PSYCHODYNAMICS VERSUS EVANGELICALISM

by
NORMAN N. BONNER, M.A., Ed.D. (Cand.)
(President, Central College, Bartlesville, Oklahoma)
and
CHARLES W. CARTER, M.A., Th.M.
(Chairman, Division of Philosophy and Religion Taylor University)

To put the subject of this paper in clear perspective, psychodynamics is defined as "the systematic study of personality in terms of past and present experience as related to motivation, but especially as represented by the naturalist Sigmund Freud". (1) Evangelicalism is adherence to the authority and teachings of the Christian gospel.

With the increasing emphasis on the functions of guidance and counseling in secular education, there appears to be among clerics a tendency to adapt the secular counseling terminology and procedures to the ministry of pastoral counseling and, in many cases, to the public proclamation of the gospel. Of particular concern to many evangelicals is the usage of Freudian terms and concepts to explain and describe the "dynamics" of Christian experience.

A careful analysis of the concepts underlying psychoanalytic terminology will indicate that in the main they are antipodal to the orthodox Christian and biblical concepts. The inherent danger is that through usage of these terms, without definition, the listener may be led to believe that a consensus has been reached between psychodynamism and evangelicalism. A case in point is observed by means of a critical comparison and contrast of Freud's idea of personality conflict-the struggle of the id, the ego, and the superego-with the scriptural position of St. Paul as reflected in Romans 7, describing mankind's struggle with the inherent principle of sin.

While there appear on the surface to be significant similarities between certain Freudian concepts, especially as they relate to the id and to libidinal impulses (instinctual energies and desires derived from the id-sexual instincts), and Pauline hamartiological principles, significant departures from the scriptural idea in his writings suggest that Freud's earlier observations may have been influenced, at least in part, by theological and biblical concepts, and that psychodynamics may represent a reaction to inherent weaknesses and inadequacies in the theological and ecclesiastical systems of his era, and a development somewhat concomitant with the rise of nineteenth century German rationalism.

By posing a series of questions, an endeavor will be made to compare and contrast the respective Freudian and Pauline positions. While this methodology and approach may not be of interest to the secular mind, it should be of vital concern to Christian theologians and ministers today. Several questions with their possible solutions call for serious consideration at this juncture.

I. What is the Id?

Freud holds that the id is the impersonality of the mind seen apart from its ego, the true unconscious or deeper part of the mind, the reservoir of instinctive impulses, dominated by the pleasure-principle and blind wishful thinking; i.e., the dynamic equivalent of the descriptive unconscious. Freud sees the sex motivation as the deepest and most fundamental of all the drives-the tap-root drive from which all the other drives of the id spring. He calls the id "a chaos, a caldron of seething excitement." (2)

In seeming agreement, the prophet Jeremiah states: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?" (Jer. 17:9, RSV). In Romans 7, the classic passage relating to Pauline hamartiology, the Apostle states:". . .1 know that nothing good dwells with me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. . Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me" (Rom. 7:18, RSV). Earlier in this epistle Paul declared: ". . . the sin in me . . . stimulated all my covetous desires" (Rom. 7:8, Phillips' trans.). In the face of this apparently hopeless situation the near-despairing victim cries out, "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Rom. 7:24, RSV); or, as Phillips graphically renders the passage: "It is an agonizing situation, and who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my own sinful nature?"

Obviously there are, at this point, certain close pragmatic similarities between Freud's id concept as "a chaos, a caldron of seething excitement," (3) and Paul's concept of the "sin which dwells within me" (Rom. 7:18), and produces "in me all kinds of covetousness" (Rom. 7:8, RSV), as far as the actual disposition and function of the two are concerned. Their radical differences are seen in the nature and origins of Freud's id concept and Paul's indwelling-sin principle. Freud's id-chaos, or "caldron of seething excitement," the true unconscious reservoir of instinctive impulses characterized by a blind dynamic wishfulness, is but a stage in the onward insurgence of blind, unintelligent and undirected animalistic evolutional force not wholly unlike Arthur Schopenhauer's "world-will" concept, or Friedrich Nietzsche's "will-to-power" notion. The immediate satisfaction of the most insistent and assertive wish-desire at whatever cost to the other desires of the id, or the desires or interests of other ids, characterizes Freud's id concept. This is not unlike John Dewey's pragmatic notion of immediate-goal realization for the various drives without regard to any overall or ultimate goal or goals to direct and correlate the satisfaction-clamor of the various drives. Thus chaotic psychic civil war results within the realm of the subconscious.

