The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  The sociological study reported in Middletown (mentioned earlier) found, among many other things, that the residents of the town took out twenty-six times as many books on psychology and philosophy in 1923 as they had done twenty years earlier, while at much the same time at Riverside Church in New York, Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote that counseling, not preaching, was his main interest; and his favorite sermon subjects were “the mastery of depression, the conquest of fear, the overcoming of anxiety, and the joys of self-realization.” The goal of pastoral care was changing, he said, from “adjustment” to “self-realization,” and “a new era in the history of the care of souls” had arrived.

  A further change occurred in 1939, when Rollo May published The Art of Counseling, grounded not in the usual American traditions but in the work of European analysts—Freud, Jung, Rank and Adler. May was a young pastor who had studied at both Adler’s Vienna clinic and New York’s Union Theological Seminary. He believed that men and women were “finite, imperfect and limited,” that counseling was as much a moral as a psychological encounter, and that counseling that did not take account of “subconscious impulses” was “superficial.”2

  SELF-UNDERSTANDING, NOT SELF-CONDEMNATION

  Joshua Loth Liebman may not be remembered today as much as other contemporary writers (he died young, in 1948), but in his day he was every bit as widely read. His Peace of Mind, published in 1946, was top of the New York Times best-seller list for fifty-eight consecutive weeks, a record until it was overtaken by Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking (see p. 360). Liebman, a Boston-based rabbi, began by drawing attention to the shortcomings of both religion and psychology. Many religious books, he wrote, succeeded only in making people feel more guilty and sinful, while many psychology books, although seeking to reassure, in fact made people feel abnormal, regarding themselves as “case histories.” His aim in Peace of Mind, he said, was to explain what modern psychology had discovered about human nature, over and above what religion said, including why people lose their faith.

  Everyone wanted salvation, he argued, but it was no easy matter to “look within.” Traditionally, religion had had a monopoly on the ways of doing this but, in the half century until the Second World War “and rapidly within the last decade, there has been developed a new method of gaining insight into the deepest emotional and psychologic disturbances that threaten man’s peace of mind.” The Freudian technique, he said, was so shocking, so unflattering, that many people were frightened of using it. Like other sciences, psychology had no moral goal, it was not a philosophy of life; and therefore, as he put it, it was only a key to the temple, not the temple itself. It must be supplemented by religion.3

  But religion was wanting too, he admitted, and that was because religion was pre-scientific, and in particular was formulated before the psychological revolution. He agreed that many people thought religion had shrunk in the wake of the scientific onslaught, and that they worried it might shrink further after the psychological revolution. But, he pointed out, “wiser religious leaders today are coming to see the fallacy of identifying truth with the frozen concepts of the past. . . . Religion must not hesitate to use the microscope of psychology, with its depth analysis of the human mind.” He did not think there was the gulf between psychology and religion that some claimed, because Freud really had a spiritual purpose, “even though he may not have been aware of it.” In fact, in psychotherapy man and God become one, and for that reason there was “no danger” that psychiatry could ever displace religion, just as it was no longer possible for religion “to sweep back the rising tide of psychological knowledge.”4

  Religion, he said, for all its wonderful achievements, has been responsible “for many morbid consciences, infinite confusions, and painful distortions in the psychic life of people.” Religion—not God—was to blame for this: the likes of Paul, Augustine, Calvin and Luther had all been obsessed with the notion of wickedness. (It is worth remembering that this is a Jewish author writing of Christianity.) He drew attention to the fact that the overall strategy employed by the church to cope with wickedness has been repression. With few exceptions, Western religions have insisted that people can be good only through the stern repression of sensual thoughts and impulses; and, most important, he concluded, that strategy has not worked. “Religion too frequently has encouraged men to make a complete detour of their un-angelic nature.” Psychotherapy, on the other hand, “has been able to evolve a reassuring approach to the problem of evil.”

  As many others had done before him, Liebman compared psychoanalysis with the confessional, but he made the important distinction that whereas atonement is the aim of the confessional, psychotherapy does not require someone to feel sorry for their “sins” as they outgrow them. Liebman acknowledged that there is little growth available via the ecclesiastical route of confession, reproof and penance. Indeed, he went so far as to say that “the confessional only touches the surface of a man’s life,” the spiritual advice of the church throwing no light on the causes that lead someone to the confessional in the first place. Moreover, priestly strictures about people needing to show more “willpower” were ineffective.5

  Psychotherapy, on the other hand, is designed to help the individual work on his or her own problems without “borrowing” the conscience of a priest or pastor, and “it offers change through self-understanding, not self-condemnation.” And this, said Liebman, was the way to inner peace. The human self, he maintained, was not a gift from God but an achievement, and this was how we should regard it. The religion of the future must take a leaf out of the psychiatrist’s notebook. Emerson had it right when he wrote that there is “a crack in everything God has made,” and this changes things, even the Commandments. In the style of the book of Exodus, he told his readers: “Thou shalt not be afraid of thy hidden impulses.” And henceforth it is not “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” but “Thou shalt love thyself properly and then thou wilt be able to love thy neighbor.” We must accept our imperfections, we must learn to accept the pluralism in ourselves, as well as the notion that failure is as much one of “the great human experiences” as is success—all of which we encounter in the heroic battle for self-discovery.

