Psychology and Spirituality
On psychoanalysis
To Mary Neylan March 26, 1940
Psychoanalysis. In talking to me you must beware, because I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility to what is fashionable. . . . No doubt, like every young science, it is full of errors, but so long as it remains a science and doesn’t set up to be a philosophy I have no quarrel with it—i.e. as long as people judge whatever it reveals by the best human logic and scheme of values they’ve got and don’t try to derive logic and values from it. In practice, no doubt, as you say, the patient is always influenced by the analyst’s own values.
Further, insofar as it attempts to heal, i.e. to make better, every treatment involves a value judgment. This could be avoided if the analyst said “Tell me what kind of chap you want to be and I’ll see how near that I can make you”: but of course he really has his own idea of what goodness and happiness consist in and works to that. And his idea is derived not from his science (it couldn’t be) but from his age, sex, class, culture, religion and heredity, and is just as much in need of criticism as the patient’s. . . .
Another way in which any therapeutic art may have bad philosophical results is this. It must, for the sake of method, take perfection as the Norm and treat every departure from it as disease: hence there is always a danger that those who practice it may come to treat a perfectly ideal perfection as “normal” in the popular sense and consequently waste their lives in crying for the moon.
(CL 2, 372–373)
Do agnostics still have a religion?
To Eliza Marian Butler September 25, 1940
A pure agnostic is a fine thing. I have known only one and he was the man who taught me to think. What I am worried about is the purity of your agnosticism: for one of the most dangerous things about the modern world seems to me the fact that most of those who call themselves agnostics have not really got rid of religion but merely exchanged civilized religion for barbarous religion—worship of sex, or the State, or the élan vital,* or the dead, or Mystery as such.
*Life Force philosophy of Henri Bergson
(CL 2, 444)
On the Shroud of Turin
To Sister Penelope November 9, 1941
(who had sent Lewis an image of the head of the Shroud of Turin)
Thank you so much for the head of Our Lord from the shroud. It has grown upon me wonderfully. I don’t commit myself to the genuineness. One can never be quite certain. But the great value is to make one realize that He was a man, and once even a dead man. There is so much difference between a doctrine and a realization.
(CL 2, 495)
Keep clear of psychiatrists who are not Christians
To Mrs. Frank L. Jones February 23, 1947
Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to “cure” it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. Often they have never given the question any serious thought.
(CL 2, 765)
The dangers of introspection
To “Mrs. Lockley” September 27, 1949
Yes, yes, I know. The moment one asks oneself “Do I believe?” all belief seems to go. I think this is because one is trying to turn round and look at something which is there to be used and work from—trying to take out one’s eyes instead of keeping them in the right place and seeing with them. I find that it happens about other matters as well as faith. In my experience only very robust pleasures will stand the question, “Am I really enjoying this?” Or attention—the moment I begin thinking about my attention (to a book or a lecture) I have ipso facto [by the very fact] ceased attending. St. Paul speaks of “Faith actualized in Love.” And “the heart is deceitful”: you know better than I how very unreliable introspection is. I should be much more alarmed about your progress if you wrote claiming to be overflowing with Faith, Hope and Charity.
(CL 2, 983)
The danger of happiness and the benefit of unhappiness
To “Mrs. Lockley” March 5, 1951
The great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the “not thinking” when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will “get through somehow in the end.”
Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we should need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment . . .
(CL 3, 93)
Grace is not frustrated by doubts
To “Mrs. Lockley” March 5, 1951
I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing [Christian faith] is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Skeptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all of our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is very active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures . . . But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly . . .
(CL 3, 93)
On the vastness and the smallness of the soul
To Warfield M. Firor March 27, 1951
The whole difficulty with me is to keep control of the mind and I wish one’s earliest education had given one more training in that. There seems to be a disproportion between the vastness of the soul in one respect (i.e. as a mass of ideas and emotions) and its smallness in another (i.e. as central, controlling ego). The whole inner weather changes so complete in less than a minute. Do you read George Herbert—
If what my soul doth feel sometimes
My soul might always feel—
(CL 3, 105)
Forgiving oneself
To Miss Breckenridge April 19, 1951
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
(CL 3, 109)
On the subjectivity of psychiatry
To Mary Van Deusen June 10, 1952
I think psychiatry is like surgery: i.e. the thing is in itself essentially an infliction of wounds but may, in good hands, be necessary to avoid some greater evil. But it is more tricky than surgery because the personal philosophy and character of the operator come more into play. In setting a broken ankle all surgeons would agree as to the proper position to which the bones should be restored, because anatomy is an exact science. But all psychiatrists are not agreed as to the proper shape of the soul: where their ideas of that proper shape are based on a heathen or materialistic philosophy, they may be aiming at a shape we should strongly disapprove. One wants a Christian psychiatrist. There are a few of these, but nothing like enough.
(CL 3, 200)
Does God seem real?
To Mrs. Johnson July 17, 1953
“Does God seem real to me?” It varies: just as lots of other things I firmly believe in (my own death, the solar system) feel more or less real at different times. I have dreamed dreams but not seen visions: but don’t think all that matters a hoot. And the saints say that visions are unimportant. If Our Lord did seem to appear to you at your prayer (bodily) what after all could you do but go on with your prayers? How could you know that it was not a hallucination?
(CL 3, 348)
Constancy of faith amid fleeting feelings
To Mary Van Deusen July 23, 1953
It is a great joy to be able to “feel” God’s love as a reality, and one must give thanks for it and use it. But you must be prepared for the feeling dying away again, for feelings are by nature impermanent. The great thing is to continue to believe when the feeling is absent: and these periods do quite as much for one as those when the feeling is present.
(CL 3, 350–351)