On the contrary, Paul's concept of". . . the sin in me ... [that] stimulated all my covetous desires" (Rom. 7:8, Phillips), while in function or manifestation closely resembling Freud's id concept, is in origin and nature vastly different from the Freudian concept. In Pauline theology the inner or subconscious chaotic striving of the desires or drives is resultant from a cataclysmic occurrence in the realm of man's moral and spiritual history, which in Christian theology is designated the Fall (Rom. 5:12).

This experience divorced the realm of the basic drives from both their divinely revealed ideals from above and the governing and empowering indwelling Spirit of God. Deprived, through the Fall, of God's indwelling Spirit, and plunged into spiritual and moral darkness through the loss of the divinely revealed synchronizing ideals, the constitutional drives of man's unconscious nature fell to unrestrained and self-destructive conflict. This conflict likewise manifested itself against the selfishly motivated desire-drives of other selves when they strove for gratification in or through the same external objects. How well the Apostle James understood this situation, together with its real causes, when he wrote:

But what about the feuds and struggles that exist among you-where do you suppose they come from? Can't you see that they arise from conflicting passions within yourselves? You crave for something and don't get it; you are murderously jealous of what others have got and which you can't possess yourselves; you struggle and fight with one another... you want only to satisfy your own desires... do you imagine that this spirit of passionate jealousy is the Spirit he [God] has caused to live in us? No, he [God] gives us grace potent enough to meet this and every other evil spirit, if we are humble enough to receive it (Jas. 4:1-6, Phillips' trans.).

In summary, Freud sees the chaotic id as a stage in man's animalistic evolutionary insurgency from the dark abyss, or primal chaos, of the unknown into an equally indeterminable future. Christianity, as represented by Paul and James, sees this chaotic condition as arising out of man's sinful nature in the realm of the unconscious, and intruding itself into the realm of his conscious being, as the result of the Fall in which God's Spirit was evicted from man's inner-self. With the loss of God's Spirit as his inner equalizing and governing factor pandemonium resulted-what Milton designated "the capital of hell." With Milton, James concurs when he writes of the evilly-motivated tongue: "it represents among our members the world with all its wickedness; it pollutes our whole being; it keeps the wheel of our existence red-hot, and its flames are fed by hell" (Jas. 3:6, NEB). But man's God-given ideals were also lost in the Fall, and thus the insurgent drives were left without any external directives beyond their conflicting immediate hoped-for satisfactions.

Man was created not only in God's personal image, but also to be the habitat of the divine Spirit. Paul asks: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God" (I Cor. 6:9, RSV; cf. 3:16, 17). Again, the Apostle says that it is "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Col. 1:27, RSV). The Holy Spirit was an essential ingredient of true or authentic manhood, as God had originally designed and constituted man. The Fall resulted initially in man being deprived of this essential ingredient. Thus man lost his authenticity in the Fall. Ever since he has been, without God in his life, unauthentic, or somewhat less than real man.

Since the Christian view of the cause and nature of this chaotic condition is entirely different from the Freudian explanation, the remedy is also necessarily entirely different. Whereas Freudianism advocates self-expressionism, as opposed to repression, for the attainment of a healthy and normal personality, Christianity offers spiritual cleansing and restoration of moral order through forgiveness and the return of the divine Spirit to mans inner being. (See John 14:16-17, 26:15:26; 16:7; cf. Acts 1:8; 2:1-4; 15:9; Heb. 9:13.) In answer to the chaotic soul's cry of desperation. ..... who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my own sinful nature?" Paul replies confidently: "I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 7:24-25, Phillips' trans.). In like manner James prescribes the Christian remedy when he says:

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you men of double mind . . . Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you (Jas. 4:7-10, RSV).

II. What is the Ego-Id Relationship?

Freud observes:

The ego is that part of the id which has been modified by its proximity to the external world and the influences the latter has on it, and which serves the purpose of receiving stimuli and protecting the organism from them, like the cortical layer with which a particle of living substance surrounds itself. (4)

Freud characterizes the ego-id relationship as one wherein the ego represents external reality to the id at the same time it effects a compromise between the blind, chaotic striving of the id and the superior forces of the environment. He holds that if the id were not so protected, it would be destroyed. In stressing the strivings of and between the perverted drives or desires, which are analogous to Freud's principle, and which he characterizes as sin in an individual awakened to righteousness by the law, Paul states:

... sin, working death in me through what is good, in order that sin might be shown to be sin, and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure... For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. So it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me! (Rom. 7:1 3b, 15, 17, RSV).

