in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love” (On Narcissism, 1914). His attitude toward scientific reason is that it entails the discipline of willing submission to facts that may painfully contradict our wishes, the sacrifice of egocentrism entailed in the decentering brought about by

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the blows to human narcissism delivered by Copernicus and Galileo, by Darwin, and by Freud himself. Resolution of the Oedipus complex entails surrendering the incestuously desired object out of love, as well as fear, of the rival, despite competitive envy and hate. “Not my will but thy will be done” says the child, as he surrenders to the laws of civilized life. The fact that the Christian myth has widely been literalized and exploited sado-masochistically does not mean that, at the same time, its symbolism has not addressed aspects of the human condition all-too-often obscured or overlooked by secular ideologies— such as the essential self-sacrificial dimension of maturity and psychological health.

There is no denying that Christianity offers wonderful opportunities for the enactment of masochistic psychopathology, as in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. (See Donald L. Carveth “The Passion of the Christ: Psychoanalytic and Christian Existentialist Perspectives,” Passionate Dialogues: Critical Perspectives on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. 2005, pp.171-178, for a critique.) But the reductionism that conceives of religion exclusively in these terms is simply unacceptable to scholars sensitive to the complexity, multiple determinants, multiple functions, and multiple meanings of human cultural productions. Can any symbolism hope to better represent Winnicott’s notion of surrender of the false self as a requirement for rebirth of the true self than the myth of the death and resurrection of Christ? Can any symbolism hope to better capture the agony clinical psychoanalysts witness daily on our couches than that of the Stations of the Cross?

At one point in his text, Rancour-Laferriere appears to approach this insight: “Life is, after all, a Golgotha, says Tarabukin. But a Golgotha accepted leads to resurrection and everlasting life, so perhaps the suffering is not suffering-for-suffering’s sake, perhaps it is not masochistic after all.” But this line of thought is abruptly dropped in favor of a critique of Nikolai Tarabukin’s attitudes. Even if it had been pursued, Rancour-Laferriere would likely have linked it to literalistic supernatural belief in a life to come, rather than viewing it as symbolic of the sort of resurrection from a neurotic death-in-life to a healthier life-through-death-of-the-narcissistic-ego, through “acceptance of castration” (read crucifixion), that psychoanalysts (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and, most explicitly, Lacan) have described.

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