In his masterful play, Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw turned the classical images of heaven and hell upside down. He described hell as a place of complete satisfaction, where all desires are freely fulfilled. Personal responsibility had no place in hell. It did in heaven, though, a place for the “masters of reality,” and curiously enough the place where souls were free to go when they finally got sick of hell.

This is a provocative metaphor, though, being a metaphor, it is not to be taken literally in a metaphysical sense. But it is a good metaphor for how we live our life in this world. It is also a metaphor that I can’t help but agree with, for through my daily life in San Francisco I am constantly reminded that there has to be more to life than hedonism and exhibitionism.



This concept of “a hell that you can leave when you get sick of it” aptly describes psychological change as well. Many people cling to their own psychological “hell,” no matter how painful it may be, because the discipline of health is even more fearful. But eventually, if they catch only a glimpse of sorrow for the mess they’re in, they can get sick of it all and decide to cross over to “reality.”


Therefore, though an atheist, not a theologian, Shaw nevertheless made a brilliant discovery: a spiritual life is also a practical life. Yet such practicality does not depend on knowledge so much as understanding.

Too many persons today, however, concern themselves with knowledge, whether it be intellectual or carnal, and in doing so they sidestep the concept of understanding. Why? Because understanding involves “standing under something,” and that something is the law. Not the Law of the Old Testament, and not the local penal code either. It’s the law of lack and limitation, the agony of being itself, as it stands on the brink of redemption through divine love. All the pages of knowledge flap uselessly in the swirling gusts that blow along that ridge.



Every child born into this world is born into a pre-existing social world of language, science, technology, art, literature, and so on. But even more profound than the mystery of the sum total of all this factual information is the mystery of the child’s own body. The child finds itself literally at the mercy of biological processes—eating, vomiting, defecation, urination, bleeding, sexuality, and death—that it can neither control nor comprehend. And so the child will feel—rightly so—that the world “knows” something that he or she does not know. Right from the beginning, then, the child is located in a profound emotional space of “not knowing.”

It’s an awkward and uncomfortable place to be. And so we all devote considerable energy to overcoming the feeling of “not knowing.” We might seek out intellectual knowledge through formal education. We might engage in scientific research. We might join country clubs, gangs, cults, cliques, or any other social organization that purports to offer some secret “knowledge.” We might seek out “carnal knowledge” through the body of another person and attempt to locate the psychological agony of our bodily mystery in the pleasure—or pain—of the other. Or we might create our own fantasy worlds—with thoughts and images of sexuality, heroism, revenge, or destruction—in which we can “figure it out” on our own so as to possess the knowledge and recognition we so desperately crave.

Nevertheless, all the “knowledge” in the world is nothing but a thin veil that hangs over the dark anguish of “not knowing.” Standing before the veil, knowing the secret truth of our “not knowing,” we feel confused, disgusted, weak, and useless.


Subject to such a law of lack and limitation, we have only one hope: to understand the soul.

Psychologically speaking, soul, to paraphrase the brilliant French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,[1] is something—alien to the mundane—that empowers us to bear what is intolerable and lacking in the human world.[2]

In this modern world, though, much of our society has lost its sense of soul. In the desire for diversity it’s all too easy to misunderstand life by confusing acceptance with tolerance, paganism with divinity, idolatry with holiness, and vanity with love.

And with the loss of soul many of us today have also discarded the concept of sin—that is, that functional narcissism in all of us which serves the self, rather than others. So, instead of making life’s decisions according to personal responsibility, we make decisions according to personal convenience. Anything today seems to be acceptable if it makes life look easier. And yet sin—in its psychological sense—is what blinds us to the realization that there’s more to see in life than what the world shows us. As such, sin pulls us away from the love of God. Sin may be convenient, but it’s just not practical.



Saint Augustine said that “Sin is the punishment of sin.” This makes perfect sense if you understand that the human world is nothing but a mass of psychological defenses—pride, anger, competition, social status, take your pick—which protect us in our blindness, the blindness that results from an ignorance of soul. All defenses originate in childhood as ways to assist survival, but carried on unconsciously into adulthood those same defenses—the ones that once protected us—lead us into nothing but the repeated punishment of psychological and social dysfunction.

Don’t misunderstand this. We are all basically good. But goodness takes work—lots of work. Hard work. And self-denial. For without our denying the pride of self and its defenses, true love, the most exquisite and pure love imaginable, remains invisible. Along the path of least resistance—the path of sin, the easy way, the way to hell—love is nowhere to be seen, for it remains banished behind the thorny hedges of psychological defenses.