In these comparative quotes, it seems that Freud comes very close to personifying the id in much the same way that Paul identifies a forceful principle that he calls sin. However, there is a vast basic difference between the two concepts. Freud's apparent personification of the id, consisting as it does of man's basic drives that arise out of the unconscious, makes all of its chaotic strivings to belong to the essential human nature. Paul, on the contrary, while apparently personifying the perverted strivings of these essential drives of man's nature as sin, nevertheless makes it clear that not the basic natural drives themselves are sinful, but that they are motivated by an adventitious or extrinsic factor to express themselves in a perverted and thus sinful manner (i.e., a perversion of former righteous elements, which are capable of restoration). Paul says: "I observe an entirely different principle at work in my nature. This is in continual conflict with my conscious attitude, and makes me an unwilling prisoner to the law of sin and death" (Rom. 7:23, Phillips' trans.). It would seem that Paul comes very near to identifying this motivating, dominating and enslaving personified principle of sin with actual demon possession. The next question that confronts us is, What force, outside of the gospel of Christ, can conquer this raging, powerful personified principle of sin?

III. How Does the Ego Control the Id?

Chaplin and Krawiec state: "The id is a mass of blind instincts, it has no logical organization., Indeed, in it contradictory impulses may exist side by side." (5) Freud says:

The ego, after observing the external world, searches its own perceptions in order to determine whether traces of internal impulses have crept in and thus destroyed the memory picture. In this way the ego 'dethrones' the pleasure principle which, in the long-run promises greater success. (6)

Here again Pauline theology departs from psychodynamics. Paul recognizes no innate ability within man to deal with this principle. He sees the natural sinful man. as an, unwilling slave to the personified principle of sin and exclaims, "Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within. me" (Rom. 7:20, RSV). Another version succinctly renders this Pauline concept as follows: "In a word then, I myself, subject to God's law as a rational being, am yet, in my unspiritual nature, a slave to the law of sin" (Rom. 7 :25b, NEB). Then, as, previously quoted in Romans 7:23; Paul describes the' warfare between this indwelling sin principle and unconverted man's moral rationality, with the former finally capturing and enslaving the latter. That Paul does not identify this personified sin-principle with man's natural God-given drives is made clear when he exhorts the divinely delivered man: "Do not yield your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but yield yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are. . . under grace" (Rom. 6:13-14, RSV).

In answer to the question, "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Paul exclaims, "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord" (Rom. 7 :25a, RSV). It is clear at this point that the two systems become antipodal, Freud holding that man has within himself the ability to "pull himself up by his own bootstraps," while Paul points to the sole hope of man as redemptive grace in Jesus Christ. We are now brought to the fourth and final question of this inquiry.

IV. What is the Function of the Superego?

Freud, (7) like Paul in his letter to the Romans, pictures an almost constant conflict between the id and the superego. He characterizes the superego as the source of man's idealism out of which arises all of the strivings for perfection. In this conflict, the ego must serve as mediator between the id and the superego. Gordon Willard Aliport points out that psychoanalysis, according to Freud, aims primarily at the reclamation of the id by the ego. (8)

