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International Colloquium ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sara Beardsworth There is a critical viewpoint suggesting that religion in America in recent years has meant, above all, a kind of fundamentalism in support of war. Psychoanalysis can be and sometimes is deployed to critique this phenomenon, showing how social identities can be formed as a “collusion of ego identities” vulnerable to manipulation by administrative power. To many in non-conservative America, it was a rude awakening that “religion as usual” proved to be so strong and widespread an example of such a collusion, one especially vulnerable to manipulation of this kind. In the aftermath of the Bush administration, the youngest men and women in America widely turn, in disillusionment, against religion. The heightening of political reflection is encouraging, yet it is doubtful whether their disillusionment meets the task recommended by Freud in 1913, when war-torn Europe revealed to him that its civilization was an illusion, one whose psychological truth lay in a lag of psychical capacities behind cultural ideals, as though psychical functioning were not highly developed enough to take the ideals as an occasion for their transformation into ethical life, rather than a vehicle for drive and unconscious phantasm. In these conditions, Freud recommended disillusionment, which he opposed to disappointment, with its threat of descent into melancholia, and which converged in some respects with the psychoanalytic journey itself. Disillusionment in this sense is not merely a negative path but a reflection on experience and a recovery of psychic space, embracing, therefore, Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious, the notions of drive, desire, and affect, and the idea of working through. Religion is of course too trenchant a part of American civilization to go into demise, despite the current youthful rejection of it. I therefore consider a growing interest in practices, on this ground, which can follow the spirit, if not always the letter, of Freudian thought. Disciplines of meditation, including the Eastern model of yoga, recover the experiential center of belief and so emphasize the incarnate condition, the subject’s openness to exteriority, the intricate building of psychic space, and singularity. Undertaking a reflective comprehension of psychic transformation and encouraging interpretations of experience, these practices can form a counterpart to disillusionment in the Freudian sense. In view of the budding encounter between psychoanalysis and meditation in America, I use Kristeva’s reminder of the scope of the Freudian approach to the pre-religious need to believe, and her psychoanalytic writings more widely, as a guide in raising the question whether this encounter may form a transformational and critical edge of the religious sphere.
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