Psychology & The Cross

(0:00) “Jesus was the first psychoanalyst, the most brilliant psychoanalyst of all time. The whole theory of projection is right there. ‘Why do you complain about a mote in your neighbor’s eye, when there's a beam in your eye?’ So much of psychoanalytic insight is there in the New Testament, especially in the words of Jesus and in St. Paul, so I became increasingly struck by these parallels.”

(0:31) Jakob Lusensky: Welcome to Psychology and the Cross. In this episode, I speak to Toronto-based psychoanalyst Donald Carveth. Don is not a Jungian, but more of a classically oriented psychoanalyst. He has written extensively on the question of conscience, super ego, or if you like, the inner voices that we are all wrestling with in our individual lives. I had heard that Don actually started off as a Jungian before converting to Freudianism. So I wanted to start by asking him about that.

(1:08) Donald Carveth: I think at age fourteen I discovered Erich Fromm's My Encounter With Marx and Freud—I think is the subtitle of that book. I was always trying to keep up with my father, but sometimes he was reading Einstein, and Alfred North Whitehead, and that was a little beyond me. But I grabbed the Freud lectures and immediately started bugging people to try to interpret their dreams over breakfast and whatever. I'd formed the intention to become a psychoanalyst at that point, about fourteen. Whenever my father on the weekends would—not have a nurse—he was a family doctor—and some kid would fall off a bike and cut his head open. And I'd be playing—I’d be eight or ten years of age upstairs—and my father would call me down to the surgery while he was stitching up the kid’s head and he would want me to clip the stitches, and invariably, I wound up fainted out cold on the floor. This happened about three or four times, but it didn't alter my plan, because I thought you had to be a physician to be a psychoanalyst. The crisis came in first-year university, when I realized there was no way that I was going to do all of that chemistry, biology—let alone cadavers and rectal examination.

So I switched into social and philosophical studies. And I thought my career as a psychoanalyst was over. It took a couple of years for me to learn that Erich Fromm, actually, was a sociologist and also a psychoanalyst. When I discovered the existence of non-medical analysis, then I immediately formed the intention to get a PhD and then go to the institute to train. And somewhere in there, even though I actually started off as a Freudian, I got very interested in Jung. I was reading a lot of Jung and there was an analytical-psychology organization in my city. And I started to attend meetings quite regularly. I found it of philosophical and spiritual interest, but I was a very troubled young man. I couldn't sustain a relationship with a female because usually there were at least two or three females on the hook at any one time. And this made me pretty anxious and made me pretty guilty. And I knew that I had—it wasn't enough for me to move through the personae, briefly hang out in the shadow, and then move on to what the Jungians in those days were really interested in, which was the archetypes of the collective unconscious. I knew my personal unconscious needed a lot of work.

So I reverted to my original Freudianism and I sought out a Freudian analyst. Well, first of all, I sought out a lot of trendy 1960s therapies: primal scream, transactional analysis, Gestalt. They were all a total waste of time for me. I couldn't connect to these things at all. Finally, a psychiatrist—who I was with for six months and we were getting nowhere because he was more narcissistic even than me—finall, when I quit him, he recommended I try the man down the hall who was a psychoanalyst. I said, “What they still do that?” I thought the couch went out with like the horse and buggy, you know. They're still doing it. He said, “Yes he's a very good man. I recommend him.” So, six months later, I called him. Within a week or two of being on the couch, I was not only in love with him, but I was a total convert to clinical psychoanalysis and he helped me greatly. I subsequently had three other analyses. So that's how—I stopped reading Jung then.

(5:04) Jakob Lusensky: Something that I really enjoy with following your work is that you are not staying strictly with psychoanalytic thinking, but you often grounding it also in analogies that you take from the bible or philosophy, and although you are very clinical, you are amplifying material within religious analogies. I was wondering about your interest, religious and spirituality, and how that has developed throughout your life, and how it is to speak about that in a psychoanalytic setting.

(5:38) Donald Carveth: Well, imagine my father. He was something like a deus. He had some vague notion of a higher power, but he rarely darkened the doors of a church. And the backyard of our house, [inaudible], the Anglican Church. They sent me—my mother, I was in the choir—my mother ironed my—they sent me, but they only came when I was singing a solo or something, you know? My father couldn't make any sense of the whole thing of Jesus Christ. So I went to church. It became very important to me. I loved the sermons. We had a particularly good rector of the church, and he was a family friend. He was always trying to convert my father. They—the beauty—the hymns, the music. I had a good voice. I got a lot of praise for my singing. Things were not happy at home. My mother was drifting into alcoholism. I took refuge in the church. But then adolescence happened. I discovered girls, masturbation, and I discovered in my father's library a book by Bertrand Russell called Why I Am Not a Christian.