  “The primary joy of life is acceptance, approval, the sense of appreciation and companionship of our human comrades. Many men do not understand that the need for fellowship is really as deep as the need for food.”

  Liebman thought that atheism had psychological causes, too, that it stemmed from a “distrust” of the universe brought about by early childhood events, when parents let their children down “catastrophically.” He maintained that the emotions generated by these experiences are more powerful than any rational arguments, leaving the victims unable and/or unwilling to believe in man or God. “The inconsistent home breeds a spiritual schizophrenia; parents are warm in their actions but embrace a God that is stern and avenging.”6

  A “SHRUNKEN” GOD

  Furthermore, we have to realize, said Liebman—and this was new for many of his readers—that God is not omnipotent but limited (in other words, religion has shrunk in some way); and this implies that we have to be partners with God, co-workers, aided by the truths that psychiatry adds to religion. He accepted that religion could be “a kind of poison,” stressing man’s evil proclivities, and so it had become essential that theology “don the more tolerant robes of psychiatric wisdom if it is to be a true ministry to our civilization and its discontents.” Religion, he insisted, must be brave enough to admit its errors and, guided by psychology, “must now recognize how profoundly it has gone astray in its attitude toward emotion.” Dynamic psychotherapy in a religious context “can make life whole again. . . . We now know enough to liberate man.”

  Liebman’s close comparison of religion with psychotherapy—his admission that in many respects they perform the same function, fill the same gap—said plainly what many individuals were already concluding for themselves. T
he book was a holding action for religious souls but its arguments that religion could be improved by psychotherapy only underlined, for those who had left the church, or who were considering doing so, that a modern technology was available in place of an outmoded and in some cases unnecessarily cruel tradition in which, as Alan Petigny has put it, “religion as a relationship to the supernatural was replaced by religion as therapy.” (Liebman himself held to his faith; when he died tragically young in 1948, Boston’s schools closed early as a sign of respect.)

  Liebman had tackled the parallels between religion and psychology head-on. Others had as big an effect but in an indirect or unexpected way. They were part of the context rather than the narrow focus, but nonetheless exerted a profound influence. One crucial figure here, who helped to spawn the “permissive turn,” was Dr. Benjamin Spock, who became interested in methods of child-rearing and in Freud at much the same time. As with the very different attitudes to art at the turn of the twentieth century, so child-rearing practices then were very different from now, and that difference is largely due to Dr. Spock.

  Until the early 1940s many parents—especially first-time parents—sought advice on child-rearing from the Bible or their local preacher, many of whom, it has to be said, regarded children “as the tainted product of original sin.” Indeed, the grandfather of Spock’s own wife had written a book about child-rearing called Christian Nurture, published in 1847. Others had thought that children’s characters were the product of heredity and evolution as much as anything else, and therefore not readily susceptible to alteration or modification. Such practices as tying children’s wrists in such a way as to prevent them sucking their thumbs were widespread.

  Spock trained as a pediatrician, and was drawn to psychoanalysis partly by nature but also because his wife, Jane, had undergone it (she was later admitted to an asylum, suffering from alcohol dependence, among other things). Psychoanalysis was still on the fringes of American medicine when Spock signed up for twice-weekly seminars at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and entered analysis himself. In analysis, and in the seminars, he was introduced to what he felt were the “deep” reasons behind such processes as breast-feeding, weaning and toilet training. Gradually he came to the view that there were no bad children, as the advocates of original sin said, but only badly handled children. He discovered the work of Erik Erikson and Margaret Mead, who showed how children were raised differently in other cultures, some less strictly, more relaxedly, than in America. This triggered in Spock a search for a practical way to adapt Freud’s ideas to child-rearing—at that time, Freud himself was not popular, in particular his notion of childhood sexuality. Spock first applied Freudian concepts in 1938.7

  The invitation to write a child-care book came from the publisher Doubleday, with the rather odd stipulation that it should cover the psychological development of the child but that that section “does not need to be very good.” What Spock brought to the book was a thoroughgoing common sense. Children shouldn’t be intimidating, he said; unlike in the Calvinist view, children are good at heart, not little villains; parents should trust themselves; they should calm their fears about budding childhood sexuality in the context of the oedipal situation. Spock had a sense of humor and a practical streak. Parents need not have an answer for everything; they should not spend their time telling their child “thou shalt not,” but aim to produce “a democratic person at home with him- or herself.” They should be flexible.

  One of the reasons for the phenomenal success of Spock’s book was that it gave many parents who had themselves had a strict or unhappy upbringing the chance to do better by their own children, to break with their own past and be more loving than their own parents had been. And America embraced Spock. America loved his new rules, about discipline, self-demand feeding, about cuddling being more important than cleanliness, about avoiding spanking and other physical punishment (but not feeling guilty about it, either, when they felt it was necessary).

