Working Notes on Countertransference and Other Issues in Researching Joseph Smith Jr. and the Mormons

For the past several years I have been studying a fascinating subject for psychohistorians: the Mormons and their founder Joseph Smith Jr. While there is a huge amount of historical literature on most aspects of Mormon life and leadership, psychohistorical scholarship on the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints (the Mormons, Saints, or LDS) remains in its infancy. For the most part, scholarship in this area remains locked into faith promoting vs. non-faith promoting work. Anything that is felt by church leaders to be non-faith promoting is declared to be dissent from this essentially closed system.

Dissenters do not have sub-groups; they are the sub-group. The main group and splinter groups exist in isolation from each other, yet they depend on each other. Splinter groups tend to be as rigid in their dissent as is the mainstream church in defending its orthodoxy. Dissenting scholarship seeks to show that some aspect of Mormon history and/or culture needs revision, that some doctrines are wrong, or that the leaders are evil or corrupt. There is little middle ground in this scholarship, as most scholars appear to have some sort of ax to grind. Dissenters are quite serious about their differences with prevailing doctrine and they have been excommunicated for their viewpoints. They describe themselves as wanting to find and/or present the truth, whatever it may be. Their truth is seldom, if ever, in line with church doctrine. The Mormon Church has no tolerance for diversity of beliefs either accept established doctrine or you have no place in the community of the faithful. As an interested outsider, it is my hope that I will be able to shed new light on the Mormons and what they have become. As a psychohistorian I recognize that my efforts can generate anxiety and that I must be careful to avoid letting my feelings sabotage my LDS project.

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This inquiry must begin with the life of Joseph Smith Jr., the prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. To comprehend how and why the church developed under this prophet and its place in our modern world, it is necessary to understand the life of Joseph and his family of origin, which influenced what he became. In this article I will outline the necessary steps to psychobiographically understand a person like Joseph Smith Jr. My goal is to show how we can cut through the mysterious aspects in the life of Joseph Smith Jr., who has perhaps been the most underappreciated religious innovator in American history. I will define the methodology we need to know in order to comprehend a person like Smith Jr.

Any person is importantly defined by the nature of his/her work. Likewise, it is important for the scholar to be aware of how much his/her emotional makeup shapes the understanding of emotion and fantasy felt by Smith Jr. This is a system that will influence how we see Joseph. Having a good comprehension of Joseph Smith Jr. might enhance our own self-image. It is important to watch out for bad psychobiography that might be used to mask emotional issues such as depression, anxiety, feelings of inferiority, etc. felt by the scholar. This can be a cause of confusion in assessing the person you are trying to understand. It is essential for scholar and subject that these factors are in balance. The scholar should not act out his/her pathology through the person under study. This can be one reason why psychobiographical work might take more time than you would expect.

The Problem of Joseph Smith Jr.

Consider the following from The Essential Joseph Smith (Signature Books, n.d., 245), in my opinion the best version of this sermon:

You don’t know me—you never will. You never know my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot do it. I shall never undertake it. I don’t blame you for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I could not have believed it myself. I never did harm since I have been born in the world. My voice is always for peace.

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What manner of man would make such claims? Why would he describe himself in such terms? These assertions come from a funeral sermon given by Joseph Smith shortly before he was killed by an anti-Mormon mob. The church was founded in 1830 by Smith with six members and has evolved into a worldwide church with 11 million current members. Despite there being a great deal of information about him, Joseph Smith Jr. has long been something of a puzzle for those seeking to understand him and the church he created. His family of origin was no stranger to various sorts of trauma. These traumas seemed to be inflicted from the outside and/or by their own bad judgment. Joseph grew up in an atmosphere of anxiety, depression, and poverty where his family did not always have enough to eat. The family moved 10 times when Joseph was young, always seeking a better life. His education was sporadic because he and his siblings had to help their father in their fields. Alvin, his revered older brother, had worked tirelessly to help the family keep its head above water until he died suddenly due to a medical misdiagnosis. All the Smith children survived typhoid fever, which was often a kiss of death. When Joseph was seven, he developed a severe infection in his leg. His doctors wanted to amputate, but the child and his family would not permit it. Young Joseph refused to take liquor the only anesthetic at the time—knowing that it meant extreme pain. Why would a child do this? Why would his parents go along with their son’s wishes? Is there some sort of unconscious collusion going on here?

His father also lost his wife’s dowry in an ill-conceived business venture. This plunged the family into even worse poverty than they had already known. They seemed to have set themselves up to fail. Why the family would have done so remains a mystery best answered by psychohistorical examination. Family is important, over and above the normal influences, because it might also shape issues of religious belief. In the family of Joseph Smith, his parents had differences on religion but I do not have a sense that they were preoccupied with their differences. Smith may have felt that he had no consistent parental example to follow. Therefore, he had to go his own way.

Joseph gravitated toward religion after a series of visions that stretched over several years. He was a charismatic leader who

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had his troubles, including that his followers were not a group of passive sheep. Along with many of his followers, Joseph looked forward to the second coming of Christ, but unlike others, the Mormons did not set a date in the near future.

Polygamy proved to be his undoing. Smith had introduced this to his inner circle as early as 1834. However, it had been whispered about for years. The editor of the local newspaper was going to publish an exposé about that which was known but not officially acknowledged. Joseph had the printing press destroyed. He was charged for destroying the press and the violation of free speech. While waiting for trial, Joseph elected to go to a county jail located outside Mormon control, where he was killed.

