Tag Archive for 'father'

Inadequate infantile attitude

Published
by
Ken
on December 10, 2008
in carl jung, christianity and god
. 0 Comments

I’ve written elsewhere about the anthropomorphism of God but another parallel with Jung’s psychology has suggested itself. This time, it is the concept of transference. Again, from The Theory of Psychoanalysis: Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series, No. 19:

Freud calls this process transference, owing to the fact that the images of the parents are henceforth transferred to the physician, along with the infantile attitude of mind adopted towards the parents. The transference does not arise solely in the intellectual sphere, but the libido bound up with the phantasy is transferred, together with the phantasy itself, to the personality of the physician, so that the physician replaces the parents to a certain extent. (p. 102)

A little later, Jung discusses the role of transference:

Through the transference to the physician, a bridge is built, across which the patient can get away from his family, into reality. In other words, he can emerge from his infantile environment into the world of grown-up people, for here the physician stands for a part of the extra-familial world.

Now, I would like to suggest an analogy where the “patient” is us and the “physician” is Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament. The transference was initiated by Jesus when he taught his disciples to pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” We now view Jehovah as a father figure, i.e. we have transferred to Jehovah the image of a parent. What this transference provides us is a way to “grow-up”; to shed the “infantile environment” of the Old Testament and enter a more mature world with a more mature view of God. However, there can be a downside to transference:

But on the other hand, this transference is a powerful hindrance to the progress of treatment, for the patient assimilates the personality of the physician as if he did stand for father or mother, and not for a part of the extra-familial world. If the patent could acquire the image of the physician as a part of the non-infantile world, he would gain a considerable advantage. But transference has the opposite effect; hence the whole advantage of the new acquisition is neutralized.

How often have you seen this exact symptom? Someone, or a group of people, “assimilat[ing] the personality of the physician.” Think of all those Christians filled with “righteous anger” who condemn (or worse) sinners “in the name of God.”

There are two end results of transference:

The more the patient succeeds in regarding his doctor as he does any other individual, the more he is able to consider himself objectively, the greater becomes the advantage of transference. The less he is able to consider his doctor in this way, the more the physician is assimilated with the father, the less is the advantage of the transference and the greater will be its harm. The familial environment of the patent has only become increased by an additional personality assimilated to his parents. The patient himself is, as before, still in his childish surroundings, and therefore maintains his infantile attitude of mind. In this manner, all the advantages of transference can be lost.

Transference can lead to either greater maturity or a continued infantile attitude. In the latter case, Jehovah maintains a strongly human father image and we continue to take on the personality of the Old Testament God, the only result of which is a wallowing in our childhood and immaturity.

Growing Old

Published
by
Ken
on November 6, 2008
in father
. 0 Comments

I am beginning to think that the purpose in getting older is exactly the thing that irks me the most—seeing my father reflected back at me as I stare into the mirror or catching myself mimicking some unconscious nervous thing that my father does or hearing some too-often used cliché of his come tumbling out of my mouth. But the purpose is not to make me lament that I have turned or am turning into my father for nothing could be further from the truth. The purpose is the occasional recollection of my father in these trivial things with the hope that the remembering will extend to the painful things. The hope that when I am impatient with my daughter that I will remember my father’s impatience with me; when I am hurtful through neglect or forgetfulness that I will remember my father’s hurtfulness; when I am selfish or irrational or obstinate or mean that I will remember my father’s selfishness, irrationality, obstinateness, and meanness not with the aim of self pity or condemnation but rather to comprehend just how fallible—how human—we both are despite our immense differences. I have “reasons” for acting as I do and while, in hindsight, they may seem poor indeed they were, nonetheless, extremely compelling in the moment and may not justify but certainly explain my attitude and actions. And it is the similarity of those irrational reasons which I and my father share—reasons unknown and unknowable to all—even, sometimes, ourselves, but reasons nonetheless which exonerate us, to some extent, from the never ending blame piled on us by our progeny. My father was, just as I am, a mere mortal trying to get through each day with all the associated complications and preconceptions and limiting biases with which he attached himself to his world and is, therefore, no more worthy of resentment than I.