  Spock has been compared to Locke and Rousseau in the effect he had on our thinking, and his book was translated into three dozen languages. Published in 1946, it sold a million copies in its first year, four million by 1952, then went on selling a million a year throughout the 1950s. Two-thirds of American mothers read it, and surveys showed that although in the early 1940s only 4 percent of families fed their babies when they were hungry, by the end of the decade that figure had risen to 65 percent. At the same time, children were spanked and scolded less often.

  Spock’s importance from our point of view is that from Freud he developed a moral base that sprang from human experience rather than from a deity. His “rules” fostered a belief in the human individual, in dignity and even nobility.8

  THE ORIGINS OF SELF-HELP

  There were other important secondary effects too. Spock’s book, or rather its success, invited a revision of Freudian ideas, and in emphasizing the emotional satisfaction of being a good mother, it helped to kick-start an explosion of self-help books, some better than others. This was the beginning of what Philip Rieff would soon call “the Triumph of the Therapeutic,” and it helped establish the therapy boom that we shall be exploring later.

  The new ethic, as spawned by Spock, and the new understanding of the overlap between religion and psychotherapy as outlined by Liebman, coincided with a growing criticism of mass culture and the bureaucracy that sustained it while at the same time impoverishing many aspects of life. Here, two European expatriate psychoanalysts were especially influential.

  The first was Erich Fromm, a German refugee who had worked for the Frankfurt Institute in Weimar Germany, one of whose projects was an attempt to reconcile Marx and Freud in a critique of modern capitalism. Fromm’s books Escape from Freedom (1941), Man for Himself (1947) and The Sane Society (1955) caught the mood of the moment perfectly. His work described the antagonism between the aims of modern society and the full development of individuals, and the emergence within capitalism of a distinctive form of human character, one with “a ‘marketing’ orientation that compelled people to ‘sell’ their personalities in a social market which rewarded charmers and back-slappers.”

  Fromm argued that human nature was, in essence, a cultural product, that the religious quest was basic, and that in modern society the central problem was that real freedom was isolating, making people lonely in a way that they found difficult to manage. “The ambiguity of autonomy had become, for many people, simply unbearable.” For Fromm, the modern world encouraged certain reactions in people that were “non-productive”: people were “receptive” (dependent on outside sources for support and reward), “exploitative” (determined to take what they wanted), “hoarding” (stingy with their goods and feelings) or “marketing” (eager to sell themselves in a personality market).9

  Karen Horney was another German refugee, from Berlin. In The Neurotic Personality of Our Time and New Ways in Psychoanalysis, she argued that aggressive, competitive Western society had produced neurosis in “practically everyone”: this distorted the growth of the personality, fostering cravings for “affection, power, and status,” where conformity was the lowest common denominator of society.

  Both Fromm and Horney therefore embraced self-realization as the goal of life. “Growth” was to be achieved, first, by distinguishing the “real” self from the “public” self, which was in part a “pseudo” self. Underneath the pseudo self and the public self was an original self, a deeper self, which was capable of self-realization. For Fromm this is what virtue was—the expression of one’s “unique individuality”—and it was the job of therapy to realize this unique individuality, the basic currency of which was love. He was highly critical of the Calvinists and of Kant, who deprecated self-love. Only those who truly loved themselves, Fromm said, could truly love others, and this was the basis for living together in society. In The Art of Loving (1956), the “spontaneous affirmation of others” in a form of union that would maintain one’s inte
grity and one’s individuality was identified as the way to realize one’s potential.

  Karen Horney was even more explicit in arguing that moral problems “were involved in every neurosis.” She thought that both children and adults, overwhelmed by a threatening world, “compensated for their anxiety by creating an ideal image of themselves—the ‘idealized self’—which gradually constituted their sense of who they were.” The result was “their self-imposed subjection to ‘the tyranny of the should.’” The unending hunt to realize the perfectionist image inevitably trapped them within “a pride system, which veiled a hidden self-contempt and alienation. Life became a series of hostile inward encounters, with the ‘actual’ self living in a constant tension, torn between the tyrannical demands of the ‘ideal’ self and the insistent efforts of the submerged ‘real’ self to express its need for spontaneous growth.” This meant that, for her, self-realization, the move toward autonomy and fulfillment, was as much moral progress as anything else. Here too, then, the overlap between religious and psychological concerns was evident.

  All this reflection and analysis came at a good time. Thanks to the GI Bill, there was an explosion of returning soldiers only too keen to go to college, spreading higher education more widely than ever before. The same people contributed to the post-war baby boom, which created more parents than ever before. Many of the GIs had been stationed abroad where norms were different, and where the danger they had been in had been accompanied by a charged sexual atmosphere (who knew what would happen next?), from which there was no going back. All this had ramifications for psychological and religious change. In 1951, the psychologist Carl Rogers claimed that “professional interest in psychotherapy was in all likelihood the most rapidly growing area in the social sciences today.” “Psychology, like God,” said E. Brooks Holifield in his History of Pastoral Care in America, “seemed omnipresent, if not omnipotent.” In 1957, Life magazine announced: “This is the Age of Psychology.”10