(6:57) The combination of these circumstances meant that I was done with my Anglican Christianity. I turned radically away from it. My heroes were all of the passionate atheists of the West: Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Freud, Jean-Paul Sartre. And for, you know, thirty years, I preached the gospel of atheism from my pulpit lecture and at the university. But I remember one year, there was a black Anglican nun—woman—in my class—in her forties, I would say—and she really liked me—and whenever I would say disparaging or caustic things about religion, she would look at me with her big eyes and I could feel that she was forgiving me. She haunted me through her forgiveness.

(7:59) It was like she knew. She knew I was going to come home one day. Well, she was right. In my forties, I had a reconversion. My father died, it so happened, in a Catholic hospital. Because he’d fallen and broken his hip and he wound up in that hospital instead of the heart hospital. And so as he lay in a coma for three weeks, there was a crucifix that on the wall, right above his bed, and it was April and it was hot, and he would throw off the covers that he was wasting away. And you could see his rib cage through the thin old skin. And I would look and, you know, I suddenly realized that's what the crucifix is about. It's about dying. It's about how we all must die. We're all going to follow in this path and that started something. And then a couple of years later, I got around to impregnating my wife.

(8:57) And I was becoming a father, but I think even before the baby was born, I shocked my wife one day. We were staying in the country and I got up on a Sunday morning and I was putting on a jacket and a tie—rare for me. She wakes up. “What are you doing?” And I said, “Well, I'm going to church.” And I had to drive into a little town nearby. She started laughing. She knew I'd been studying theology for years, even during my atheism. I would go to the bookstore looking for something Marxist, but I'd wind up in the basement where they stored the theology, and I would walk out of the bookstore with eight theological texts, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, whatever, Reinhold Niebuhr.

I mean, I was reading these guys all along. I was so impressed with their intelligence. And I was so impressed with their critique of Freud, because they put their finger on the fundamental problem in Freud: his naturalization of human destructiveness, as if it's an instinct, as if it came from the animal in man, when in fact it comes from what is most unique about man. I knew that. And it seemed irrelevant to the thesis I was trying to write, but it turned out to be completely relevant. The thesis I ended up writing was very influenced by these theological perspectives. So even before I took the step of going back to church, I was very familiar with liberal existentialist theology, John Macquarie, reading the gospel through Heidegger, you know. That was already there. I mean, somewhere Heidegger would say the cathedral was already built. It was just empty. But then I went back to church and the cathedral was not empty anymore. I caught up, affectively and emotionally, with where my head was already prepared to be.

(10:58) I remember walking into that church. My wife was laughing because she was saying, “Well yeah, in small-town Ontario, this little dinky town, you're going to fly in some preacher who's going to convey Christianity in your style—Bonhoeffer, Tillich, whatever. Well, I went to the church and the preacher was a product of the Toronto School of Theology. He built his sermon around the critique of the letter, rather than the spirit; the confusion of our faith; with the stained glass and the beautiful buildings and the gothic arches. And I'll invest, it was a very good sermon, actually. So, but that was the start. I returned to church, walking back into church and hearing the same hymns, I was weeping. It felt like coming home. I felt like the prodigal son. I felt welcomed and it was pretty intense for a while. It was pretty intense. I would have to say. I was in the paranoid-schizoid position.

It had a magical element to it. I was praying. I was wearing a cross around my neck, which I still wear. And gradually it settled down. I moved back into the depressive position. But I needed the help of priests who are men, with men who wear dresses. I was trying to become a father; it scared the hell out of me. How am I going to father this boy? So I had to take him to men I called father, and I would kneel at the rail to receive the eucharist, and the priest would put his hand on my little boy's head and bless him. I loved this. But as I settled down and became comfortable with being a father, and so on, I found I needed church less and less. I drifted away. I would attend at Christmas and Easter. But my home is full of crucifixes.

It depends on how you define prayer. If you define prayer as “thought turned to God,” I guess I'm praying all the time because I'm constantly thinking about theological issues and I'm constantly thinking about the words of Jesus, and finding parallels. I mean it seems to me that Jesus was the first psychoanalyst, the brilliant psychoanalyst of all time. The whole theory of projection is right there. “Why do you complain about a mote in your neighbor’s eye, when there's a beam in your eye?” he said. So much of psychoanalytic insight is there in the New Testament, it seems, especially in the words of Jesus, and in St. Paul. So I became increasingly struck by these parallels.