To understand Sigmund Freud's concept of the superego, it is necessary to consider him in historical context. While his life and work extended over into the twentieth century (1856-1939), he was essentially a product of the extremely naturalistic nineteenth century. Eighteenth century deism, while allowing God personality and special creatorship, had completely divorced the natural order from His control, or even concern. However, by the nineteenth century deism, having accomplished the political purpose for which it was invented by non-theologians, phased out into two essentially naturalistic branches of thought, though these expressed themselves in quite different forms. The one was pantheistic transcendental naturalism, and the other was crass naturalistic materialism.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) may best represent the first type, and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) the second. Of whatever kind, nineteenth century naturalism orphaned man from God and left him with a sense of imperfection or incompleteness. To compensate for his unauthenticity it 'was necessary for thinking man to resort to one form or another of subjective idealism (or as in Darwin's case, what might be designated materialistic subjectivism) to account for man's, or society's, missing higher-part. Emerson sought it in the "Oversoul"; Charles Darwin thought he had found it in the naturalistic evolutionary notion of the "Survival of the Fittest"; William James (1842-1910) designated it the "More Than Self"; Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) saw it in the "Superman"; and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought he had discovered it for sure in the "Superego." In our own day, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905- ), the French naturalistic existentialist, is still seeking for man's completion in the highly subjective concept of the "Authentic-Self." (Perhaps President Johnson envisions it in his "Great Society" concept, if he really understands what he means by the phrase.) Of course the "Manifest Destiny of America" notion, as also the "inevitable perfectibility of man and all things" made heavy contributions to this nineteenth and early twentieth century naturalistic idealism. Freud's identification of the superego with conscience is understandable when it is considered that his superego is a subjectively created ideal, and conscience and ideals are intrinsically related.

Freud's superego, like the other aforementioned ideals, is subjectively created and projected, and thus it has no intrinsic reality. Since the ego is in itself unauthentic it must depend for its authenticity or reality upon the superego. But the purely subjective or cultural (and hence relative) unreality of the superego is totally incapable of giving any real substance to the ego. Consequently the ego, Freud's supposed mediating personality between the id and the superego, loses its meaning entirely and thus falls back hopelessly into the dark abyss of the confusions and conflicts of the chaotic id.

In contrast to this hopeless Freudian position, Paul develops the redemptive Christian process in Romans 8 thus:

No condemnation now hangs over the head of those who are in Christ Jesus. For the new spiritual principle of life 'in' Christ Jesus lifts me out of the old vicious circle of sin and death. The Law never succeeded in producing righteousness-the failure was always the weakness of human nature. But God has met this by sending his own Son Jesus Christ to live in that human nature which causes the trouble. And, while Christ was actually taking upon himself the sins of men, God condemned that sinful nature. So that we are able to meet the Law's requirements, so long as we are living no longer by the dictates of our sinful nature, but in obedience to the promptings of the Spirit. The carnal attitude sees no further than natural things. But the spiritual attitude reaches out after the things of the spirit. The former attitude means, bluntly, death: the latter means life and inward peace. And this is only to be expected, for the carnal attitude is inevitably opposed to the purpose of God, and neither can nor will follow his laws for living. Men who hold this attitude cannot possibly please God (Rom. 8:1-7, Phillips' trans.).

Thus Christ Jesus, the authentic Godman, is fallen man's one and only True Superego. As opposed to the various subjectively created and projected humanistic superegos, Christ is God incarnate-the Godman-the divinely revealed authentic superego, in a faith relation with whom every man may realize his God intended authentic manhood. To the Athenians Paul declared of Christ, the "Unknown God" to them: "In him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17 :28a, RSV). With Christ as his real personal ideal, and the Holy Spirit as his indwelling, purifying, controlling and enabling Paracletos, believing man, redeemed by the atoning death of the Savior, is assured of an authentic Christian personality (ego) here and hereafter. Little wonder that Paul could say, '. . . I am not ashamed of the gospel. I see it as the very power of God working for the salvation of everyone who believes it" (Rom. 1:16, Phillips' trans.).

In conclusion, let it be observed that Paul made it clear that there is one and only one solution to the sin problem-whether it issues from the actual commission of sin or the inherent principle or ens of sin-and that is the offering up of the body of Christ. Man, unaided, cannot control the raging passion of sin, but through Christ he may seek and find deliverance through the efficacy of the Savior's death and resurrection. The gospel that Paul preached was a dynamic gospel able to meet the deepest need of man. And for this gospel there is no substitute, psychodynamism notwithstanding. In the words of another: "Only the Christian Evangel can come to grips with the whole Gestalt of man-by-creation, and restore its order and wholeness without sacrifice of its higher constituents." (9)

DOCUMENTATIONS

1. Jess Stein, ed., The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1966).

2. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis J. Strachey, ed. (New York: Norton, Standard Edition, 1965), p. 104.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., p. 106.

5. J.P. Chaplin and T. S. Krawiec, Systems and Theories of Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 411.

6. Op. cit., p. 106.

7. Ibid., p. 90.

8. Gordon Willard Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1937), p. 189.

9. Harold B. Kuhn, Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Asbury Theological Seminary.