The Psycho-Theological Work of W.W. Meissner: Charting a Course Between Charybdis and

Readers of Greek mythology are well familiar with the tale of Charybdis and Scylla, the two monsters whose positions on opposite sides of the Strait of Messina threatened passing navigators. This image may be helpful in characterizing the skilled scholarship required to engage the often-tumultuous controversies between psychoanalysis and religion. Those who have followed the dialogue are well acquainted with the work of William W. Meissner (1931-), who has at times employed the image of Charybdis and Scylla to describe some of the careful nuances required to handle the conflicting tensions involved in his work. Certainly, in more than 40 years of research and dozens of publications, Meissner has been influential in forging the dialogue between the domains of psychology and theology. He has done so by maneuvering between the Charybdis of psychoanalytic formulations and the Scylla of theological technicalities. This essay will present examples of the principles and themes whereby Meissner has created new understandings relevant to both domains, showing how Meissner as a priest and a psychiatrist, a Jesuit and a psychoanalyst, has proved himself an able navigator.

Meissner first entered the seas of psycho-theological dialogue in his Annotated Bibliography in Religion and Psychology (1961). Developed when he was just a Jesuit scholastic at Woodstock College in Maryland, the bibliography offers an exhaustive compilation consisting of more than 2,900 articles published between 1900-1960 from more than 300 journals in English and in French. Organized into some 40 sections, the bibliography established points of dialogue among various pastoral and psychological domains, and equipped the young Jesuit with the resources needed to sail through the precarious straits of future scholarship.

Interestingly enough, as Meissner reported to me in an interview, his earlier intention as a Jesuit was to concentrate his studies in biology. During his Jesuit formation, however, his superiors approached him to consider pursuing work in psychiatry. Such a suggestion went against the view of many Catholic leaders, among them Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who were suspicious of a psychiatry heavily influenced by a psychoanalytic theory whose Freudian principles tended to be hostile toward religion. However, during the late 1950s there were increasing indications of growing cooperation and less antagonism between the two disciplines, with major conferences on psychology and religion beginning to take place on an annual basis at such Catholic institutions as Fordham University and St. John’s College in Minnesota. Meissner’s mentors no doubt saw the significance of these conferences and the need for more Catholic psychoanalysts.

It was during his theological studies that Meissner began to integrate psychology and theology in a modern-day version of the medieval scholastic enterprise of integrating reason and faith. Unlike scholasticism, however, the reason component was often an articulation of unconscious and irrational structures. The faith component would soon have some of its traditional structures challenged and changed through the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

Following his ordination in 1961, Meissner entered medical school and later psychoanalytic training, and so became personally and professionally engaged with the question of how to relate psychological with spiritual identity. He found a helpful approach in Thomas Aquinas’s axiom, gratia perficit naturam (grace perfects nature). For Aquinas and then for Meissner there is a basic correlation between the motivations of one’s psychological identity with the movements of one’s spiritual nature. First formulated in works such as

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 Foundations for a Psychology of Grace (1964), Meissner has carried this principle forward throughout subsequent writings. Guided by the psychoanalytic formulations of Erikson, Mahler, Rizzuto, and Winnicott, Meissner developed innovative understandings through which he has articulated his psycho-theological correlations.

In Life and Faith (1987), Meissner demonstrates his method by articulating three principles that can be used to correlate the psychological with the spiritual. First, there is the principle of reciprocal influence by which Meissner means that for grace to be operative with the ego, it depends upon the functioning of the ego to produce a desired effect. That is to say, spiritual movements build upon psychological capacities and conditions.

As a second principle, Meissner presents compensatory activation whereby the movements of God’s grace energize ego-functions. Such energizing serves as a sanative function, which allows psychological healing to take place. The energizing of the ego, however, cannot force healing for it cannot violate the functions of one’s ego.

Meissner sees epigenesis as a third principle. Simply put, the psy-

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chological and the spiritual interrelate developmentally through the course of a lifetime. Using Erikson’s eight stages of development he postulates that ego strengths, especially earned through crisis, can be considered virtuous, implying a spiritual growth. He goes on to postulate psychospiritual virtues or correlates with each one of Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial crises, for example, Identity/Humility and Intimacy/Love of Neighbor.