(13:58) Jakob Lusensky: It's so wonderful to hear you sharing these experiences. It's also very touching, what you share with your father, and the cross, and how you came back in contact with your faith. I'm wondering how has it been received by your psychoanalytic colleagues, and have you had to hide? Because now you speak very openly about it.

(14:20) Donald Carveth: Yes, I do. How was it received? I think I'm luckier than the generation of guys one generation older than me. We invited William Meisner, MDSJ. I think he was chair of psychiatry in Boston. He was a senior training analyst in Boston. We invited—one of the psychoanalytic institutes invited him—and over lunch—and he had just written a wonderful book on psychoanalysis and religion—and over lunch, I tried to get him to talk about psychoanalysis of religion.

I persisted. I was irritating him; he was dodging me. Finally, he looked at me and he said, “Professor Carveth, I have been invited to Toronto by a psychoanalytic institute to speak on psychoanalytic topics. If you wish me to speak on religious topics, have me invited by a religious organization, and I will be happy to do so. Next subject.” Okay? So this man wore two hats, he rode two different horses, and he survived in the American psychoanalytic establishment by never mixing them. Okay? That's how he did it. By the time it came to me, I didn't actually have to do that. Or maybe I just am too stubborn—I wouldn't do it. My colleagues have always known this about me. The very atheistic, classical Freudians, no doubt, in private, they think it's, “Carveth didn't have enough analysis. It's an unfinished analysis.” That's probably what they think. But they're too polite to say so. They don't exactly roll their eyes and they don't sanction me. I happen to be a very popular teacher in my institute, and they need me to do a lot of teaching, and so they tolerate it. I try to be fairly discrete about it.

(16:23) Jakob Lusensky: I would like us to spend some time talking about the book that you wrote in 2013, published through Karnac, The Still Small Voice: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Guilt and Conscience. In this book, you're arguing that we need to help people, our patients. We are their guilt—not to eliminate it. And you make some important distinctions also between the reparatory guilt that’s needed in individuals, that's needed for, sort of, development of civilization, versus the persecutory guilt, and you further write that “the essential ingredient of the conscientious practice of psychoanalysis involves knowing the difference between the conscience and the super-ego.” That you had come to the conclusion that the only way out of persecution by the sadistic super-ego is through reconciliation with conscience.

(17:22) Donald Carveth: Yes.

(17:23) Jakob Lusensky: Could you speak a little bit about this important differentiation, and maybe also about the book, how it came to you to write this?

(17:29) Donald Carveth: Right. Okay. So as a young man, I did not want to have to be good. I wanted to be bad. Well, I didn't want to be bad, exactly, but I wanted what I wanted. I did not want to say no to myself. I wanted self-gratification, and I sought it, and in seeking self-gratification, I was very selfish. I hurt people. Ultimately, I hurt myself, and I guess that's the point. I learned that, as smart as I am, I'm not smart enough—no one is smart enough—to be able to get away with it. I decided that ultimately nobody, nobody gets away with anything. Even Donald Trump. I mean, it looks like he does. But if you put a person's life under the microscope, like if they came and lay on your couch four or five times a week, you would see that they're not getting away with anything. I realized I was paying too high a price for my ongoing effort to have my cake and eat it too. I did not want to lead a life of having to sacrifice impulses because they were wrong, or out of loyalty to someone or whatever. I did not want to “go straight,” as they say. I didn't want to go straight. But I finally realized, I'm sorry, I have to go straight and I don't have to go straight because God says so, no, or the church says so. No. I have to go straight simply because anything else will end up hurting too much. You could say that I became a very enlightened hedonist. The only way to ultimately find—and I don't like the word happiness; I much prefer inner peace—I want inner peace, and the only way I'm going to find that is by becoming a good man in my own eyes, not anyone else’s. One of the wise things my father said to me when I was a kid was, “Son, there's only one person you have to live with 24/7. And that's yourself.” Boy, was he right about that.

Okay, so I realized that I have to start doing right so that I can see myself as a good man, and then I'll be able to sleep at night, and then I'll be able to have peace sitting in the garden in the sunshine. So, I decided, okay, well what the lesson there is you must reconcile with conscience because otherwise your super-ego—which is pseudo-moral, it isn’t really moral, it’s cloaked in morality—but really it's a satanic attacker and it will go on persecuting. I think of the super-ego as the devil, basically. It’s demonic. It cloaks itself in a moral disguise, but it is out to destroy us. It's our enemy. And it will make our lives a living hell. That's the way I understand heaven and hell. These are states of the soul now.

