Content & Context
The Books & Culture Weblog
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WEEKLY DIGEST
- Sigmund Freud is remembered as the founder of psychoanalysis, but since many of his theories have been discredited, his influence is ambiguous. But last week's PBS special, The Question of God, is a reminder that Freud's rejection of the spiritual and divine helped lay the groundwork for the kind of humanistic reduction that has pervaded the social sciences ever since. The series pits the views of Freud against his foil: C.S. Lewis, who seemed to follow Freud's work. "I was astonished at how Freud would raise a question and then Lewis would attempt to answer it," Armand Nicholi—whose course at Harvard Medical School inspired the PBS series—told columnist Terry Mattingly. "Nicholi presents Freud as a spokesman for the 'secular worldview' that denies the existence of any truth or reality outside the material world. Lewis is the champion of a 'spiritual worldview' which accepts the reality of God," Mattingly says. In the New York Times , Peter Steinfels questions whether Lewis was as influential as Freud, but summarizes one of the scholars interviewed in the series: "Despite much talk of postmodernism, for many people the major arguments about belief in God's existence are the same today as they were a century ago, arguments pitting faith and religious experience against the philosophical naturalism that accepts only claims passing tests of scientific verification." Mattingly/Steinfels*
- There were hints of Freud's humanism in a Slate piece last week on secular life ceremonies. "The rituals are the work of a growing number of "secular officiants" who create religion-free life-cycle rituals … [that] attract those who have abandoned traditional religion—atheists and the 'spiritual but not religious' alike," Slate wrote. Secular wedding ceremonies might include "'calling the directions,' a commonly adopted Wiccan (neo-pagan) and Native American custom in which North, South, East, and West are summoned to bless and aid those involved in the ceremony." As Slate observes, the problem is that "pulling rituals from various traditions and performing them out of context risks distancing them from the realities of participants' spiritual lives. They may evoke the intended visceral reactions—pushing the right emotional buttons and giving the proceedings the solemnity they deserve—while leaving little below the surface." Article
- Working his dissertation on the history of suicide in America, Harvard graduate student Richard J. Bell has revised his central questions, he says in the journal Common-place. He began by asking how many early Americans killed themselves, how and why. Because of the paucity of data for these questions, Bell is now asking "how Americans in the early republic responded to suicide or the threat of it and what they understood that threat to be." Suicide was against the law in early America and often covered up, even with the cooperation of the news media. But accounts of slave suicides are so common and compelling that "I have recently moved suicide and slavery to the center of my dissertation project." Early American reformers compared dueling, gambling and drinking to suicide to advance their cause, and Benjamin Rush of the Humane Society of Philadelphia, in the early 1800s, took measures to prevent suicide, including signs on bridges that read, "Do Not Despair." Essay
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