Of Saints and Sinners

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

When someone regularly quotes God in their daily utterances we usually mark it as an unnecessary vanity or an irritating personality trait. Not everyone believes in God. And not everyone wants to have it thrust at them as the only possible way of living one’s life.
That’s why it becomes such a point of fascination when people who obsessively promote their religious beliefs, and by implication their special relationship with God, fall from their carefully constructed state of grace. We have a recent case of it with a politician in Northern Ireland; one that involves all the necessary ingredients for public scandal - infidelity, sexual impropriety, secret financial dealings and all delivered in a setting of power and privilege. Once again we find ourselves considering the fate of someone who was quick to point out the sins of others but who now finds themselves in the place of sinner.
There have been many other examples. Think of the number of high profile American evangelist preachers – men whose careers have been predicated on that ‘special understanding of’ and ‘special relationship with’ God – who have been exposed as hypocritical in their private lives.
Even closer to home, think of the number of priests who have had and continue to have sexual affairs even though this is supposedly prohibited to them. And that’s before we include those priests and religious orders who sexually and physically abused generations of children, a form of sexual perversion that requires an even more specialised perspective, although it is related.
Human frailty is a fact of life but when you stand back from the glaring contradiction at the heart of these behaviours, it is as if the pressure of putting oneself, or being put there by others, in a position of moral authority comes with a built-in danger of falling from that pedestal.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, the process by which this happens has been part of the theory for over a hundred years. In 1907, Freud wrote a paper called Obsessions and Religion in which he said that ‘complete backslidings into sin are more common among pious people’ than they are among the ordinary population.* What’s more, he went on to say that this generally gives rise to a whole new impetus for penance, effectively beginning the cycle of extreme religiosity all over again.
What, then, does the theory say as to why this type of situation arises in the first place? Well let’s look at the popular understanding first. We usually see a person who has lived an impeccably ordered and upright life engaging in an activity that is morally at odds with this usual pattern. Generally speaking, we explain it away on the basis that the pressure of work, the loneliness of the position, the effort of being so pure, or whatever, led them more than the rest of us to being especially prone and susceptible to temptation. All well and good.
Psychoanalysis, as you might expect, sees things differently. And bear in mind we are talking here about people who have a more intense relationship with religion and the concept of God than the general population. From a psychoanalytic perspective, therefore, an extreme religious belief – and we see many examples of this in the world today – is a form of obsessional neurosis.
Obsessional neurotics, among many other things, are characterised by compulsive behaviours and self-imposed prohibitions that bar them from a whole range of ideas and actions they consider to be ‘bad’. The person behaves on the face of it as if motivated by the purest of intentions. At another level, however, they also exhibit the same set of behaviours that you would see in a person wracked by guilt.
Freud honed in on the sense of guilt and suggested that it was unconscious and was the pious individual’s response to the earliest psychological experience of sexual impulses. These responses are then revived and renewed in later life as newer temptations arise and are pushed away equally vigorously. The guilt also carries with it a lurking sense of anxiety, combined with the expectation of punishment, and these must also be warded off at all cost, usually by ceremonial ritual.
It is the sense of guilt, as far as Freud is concerned, that allows the pious to say that they know they are miserable sinners at heart. So while their actions may send out a different signal publicly, all the praying, proselytising, ritualising and quoting of Scripture are personally directed defensive or protective measures.
The essential point at work is the renunciation of the underlying instinctual life that exists in all of us, in this case the sexual instinct. It is a suppression kept in place by force of will and supported by ritualised behaviours and the repetition of religious doctrine.
But instincts are much like a strong flowing river and Freud points out that any attempt at their suppression is usually inadequate. That is why we see so many examples of those who live on the moral high ground falling to earth. Their chosen way of embracing religious fervour is directly related to their experience of and relationship with their own underlying instincts, again predominantly sexual.
The irony is that despite living lives that bring them so close to the things that make us human, few of these fallen leaders seem to emerge any the wiser for it.
The best moral leaders are those who not only recognise their human frailties but who can manage to accept them and assimilate them into their journey to whatever god they believe in. History shows us that the most influential religious people are those who have managed to go to the heart of their own selves and accept what they have seen there.

* Freud, S., 1907, Standard Edition 9, Vintage – The Hogarth Press, London, p. 125.