I'm not talking about a future. But I have been in hell. And I have experienced heavenly moments of grace. And the way to escape from hell and access heavenly moments is by turning away from what's wrong and doing what's right. So it's a personal—I feel driven by personal experience into this position. And then clinically, I certainly see it with patients. I see it with my patients: they have to stop. I don’t moralize with them. I mean, I don't tell them that cheating on their wife is wrong. I don't tell them that going to prostitutes is wrong. I don't tell them that stealing from the company is wrong. I wait, sitting back in the bushes, until I see what the consequences are of cheating on the wife or stealing from the company. I watch what happens. Every time you do that, the migraines come. Every time you do that, the ulcers kick up. And I play a little naïve: “Seems like there's a connection between your being unfaithful to your wife and these terrible attacks of migraine headaches.” The patient gradually begins to come to understand that the wages of sin are death or pain or sickness or mistakes that lead to great losses. Whatever. That's what I point out.

(22:45) Jakob Lusensky: What led you to write the book? Obviously been thinking a lot about this. But you decided to write a book about it, and this book.

(22:55) Donald Carveth: Well, that's an interesting thing. I was always a peer-reviewed journal-article writer. As an academic, I never wrote a book. I was in my late sixties when I wrote that book. I had progressed through the ranks. I'd become a full professor, because I’d published a fair amount, at least one or two big articles a year. But I didn't—I had an inhibition—I never published my doctoral thesis. The idea of publishing a book intimidated me. And then a very strange thing happened in around twenty eleven or twelve, or I guess 2011.

I was teaching. I had this book by Eli Sagan on my bookshelf for many years. You know, you buy books. They've got great titles. They look good. You put them on the shelf or you don't get around to reading them. One day, for whatever reason—if I want to move into the paranoid schizoid position, I would say that God led me to take that book off the shelf—I usually don't think that way or talk that way, but sometimes—anyway I took the book down. I read it. It blew my socks off because Sagan had answered, addressed and answered, many of the things that had puzzled me about Freudian theory, bothered me for many years, especially the super ego issues. And I started teaching his book to my students and one day a student said, “So, who is this guy saying it, anyway?” And I was embarrassed. I didn't know who he was, really. So I went and did a search on the internet and I could find out nothing about him. He seemed to have no digital footprint at all. But finally, I came up with an address in New Jersey. So I wrote him a letter and then a week or so later, I'm sitting in my office and the phone rings. And this squeaky, “Hello Carveth this is Eli Sagan.” And we started talking. Every second Sunday, we had a phone call for a couple of hours.

I read through all of his big books and we talked about all of that and then he was reading my stuff. Next thing, I'm writing a book. I needed some unfinished business with a father. My father was a family doctor. He was a self-taught kind of intellectual guy, but he wasn't the real deal. Sagan was the real deal. You know, very impressive intellect. He'd written all of these big books. Suddenly, I'm writing a book. I needed that identification. I needed his blessing. And boy, did he ever give me his blessing. We started to disagree. He made the distinction between super-ego and conscience. Essentially, he threw the ball. I caught the ball, and I'm running with it.

Okay. I'm running with it, and he's saying, slow down, slow down, you’re going too far, you’re going too far with this distinction, you know. And he wasn't a trained analyst. He was an intellectual, but he was not a psychoanalyst. And I'm taking his distinction into psychoanalytic quarters, and he's thinking, “No.” And then suddenly, about three or four weeks before he died, I was up north, like barely had a cell signal, but he got a message through to me. He told me to read a particular chapter in Pelican’s History of Christian Theology. He had come across St. Paul. St. Paul's distinction between the law and the gospel. And he had recognized that his own distinction was—that his distinction between conscience and super-ego was echoing that. And he realized that I was running with this because I had a Christian background as well as a psychoanalytic background. Somehow, my reading of the New Testament had set me up to be ready to make that distinction. And then reading Pelican and so on had reinforced it. So that's how I came to write the book. Eli started me off, and then at the end, he gave me another push.

(27:23) Jakob Lusensky: Staying a little bit with law versus gospel and super-ego versus conscience. Translate it a bit, yeah?

