As human beings grow in discipline and love and life experience, their understanding of the world and their place in it naturally grows apace(飞快地). Conversely, as people fail to grow in discipline, love and life experience, so does their understanding fail to grow. Consequently, among the members of the human race there exists an extraordinary variability in the breadth(宽度) and sophistication(精密) of our understanding of what life is all about.
This understanding is our religion. Since everyone has some understanding-some world view, no matter how limited or primitive or inaccurate-everyone has a religion. This fact, not widely recognized, is of the utmost importance: everyone has a religion.
We suffer, I believe, from a tendency to define religion too narrowly. We tend to think that religion must include a belief in God or some ritualistic(仪式的) practice or membership in a worshiping(祭拜) group. We are likely to say of someone who does not attend church or believe in a superior being, “He or she is not religious.” I have even heard scholars say such things as: “Buddhism is not really a religion” or “Unitarians(上帝一位论派教徒) have excluded religion from their faith” or “Mysticism is more a philosophy than a religion.” We tend to view religion as something monolithic(整体的), cut out of whole cloth, and then, with this simplistic concept, we are puzzled as to how two very different people can both call themselves Christians. Or Jews. Or how an atheist(无神论者) might have a more highly developed sense of Christian morality than a Catholic who routinely attends mass(弥撒).
In supervising other psychotherapists I rather routinely find that they pay too little, if any, attention to the ways in which their patients view the world. there are several reasons for this, but among them is the notion that if patients don’t consider themselves religious by virtue of their belief in God or their church membership, they are lacking in religion and the matter therefore needs no further scrutiny(详细审查). But the fact of the matter is that everyone has an explicit or implicit set of ideas and beliefs as to the essential nature of the world. Do patients envision(想象) the universe as basically chaotic and without meaning so that it is only sensible for them to grab whatever little pleasure they can whenever it is available? Do they see the world as a dog-eat-dog place where ruthlessness is essential for their survival? Or do they see it as nurturing sort of place in which something good will always turn up and in which they need not fret(烦恼) much about the future? Or a place that owes(欠) them a living no matter how they conduct their lives? Or a universe of rigid law in which they will be struck down and cast away if they step even slightly out of line? Et cetera. There are all manner of different world view that people have. Sooner or later in the course of psychotherapy most therapists will com to recognize how a patient views the world, but if the therapist is specifically on the lookout(监视) for it, he or she will come to this recognition sooner rather than later. And it is essential that therapists arrive at this knowledge, for the world view of patients is always an essential part of their problems, and a correction in their world view is necessary for their cure. So I say to those I supervise: “Find out your patients’ religions even if they say they don’t have any.”
Usually a person’s religion or world view is at best only incompletely conscious. Patients are often unaware of how they view the world, and sometimes may even think they possess a certain kind of religion when they actually are possessed by a far different kind. Stewart, a successful industrial engineer, became severely depressed in his mid-fifties. Despite his success at work and the fact that he had been an exemplary(典范的) husband and father, he felt worthless and evil. “The world would be a better place if I were dead,” he said. And meant it. Stewart had made two extremely serious suicide attempts. No amount of realistic(现实可行的) reassurance could interrupt the unrealism of his worthless self-image. As well as the usual symptoms of a severe depression, such as insomnia(失眠) and agitation(焦虑), Stewart also suffered great difficulty in swallowing his food. “It’s not just that the food tastes bad,” he said. “That, too. But it’s as if there’s a blade of steel stuck straight in my throat and nothing but liquid can get by it.” Special X-rays and tests failed to reveal a physical cause for his difficulty. Stewart made no bones about(对……毫不犹豫) his religion. “I’m an atheist, plain and simple,” he stated. “I’m a scientist. The only things I believe in are those things you can see and touch. Maybe I’d be better off if I had some kind of faith in a sweet and loving God, but, frankly, I can’t stomach(忍受) that kind of crap(胡扯). I had enough of it when I was a child and I’m glad I’ve gotten away from it.” Stewart had grown up in a small Midwestern community, the son of a rigid fundamentalist(原教旨主义者) preacher(牧师) and his equally rigid and fundamentalist wife, and had left home and church at the first opportunity.