Smith Jr. must have known on some unconscious level that he wanted to die in order to save women and men from themselves. Did he unconsciously cause his own death at the hands of a mob? Did he see himself as a new Christ? Did he want to inspire future generations of Mormons via the example of his martyrdom as Christ had done for Christians?

From this it should be obvious that a psychobiographical approach, despite its difficulties, is the best way to understand Joseph Smith Jr. and his creation.

Transference and Motivation

My conscious motivation for this research was related to an anger that seemed to me out of proportion to the subject. I wanted to tell the presenter that I felt the presentation was unduly excessive. I quickly realized that I did not know enough to intelligently engage in a critique. Once I started reading, I found myself totally hooked on the subject and felt that with enough study I might be able to do it better. As my studies progressed I became aware of some unconscious transference.

This transference occurred in part because of the similarities between my father and Joseph Smith Jr. Like my father, Joseph had a slight limp and was a charming, promiscuous man, not above lying when he felt it to be necessary. Both men, for different reasons, were adulterers. I felt a great deal of ambivalence and some envy toward Joseph and my father. Joseph and his followers developed elaborate religious justifications for their conduct. My father

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used a tissue of lies that became increasingly untenable over the years. I felt a certain envy of my father’s appearance of ease connecting with people. However, that ease tended to be on a surface level because once others got to know him they were often disenchanted. Whether or not the relationship was able to evolve to a deeper level was always uncertain. Like Joseph Smith Jr., my father seemed to prefer a surface relationship where people looked up to him. Mormonism produced longer term relationships among converts and followers, while my father based many of his relationships on sex and/or taking advantage of the other person. Both men, for different reasons, felt themselves to be alone. Since I did not like my father, although at this stage of my life I want to know more about him, I have to be aware of my inclination to have a negative transference to Smith.

Such issues need not be explicitly written out as part of a research project. However, they need to be known and understood because they influence how we interpret our findings. Psychohistorians routinely put themselves on the line. Awareness of our emotional baggage will positively influence any psychobiographical project. Fear of revealing too much about ourselves is one reason why scholarship might provoke anxiety and I fight this tendency.

Religion

Understanding any group involves knowing its emotional power, meaning, and appeal for members. We need to know how members feel the group meets their needs and contains their emotions and fantasies. Understanding large and small group psychology is necessary here. Contrary to those who believe there is inadequate literature on large and small group psychology, the reality is that there is ample material on this subject. An important aspect of group life is that it can influence how members define themselves. Religion is an especially obvious example of this. Most of the time Joseph Smith Jr. defined himself in terms of his religion. What would he have been without religion? In all likelihood, he would have been an anonymous farmer that no one beyond his family would ever notice.

How, then, should we deal with the problem of religion? We should try not to project our personal beliefs, values, feelings,

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and fantasies upon what we seek to understand. Of course, this is easier said than done. We need to familiarize ourselves with the doctrines and practices of the religion we want to understand. It can also be helpful to understand the issues involved with dissent. There have been over 200 dissenting Mormon groups, most of which have not survived. Personally, I come from a position of religious agnosticism, which means that I do not share the antagonism to the Mormons that is common among many of my fellow Protestants. Approaching the topic with disciplined awareness of my emotional baggage and an open mind is essential. The desired goal of neutrality regarding different issues involved with the Mormons can be difficult since they have evoked powerful reactions ever since their creation by Smith.

God and Angels

There is the issue of God and angels that is important because Joseph Smith regularly had visions of God, Jesus, and angels. He routinely spoke with an angel named Moroni. Such experiences had a lot to do with the creation of his church. This, combined with an additional scripture that forms The Book of Mormon, offered a very real appeal for converts who believed that Mormonism did not come from Joseph; rather, from God through Joseph. He was the prophet, seer, and revelator bringing the word of God to his followers. One reason that members felt a strong attraction to the church was because they felt able to bring their questions and/or problems to Joseph and found answers or resolutions from God through him.

Moving away from the LDS church and towards academia, scholars, especially Weston La Barre in his book The Ghost Dance (1971), have made a persuasive case for God being a delusional search for the strict and loving lost father of childhood. The Ghost Dance, The Origin of Religion remains one of the basic texts on the origin of religion. A contemporary text that makes the same point is M. D. Faber’s The Psychological Roots of Religious Beliefs, Searching for Angels and the Parent-God (2001). Faber successfully integrates the neurological and emotional developmental processes of human beings. He does not try to assign primacy to either one; rather emotional and neurological work together as a system. Belief in God is something that most of us need to some degree. Such belief is also something that can take us beyond ourselves.

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We are as children, looking to restore the loving father-child relationship. If the parent-child relation was abusive, religion might help ease the pain and make it bearable via inflicting pain upon nonbelievers or heretics. If the relationship was fulfilling, we might see the father/God as a being who might help us find ways to assist other people. Still others might find in religion a way to control their inner rage and violence.

Such a formulation can, all too easily, be an excuse for prejudice, which must be avoided. We must respect the faith of others even if we find it to be personally repugnant. Though religion can be a force for good, all too often it can be something less.

[Editor’s Note: This unfinished article was found in the computer of the late Henry Lawton by his son Jason and passed on to Clio’s Psyche to be edited for publication.]

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