(27:32) Donald Carveth: Yeah. Well, I mean my understanding of Jesus is precisely that he is an attacker of religion. He did a savage attack on the religion of his time, which happened to be Judaism and the temple. “Man is not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath is made for man.” He was constantly violating the Jewish law for humane purposes. He was a critic of the super-ego, the law. “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” he says to the mob who are stoning a woman caught in adultery. So Jesus is conscience rebelling against law. But for a time, I went overboard, and I joined Freud, Ferenczi, and Alexander, who said that the psychoanalytic cure is the complete elimination of the super-ego for a while. I went for that, but then I came back to the gospel, because Jesus says, “Think not that I come to abolish the law and the prophets. I come to fulfil them,” which I then interpret as, our goal is to subordinate the super-ego to the conscience. The super-ego must be disciplined by the conscience. We still need a super-ego. We need a book of rules. We need to know the law, but the law has to be subordinated to the conscience. Yeah.

(29:12) Jakob Lusensky: In your practice and with your patients, or within yourself, the differentiation between the two, is there anything you can say as a technique, as a sort of help on the way for people?

(29:26) Donald Carveth: I think the simplest way to think about it is that conscience is governed by love. And it speaks in the language of love. And there is a bite to conscience. But at the same time, as conscience is saying, “Don, you're on the wrong path. I'm not sleeping well, because my conscience is uneasy. You're on the wrong path, Don.” But that voice is also my father who will welcome me home and kill the fatted calf, and there will be a celebration because I heard him and I turned back onto the right path. So this is a loving conscience. I mean, when he reproaches me for being on the wrong path, there are tears in his eyes because he doesn't like reproaching the son he loves. It makes him very sad to have to see that his son has gone off, and he is delighted to welcome me back.

The super-ego is a sadist. One of my greatest personal images of the super-ego is from the great film, Fanny and Alexander. Who's the filmmaker? The famous filmmaker.

(30:44) Jakob Lusensky: Bergman. Ingmar Bergman.

(30:45) Donald Carveth: Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny. And Alexander. And so, the two children, the boy and the girl, their father dies and their mother marries this stuffy Lutheran pastor of some kind, of the kind that, you know, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” and he likes beating the children. And I wish that Ingmar Bergman had done a close-up on him when he's beating the children to reveal that he's got an erection. Because he's getting off on beating the children, ‘cause he's a sadist. That's my model of the super-ego: it speaks this moral language, but it really is fueled by the Id. This is pure Freud. Freud said the super-ego is Id aggression turned back against the ego. That's the first layer of the super-ego, Id hostility turned back on me. Second layer: internalization of the culture via the parental superegos. But what Freud fails to point out is that the culture that's internalized is racist, sexist, heterosexist, classist, etc. Freud gives us no critique of the contents of the super-ego, but it's basically ideological crap that fills the super-ego, you know. Not entirely. Look, some people go to church and what do they hear in church? They hear, “Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.” Every once in a while the super-ego says something coincident with conscience, and some people who are particularly healthy people, they have a super-ego that is almost entirely indistinguishable from conscience. That's a great situation to be in. You’re hearing the right message from both super-ego and conscience, because they coincide, never perfectly. With humans, nothing is ever perfect, obviously. But yeah, so I think, I think, when you hear the hate in the voice, the moral voice, when you hear the cruelty, you know you're dealing with super-ego.

(33:02) Jakob Lusensky: Yes.

(33:05) Donald Carveth: I think, and I’ve said, too, the patients depend on us to have a conscience. We mustn't moralize. We mustn't be super-egoish with patients. My classical colleagues, they may disapprove of my Christianity, but they know that—they know that I know that I must not be super-egoish with my patients. But the error that they fall into is because they've lost the distinction between super-ego and conscience.

(33:39) Jakob Lusensky: Hmm.

(33:40) Donald Carveth: They've not—they’re not able to recognize that while we mustn't be super-egoish, we do need, at times, to be the voice of conscience. We need to have a conscience, and every once in a while, we need to voice it.

(33:53) Jakob Lusensky: I think that's maybe where Jungians use the concept and the experience of the self. Jung also said that he saw Christ as a keeper of the self and I’m not saying that I fully agree with him—

(34:05) Donald Carveth: But I have to say that I agree with your interviewee Sean McGrath. I was very impressed with him. He's saying that Jesus is not an archetype. I think—oh, you asked why I chosen from Jung back to Freud. I think I forgot to say that even back then, I read Martin Buber’s essay on Jung. And Martin Buber, as a religious Jew, he put his finger right on the same thing that McGrath put his finger on. That Jung is a Gnostic, and Gnosticism is a heresy for both Judaism and for Christianity. And when you relocate God in the unconscious, you're relocating God in part of the self, and I wish I could quote it exactly. But one of my most favorite passages of all time is from G.K. Chesterton. And he's writing about what he calls the God within. He says, “Of all possible Gods, save me from the God within.” He says, “You all know how it works. Anyone who knows anyone from the Higher Thoughts Center will know how it works. When Jones comes to worship the God within, what that means is that Jones comes to worship Jones.” He says, you know, Christianity came to get us to worship the God without, not the God, within.

