Personal Journey ( Part II )

As I continue to reflect on my personal journey--not a bad thing to do in my senior adult years, I am thinking that I have always been interested in the big questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where did I come from? Where am I going? What will happen to me when I die? I began wondering about these questions early on. In the Baptist church in which I was raised we were always asking, "Do you have a relationship to God?" "Are you ministering to others?" "Are you trying to lead a good life? Do you know what is going to happen to you when you die?" We asked these questions because that is what we believed life was all about--what the meaning of life was--the purpose of life........... During my childhood and teenage years I knew nothing about psychology. One highschool course in the Humanities did mention the Social Sciences, but I did not know what they were or what they taught. I knew only about sin, judgement and guilt--hopefully followed by grace, forgiveness and salvation. These were the experiences I brought to life and the categories I used to interpret life. I had certainly never heard of the unconscious, anxiety, dream interpretation, neurosis, or psychopathology. I did not know the difference in emotional problems and emotional health.......... In college, however, something happened to me. I was opened up to a whole new world. After stumbling through pre-dental science courses my first two years, I finally ended up in sociology. My major sociological interest was marriage and the family. For electives I added music, religion, and psychology courses. A whole new way of interpreting life had come my way. Much of what I had experienced in church could now be explained sociologically, psychologically, and biologically. A few college religion courses also further liberalized my thinking.......... Yet the pull toward a ministry profession persisted. Instead of pursuing the path of becoming a marriage and family therapist, I decided to get married, work in a church, and go to seminary. While in seminary( 1976-79) my sociology/psychology/science side waned a bit and the theology/philosophy side flourished. In my Personal Journey ( Part I ) I shared what happened to me during seminary and my subsequent experiences in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Those experiences while serving as a pastor led me in 1995 to specialize in pastoral psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a career. Today, 30 years later, I do scientific neuropsychoanalytic therapy, supervise others in this treatment, and write and teach about it whenever I have opportunity.......... The point I am making is from early on in my life I have sought ways of trying to understand myself, others, and life itself. I continue today seeking to find ways to understand reality. At the level of Deep Metaphor (Browning, 1987) all these disciplines have provided me with languages to talk about what I think life is all about.......... After seminary graduation, I found the view of William James quite helpful. He wrote that religious people understand life religiously, and that non-religious people understand life scientifically (or naturalistically, humanistically, etc.) And there are quite a number who seek to try to integrate science and religion. That was certainly the case for me when I first pursued pastoral counseling. The uniqueness of pastoral psychotherapy as a discipline is the integration of psychology (science) and spirituality (religion.) How this played out in my life at that time was to focus on the theological understanding of Christian Santification verses the scientific/psychological understanding of the Psychoanalytic Process. Back then I saw them as the same process. They both described a life journey toward healing, health, maturity, and wholeness. If you were a Christian you called the journey Christian Santification aided by psychoanalysis. If you were not a Christian or a religious person you simply called it the scientific, Psychoanalytic Process. The faith stance of the client had everything to do with how the psychotherapeutic experience was understood. I was a person of faith at the time, but was clearly in the camp of liberal theology. Though my seminary was primarily Neoorthodox, the major influences on my thinking at that time were the liberal thinkers Paul Tillich, Hans Kung, and Charles Hartshorne. Through these progressive theologians I became interested in the field of science and religion (starting in the early 1990's). I read Ludwig Feurbach's, The Essence of Christianity, where he first espoused the projection theory that Freud further developed. This view stated that God was a projection of the human parents onto the universe and believed in as a divine being......... I further read Sigmund Freud's view of religion in his text, The Future of an Illusion. Though Freud was an atheist he remained friends with his colleague Reverend Oscar Pfister . Pfister was a Lutheran pastor who knew Freud personally and studied and practiced psychoanalysis as well. But unlike his scientific worldview friend Freud, Pfister remained a parish pastor and incorporated what he learned from Freud and psychoanalysis into his pastoral counseling with his parishoners. In those early days of pastoral counseling training( 1991-93), I went back and forth--sometimes identifying with Freud, other times Pfister. Perhaps a better known disagreement about a religious verses a scientific understanding of life was Carl Jung and his mentor Sigmund Freud. Jung was the son of a minister and though he was a scientist and psychoanalyst he never accepted Freud's naturalistic, scientific and atheistic worldview. Due to Jung's spiritual views, as well as his denial of the Freudian drives, Freud and Jung did not remain friends. They parted ways and Jung went on to establish his own school of psychoanalysis (Jungian Analysis.) Early on in my career I identified more with Jung. As my studies progressed I identified more with Freud. Oscar Pfister, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud all believed in science and the science of psychoanalysis. Where they differed is that Pfister and Jung remained religious, whereas Freud, who was raised a secular Jew, did not. I am today more influenced by Freud and the scientific/psychoanalytic understanding of religion that he first espoused back in 1927 in, The Future of an Illusion. As time and study went on I found myself mire comfortqble with tbe oksition of agnosticism ( 2010). If you have read some of my blog posts you have witnessed some of this intellectual and personal journey from my first career as a pastor ( 1979-1995), and it's expansion into the ministry specialty of pastoral psychotherapy. I next transitioned into psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and finally neuropsychoanalytic psychotherapy ( today). If you continue to follow along you will find out further where my neuropsychoanalysis immersion has taken me. Thanks for joining with me! Please ask a question or make a comment. I want to know my readers!