Earlier, in perhaps his most influential work, Psychoanalysis and Religion (1984), for which he won the prestigious Oscar Pfister Award of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Meissner works out a relationship between psychoanalysis and religion through the work of the object relations theorists Donald Winnicott and Ana-Maria Rizzuto. Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena became the lynchpin for Meissner’s formulations. With Winnicott, Meissner asserts that illusions, rather than necessarily constituting pathological phenomena, could also be conceived as sources of creativity and play. Supported by Rizzuto’s application of Winnicott’s construct in her Birth of the Living God (1979), Meissner shows how illusions can lead to the transitional phenomena necessary to face rather than to avoid reality, for instance, a blanket or a teddy bear acts as a replacement for a mother’s presence and soothing touch. Such phenomena, in turn, are often the means whereby representations of God and hence religious beliefs are developed as a means of facing reality.

By incorporating the work of Winnicott and Rizzuto, Meissner goes on to state a case against Freud’s position that religious belief is illusory and avoidant of reality. He argues that what Freud saw as pathological in religion can really be healthy and helpful. For Meissner, some sharing of illusion is necessary for individuation as well as a sense of sharing in community. Meissner further suggests that religions employ symbols as transitional objects so as to keep the God representation alive, for example, the cross for Christians, the Star of David for Jews. While he would agree with Freud that such use of symbols fosters an illusory world, Meissner would concur with Winnicott that this illusory world is what makes us most human. Meissner’s reinterpretation of one of the central tenets of Freud’s psychoanalytic critique of religion serves to establish a bridge over which other forms of dialogue and understandings between psychoanalysis and religion may flow.

Meissner’s study of the case of the founder of his Jesuit order, Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), employs material from the saint’s biographies and the more than 7000 letters that Ignatius wrote in his capacity as the founder of the Society of Jesus. In Ignatius of Loyola: The Psychology of a Saint (1992), Meissner presents what he views as a demonstration of how the conditions of nature and the movements of grace are evident in the life of Loyola.

As a psychoanalyst, of course, Meissner sees great significance in the fact that Ignatius’s mother died shortly after she brought him into the world and that his father and brothers exemplified the gallantry, at times chauvinism, common to Spanish hidalgos (lower nobility) of the time. When a cannonball in battle broke Ignatius’s leg his career as a cavalier was shattered, but Meissner saw the more important blow as that suffered by Ignatius’ phallic narcissistic self. He suggests that such a loss of self led Ignatius into a depression that bordered on the suicidal. Subsequently, Ignatius underwent a religious conversion, a process that Meissner sees psychologically as transvaluation and theologically as prompted by the healing energies of grace. Such a process became internalized when Ignatius saw in the person of Christ an identity fulfillment that was once sought in battles and bosoms.

Meissner proceeds to trace, through psychoanalytic formulations, some of the unconscious movements and motivations found in Ignatius’s ego, relating how Ignatius moves from being a “pilgrim” to the founder of what was to become the largest religious order of the Catholic Church. Meissner, for example, finds evidence that Ignatius struggled with a self-punitive superego and displayed such defense mechanisms as isolation, intellectualization, and reaction formation. He goes on to describe how such mechanisms tended to become sublimated through the mystical movements and spiritual disciplines that Ignatius experienced through his conversion process.

A final example of Meissner’s ability to navigate the currents of psycho-theological controversies may be found in The Cultic Origins of Christianity: The Dynamics of Religious Development (2000), where he describes the early Christian communities as exhibiting cultic processes. Given their periodic persecution and their marginalized status from the economic and political structures of imperial Rome and the spiritual systems of Judaism, these communities as cults tended to emerge through a paranoid process that was not necessarily pathological. For Meissner, such a process involved the mechanisms of introjection and projection, which were maintained and reinforced through paranoid construction. He asserts that such psychodynamics were to be theologically expressed in the Christian assimilation of the Apocalypticism and Gnosticism of the period.

Meissner’s psycho-theological understandings are not without controversy. Psychoanalysts and theologians alike question his theoretical excursions into history and the conclusions that he draws for both fields. Yet, as I have attempted to show, his scholarship has helped to shape the dialogue between psychoanalysts and theologians alike. The fact that he has been engaged in such an enterprise for so long and performed so well suggests that W.W. Meissner is an accomplished navigator whose writings continue as important charts that may guide readers through the turbulent currents between Charybdis and Scylla.

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