Higher Powers and Infernal Regions”: Models of Mind in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Their Implications for Pastoral Theology

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Pastoral Psychology [pspy] PH110-370130 February 21, 2002 14:0 Style file version Nov. 19th, 1999

Pastoral Psychology, Vol. 50, No. 5, May 2002 (C© 2002)

“Higher Powers and Infernal Regions”: Models ofMind in Freud’s Interpretation of DreamsandContemporary Psychoanalysis, and TheirImplications for Pastoral Theology

Pamela Cooper-White1

Freud’s “topographical” model of conscious and unconscious had a powerful earlyinfluence on pastoral psychology. The hegemony of this so-called “depth”-orientedrepression model is being challenged on a number of fronts. The increasing recog-nition of the mutability of memory, and the politicization of repressed memory hascalled the idea of the repression barrier under scrutiny. Psychoanalytic thinkersand neurobiologists are separately rejecting the concept of repression in favorof dissociative processes and multiple mental states. Postmodernists question thenotion of unitary self. This article explores the importance of these critiques fortheological anthropology, and suggests their implications toward a new, more mul-tiple and mutableimago Dei. The article concludes with implications of the newmodels of mind, emphasizing dissociation and multiplicity, toward a constructivist,intersubjective view of meaning-making in pastoral praxis.

KEY WORDS: psychoanalysis; dissociation; postmodernism; Trinitarian theology; intersubjectivity.

INTRODUCTION

While Freud’sInterpretation of Dreamsis best known for his detailed illu-mination of the symbolic meaning of dreams, it actually represents one of Freud’smost significant achievements as the first explication of Freud’s “discovery” of

1Pamela Cooper-White is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology at the Lutheran Theological Sem-inary in Philadelphia, and author ofThe Cry of Tamar: Violence Against Women and the Church’sResponse(Fortress, 1995). An Episcopal priest and Fellow in the American Association of PastoralCounselors, she holds two Ph.D.s, from Harvard University, and the Institute for Clinical Social Work,Chicago. Address correspondence to Pamela Cooper-White, 7301 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia,Pennsylvania 19119; e-mail: [email protected].

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the unconscious (the “system Ucs.”) and in particular the concepts of repressionand unconscious conflict. It also represents his first major work after the aban-donment of the seduction theory. Over the next decade and a half, Freud workedout the details of what is now known as his “topographical” model of the mind,in which conscious/preconscious and unconscious are conceptualized as separatespatial areas of the mind, divided by the repression barrier, but each having itsown strong influence on behavior, cognition, affect, and sensation—and potentialpathogenesis. It was this model that was first transmitted to pastoral caregivers inAmerica, such as the “Emmanuel movement” in Boston, and clergy and seminaryfaculty who attended lectures by A.A. Brill in Boston and New York, and the ClarkUniversity lectures of Freud and Jung in 1909 (Holifield, 1983, p. 195). Freud’sfurther contributions to the stages of infantile psychosexual development, the oedi-pal situation, and the structural model, with its tripartite institutions of the mind,the ego, id, and superego, were not to come for another two decades. These furtherstrengthened the notion of repression as the central mechanism by which certaincontents of the mind, conceived of as unacceptable or even intolerable, could beswept from consciousness into the “infernal regions” by the “higher powers” ofa well civilized, well socialized ego (Freud, 1900, Vol. 5, p. 608). Thus, from itsearliest days, this model of conscious/preconscious and unconscious divided bya repression barrier has had a powerful and formative influence on pastoral psy-chology and pastoral theology.

Freud first conceived of conscious, preconscious and unconscious as mentalregions laid out horizontally along a line or plane, separated by fence-like barri-ers functioning somewhat like locks in a dam, as illustrated in theInterpretationof Dreams(Freud, 1900, Vol. 5, p. 541), the so-called “picket fence” diagram,shown in [Figure 1]. Freud subsequently rotated this diagram by 90 degrees, tobecome avertical conception of mind. In an explanatory footnote added to theInterpretationin 1914, he likened the mechanism of repression of the unconsciousto the hydraulic system in a pyramid: “. . . a thought becomes repressed as a re-sult of the combined influence upon it of two factors. It is pushed from the one

Fig. 1. Freud’s Topographical Model.



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Fig. 2. Freud’s Structural Model.

side (by the censorship of the Cs.) and pulled from the other (by the Ucs.) in thesame kind of way in which people are conveyed to the top of the Great Pyramid”(p. 547). At this time, Freud was further likening this vertical pull of the uncon-scious to thedownwardor inward pull of gravity: “the concept of the mind is awider one than that of consciousness, in the same kind of way in which the gravita-tional force of a heavenly body extends beyond its range of luminosity” (p. 612nl).The unconscious thus came to be understood not only as removed from consciousawareness, but privileged as thedeepestlayer. Freud went so far as to name thisas the “true psychical reality” (p. 525, emphasis added). The dynamic verticalconception was retained and incorporated into Freud’s later structural model inThe Ego and the Id, with the repression barrier shown as a partial “lid” over theunconscious, and the ego resting atop the id “as the germinal disk rests upon theovum” (Freud, 1923, p. 24), [Figure 2].

While there are important differences between the topographical modelper seand the later tripartite structural model,2 it is the vertical ordering of conscious andunconscious mental contents and the economic principle of bound mental energy,which is shared by both models, that are of concern in this paper. This verticalmodel of conscious and unconscious is still taught and used in clinical practicetheory today, and it has enjoyed a long tenure as the most commonly acceptedtheory of mind this century in America (with the exception of strictly behavioralcounter-models), including in the fields of pastoral care and counseling.

2For example, “in the topographic model, defense was considered synonymous with repression, andrepression produced anxiety. In the structural model (after Freud, 1926a) this view was exactly re-versed, and anxiety evoked defense. Furthermore, anxiety was linked to object relations from earliestinfancy; anxiety evoked defenses of which repression was only one; and the central significanceof early developmental factors became far more important than they had been in the topographicalmodel” (Boesky, 1995, p. 497, citing Arlow and Brenner, 1964).



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Fig. 3. “The Nightmare” by Henry Fuseli.

The language of conscious/preconscious, and unconscious (in GermandasUnbewusst3), resonates with late 19th century fascination with the occult realmsof the unseen and the unknown. As Peter Gay (1988) and others have pointed out,the idea of unknown “depths beyond depths” (p. 128) in the mind was alreadya feature of 19th century romantic literature, the poetry of Goethe and Schillerwhom Freud could “quote by the hour” (p. 366). Parallel ideas were also afloat inthe philosophical works of Schopenhauer and Nietzche. The mystery of the dreamitself was a favored subject of late 18th and 19th century romanticism, produc-ing such art works as “The Nightmare” (1782) by Henry Fuseli [Figure 3], andwidespread fascination in literature, theatre and the opera with nocturnal themesblending eroticism, horror and the supernatural—as seen, for example, in the pro-liferation of stories, plays and operas about vampires (Cooper-White, 1987).

