During Holy Week and over the Easter weekend I’ve been reading an old Pelican Book I picked up somewhere and half read a few years ago and dipped into again, more recently, returned to this Easter weekend, and still haven’t quite finished. The book is Freud and Christianity by R. S. Lee. First published in 1948, a Pelican edition was published in 1967. Roy Stuart Lee spent his boyhood years in the Australian bush. Having studied theology and received M.A., B.Litt. and D.Phil. degrees at Sydney and Oxford and been ordained, from 1938 he worked at St Martin-in-the-Fields. After the war he was for some time overseas religious broadcasting organiser for the BBC, then Vicar of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, and from 1967, Fellow and Chaplain of St Catherine’s College and Chaplain of Nuffield. While at Sydney University he held a science Research Scholarship in Psychology. Most of what follows is transcribed from his book.
The Super-ego
On Easter Day I reached the chapter on the Super-ego, Sin, and Atonement. In Lee’s Freudian understanding, the Pharisees’ God was simply a projection of the unconscious father-image, the core of their Super-ego, and because they gave supremacy to it, their God was not the real God with whom Jesus was concerned, a father welcoming home his long-lost son, a God discoverable by the ego. Theirs was an authoritarian God, the projected infantile image of the father of the Super-ego. Any authoritarian system of morals, whether it ascribes authority to God or the Church (or the Bible), if it is accepted uncritically, depends on the Super-ego. It is opposed to the Christian principle of using eyes and ears to learn for oneself. Both Ego and Super-ego must grow up and forsake infantile fixations. There is a large section of Christian teaching which believes that the ideal Christian life is attained by having a domination Super-ego strong enough to enforce all its demands on the Ego and suppress the Id. This type of Christianity concentrates in its moral teaching on developing a sense of sin, which means, psychologically, sharpening the subservience of the Ego to the Super-ego at the expense of the Id. We are here considering a type of religion which is a perversion of Christianity, but which is unfortunately common enough. Official teaching has tended to support the Super-ego type.
Full Christian freedom, life in all its fullness, can grow from reading the Bible where the characteristics of the true Christ can begin to emerge more clearly and objectively gaining real freedom and discovering real growth. There is a difference between being filled with Christ and obsessed with him. The Christ-filled character has really grown to be like him because through identification the Ego has taken on the character of the real Christ and has gained a new outlook, freed from the domination of the fanatical Super-ego, which manifests itself by a frenzied insistence on the destructive vengeful wrath of God. The real Christ cannot grow in is when our chief preoccupation continues to be sin, not love.
Ego-religion is not the Christ of the Gospels
Jesus was not primarily interested in sin. His strongest condemnation was against hypocrites and those who misled or thwarted the aspirations of the young and the spiritually hungry (and LGBTQIA+ people). Jesus seems to believe quite confidently that his followers can and will become like him. ‘I have called you friends,’ ‘Greater things than these shall ye do,’ ‘Be ye perfect,’ and so he claims for us more than most Christians are prepared to claim. The difference in being a Christian is much more a matter of emphasis on values, a question of what is of primary importance. The Super-ego type of Christian may use Christ for relief from his or her sense of guilt, but they do not understand Christ. Lee would be almost inclined to say that they understand the Christ of theology but not the Christ of the Gospels. Ego-religion is a vastly different thing from self-worship and has nothing to do with egotism, the pursuit of self-interest. Ego-religion springs not from the strictures of the Super-ego but from the Ego’s grasp of the nature of the real world and its attempts to deal with that world in such a way as to give most effective expression to the impulses coming from the Id. Instead of leading to paralysis and a retreat from the world it opens up the way to fuller life – the abundant life promised by Christ.
Atonement
Atonement, oneness with God, is not the spectacular business of ‘conversion’ or repentance found in the Super-ego type of religion. It is on the whole a steady, strong growth of the personality, taking place through many stages of development that are sometimes so gradual that they are scarcely noticeable.
A preoccupation with sin and not with love has become far more dominant in the Church of England today. Progress with the Living in Love and Faith process and acceptance that same-sex couples fall in love, enjoy sex and want to marry the person they love is blocked by a dominant Super-ego minority for whom gay sex is sinful. Equal marriage must be blocked because the Bible and God say so. Jesus’ teaching about the primacy of love becomes subservient to the rule of law. I think leaders want people to become dependent on them today to a very unhealthy degree. Their churches want followers to become attached, to them and their version of God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, how we become, and what it means to be, Christian.
God the Super-ego substitute
In an earlier chapter Lee speaks of belief in God beginning from a wish-fulfilment – the father-image is projected onto God. If God remains this, the creation of or the substitute for the Super-ego, He remains only a wish-fulfilment and represents our bondage to our unconscious conflicts. It is this bondage that St Paul describes in his Epistle to the Romans, a bondage from which he could not get free till he found the way to freedom in Christ. It is not the Super-ego, the source of morals, of duty, that leads us to the living God. It is the Ego that does this for us. If the Super-ego plays its proper role it accepts the God given to it by the Ego, a God of creation, of history, of life and love, not a God of duty or fear, of abstract righteousness. It accepts a friendly God, not a hostile God.
Developing a healthy Ego
Real growth comes through discipleship, the method adopted by Jesus with his chosen band of followers, but discipleship can take many forms. Discipleship implies the use of both identification and reflective judgement. It begins with some form of hero-worship leading to an identification. The period of identification is one of almost uncritical absorption, of living in and through the other person, striving to see, understand, think, feel as they do, and of accepting their teaching. It is a period of growth and enrichment. It needs to be followed by a period of digestion, in which the Ego emerges from the identification and takes stock, becoming independent of the hero. This involves critical examination of what has been learnt, appraisal in the light of knowledge and wisdom gained from other sources. In this way the Ego truly and consciously appropriates what has been gained through identification and discriminates between what is essential and what is incidental. The gain then ceases to depend on on the continuance of the emotional tie. It also enables the Ego to reappraise the leader from a new level of understanding and, if the hero justifies it, to make a further identification with fresh gains. The outcome of such discipleship is independence, not the blind acceptance of the leader and their thought.
This independence seems to be what Jesus expected of his disciples. He asked them to follow him, to identify themselves with him, but he imposed no authority over them and gave them no clear cut system of rules and beliefs for them to accept. He made no attempt to persuade the rich young ruler, who was so close to the Kingdom of Heaven, to give up his riches and become a complete convert. He simply told him what he needed. In the same way, he did not try to dissuade Judas from betraying him, though he knew the betrayal would cost him his life. He expected his disciples to observe and draw right conclusions for themselves. ‘Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip?’ They must stand on their own feet as he stood on his and thereby was so vastly different from the Pharisees. They were not his servants, but his friends. In the same way, they were not slaves of God, but sons and daughters with all the liberty of sons and daughters.
My thoughts
Roy Lee’s wisdom, his synthesis of Freudian analysis with Jesus’ model of being fully human and growing into life in all its fullness in his 1948 book was clearly one of the influences that resulted in the theological and liturgical developments of the following decades, not least in John Robinson’s liturgical explorations at Clare College and in his later books. This was the soil in which my own faith was nurtured and grew. Four decades later, I was the beneficiary of another Lee, John Lee, priest and psychotherapist, in the group he ran for gay clergy. In the Diocese of Southwark, Pastoral Care and Counselling groups were a vital element of life for many clergy. The Church still has enough wisdom today to provide counselling and therapeutic support to clergy who acknowledge their need for such support. I’m not a Freudian but I have found reading Roy Lee’s book deeply valuable in restoring some sanity, depth, freedom and courage to my sorely tested faith.