Several months after he entered treatment Stewart recounted the following brief dream: “it was back in my childhood home in Minnesota. It was like I was still living there as a child, yet I also knew I was the same age as I am now. It was nighttime. A man had entered the house. He was going to cut our throats. I had never seen this man before, but strangely I knew who he was: the father of a girl I had dated a couple of times in high school. That was all. There was no conclusion. I just woke up fearful, knowing that this man wanted to cut our throats.”
I asked Stewart to tell me everything he could about this man in his dream. “There’s really nothing I can tell you,” he said. “I never met the man. I only dated his daughter a couple of times-not really dates, just walking her home to her door after church youth group meetings. I did steal a kiss from her in the dark behind some bushes on one of those walks.” Here Stewart gave a little nervous laugh and went on, “In my dream I had the sense I’d never seen her father, although I knew who he was. Actually, in real life I did see him-from a distance. He was the stationmaster(站长) for our town. Occasionally I would see him when I used to go to the station and watch the trains come in on summer afternoons.”
Something clicked in my mind. I too as a child had spent lazy summer afternoons watching the trains go by. The train station was where the action was. And the stationmaster was the Director of the Action. He knew the distant places from which the great trains were coming to touch our little town and the faraway(遥远的) places to which they were going. He knew which trains would stop and which would roar through, shaking the earth as they went. He worked the switches, the signals. He received the mail and sent it off. And when he was not doing these wonderful things he sat in his office doing something more wonderful: tapping on a magical little key in a mysterious rhythmical(有节奏的) language, sending message out to the whole world.
“Stewart,” I said, “You have told me that you’re an atheist, and I believe you. There is a part of your mind that believes there is no God. But I am beginning to suspect that there is another part of your mind that does believe in God-a dangerous, cutthroat(残酷的) God.”
My suspicion was correct. Gradually, as we worked together, reluctantly, striving against resistance, Stewart began to recognize within himself a strange and ugly faith: an assumption, beyond his atheism, that the world was controlled and directed by a malevolent(恶毒的) force, a force that not only could cut his throat but that was eager to do so, eager to punish him for transgressions(越轨). Slowly also we began to focus on his “transgressions,” mostly minor sexual incidents symbolized by his “stealing a kiss” from the stationmaster’s daughter. Eventually it became clear that (among other reasons for his depression) Stewart was doing penance(忏悔) and figuratively(象征性地) cutting his own throat in the hope that by so doing he could prevent God from literally(真正地) cutting it.
Where did Stewart’s notion of a vicious(恶意的) God and a malevolent world come from? How do people’s religions develop? What determines a person’s particular world view? There are whole complexes of determinants, and this book will not explore the question in depth. But the most important factor in the development of the religion of most people is obviously their culture. If we are European we are likely to believe that Christ was a white man, and if we are African that he was a black man. If one is an Indian who was born and raise in Benares or Bombay, one is likely to become a Hindu and possess what has been described as a pessimistic(悲观的) world view. If one is an American born and raised in Indiana(印第安纳州), one is more likely to become a Christian than a Hindu and to possess a somewhat more optimistic world view. We tend to believe what the people around us believe, and we tend to accept as truth what these people tell us of the nature of the world as we listen to them during our formative(形成的) years.
But less obvious(except to psychotherapists) is the fact that the most important part of our culture is our particular family. The most basic culture in which we develop in the culture of our family, and our parents are its “culture leaders.” Moreover, the most significant aspect of that culture is not what our parents tell us about God and the nature of things but rather what they do-how they behave toward each other, toward our siblings and, above all, toward us. In other words, what we learn about the nature of the world when we are growing up is determined by the actual nature of the our experience in the microcosm(微观世界) of the family. It is not so much what our parents say that determines our world view as it is the unique world they create for us by their behavior. “I agree that I have this notion of a cutthroat God,” Stewart said, “but where did it come from? My parents certainly believed in God-they talked about it incessantly(不停地)-but theirs was a God of Love. Jesus Loves us. God loves us. We love God and Jesus. Love, love, love, that’s all I ever heard.”
“Did you have a happy childhood?” I asked.
Stewart glared at me. “Stop playing dumb(装聋作哑),” he said. “You know I didn’t. You know it was miserable.”
“Why was miserable?”
“You know that too. You know what is was like. I got the shit beaten out of me. Belts, boards, brooms, brushes, anything they could lay their hands on. There wasn’t anything I could do that didn’t merit(值得) a beating. A beating a day keeps the doctor away and makes a good little Christian out of you.”