3The termdas Unbewusst(as well asdas Bewusstsein, the word for consciousness), has its roots in theverbwissen, to know, as in an idea, a fact, or a skill.Wissendoes not encompass, as does the wordknow in English, the sense of knowing a person or thing, which in German is carried by the verbkennen. It may be of interest, given the relational paradigm of this paper, thatwissendoes not carrythe meaning of recognition.




Freud’s collection of archaeological artifacts, and his own likening of thepsychoanalytic process with an archaeological dig (Shengold, 1991, pp. 29–41),betray the broader influence of the European fin-de-si`ecle romance with “darkcontinents”—Freud’s (1926b) metaphor for “the sexual life of adult women”(p. 212). This nineteenth century fascination also manifested itself in movementssuch as orientalism, spiritualism, the rise of historicism, a new historical con-sciousness across many disciplines, and colonial exploration and expansion. Inthis sense, the “dream’s navel,” is the ultimate unknown continent: “the spot where[the dream] reaches down into the unknown,” the “tangle of dream-thoughts whichcannotbe [further] unravelled” and “which has to be left obscure” (Freud, 1900,Vol. 5, p. 525). In some sense, Freud’s wish was not only to be a great scientist(his own most conscious aim), or even a great artist-philosopher and hermeneut(as he is sometimes now recast), but also an heroic explorer, penetrating furtherand deeper to bring back artifacts from the uncharted regions of the mind.

As with all exploration of his time, Freud’s attendant agenda of conquest andcolonization was never far behind. In several papers, perhaps most notably his1912 paper “The Dynamics of the Transference,” Freud employed the language ofa heroic military struggle to describe the psychoanalytic process. The conflict wasstaged between three pairs of opposites: doctor vs. patient, intellect vs. instinct,and recognition (insight) vs. striving for discharge (we might say “acting out”).Psychoanalysis became the battleground4 on which, in Freud’s own words, “thevictory must be won” (p. 322.)

Thus, the topographical model came riding in to America in the early 20thcentury on the twin horses of romanticism and expansionism, both congenial ani-mals in the stables of America’s heroic self-concept and belief in manifest destiny.Embedded within it was a hierarchical ordering of consciousness. The consciousportion of the ego was privileged as the executive function in daily life, but the un-conscious was admired as the “true psychic reality,” and was therefore accorded anaura of mysterious power. In this model, the psychoanalyst (and by extension, thepsychoanalytically devoted psychiatrist, social worker, or pastor) was the shamanof rationality, the experienced voyager to the deep recesses of the mind, who couldinitiate new acolytes on their own voyages of discovery and colonization. Freudreputedly told his biographer Ernest Jones (1953) that he considered himself not“really a man of science. . .nothing but by temperament a conquistador” (p. 348).Freud comparedThe Interpretation of Dreamsitself to a heroic journey, with

4The heroic, military tone of this paper may reflect a consciousness of the gathering political tensionsin Austria, which would culminate in the Great War two years later. But the heroic tone also reflects,perhaps, the power of forces of opposition with which Freud felt himself personally to be contendingin the years 1911–12. The defensive, combative tone also reflects tensions with Jung, and in particularFreud’s upset about Jung’s tempestuous sexual involvement with a patient Sabina Spielrein, and thedangers inherent in such mishandling of the transference, both for individuals and for the advancementof psychoanalysis as a movement. For more on the history of this period, see Gay, 1998, and Kerr,1993.



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explicit parallels to Dante’sInferno, which he was reading during the same period.The quotation from Virgil which served as the motto for the book reflects the toneof the conquering explorer (Shengold, 1991, pp. 44–50), penetrating depths where“every path will end in darkness” (Freud, 1900, Vol. 5, p. 511). The sexual symbol-ism is perhaps self-evident. Mastery of these infernal regions was seen as freeinginitiates from self-generated neurotic limitations, and conferring upon them theability to harness these mysterious powers for productivity and conquests of allkinds. This model, to varying degrees, has held sway for much of this century in avariety of psychotherapeutic disciplines and has had great influence in other fieldsas well, such as philosophy and the arts.

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES

The hegemony of this vertically conceived model of the mind, with repressionas the central mechanism form removing mental contents from consciousness,is now increasingly being challenged within psychoanalytic schools of thought.These challenges are arising from a number of separate theoretical and clinicalspheres, generating ideas that are just now in the process of being crystallized.These new ideas seem to be converging toward a new model of the mind thatis more multiple, with its contents more dispersed, and depicted more spatially(horizontally or even 3-dimensionally).

The sources of these challenges are numerous. Common to these contem-porary movements is a challenge to the centrality of psychic conflict in Freud’sconcept of the formation of the unconscious. Freud’s concept of repression increas-ingly relied on drive theory to explain why mental contents had to be removed fromconscious awareness. Repression was a byproduct of psychic conflict. Object rela-tions theory, all the way back to Melanie Klein (1946), has for many decades nowchallenged this notion in favor of a model of splitting, motivated not by forbid-den drives and terror of castration, but by irresolvable contradictions between andamong fantasied and real experiences of parental/environmental provision vs. de-privation, and one’s own hunger and aggression. Regardless of the specific schoolof object relations (and here I heretically include self psychology as well) everyobject relations theory has stated in its own way that it is these unresolveable re-lational contradictions that create splits in mental life. Over time an entire innerlandscape comes to be populated with “objects” (or “selfobjects”), i.e. stronglycathected people, part-people and other figures that dwell in both conscious andunconscious regions. These inner objects are further understood both to inhabitand to provoke different states of consciousness with different accompanying af-fective atmospheres and cognitive capacities. Inner objects are alsoinvoked, orprompted into behavioral enactment, by various shifts in the external environmentthat may have resonance with them. It is not surprising, then, that contemporary




Fig. 4. Kohut’s vertical split.

heirs to object relations theory, from both self psychology and the new “relational”school of American object relations, are leading the charge to reject the centralityof the concept of repression in favor of models that might be understood morehorizontally.