(35:39) Jakob Lusensky: I agree with you, there’s a lot one can critique. But I also believe that it's important to differentiate, because Jung didn't ever say that there's a God within, he said there's an image, an Imago Dei. There’s an image of God within. So there’s that. But then, of course, taking literally Jungianism and many of those ideas become, yeah, they become problematic. There is something about psychologizing religion and turning it into navel-gazing that can happen. But I do must say, in my experience, in my practice, I think that Jungian analysis, done right, helps people at times to find back and deepen their faith, you know.

(36:22) Donald Carveth: Ah, okay. But you're quite right. I respect what you're saying. You're absolutely right. And the same thing can be said about the Freudian tradition. People take Freud literally. I’m not a Lacanian, but one thing I appreciate about Lacan is that he metaphorizes psychoanalysis. It's not about that stupid little piece of flesh called the penis. It's about the phallus, which is a very important symbol. So he metaphorizes psychoanalysis and that's very important. Once having read Lacan, your understanding of Freud is quite different.
So I see the same would apply to Jung. You can take it literally or you can treat it more metaphorically and symbolically

(37:20) Jakob Lusensky: Moving forward to recent times, in 2020. And you published a paper, “Psychoanalysis is Spirituality.” And in that paper, you write that, “While others fail to practice what they preach, we, psychoanalysts, refuse to preach what we practice. We disguise our ethic of love. It needs a medical façade.” And further you write that “we lie to ourselves and others and call it mental health when it really amounts to salvation.”

(37:52) Donald Carveth: Yes. Yes.

(37:53) Jakob Lusensky: And you write—you describe it as a conversion.

(37:56) Donald Carveth: Well, I was asked just recently to speak to the Ottawa Psychoanalytic Society. And I'm, I've been thinking about the topic. And the title that I've come up with so far is “Transformation: Clinical Psychoanalysis as Deconstruction and Conversion.” That's the title of the paper. Two things. In deconstruction and conversion. Well, let me start with the conversion, because that's what you're asking. I mean, I think that in a deep psychoanalysis—and I think this is the difference between psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis—in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, we do a lot of things to help people cope with their anxiety, to relieve their depression, and so on and so forth, but it's more like repairing a house rather than gutting it and rebuilding it from the inside out. I think of a deep psychoanalysis as something like gutting an old house and rebuilding it from inside out. So we're talking about a radical transformation from—if I want to speak in religious terms—from Adam to Christ. Old Adam, the old sinner, to Christ. That's a conversion. I think there's a perfect correspondence here between that and trying to help a person, as Freud says, transcend narcissism in favor of object love.

I mean, all these people who think they're in love, but the person they're in love with simply stands for the self they were, like the old guy who falls in love with a young woman. She just represents his lost youth. He doesn't even know who she is, except her body is smooth instead of wrinkly. The self that I am or the self I would one day like to be. Why is she involved with him? Because to help a person move out of that field of narcissism into recognizing that other people are actually real, and beginning to actually care about their welfare. That's a—that’s a conversion. I mean that's a radical personality transformation, to help a person move out of the paranoid schizoid state, where life is a jungle and it's kill or be killed. That amazing show Succession. I mean, that show is about life in the paranoid schizoid position. Also life in late-stage capitalism. It's like rolling over a rock. That is a sinful—that’s what sin looks like. That's what hell looks like. We're trying to help save people from these hellish states, and they will continue to send themselves to hell, unless they decide to convert and be good.

And we're trying to help them achieve that. Not by sermonizing, not by wagging our fingers, not by reproaching, but by closely analyzing the consequences for them of their own choices, their own paths, that they're choosing. We help them see how they're putting themselves in hell, which opens up for them the option to stop putting themselves in hell. So, yeah, I think we are out to convert our patients. But in a very subtle and respectful and patient way.