And what is true love, if not to give of yourself to save others—even those who hate you— from their blindness?


So hell, too, the place where responsibility and discrimination are absent, is its own punishment. It is startling to realize that the two most powerful diseases of the modern age—cancer (unrestrained reproduction of certain cells) and AIDS (indiscriminate destruction of the body by its own immune system)—should be such potent metaphors: our social “dis-ease” is that of irresponsible growth and a lack of discrimination.

Although most cases of AIDS and some forms of cancer are directly related to personal behavior, when someone gets cancer or AIDS we are all responsible. The tragedy here is that culture has the capability of “infecting” its individual members with defensive ideals that have lost any sense of meaningful direction.

And so we, as individuals, would do well to pay attention to sin today while remembering that crossing the barrier between sin and spirituality is a simple matter of personal choice, with complete freedom to go in either direction. Psychology, at least in the U.S., has too often been preoccupied with the pursuit of happiness,[3] and it has missed the point about helping individuals understand life and find a personally meaningful—and practical—sense of direction. Psychology in itself, of course, cannot offer any meaning to life,[4] but it can help individuals disentangle themselves from the snare of illusory social identifications that keep us trapped in blindness and pull us backwards into self-destruction.

I can offer no proof of God, nor can I prove that souls exist or that spirituality is anything more than a figment of our imaginations. But look at it this way: If you value spirituality, what do you have to lose? Mediocrity. What do you have to gain? Everything. But the proof of love is simple:


Additional Resources

Notes:

1. Jacques Lacan, “A Love Letter.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York: W. W. Norton [paperback], 1985). See p. 155:
“And yet I fail to see why the fact of having a soul should be a scandal for thought—were it true. If it were true, the soul could only be spoken as whatever enables a being . . . to bear what is intolerable in its world, which presumes this soul to be alien to that world. . . .”

2. Please note that the psychological meaning of “soul” is one thing, whereas the theological meaning (and welfare) of the soul is a matter for religion, which can be a transcendent step above spirituality. That is, some spirituality, in its aspiration for a “oneness” with the universe, often inadvertently becomes a oneness with sin as well. Religion, if its spirituality seeks a moral responsibility to the divine, can transcend moral relativism. Sadly, though, some individuals make their religious practices into mere intellectualism lacking in spirituality.

3. Jacques Lacan, “The signification of the phallus.” In Écrits: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). See p. 287:
“In any case, man cannot aim at being whole (the ‘total personality’ is another of the deviant premises of modern psychotherapy), while ever the play of displacement and condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks his relation as as subject to the signifier.”

4. Lacan, at least, did not attempt to subvert religion like Freud, nor did he try to “psychologize” religion like Jung and Rank. Lacan simply respected the fact that psychoanalysis could say nothing meaningful about religion. See “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious.” In Écrits: A selection (Alan Sheridan, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton, 1977, p. 316:
“We [psychoanalysts] are answerable to no ultimate truth; we are neither for nor against any particular religion.”

5. I found this quote in The Ascent of Mount Carmel by Saint John of the Cross, Book Two, Chapter 17, no. 5. (The English translation is my own.) Saint John refers to it as “a frequently quoted spiritual axiom.” Saint Bonaventure, in his Commentaria in Quatuor Libros Sententiarum attributes the quote to Pope Saint Gregory the Great (see Opera Omnia S. Bonaventurae, Ad Claras Aquas, 1882, Vol. 1, p. 254), though the quote may actually have its origin in a letter (Epistle 111) by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.


Lacan:
Lacan Related Papers provides links to numerous Lacan-related papers.
The Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in the San Francisco Bay area, offers training in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The San Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies provides lectures and information about Lacanian psychoanalysis.

St. John of the Cross:
JUAN DE LA CRUZ
The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross

Miscellaneous:
Agnosticism, Atheism, Humanism, & Secularism
Chastity – In San Francisco? — psychological healing and spiritual direction in the Roman Catholic mystic tradition.
Institute for the Psychological Sciences — offers graduate training in clinical psychology that is grounded in spiritual values.
Miscellaneous Theology and Spirituality Topical Index Page — includes topics on Angels and Demons (e.g., Angels, Demons, and Evil); Anthropology (e.g., Soul, and Sin); Eschatology (e.g., Heaven, and Hell)
Moral Theology — includes topics on Morality, Absolutes, and Relativism; Ethical Issues; and The Good and Virtuous Life.
The Psychology of Atheism — offers some interesting psychology (but leads to no real answers).


www.guidetopsychology.com