THE CHALLENGE FROM SELF PSYCHOLOGY

In self psychology, this charge issues from Kohut’s (1979) idea of the “verticalsplit,” born not from oedipal conflict, but from a more primitive narcissistic splittingof reality, based on preoedipal experience. This idea was first introduced anddiagrammed by Heinz Kohut (1979) in his paper “The Two Analyses of Mr. Z”[Figure 4]. In this paper, regarded by some as autobiographical, Kohut describedtwo separate analyses of the same patient, a socially isolated young man whopresented with narcissistic traits, and an unusually close peer-like relationshipwith his widowed mother, with whom he was living. The first analysis, conductedalong classical structural lines, framed Mr. Z’s pathology in terms of unconsciousconflict and defense:

The center of the analytic stage was occupied by transference phenomena and memoriesconcerning his, as I then saw it, pathogenic conflicts in the area of infantile sexuality andaggression—his Oedipus complex, his castration anxiety, his childhood masturbation, hisfantasy of the phallic woman, and, especially his preoccupation with the primal scene—and,on the other hand, by his revelation that, beginning at the age of 11, he had been involved in



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a homosexual relationship lasting about two years, with a 30-year-old high school teacher,5

a senior counsellor and assistant director of the summer camp to which he had been sentby his parents. (p. 5)

The split in consciousness, as diagrammed, was understood as a conscioussense of entitlement born of a narcissistic wish to regress to a preoedipal, pregenitalstate of merger with the mother, vs. an unconscious oedipal rivalry and accom-panying fear of castration resulting in depressive anxiety and social inhibition.The second analysis, separated from the first by a space of about five years, wasconducted along the lines of Kohut’s then newly developing “psychology of theself.” In this second analysis, Mr. Z’s difficulties were no longer primarily inter-preted in terms of repression of conflictual aims. Now these were understood asresulting from the splitting off from awareness of intensely negative aspects of hismother’s emotional domination. Breaking this taboo was accompanied by intenseanxiety, as the loss of the idealized archaic selfobject of the mother threatened thedissolution of his sense of his own self, in Kohut’s words, “the loss ofa self thatat these moments—and they were more than moments—he considered tobe hisonly one” (p. 13, emphasis added). In this sentence, Kohut quite matter-of-factlyushered into psychoanalysis the idea that one could have more than one self. Andin the model presented in Mr. Z’s second analysis, what we see is at least threeselves: a self based on merger with the idealized mother; a split-off depressed selfthat behaviorally manifests the difficulties with the mother through compulsivemasturbation and social inhibition; and a so-called “repressed” vital self that rep-resents Mr. Z’s self-assertion and male sexuality. This third self, which Kohut alsocalled the “nuclear self,” similar to Winnicott’s (1965) formulation of the “TrueSelf” (pp. 140–52), is identified with a longing for an idealized or idealizablefather, and is enraged at the mother’s domination. It is not clear, nor did Kohutelaborate in this article, whether the use of the term “repression” for the horizon-tal split depicted in this second model is really accurate, or whether some othermechanism for removing mental contents from awareness is being conceptualizedhere. Rather than pushing back conflictual aims, the “downward” push in the sec-ond model resembles more a schizoid withdrawal from consciousness, as in theworks of Klein (1946), and later Guntrip (1994, pp. 127–56), which also might beunderstood as a form of dissociation.

5Contemporary readers are usually quick to note the disturbing fact that in neither of Mr. Z’s twoanalyses is the behavior of the 30-year old camp counselor framed as sexual abuse. In the firstanalysis, it was interpreted as a reactivation of the fantasied bliss of preoedipal merger with theidealized mother. In the second analysis, it was reframed as again a largely positive enactment ofthe yearning for a strong idealizable father figure—although Kohut did “only once, briefly,” voice hisopinion that “Mr. Z would have obtained more lasting benefits from the friendship with this man, who,as far as I can judge was indeed a remarkable person, if their closeness had remained free of sexualcontacts.” (p. 19). In the best construction, this probably must be understood as Kohut’s wish not toimpose judgments on the patient’s own positive perception of the relationship and, particularly in thesecond analysis, Mr. Z’s use of the camp counselor as an idealized paternal selfobject. The suggestionthat this article was semi-autobiographical further complicates our reading of this apparently rathermild acceptance of the sexual exploitation of a child.




The mechanism of the vertical split, in any case, is clearly not repressionin any formulation. Kohut used the termdisavowal, in which certain aspects ofthe self are accessible to consciousness, in that they are not repressed, but souncomfortable to one’s sense of self that they are normally kept out of awareness.In a new book devoted entirely to the concept of the vertical split in self psychology,Arnold Goldberg (1999) explains:

Rather than being inaccessible, as the repressed is, one can attend to them, [the contentsof the vertically split-off segment] are similar in form in the sense of being characterizedas a secondary rather than primary process, and they manifest an organization reflecting atotal personality. It is often only in respect to their relationship to the world that somethingdifferent and even strange may be seen. (p. 10)

While repression is usually ascribed to neurotic process, the vertical split is consid-ered by self psychologists to be implicated in narcissistic pathology and behavioraldisorders. The split-off aspects of the self are considered mainly to be manifestedin behaviors, usually compulsive acts that the person would ordinarily find com-pletely alien. Goldberg cites Montaigne (1588): “We are, I know not how, doublein ourselves, so that we believe what we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves ofwhat we condemn” (Goldberg, 1999, p. 12). Pastoral theologians will likely thinkof St. Paul’s protestations, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do notwant is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sinthat dwells within me” (Rom. 7:19–20). What a perfect description of the verticalsplit! The origins of such a split are attributed to attempts in the earliest year of lifeto “turn a blind eye” or to rid oneself of unwanted experience, which may becomehabitual in some personalities. Goldberg cites Bowlby’s (1980) attachment theory,drawing a parallel with Bowlby’s own term “cognitive disconnection,” observedas a reaction to loss in very young children (Goldberg, 1999, p. 22).

The principal contribution of the theoretical construct of the “vertical split” inself psychology is, I believe, in clarifying that the repression of conflictual aims isnot the only means by which mental contents may be removed from awareness. Itis, perhaps, the first, and certainly the clearest depiction of a process in which con-sciousnessitself is divided into two separately functioning areas of awareness andself-knowledge. It serves particularly well to explain certain forms of inconsistentbehavior, in which different behavior patterns are governed by the two separatearenas of consciousness, for example, in cases of sexual misconduct by reveredclergy and other moral leaders. Still, the construct of the vertical split in self psy-chology is a mainly binary model. Some contemporary psychoanalytic theoriesare now going further in exploring a multiplicity of mental states that may coexistat varying levels of consciousness within the same self or mind.

THE CHALLENGE FROM RELATIONAL THEORY

In relational theory, a new movement centered largely in New York, with ori-gins in the interpersonal (or Sullivanian) school, increasing attention has been given



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to dissociation as a nonpathological phenomenon. This is being placed alongsideand even replacing repression altogether as the primary model of mental geography.In a very recent article, Jody Messler Davies (1998) has summarized this aspectof relational theory “that has begun to conceive of self, indeed of mind itself,as a multiply organized, associationally linked network of parallel, coexistent, attimes conflictual, systems of meaning attribution and understanding” (p. 195). Inan earlier article, Davies (1996) wrote:

Not one unconscious, not the unconscious, but multiple levels of consciousness and un-consciousness, in an ongoing state of interactive articulation as past experience infuses thepresent and present experience evokes state-dependent memories of formative interactiverepresentations. Not an onion, which must be carefully peeled, or an archaeological site tobe meticulously unearthed and reconstructed in its original form, but a child’s kaleidoscopein which each glance through the pinhole of a moment in time provides a unique view; acomplex organization in which a fixed set of colored, shaped, and textured components re-arrange themselves in unique crystalline structures determined by way of infinite pathwaysof interconnectedness. (p. 197)

In a similar vein, Adrienne Harris (1996) also wrote, “This model of con-sciousness is less archaeologically organized and more a set of surfaces or repre-sentations with boundaries of varying permeability” (p. 159n2).

