Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily. Rav Wolbe has another beautiful thought brought down in his essay based on the speech he gave to religious psychologists about religion and psychiatry. But before we discuss his point, we need a little background. There's something in psychiatry called repression. Repression is a defense mechanism in which people push difficult or unacceptable thoughts out of their conscious awareness.
This was a very fundamental piece of Freud's psychoanalytic framework. Freud believed that people repressed memories that were too difficult to confront (particularly traumatic memories), and expelled them from their conscious thought. He felt that this was the root of a lot of mental illness, such as stress, anxiety, and depression. He thought that the proper way to treat the patient was by recalling their repressed experiences into their consciousness and confronting them in therapy.
For example, imagine an adult that suffers a nasty spider bite as a child and develops an intense phobia of spiders later in life, without any recollection of his experience as a child.
He has no idea, because his memory of the spider bite is repressed.
So a person may not understand where the phobia originates. That is the concept of repression. It's a real concept; people do repress thoughts that are bothersome. There's also something called suppression, with the key differentiator being that repression is an unconscious decision, whereas suppression is regarding something that you're aware of, that you push out of your mind. With that background, we can discuss Rav Wolbe’s point:
He quotes from a Dr. Young, who says that the main suffering of patients would not fully be healed until they found a living connection with God. That's a interesting concept.
Rav Wolbe adds that the difference between Freud’s idea of repression and his was that Freud believed a person really wanted to fulfill all of these various repressed improper, lustful desires and thoughts, and since they weren't able to come out, anxiety was the result.
So Freud, in his psychotherapy, would delve into all kinds of improper areas, which is one of the reasons that religious figures were not very fond of him.
This need to bring out all of your desires, and, as he would say, not repress anything, is not at all a problem today, because as Rav Wolbe says, everything's out there. Today, people no longer repress those lustful feelings.
What is being suppressed, he says, is religious feelings. A person, as we said previously, has a need for religion. It's a natural instinct and a natural feeling to connect, but because he doesn't want live with it or deal with it, he either suppresses or represses those feelings. Rav Wolbe quotes another psychiatrist, Gordon Allport, who says that in the past 50 years or so, we've switched to the suppression of religion from the suppression of lust.
He adds that we see today that many psychologists clearly avoid any discussion about religion or religious interest. And therefore, he says, modern day psychology stands in front of a new challenge, a new frontier, to pay attention to the suppression of religious feelings.
Rav Wolbe adds another very interesting point, which is the lack of connection and religion.
That means a person needs attachment (in what we call the attachment theory). People that don't have attachment, whether it's to themselves, to their friends or to God, are going to suffer mental illness. Attachment is very necessary. If a child is disconnected from his mother, even though he has other caretakers, he will suffer from that. And it's no different with connection to religion.
Rav Wolbe writes, in his very sophisticated vocabulary, that the transcendent connection won't let go of man.
What does transcendent mean? Transcendence is a feeling that something is above the physical. A
person needs to know that the world is not just the physical world that he sees. And if you don't have some fulfillment of that, with prayer, or whatever it may be, then the person will be lacking and will not be mentally healthy.
Rav Wolbe says this is one of the reasons for the upsurge in drugs 30-40 years ago. People need to connect to something, and they will use the back door to create some other type of transcendent feeling, with psychedelics and all kind of visions that come from drugs. That is an artificial substitute for the feeling that the soul needs. So, once again, we see how important religion is in mental health.