Status Updates From Keeping Ourselves in the Dark

Romantic humanism and theism are certainly united in their vision of a happy world in which from birth onward we live sin-free or neurosis-free lives completely in tune with natural and metaphysical laws that guarantee individual and social harmony at all times. ... we may assume there would be no atrocities. The problem is simply that such worlds do not exist and cannot be forced into existence.

From whatever vantage, it seems that psychology and religion can’t live with or without each other. They will line up, however, against the specter of nihilism, which threatens the heart of religion and the economy of psychology. There’s no money in nihilism or parrhesia.

Many of the original founders of psychotherapeutic theories and schools were Jewish—Freud, Klein, Reich, Perls, Berne, Moreno, Assagioli, Frankl, Janov, Ellis, Beck, et al.—and have quite possibly and quite unconsciously carried forward certain Judaic concepts of suffering and cure. Carl Jung’s analytical psychology has also been called Jungism and his approach a cult.

Comforting illusions, it will be said, are better than no comfort at all. As it turns out, many counselors, most of whom in the UK are women, are sympathetic to astrology and loosely defined spirituality. Of course they are. Because for many of us the talking therapies and their wider ethos have come to take the place of bygone religions.