In this view, dissociation is not regarded as pathologicalper se, although itmay become problematic, as in severe post-traumatic states in which continual ex-periences of fragmentation interrupt the normal sense of a seamless continuity ofconsciousness. However, dissociation, or multiplicity, is increasingly being recog-nized as inherent in mental functioning, and not only as asequelaof trauma. Theidea that the mind begins as a unitary phenomenon and is gradually fragmentedby traumatic experience is itself increasingly being challenged. Philip Bromberg(1994), a relational psychoanalyst who has written considerably about dissociation,the unconscious, and clinical process, has observed:

The process of dissociation is basic to human mental functioning and is central to thestability and growth of personality. It is intrinsically an adaptational talent that representsthe very nature of what we call ‘consciousness.’ Dissociation is not fragmentation. In fact,it may be reasonably seen as a defense against fragmentation, and in this regard, Ferenczi’s(1930) struggle with whether fragmentation is merely a mechanical consequence of traumaor may actually be a form of adaptation to it was brilliantly ahead of its time. The answerto his question, however, took sixty years to appear. There is now abundant evidence that thepsyche does not start as an integrated whole, but is nonunitary in origin—a mental structurethat begins and continues as a multiplicity of self-states that maturationally attain a feelingof coherence which overrides the awareness of discontinuity (Bromberg, 1993). This leadsto the experience of a cohesive sense of personal identity and the necessary illusion of being‘one self.’ (pp. 520–521)

Bromberg and others point to a body of psychoanalytically informed research basedon infant observation. Researchers such as Robert Emde (1983, 1984), Daniel Stern(1985), and Beatrice Beebe and Frank Lachmann (1992) have observed that theearliest experiences of the self appear to be organized around a variety of shift-ing self-states that encompass cognitive, affective and physiological dimensions,




and appear to include internalized representations of relational or interactive ex-periences (Stern’s “representations of interactive experience as generalized,” or“RIGs”). Therefore, a central aspect of the developmental process consists of be-ing increasingly able to move smoothly and seamlessly from one self-state toanother with more sense of self-continuity and more capacity for self-regulation.This process is facilitated (or not facilitated) by primary caretakers’ responsiveness(or lack thereof). The quality of the boundaries between self and other are alsogradually established through mutual recognition and regulation. In less desirablescenarios, this is impaired by parental nonrecognition and/or intrusion.

THE CHALLENGE FROM TRAUMATOLOGY

The ideas in relational theory has been highly influenced by clinical workwith trauma survivors, particularly survivors of sexual abuse. In fact, one recentsource of the disruption of Freud’s topographical and structural models has beenthe resurgence of serious attention to thesequelaeof severe trauma in mental life.Relational authors are to some extent reclaiming models of dissociation advancedby Freud’s predecessors Charcot (1889) and Janet (1907), whose studies of hys-teria took seriously the link between trauma and dissociation, and the writings ofFerenczi (1933), whose continuing emphasis on the actual impact of environmentaltrauma contributed to his ejection from Freud’s inner circle.

The mutability or robustness of memory, particularly traumatic memory, isone particular arena in which questions of conscious and unconscious have beenhotly debated in recent years. Both “repression” and “dissociation” as terms havebeen appropriated–sometimes incorrectly—by combatants in recent wars aboutthe reliability of memories of adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. Thepoliticization of issues surrounding trauma, sexual abuse, and so-called “recov-ered memory therapy” has unfortunately obscured a growing body of seriousresearch on both traumatic and nontraumatic memory. We have already seen that,in psychoanalytic models, “forgetting” is not conceived of as a single process, butmay involve repression, in Freud’s original sense of banishing once-known butintolerable thoughts (particularly wishes); disavowal, in which something fullyknown but dystonic with one’s sense of self is split off from everyday aware-ness; and dissociation, in which multiple arenas of cognition, affect, and sensa-tion may be split off from consciousness for varying lengths of times and withboundaries of varying permeability. Exegeting beyond political rhetoric for validevidence about the nature of memory, a somewhat less politically clouded but noless complex consensus may now be emerging. Some basic principles seem toinclude:

1.) Memory is not a single phenomenon or process. Neuropsychologicalstudies by Van der Kolk (1994; Van der Kolk and Fisler, 1995) and others have de-termined that memory is “state dependent,” i.e. determined by whether the external



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circumstance is relatively calm or threatening. Trauma specialists working in themedical and neurobiological fields have begun to validate the importance of dis-sociative processes, on a spectrum from normal and universally experienced shiftsin states of affect and cognition, to highly fragmented states of consciousness re-sulting from efforts to adapt to extreme trauma. Psychobiologists have also begunto offer evidence for the impact of a normative, nontraumatic early social envi-ronment on the brain, pinpointing neurochemical changes resulting from affect-regulating functions of the primary caretaker. They suggest a model of mind withgreater developmental plasticity throughout the lifespan. In some ways, this modelis more in keeping with lateral moves among multiple mental states, than a verti-cal model of repression as the sole mechanism of removing mental contents fromawareness (e.g., Schore, 1994; Moskowitz et al., 1997).

2.) Not all memory is cognitively processed into a narrative or even symbolicframework. Different types of memory are stored differently in the brain. Ordinarynarrative or “declarative” memory is generally associated in neurobiology with thefrontal lobe and the hippocampus. Nondeclarative memory (including emotionalresponses, reflexive actions, classically conditioned responses, and memories ofskills and habits), appears to be associated with the central nervous system (Vander Kolk and Fisler, 1995, p. 4, citing the work of L.R.Squire and others). Thereis growing evidence that certain experiences, including severe trauma, may onlybe encoded in portions of the brain that do not primarily affect cognition, andtherefore are accessible to consciousness only through visual fragments, intensewaves of affect, or olfactory, auditory, or bodily sensations (Van der Kolk, 1994;Perry et al., 1996). Hormonal hyperarousal resulting in chronic anxiety states, anddissociative responses may themselves be memory traces (Van der Kolk, 1994).Gender differences have also been seen, with males more likely to respond tothreat with a “fight-or-flight” reactions, vs. females more likely to respond with a“freeze-and-surrender” reaction. These differences are seen both in behavior and incorresponding brain chemistry (Perry et al., 1996).

