Freud and Suspicion

Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. This year, then, is his 170^th birthday year. That’s not a significant marker, but having come across that fact, I was reminded of all that I read about Freud during the 150^th anniversary, in 2006, when we were given many anecdotes about his life. Here is one that stuck with me. One of Freud’s biographers reported that it was one that Freud loved to tell.

The story was about an insurance salesman who had a fatal disease and was on his deathbed.  The man was an avowed atheist, and his family members, who were devout Lutherans, were concerned about his soul. So, they called upon their pastor to visit the dying man, in the hope that the dying man would experience an end-of-life conversion. The family members were pleased when their loved one warmly greeted the pastor, and they waited hopefully outside the man’s bedroom as he and the pastor talked together behind a closed door. As the minutes passed, their hopes increased. The two men were obviously having a lengthy conversation, which meant that some sort of serious exchange was taking place. When the pastor emerged from the room, however, they were deeply disappointed. The dying salesman was still an atheist, but the pastor had been sold a new insurance policy! Freud’s point in telling that story was to warn his disciples not to be talked out of their convictions by competing schools of thought that he considered to be near death.

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, well known for his “hermeneutics of suspicion,” famously designated Freud, Marx and Nietzsche as “the masters of suspicion” for their focus, as atheists, on the ways religious believers fail to be aware of hidden biases at work in their beliefs. The evangelical philosopher Merold Westphal elaborated on Ricoeur’s views in his insightful book Suspicion and Faith. What I find especially helpful in Westphal’s book is the emphasis captured in his subtitle: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism. We can benefit spiritually, Westphal argues, by employing suspicion, as a reflective process, to engage in an honest examination of the motives at work in our professed beliefs.

While taking Westphal’s counsel seriously in my own life, I have to confess that I have taken some delight in turning Freud’s use of suspicion back on himself.  He obviously wanted us to see the dying atheist as clever and the pastor as inept. But here is an alternative version of the story.  Insurance policies are not in themselves bad things, and it may be that the pastor actually needed one. He accepted in good faith the family’s invitation to visit their dying loved one, even though he was not hopeful of bringing the man to faith. But he prayed that he would do his best to engage the man in a loving conversation about the issues of life and death, and if it seemed non-manipulative, he would see if there was an opportunity to respect the man’s expertise by asking for counsel about insurance policies. The conversation was a friendly one, and he agreed to an option offered by the agent.  In considering this version of the story, Freud would be applying the hermeneutics of suspicion to his own way of depicting religious believers.

Still, there is a good lesson in Freud’s story for Christians. We are often taken in by the very viewpoints we ought to be challenging.

When I decided, as a young person who felt called to an academic vocation, to engage in university studies in philosophy, a well-meaning family friend wrote me a long letter warning me against my chosen program. What I was planning to do was an act of disobedience to God, he said. Had I not read the Apostle Paul’s warning in Colossians: “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition”?

I appreciated his concern for my soul, but I did not see myself as disobeying the Apostle’s counsel. In looking for an insurance policy, it is good not to be taken in by a scam. Similarly, the best way to keep from being taken captive by false philosophical ideas is to be clear about true ideas. It is much easier for us to be deceived by worldly systems of thought if we have not engaged in clear thinking about the Bible’s worldview. The Apostle’s warning is still a wise one. There are many voices today calling us to pattern our lives “according to human tradition.” More than ever, we need to be discerning Christians, applying the hermeneutic of suspicion to our motives, to gain an honest understanding of our faith. Too many dying systems of thought are trying to sell us insurance policies these days.