(41:38) Jakob Lusensky: Hm. I think when we use that word, many people associate it also to religious conversion. And I'm thinking maybe, at least myself, I'm thinking of something very radical, you know, and it can be a conversion. But our work is so slow, and it takes such a long time, but conversion is still, that’s the word you would use for it. Somehow it’s a slow conversion—

(42:01) Donald Carveth: It’s a slow conversion, a gradual conversion. But I think it deserves, still—it’s not a sudden conversion, which is unlike Paul on the road to Damascus—but it ends up being—I think it can be so profound. It deserves the word. Because when you switch from an entirely self-interested approach to life, to grab grasping the need for sacrifice—to actually being able to sacrifice your self-interest out of loyalty and commitment to others, to say no to yourself—the ability to say no to yourself, which is the ability to be a good father to yourself or a good mother to yourself: “No, I'm not going to let myself have that pleasure or gratification, because I have loyalty and commitment over here”—you’re a very different person now.

(43:05) Jakob Lusensky: Well, a few months ago, I very much enjoyed the podcast interview or conversation that you had on Psychoanalysis On and Off the Couch with Harvey Schwartz, and at the end of that, he tries to summarize some of your insights and he uses the words, “Okay, if I understand you right,” he says, “an advanced civilization requires each of us to care about each other and care about our impact on each other.” And then you say, as a response. “I would make it more challenging than that by saying that the advance of civilization depends on finally coming to understand what was meant in the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the Fall of Man.” You also emphasize the importance of us needing to know how sinful we are as human beings. Could—

(43:53) Donald Carveth: I meant what I said. I agree with him, of course. He's right that we do need to develop a capacity to actually transcend narcissism and begin to care about the welfare of others, the welfare of the society, and so on. But I do believe that we need to be able to acknowledge our sinfulness. I always laugh because many years ago, I found a letter to the editor in the Toronto Globe and Mail and I clipped it out and I put it in a file folder in the library for my students to read. It’s a woman and she lost any religious interest she'd had as a teen, but now she's a mother of two young girls and she's not happy with the level of moral education that her daughters are receiving in the public-school system. So, to supplement that, she's been taking the girls around to various churches, looking for a church that has a nice nursery school that would teach the kids.

Okay, but you know, wherever she goes, the pastor or the minister or the priest and their service are all telling her she’s a sinner and she isn't. But, and I'm thinking, Here’s a woman who's convinced she's not a sinner. I can't get through two seconds without knowing I'm a sinner. I mean, I'm always sinning one way or another. Fortunately, as I've gotten older, the sins are diminishing in significance, but I'm still a sinner. I'm not just a sinner. But I am a sinner. That is what it is to be human—is to be a sinner. But in today's society, this culture of narcissism, people can't stand it. They get enraged at the idea that they should have to acknowledge. I think it's because of splitting, frankly. I think that especially very narcissistic and borderline-y kinds of people, they can't acknowledge any sin because everything becomes totalized. If they acknowledge a little bit of sin, pretty soon it’s going to go like ink in the water, and they're going to be all bad, and then they'll have to kill themselves. So they can't admit a little bit of badness because it will be totalized. So that's what I meant. I think the ability to move into that space where you have a very jaundiced view of yourself, a very suspicious view of yourself—I hear what I say, you know, and then I think a part of me—and my wife has even more of a jaundiced view of me than I do, and so she helps with this—“Really, Don? You just said that—really? Come on”—you have to be suspicious of yourself. Because we're liars. We are liars, and we're selfish. And we can make great progress, but never total progress. The devil is always whispering in our ear.

(47:13) Jakob Lusensky: The importance to realize that we are sinners, but I'm also reminded of what you just shared about the patient of yours who feels he is a bad person, he’s a bad—

(47:25) Donald Carveth: Yeah. He's totalized it, right? That's the different solution. Yeah, let's avoid that. That's another split. I mean look, some people are very bothered by an excessive sense of sinfulness. Certain psychotic patients. A guy was found living in a cardboard box in a ravine here in Toronto, he’d gone off his meds, and he believed he stank. He was a stinker. He had to retreat from human society because he gave off such a foul smell. Now, living in a cardboard box for months, he probably did start to smell. But that's a psychotic delusion of foulness, right? The patient I mentioned is not nearly that severe. It’s a mild neurotic-level delusion of having been a disappointment or being rotten at the core. It's not on the psychotic level, but it's all just a matter of degree. So no, I mean, I don't want, when I say we have to admit that we are sinners, I don't want us walking around beating on ourselves. I want us to have a forgiving attitude towards ourselves. I want us to have an ironic attitude. Irony towards oneself: being able to laugh at ourselves and see the ridiculousness of all of our stances and self-images and whatever, our theories of ourselves. It's a more forgiving, ironic, humorous, “Of course I’m still tempted,” et cetera. Yeah.