3.) In severe trauma, there is rising evidence that “memory” itself is not aunitary phenomenon, but an event that may be encoded in several separate domainsat once, including affect, sensation and cognition, but never connected to makewhat we would ordinarily understand as full narrative memory of an event bysubsequent cognitive processing (Van der Kolk and Fisler, 1995). The capacity toprocess an experience is strongly influenced whether the environment at the timeof the event and immediately thereafter is hospitable or inhospitable to the actof processing into memory. Distortion may be introduced during the time periodimmediately surrounding the trauma. This may occur in a situation of familialincest, when a painful sexual violation is framed by the abuser as something goodand desirable, and is treated by other family members as unreal and unseen.

4.) Some memories may be fabricated, or, more likely, elaborated from a ker-nel of actual experience. However, the heavily touted evidence that false memoriescan be implanted by an outside person has frequently been overstated for political




purposes. For example, in Elizabeth Loftus’ now famous study of implanting mem-ories of being lost in a shopping mall (Loftus and Hoffman, 199; Loftus, 1993),only 10% of research subjects actually came to accept the story as their own, and90% resisted (Davies, 1996, p. 193). In most cases, a core of memory persists,although it may not have narrative form. Surrounding details may be shaped inconsciousness by the relational surround at any given time, including both personaland wider societal canons affecting what is believable (Harris, 1996, p. 171).

5.) Finally, and this has perhaps the most important implications for clin-ical and pastoral work, memory cannot be divorced frommeaning. Details of aremembered event may in fact shift and change, particularly in what is backgroundvs. foreground, depending on the meaning or multiple meanings assigned to theexperience. This process ofmeaning-makingis not a solitary one, but is cocon-structed (for good or ill) in both therapeutic and nontherapeutic relationships. Aconstructivist framework for therapy and pastoral care does not imply that originalevents are being “made up” by therapist and patient. Donnel Stern (1996) likensthe constructivist view of memory to figures emerging from a dense fog:

They do have shapes, rough or ‘fuzzy’ shapes, and those shapes, while allowing a number ofinterpretations, forbid many others. . .We are not free to assign any interpretation we pleaseto our experience, not without violating the semiotic regularities of our culture. . .Suchviolations are so meaningful that we notice them immediately, and the conclusions we drawfrom them are either dire or terribly interesting: that is, when the wrong use of signs doesnot indicate psychosis, it either indicates willful disregard (a lie) or playful disrespect (asin art) of the codes of communication in which we live. (pp. 262–63)

What is co-constructed, then, is not the core of experience, butwhat theexperience comes to mean. The process ofmeaning-makingis not and should notbe seen as moving toward some single, incontrovertible truth or concrete certainty.

The “truth” of an experience, when given an open, nonleading and nonintru-sive exploration in the context of mutual, empathic curiosity, will usually becomeincreasingly rich, complex, and multiple over time. The question thus shifts fromthe narrow forensic one of “Did ‘it’ happen?” to “What does ‘its’ presence—in myfeelings, senses, thoughts, fantasies, memories, and behavior—mean?” Differentmeanings will then lead to different choices and actions at different times, andwhat constitutes “right” actions will also change over time as meanings continueto grow in subtlety and complexity.

Increasing recognition of the complexity of memory, traumatic and otherwise,leads to more complex understandings of consciousness itself as influenced by thevicissitudes of loss, grief, and desire, and by the coconstruction of reality in thecontext of relationships.

CHALLENGES FROM POSTMODERNISM

This view coincides with a final source of challenge to the topographicalmodel, which is being advanced on the philosophical front by postmodernism.



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Postmodernist thinkers have, from a slightly different vantage point, also calledinto question the whole notion of a unitary self. Some have drawn analogies be-tween the mind and cyberspace, which has been described by Graham Ward as“an undefined spatiality, like the contours of a perfume” (Ward, 1997, p. xv). Asomewhat parallel paradigm shift in cognitive science is a movement variouslycalled “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing,” which draws analo-gies between “human information processing” and digital computers (Bechtel andAbrahamsen, 1991). Such constructs are problematic, however, if taken to ex-tremes. The metaphor of cyberspace and computers is a mechanistic one, and maytend back toward a more abstract Cartesian conception of mind, in which time andthe body are again disregarded.

In a different, more embodied postmodern vision, drawing more from thefeminist writers Luce Irigaray and H´elene Cixous, and from contemporary psy-choanalysis, Jane Flax (1993) critiques modernist conceptions of the unitary selfas potentially repressive of subjugated inner voices. Flax writes:

I believe a unitary self is unnecessary, impossible, and a dangerous illusion. Only multiplesubjects can invent ways to struggle against domination that will not merely recreate it.In the process of therapy, in relations with others, and in political life we encounter manydifficulties when subjectivity becomes subject to one normative standard, solidifies into rigidstructures, or lacks the capacity to flow readily between different aspects of itself. . . . Nosingular form can be sufficient as a regulative ideal or as a prescription for human maturityor the essential human capacity. . . . [I]t is possible to imagine subjectivities whose desiresfor multiplicity can impel them toward emancipatory action. These subjectivities would befluid rather than solid, contextual rather than universal, and process oriented rather thantopographical. Emancipatory theories and practices require mechanics of fluids [a quotefrom Luce Irigaray] in which subjectivity is conceived as processes rather than as a fixedatemporal entity locatable in a homogeneous, abstract time and space [Flax’s reading ofthe Cartesian idea of the self ]. In discourses about subjectivity the term ‘the self’ will besuperseded by discussions of ‘subjects.’ The term ‘subject(s)’ more adequately expressesthe simultaneously determined, multiple, and agentic qualities of subjectivity. (p. 93)

While Flax is not addressing states of consciousnessper se, as a psychoan-alyst her work includes a deep respect for mental contents that exist both in andout of awareness. What I find in Flax’s conception of a multiple, fluid, contextualconception of self and subjectivity are the possibility for greater passage betweenconscious and unconscious and a sense of mental contents shifting in and out ofawareness as contexts and subjective states shift and change. The “return of therepressed” gives way to a more variable process in which we move in and out ofmultiple areas of our own knowing and unknowing. “Knowing” itself may be un-derstood as more than cognitive appreciation alone, or even cognitive and affectiveexperience together, which is usually possible to verbalize. “Knowing” can alsoinclude nonverbal mental contents that are only symbolic, or even pre-symbolic,the knowledge of the body and physical sensation—in Christopher Bollas’ (1987),words, “the unthought known.”

As unsettling as we may find a multiple, fluid, and spatially conceived modelof the mind, advances both in psychoanalytic clinical theory (grounded in listening




to patients’ inner experiences) and in neurobiology (especially research into thesequelaeof traumatic experience) suggest that the postmodern view may be a moregenerous and apt description of the true complexity and multiplicity of mental life.In fact, given the complex, pluralistic nature of our postmodern world and society,mental health may depend as much on the capacity for “identity complexity”(Saari, 1993) and the ability to entertain multiple meanings, as it does on unity,integration, and the capacity to synthesize.