“Did they ever try to strangle(扼死) you or cut your throat?”
“No, but I’m sure they would have if I hadn’t been careful.” There was a long moment of silence. Stewart’s face became extremely depressed. Finally, heavily, he said, “I’m beginning to understand.”
Stewart was not the only person who believed in what I have come to call the “monster-god.” I have had a number of patients with similar concepts of God and similarly break of terrifying notions as to the nature of existence. What is surprising is that the monster-god is not more common in the minds of humans. In the first section of this book it was noted that when we are children our parents are godlike figures to our child’s eye, and the way they do things seems the way they must be done throughout the universe. Our first(and, sadly, often our only) notion of God’s nature is a simple extrapolation(推断) of our patents’ natures, a simple blending of the characters of our mothers and fathers or their substitutes. If we have loving, forgiving parents, we are likely to believe in a loving and forgiving God. And in our adult view the world is likely to seem as nurturing a place as our childhood was. If our parents were harsh(残酷的) and punitive(惩罚性的), we are likely to mature with a concept of a harsh and punitive monster-god. And if they failed to care for us, we will likely envision the universe as similarly uncaring(想象).
Frequently(but not always) the essence of a patient’s childhood and hence the essence of his or her world view is captured in the “earliest memory.” Consequently I will often ask patients, “Tell me the very first thing that you can remember.” They may protest that they cannot do this, that they have a number of early memories. But when I force them to make a choice of one, the response will vary in flavor from “Well, I remember my mother picking me up and carrying me outside in her arms to show me a beautiful sunset” to “I remember sitting on the floor of the kitchen. I had wet my pants and my mother was standing over me waving a big spoon in the air and screaming at me.” It is probably that these first memories, like the phenomenon of screen memories, which they so often are, are remembered precisely because they accurately symbolize the nature of a person’s early childhood. It is not surprising, then, that the flavor of these earliest memories is so frequently the same as that of a patient’s deepest feelings about the nature of existence.
The fact that our religion or world view is initially largely determined by our unique childhood experience brings us face to face with a central problem: the relationship between religion and reality. It is the problem of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Stewart’s view of the world as a dangerous place where he would get his throat cut if he wasn’t very careful was perfectly realistic in terms of the microcosm of his childhood home; he lived under the domination of two vicious adults. But all parents are not vicious and all adults are not vicious. In the larger world, the macrocosm, there are many different kinds of parents and people and societies and cultures.
To develop a religion or world view that is realistic-that is, conforms to the reality of the cosmos(宇宙) and our role in it, as best we can know that reality-we must constantly revise and extend our understanding to include new knowledge of the larger world. We must constantly enlarge our frame of reference. We are dealing here with the issues of map-making and transference, which were discussed at some length in the first section. Stewart’s map of reality was accurate for the microcosm of his family, but he had transferred that map inappropriately into a larger adult world, where it was grossly(非常) incomplete and hence defective. To some extent the religion of most adults is a product of transference.
Most of us operate from a narrower frame of reference than that of which we are capable, failing to transcend the influence of our particular culture, our particular set of parents and our particular childhood experience upon our understanding. It is no wonder, then that the world of humanity is so full of conflict. We have a situation in which human beings, who must deal with each other, have vastly different views as to the nature of reality, yet each one believes his or her own view to be the correct one since it is based on the microcosm of personal experience. And to make matters worse, most of us are not even fully aware of our own world views, much less the uniqueness of the experience from which they are derived. Bryant Wedge, a psychiatrist specializing in the field of international relations, studied negotiations between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and was able to delineate(描述) a number of basic assumptions as to the nature of human beings and society and the world held by Americans which differed dramatically from assumptions of Russians. These assumptions dictated(支配) the negotiating behavior of both sides. Yet neither side was aware of its own assumptions of the fact that the other side was operating on a different set of assumptions. The inevitable result was that the negotiating behavior of the Russians seemed to the Americans to be either crazy or deliberately(故意地) evil, and of course the Americans seemed to the Russians equally crazy or evil.
We are indeed like the three proverbial(谚语的) blind men, each in touch with only his particular piece of the elephant yet each claiming to know the nature of the whole beast. So we squabble(大声争吵) over our different microcosmic world view, and all wars are holy wars.