(48:59) Jakob Lusensky: Mmmm. Yeah I’m also thinking about this to be a sinner without belief. Or you’re a sinner without God. It's also helping people to a pretty empty space for some people, yeah? To realize this sinful nature, but to move from there to the more forgiving.

(49:23) Donald Carveth: Oh, absolutely, you don’t want people facing their sinfulness unless at the same time, they see the clear possibility, the love of a father welcoming them home like the prodigal son. “Yeah, you're sinning, but you could be good. You could love yourself. You could be loved by the people you care about. Why don't you avail yourself of this available love?” No, I would never want to point someone’s sinfulness out to them if they don't have an image of another light of being lovable to themselves and to others, of course. Yeah, but I don't frame it as God. I don't have any supernatural sense of a God. If someone asks me nowadays, “Don, do you believe in God or don't you?” I say, “Yes, I do. And no, I don’t.” And then they say, “You can't have it both ways.” I say to them, “You haven't understood Freud.” The Freudian Revolution is that we are all split. We are all contradictory and, of course, in saying that, he's in touch with the New Testament because the New Testament says we're all split between old Adam and Christ. So here again, Christianity and Freudianism completely correspond. There is no unitary stuff. Freud was embarrassed about this. He was—he was ashamed of his interest in numerology. And he of course he projected his own—those kinds of mystical—onto Jung. And then he got rid of Jung because he couldn't own that as a part of himself.

So, I have a paranoid schizoid position. I visit it frequently. And when I went for surgery, I was praying before the surgery, and I woke up and there was a Muslim family and of course—the grandparents, the aunts, the—like, there must have been fifteen people in the space next to me in the recovery room—and I'm coming out of morphine and they're all praying in Arabic and I'm thinking, “Oh God, I’m so glad they're there.” It was like I was praying with them, and I felt the presence of God and, but I don't believe in God, but apparently, I do believe in—okay? I do and I don't. That's the only honest position on this, it seems to me.

(52:17) Jakob Lusensky: Well that reminds me a little bit of the position that your fellow Canadian Jordan B. Peterson seems to take today, someone who speaks more and more about, yeah, Christianity. And really explores these questions in depth. I don't know if you have any—have you had any thoughts about him?

(52:34) Donald Carveth: I mean, it's very complicated. I supported his rebellion against attempts by the university or the society to legally impose this new way of speaking when it comes to trans issues. I thought he was very courageous to speak up about that.

He was invited to give a talk this university, where my son is doing his doctorate, and to my son's horror, there was a huge group of people trying to shout him down and deprive him of free speech at the university. To my son's horror, it was the social work department, largely, that was trying to shut him down. That's to me, horrific. I'm an old-fashioned supporter of free speech. A university is a place for free speech. You may hate what the guy is saying, but you defend his right to say it. So I'm with Jordan on that.

But I don't like his obscurantism. I mean, he talks about what he calls the cultural Marxists. He never defines what he means. He doesn't have any adequate understanding of what Marxism is, or the history of Marxism. He doesn't seem to understand that Marxism is an expression of Messianic Judaism, has its roots in the prophetic biblical tradition. You know, I think he—there’s a fair amount of ignorance. He's a smart guy in many ways. But there's a—he’s insufficiently responsible as a scholar in various ways, in my opinion. I haven't made a close study of him.

(54:17) Jakob Lusensky: Yeah, I mean, I think—if I can speak for us Jungians—if I can speak so—he’s been the most important person somehow on the field the last ten to fifteen years, because he's very often referring to Jung, you know, and he’s somewhere very close to Jung’s position in his wrestling with Christianity and with the Christian faith. But he's not, he doesn't seem safe as a Christian, but it seems like he's very much, especially lately, engaging deeply with these questions, and he did this biblical series, which is available on YouTube, which I did find profound and intriguing, because he does have that—which I also feel like you have—he has this capacity to use analogies and to make the theories come alive, and that’s a beauty.

(55:04) Donald Carveth: Well he’s a real presence, and he’s had a big influence, maybe largely for the good, on a lot of young people. I'm going to say something that revealed my own lingering sinful narcissism. If Jordan was really smart, he would come to me for analysis. (Jakob’s laughter.) I think I could help him. Maybe he could help me. Maybe he could help me move in that Jungian direction I have failed to move in. I think it would be a very interesting dialogue.

(55:39) Jakob Lusensky: (Through recovered laugher) I am sure. I am sure.

(55:41) Donald Carveth: But I would have to be the analyst. He would have to be the patient (laughs heartily).

(55:45) Jakob Lusensky: That makes sense to me.