The Holiness Code and ‘Psychotherapy’
Anthony Stadlen
Summary by Naomi Stadlen of a Public Lecture by Anthony Stadlen
to West Midlands
Institute of Psychotherapy
at Birmingham Medical Institute,
Edgbaston
Anthony began by saying that the Holiness Code ran through several
chapters of Leviticus, a book of the
Bible. He said he wanted to focus on chapter 19. He believed it had something
to say to everyone, whether they thought in terms of ‘God’ or had no need of
that concept. The Holiness Code was a wonderful collection of ethical principles.
Each verse was like granite, placing two or three terse, enigmatic injunctions
together in an apparently arbitrary or even contradictory way, sometimes conjoined
by the Hebrew conjunction ‘ve’, the
single letter vav, which leaves open
whether it is an intensifying ‘and’
or an adversative ‘but’.
He then read verse 18 of chapter 19: ‘Thou
shalt not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the children of thy
people; thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ In order to understand this,
Anthony showed how, by going back to preceding verses, one could see the
context building up for this one. So verse 17 was: ‘Thou shalt not hate thy
brother in thy heart; thou shalt surely rebuke thy neighbour, and not bear sin
because of him.’ This meant, Anthony said, not hating someone in secret, but telling your neighbour to his face
if you think he has done something wrong. Verse 16 made it even clearer. ‘Thou
shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people; neither shalt thou
stand idly by the blood of thy neighbour.’ This meant that you should not spread
gossip or speak badly about another person, even if what you say is true. But also you shouldn’t do nothing if
your neighbour has been wronged. Verse 15 added further clarification. Loving
one’s neighbour, in this context, didn’t mean walking down the street feeling a
rosy glow, Anthony said. The context of Leviticus
makes it clear that love is not a cosy feeling. Love is action.
Most other religions, even humanism, teach
similar precepts. ‘Love thy neighbour’ can seem banal, unobjectionable.
However, one person who strongly objected was Freud. In Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929), he wrote that his own love
was precious and should be given to a neighbour only ‘if he is so like me in
important ways that I can love myself in him’. This, Anthony pointed out, is a
statement of psychoanalytic narcissism.
He then turned to Freud’s essay ‘On Transience’
(1916) in which Freud considers death and mourning. The capacity for love Freud
called ‘libido’, a pseudo-scientific term which Freud explicitly intended to
evoke something like an electric charge. When the ‘object’ of the libido died,
Freud said, the libido could return to the ‘ego’. Yet why, he asked himself,
was this so painful? Mourning presented psychologists with a riddle.
‘It’s moving,’ said Anthony, ‘that in the
concordance to Freud’s works the word “Liebe”
(“love”) occurs hundreds of times.’ But is Freud’s understanding of love
adequate? Is it superior to that of ordinary people, or of the Holiness Code?
Today, ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ is popular. In Why Love Matters by Sue Gerhardt, we are
told that love matters because it shapes the baby’s brain. If it didn’t,
Anthony remarked dryly, would love still matter? He asked the audience: ‘How
can you learn about love by looking at the brain?’
A concrete example of the psychoanalytic
concept of love arises in Freud’s ‘Dora’ case. ‘You may argue,’ Anthony said, ‘that
we have come on so far that discussing Freud’s cases is like going back to
Edison’s phonograph. But I cannot agree. The shift from Freud to Fairbairn and “object
relations” is not so fundamental. There is still an attempt to reduce love to
questions of health, utility, or science. One has to examine Freud, to see
where it all started.’
Dora’s father paid for her analysis and asked
Freud to ‘bring her to reason’. He wanted Freud to ‘confirm’ that Dora was
deluded. Most people praise Freud’s integrity in not doing this. Freud actually
‘confirmed’ that Dora’s account was accurate in every detail. In particular, he
‘confirmed’ that her father had tacitly allowed his friend Herr K. to molest
Dora sexually in exchange for sexual favours from Herr K.’s wife. But, Anthony
asked, how did Freud know this? He couldn’t have known. It used to be
fashionable for analysts to dismiss as fantasy their patients’ reports of
childhood sexual abuse. Today it is fashionable for therapists to ‘believe’ clients
who ‘disclose’, i.e. claim, that they
have been sexually abused. But the Holiness Code [Note, 2020. Not the Holiness Code, but the Torah elsewhere. A. S.], Anthony said, makes it clear
that no judge can tell the difference between truth and falsehood without
witnesses. A therapist may sense that the client is telling the truth, but this
is different from claiming to know.
What is wrong with saying: ‘I have no reason to disbelieve you’? This would
have put Freud in a more honest position towards Dora. Yet no one in the vast
literature on the case has pointed this out. In the last quarter-century there
has been much criticism of Freud’s approach to Dora. But everyone praises him
for ‘believing’ her.
Then, said Anthony, comes the twist, praised by
Lacan as a masterly Hegelian ‘dialectical reversal’ by Freud. Freud wrote:
‘When a patient brings forward a sound and incontestable train of argument
during psychoanalytic treatment, the physician is liable to feel a moment’s
embarrassment.’ ‘But why?’ asked Anthony. ‘Why wouldn’t the “physician” feel
pleased if his “patient” seemed to be reasoning well?’ Freud’s solution to his
embarrassment was to assert a priori that
Dora’s reproaches were defences against self-reproaches.
He didn’t say Dora’s reproaches were deluded. He simply said she was sick for
making them. A ‘healthy’ girl would have kept her mouth shut. He thus
invalidated her and colluded with her father more radically than her father could
have dreamed of. Certain verses of the Holiness Code could have guided Freud here.
Freud claimed to have a superior way of seeing
love, mourning and revenge. But Anthony considered that much psychoanalytic
writing on these themes was not even up to the standards of ordinary people. Ernest
Jones called Dora ‘a disagreeable creature who preferred revenge to love’.
Anthony emphasised that his critique still
applies widely today. For example, most psychoanalysts appear to treat as dogma
the idea of a mother’s ambivalence towards her baby. Psychotherapists talk
about a psychological ‘love’, by which they mean a feeling, not the authentic
love-as-action of the Holiness Code. For them, where there is ‘love’ there must
be ‘hate’. Not to feel such hate is to be in ‘unhealthy’ ‘denial’.
Is this version of love really an advance on
popular understanding, let alone the wisdom of the Holiness Code or writers
such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Tolstoy? Freud himself pointed to his
bookshelves and said: ‘These are my precursors.’ But the language of ‘mental
health’ encourages people, even great thinkers like Freud and Jung, to talk in
alienated ways. They can get confused and lose their ordinary humanity. Psychotherapists
who quote the Bible usually patronise it. But the Holiness Code, written in
ordinary language, transcends the theories of Freud, Jung, and other psychologisers.
Anthony said he did not want to be prescriptive.
He invited his listeners to think whether Chapter 19 of the Holiness Code suggests
more honest ways of relating to clients in ‘psychotherapy’.
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