Postmodernist writers also highlight the emancipatory implications of thesetheories, especially as they influence the social construction of self and others,and the resulting social construction of categories such as gender, race and class,and the distribution of power (e.g., Flax, 1993, pp. 111–128).

IMPLICATIONS FOR PASTORAL THEOLOGY

What are the implications for the discipline of pastoral theology of this recentshift away from a depth-oriented repression model toward new, spatially dispersedmodels emphasizing dissociation and multiplicity?

As we have seen, the topographical model privileged the unconscious, andearly generations of psychoanalysts and their enthusiasts, including the Emmanuelmovement and early pastoral psychologists, understood themselves as heroes—pioneers into uncharted territories where deeper truths would be unearthed tocathartic effect. This romantic ideal lives on, even as we enter a new millenium.Who among us has not at one time or another thrilled at the notion that some-where resident in our own psyche there are regions of which we know little, evennothing, and that we contain within ourselves deep wells of unknowability that aknowledgeable guide could help us to plumb?

I am not disputing the phenomenological evidence that people, when en-gaged in an experience of introspection and perhaps especially in the ritualizedcontext of psychoanalysis, realize that there are domains of knowledge and desirethat have been inaccessible to everyday states of consciousness. I am not evendisputing that the mechanism Freud identified as repression, in an increasinglyrich and complex theoretical formulation, has a place in our understanding, asone possible way in which mental contents come to be removed from aware-ness. What the accumulation of new research and theory suggests, however, is thateveryday consciousness itself ismorecomplex and multiple than our 19th century-informed models of mind have suggested to us, and that domains hitherto referredto as preconscious and unconscious may not bedeeperin the psyche, but simplyother—states that become accessible under conditions different from everydayactivity.

I am further suggesting that this is less comfortable to us than the notion ofplumbing a single, vertically drilled well deeper and deeper into the territory labeled“the unconscious.” As disquieting as that notion is, is it not more manageable in



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some sense than the idea that the mind is more disparate than we had thought, andthat our late Victorian maps do not begin to show all the “infernal regions” thatmight exist? In Kuhnian terms, the psychoanalytic model worked because it wasa paradigm (Kuhn, 1960): it produced evidence and answers based on what wasphenomenologically observable when asking the questions that could be conceivedwithin that paradigm. The topographical model at least gave us the illusion of acertain element of control over the unknown. The “infernal regions” could bescary, but they constituted an increasingly recognizable region with categoriz-able contents based on the cartography of Freud and his followers. This, it seems,feels preferable to us than the idea of our own minds as “undefined spatiality, likethe contours of a perfume.” And yet, contemporary pioneers are challenging usto entertain the possibility that our minds, and indeed our selves, are more likehighly complex, networked systems, not discrete entities. We are more like the“clouds” of chaos theory than the “clocks” of Newtonian physics (Polkinghorne,1997a, 1997b). What might this do to our theology, our theological anthropology,and our work as pastoral theologians and caregivers?

It seems to me that as we embrace a model of greater complexity and multiplic-ity of the human mind, we will be led to a more complex and nuanced appreciationfor the diversity and mutability of human persons, and a similarly more variegated,nonlimited and nonlimitingimago Dei. In contemporary Trinitarian theology, pro-cess theology, and feminist theology, we find resources that support a theologyof complexity, diversity and mutability. Elizabeth Johnson (1994) describes howthe very image of the Trinity is one that challenges unitary, totalizing images ofGod.6 Using the Rublev icon [Figure 5] as her exemplar, Johnson presents us witha trinitarian image of God as fluid, multiple, and profoundly relational:

At its most basic the symbol of the Trinity evokes a livingness in God, a dynamic coming andgoing with the world that points to an inner divine circling around in unimaginable relation.God’s relatedness to the world in creating, redeeming, and renewing activity suggests to theChristian mind that God’s own being is somehow similarly differentiated. Not an isolated,static, ruling monarch but a relational, dynamic, tripersonal mystery of love—who wouldnot opt for the latter? (p. 192)

In her vast mining of the Catholic theological tradition, Johnson finds supportfor this idea in numerous sources, including Aquinas: “. . . relation really existingin God is really the same as His essence, and only differs in intelligibility. InGod relation and essence do not differ from each other but are one in the same”(pp. 227–228). She quotes the contemporary feminist theologian CatherineLaCugna, “To be God is to-be-relationally” (p. 228). Johnson continues with the

6As Johnson herself exhaustively catalogs (p. 210), there are numerous 20th century articulations oftrinitarian theology, many of which could be considered relational, e.g., Moltmann’s (1981) influentialidea of the trinity as “divine society,” and Boff’s (1986) statement, “In the beginning is communion.”See also Macquarrie’s (1977) rendering of the trinity as primordial source, expressive dynamism andunitive Being in Love (pp. 190–210), and McFague’s feminist trinity of mother-lover-friend (pp. 35et passim).




Fig. 5. Icon of the Trinity by Anton Rublev.

Johanine statement:

Being related is at the very heart of divine being. God’s being is not an enclosed, egocentricself-regard but is identical with an act of free communion, always going forth and receivingin. At the deepest core of reality is a mystery of personal connectedness that constitutes thevery livingness of God. The category of relation thus serves as a heuristic tool for bringingto light not just the mutuality of trinitarian persons but the very nature of the holy mysteryof God herself. Divine unity exists as an intrinsickoinoniaof love, love freely blazing forth,love not just as a divine attitude, affect, or property but as God’s very nature: ‘God is Love’(1 John 4:16). (p. 228)



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In another trinitarian approach, John Milbank (1997) argues for a “postmodernChristianity” that values diversity as a central organizing principle. For Milbank,the Trinity is a sign of God as community, “even a ‘community in process,’ infinitelyrealized, beyond any conceivable opposition between ‘perfect act’ and ‘perfectpotential.’ ” Milbank writes:

Christianity can become ‘internally’ postmodern. . . I mean by this that it is possible toconstrue Christianity as suspicious of notions of fixed ‘essences’ in its approach to humanbeings, to nature, to community and to God, even if it has never fully escaped the grasp of a‘totalizing’ metaphysics. Through its belief in creation from nothing it admits temporality,the priority of becoming and unexpected emergence. A reality suspended between nothingand infinity is a reality of flux, a reality without substance, composed only of relationaldifferences and ceaseless alterations (Augustine,De Musica). Like nihilism, Christianitycan, should, embrace the differential flux. (p. 267)

Milbank finds the expression of this Christianity not in creedal statementsabout God, but in Christian practices of community. Christian community embod-ies a commitment to difference, but unlike nihilism, envisions the possibility of dif-ference with harmony; borrowing from Augustine, aconcentus musicus(Milbank,pp. 268–69), and echoing formulations of the social trinity by Moltmann (1981)and Boff (1986, esp. pp. 118–19). In Milbank’s attempt to work within a postmod-ern framework, a subtle shift has occurred, as in the feminist work of Irigaray andothers (Irigaray, 1989; Jones, 1993; Jantzen, 1997), in which the implicit ethic is notjustice based on equality as much as a nonviolence based on valuing differences.

All the detailed arguments of Milbank’s postmodern theology (includingsome internal contradictions, imported from postmodernist philosophy7) cannotbe adequately explored here. It is interesting, though, in light of our focus hereon conscious and unconscious, the known and the unknown (das Unbewusst), thatanother of Milbank’s propositions is that desire (which for Milbank is the expres-sion of the third person of the trinity), and not “Greek knowledge,” is the mediatorof reality (p. 275). Desire for the other reaches across the gaps, the “transitionalspace,” to create an intersubjective arena of creation. If we accept the conceptof the relational dimension of consciousness and its construction, our theologycan be similarly understood as a mutual, coconstructive, cogenerative yearningbetween humans and the divine (pp. 274–5). Luce Irigaray’s postmodern cre-ation statement is “On the first day, the first days, the gods, God, make a worldby separating the elements” (Irigaray, 1993, p. 7). Irigaray emphasizes the actof creation as doubling and difference, rather than unity which can all too eas-ily translate into totalitarian oppression, the subsuming of all otherness into One.What binds and heals in a relational model is not a vision of ultimate oneness, as in

7Milbank’s theology imports one of the central problems of postmodernist philosophy—that of ethicalcriteria. In his own words, “postmodernism claims to refuse dialectic, but this is the instance of itsfailure to do so; it is right to make the effort” (p. 270). Like many postmodern writers, Milbanklinks violence with exclusion of the other, but does not resolve the real social and political problemsresulting from the inclusion even of oppressors (e.g., p. 273).




homogenization, but mutual desire and love that bridges toward the other, embrac-ing difference.

Christianity is at heart a praxis of diversity in love, not what Milbank (1997)calls a “gnosis, in the sense of a formulaic wisdom that we must just recite ormagically invoke” (p. 274). A relational theology both models and makes roomfor difference, for a multiplicity of ways of knowing, and a flux between sensation,hunger, emotion, and rational thought. It is a theology that is not set abstractlyapart from bodies, but locates itself in and between them.

Such a view also works well with the idea from process theology that God isnot monolithic or static, but fluid, changing, and in process. “God is a verb,” to quotethe feminist theologian Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (1987). Process theology offersus a vision of a God who does not interfere with the gift of human free will, butwho is always present to transform suffering into healing, and each twist and turnof life into a new possibility, a new beginning (e.g., Cobb, 1975, 1977; Suchocki,1982).8 Bernard Loomer (1976, 1987) speaks of the “size of God,” large enough tocontain everything in the universe, large enough to contain even our suffering. Thisview is one that respects and honors the depth of suffering, without trivializing orsugar-coating it, but also offers hope for transformation as always and eternallyavailable, small resurrections possible every day.

A final caution regarding theology: a theology of multiplicity, like any the-ology, could under certain circumstances waft again into the realm of abstractionand disconnection from the body. In some postmodern constructions, cyberspacehas been posited not only as a metaphor for the human mind, but for the divine.Graham Ward (1997) writes of cyberspace:

In this land of fantasy and ceaseless journeying, this experience of tasting, sampling andpassing, truth, knowledge, and facts are all only dots of light on a screen, evanescent,consumable. This is the ultimate in the secularization of the divine, for here is a God whosees and knows all things, existing in pure activity and realized presence, in perpetuity.Divinization as the dissolution of subjectivity within the immanent, amniotic satisfaction,is the final goal and object of postmodernity. Cyberspace is the realization of a metaphorused repeatedly be Derrida, Irigaray, and Kristeva—the Khora, the plenitudinous womb,dark, motile, and unformed, from which all things issue. (p. xvi)

However, this view is problematic, and the analogy between cyberspace andthe womb is inaccurate, precisely because cyberspace is sodisembodied. TheKhorasignifies a profound origination in relation that cyberspace, for all its rapid-fire electronic connectivity, lacks. “Surfing the web” can be as much an experience

8Here I am using process theology selectively. A different tendency in process theology, toward binaryformulations, is less useful in constructing a theological model of multiplicity—e.g., Whitehead’s(1929) polarities of conceptual and physical, and God’s “primordial nature” and “consequent nature,”Part V in Process and Reality, diagrammed by Suchocki as ayin-yang, (1982, p. 113). See also JohnCobb’s discussion of “binity” in “Relativization of the Trinity,” (1997, pp.1–22). Other language inprocess theology as God’s “feeling of the world” (Cobb, 1997) may also ascribe an unnecessarilymonistic and conscious subjectivity to God. Whitehead’s category of subjective unity of “actualentities,” including God (1929, Part III), does not encourage a normative model of multiplicity.



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of profound isolation and alienation, as one of connection. In the anonymousdiscourse of cyberspace, identity is not only fluid, but disconnected from bodies,and from any ongoing commitment or responsibility to either oneself or others. AsWard himself notes, it is also a realm that purports to offer universal access, but isin fact heavily tied to capitalist venture, and therefore available only to those withthe financial resources to pay for the privilege of “surfing.”

The image of theKhora does speak to something beyond sheer complexityand motility. God is in the body, not disembodied. Numerous feminist theologianshave challenged the Cartesian mind-body dualism as perpetuating the subjugationof women’s experience, and glorifying disconnected rationality at the expense ofthe lived experiences of childbirth, sexuality, dying, suffering, and surviving (e.g.,Moltmann-Wendel, 1995). Womanist theology in particular celebrates the powerof sheer survival as a source of power and knowledge to inform and sustain faith(e.g., Williams, 1993; Townes, 1997). God is experienced both in the communityof solidarity and within the self, as in Ntozake Shange’s oft quoted line of poetry:“I found God in myself and I loved her/I loved her fiercely” (Shange, 1977, p. 63).God is understood in the Black Church tradition as immanent, a source of strengthin the face of concrete racial and economic oppression, the God “who makes away out of no way” (Williams, 1993, p. 6; Baker-Fletcher, 1995, p. 125). This isa profoundly incarnational theology, in which God/Jesus/Spirit is recognized andcelebrated as present and in motion in the world, in the dailiness of life, and in thebody.

The imago Deiwe embrace inevitably influences our theological anthropol-ogy. Faith in an incarnational God conceived as fluid, multiple, in motion, and inperpetual relation both with us and within us, emancipating us from constraining,static, monolithic notions of both God and human beings. A multiple, relationaltheology it seems to me, is hospitable to an embodied conception of mind andself that gives room enough for the human person to encompass a wide capacityfor relationality, both with other people, and with and among theinnerselves thatinhabit the time and spatial dimensions of one’s own lived life. The rigid hierarchyof “higher powers” and “infernal regions” collapses, as we recognize that all ofus contain spheres of both rationality and irrationality, knowability and unknowa-bility, of abstract thought, emotion, and animal sense, both within ourselves andin our relations with one another. Furthermore, these are not fixed positions, butin continual flux as we move in and out of different internal and external states ofpressure, desire, conflict, and union.

IMPLICATIONS FOR PASTORAL PRAXIS

In conclusion, what are the implications for pastoral praxis? Especially forthose of us who are practitioners of pastoral care and psychotherapy, the archetypeof the heroic explorer of “dark continents” (Freud, 1926b), while seductive, needs




to be modified. This is not to say that as helping professionals we can jettison allauthority or erase the boundaries that create a safe holding environment for thosewho come to us for help. Drawing again from the relational school of psycho-analysis, it is, however, possible to move from a more hierarchical model of thetherapist as knowing explorer (active) and the patient as continent (acted upon).The new model acknowledges an asymmetry of roles and responsibilities, while ithonors that meanings are continually being co-constructed and re-constructed inthe intersubjective space of the therapeutic relationship.

New capacities are required of us in this emerging paradigm. The first iscom-plexity. Simplistic answers and once-for-all interpretations will not satisfy. Theytend toward fixity, absolutism and totalitarian force—if only ideological. This willchange the quality of our listening. Rather than listening only or primarily forunifying themes and overarching patterns, we will listen with greater attention tocomplexity and multiplicity.

Bromberg (1994) suggests a focus-shift in our attention, involving a “dialoguebetween discontinuous domains of self-meaning held by a multiplicity of statesof consciousness, some of which can be told and some only enacted. . . . [G]ettinginto a mood represents a shift to a state of consciousness with its own internalintegrity, its own reality, and sometimes its own ‘truth’ ” (p. 533). He writes:

A case could be made, for example, that the reason a state such as depression is difficult toalleviate even with medication is that it is not simply an ‘affective disorder’ but an internallycoherent aspect of the self. . .with its own narrative, its own memory configuration, its ownperceptual reality, and its own style of relatedness to others. . .So the ‘curing’ of depressionmust be a process that does not become an effort to cure the patient of ‘who he is’. . . [but] adialectic with a multiplicity of different self-narratives, perceptual realities, and adaptationalmeanings to the patient, each of which speaks with its own voice. (pp. 522–23)

This also suggests a shift in listening from content to process, especially shifts instates of self and the quality of relatedness between subjects, between the multiple“I’s” and the “Thou’s” (Buber, 1970) that may be present at any given moment.

This calls for a second capacity, arevaluing of subjectivity. We are challengedto give recognition to more varied kinds of knowledge than simply the positivistand argumentative versions of “truth” we were all taught to render from our mod-ernist grammar school curricula onward. In the words of Mary Belenky and hercolleagues (1986), we are called to “passionate knowing” (pp. 141ff). In their bookWomen’s Ways of Knowing, these researchers describe “passionate knowers”:

[those who] seek to stretch the outer boundaries of their consciousness—by making theunconscious conscious, by consulting and listening to the self, by voicing the unsaid, bylistening to others and staying alert to all the currents and undercurrents of life about them,by imagining themselves inside the new poem or person or idea that they want to come toknow and understand. . . knowers who enter into a union with that which is to be known.(pp. 522–23)

Like their example, the geneticist Barbara McClintock, we are challenged not tolook at the subjects of our investigation from the outside, but to get inside them as



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much as is humanly possible, to know one another and perhaps even God throughexperience and empathy, not just objective observation. The word “I” thus comesback into serious, even scholarly discourse.

This subjectivity and passionate knowing will lead us naturally, I believe, to athird necessary quality or qualities:empathy and mutuality. A relational image ofGod works together with relational humanity. Such theology holds empathy andmutuality at the heart of an ethical stance toward one another. If reality is no longerimposed, but coconstructed in relationship, then relations among people requirea higher level of intentional listening and intentional speaking. The “ideal speechsituation” (Habermas, 1975) will be one ofintersubjectivity. I find resonance withthis idea in the Judaeo-Christian tenet of reciprocity of love of self and neighbor,the New Testament language ofagapelove, and the Catholic tradition’scaritas.We can perhaps find an intersubjective interpretation in the narratives of Jesus’life. For example, Jesus allowed himself to be changed by his encounters, as in thestory of the Canaanite woman who dared to enter into a midrash-like debate withhim on behalf of her sick daughter, and won his admiration: “Great is your faith!Let it be done for you as you wish” (Matt. 15:21–28; Mk 7:24–30). Peter is able towalk on the water toward Jesus, upheld by his faith while held in a mutual gaze,but when he is distracted by his fear of the wind, the intersubjective moment iseclipsed, and Peter begins to sink. He is saved from drowning by Jesus’ reachingout and restoring their relational connection (Matt. 14:22–32).

A commitment to mutual engagement and inter-subjectivity leads to a fourthcapacity,patience. Recognizing that the sacred, with all of life, is aprocess, andhaving faith that God is in process with humanity (i.e., not simply actingonhumanbeings from above), demands from us the capacity to allow time for changes tounfold. Human beings, too, cannot simply actupon others. Therefore activistbehaviors may participate in wrong, if the activists use totalitarian moves to undowhat they perceive as the wrongs of others. Balance is required, and thereforepatience is important, because discernment and process take time. When balancefails, patience is also needed: to be of good courage, to seek one other’s forgiveness,to begin again, and to take the long view.

The last capacity I will mention (but probably by no means the last) inspiredby this new paradigm is commitment toemancipatory listening, a justicemakingbased on respect for difference. Jane Flax’s (1993) formulations of a non-unitaryself in the context of an emancipatory intersubjectivity lead to ethics—understoodas the deconstruction of dominant discourses—even within the self, but certainlybetween and among selves, none of whom are conceived as static or monolithic.These selves are gendered, embodied, and embedded in the contexts of culture,race and class. Difference will emerge from the gaps and the margins. If God’s ownbeing is to be understood as multiple, fluid, relational, in process, and encompassingdifference, then we will also be attentive to finding God’s own self/selves in thegaps and on the margins.




This will involve silence as well as speech. We will often need to still ourown voices (including the internalized voices of our own socialization and en-culturation) in order to seek and discern beyond the tacitly accepted “knowns”and “truths” of any particular time and place, to what voices and realities may beexcluded or not yet recognized. Our practice of silence will not be one of “neu-trality” but of profound respect for the complexity that might emerge from thenot-yet-known-or-knowable. In such a model, a fluid, multiple, dynamic God willbe found in the interstices, the “transitional spaces” of domestic, social, political,and institutional life, and sometimes in the least expected places, even within themany continents and “infernal regions” of our own selves.

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