“Pope Francis Sought Psychoanalysis at 42,” the Times headline read.
Other outlets treated the news more salaciously—“Pope Reveals,” “Pope
Admits.” Some noted that the psychoanalyst in question was Jewish, or
that she was a woman. Below the headlines, though, the stories were the
same: a French sociologist named Dominique Wolton had published a book
of interviews with the Pope,
and, buried on page 385, amid discussions of the migrant crisis and the
clash with Islam, America’s wars and Europe’s malaise, was the
four-decade-old scoop that had made editors sit up. “I consulted a
Jewish psychoanalyst,” Francis told Wolton. “For six months, I went to
her home once a week to clarify certain things. She was very good. She
was very professional as a doctor and a psychoanalyst, but she always
knew her place.”

Almost immediately, the news drew venom from the Pope’s detractors. A
writer for the Web site Novus Ordo Watch, a mouthpiece of the
ultra-conservative Catholic fringe—its slogan is “Unmasking the
Modernist Vatican II Church”—insisted that Francis’s treatment by a
“female Jewish Freudian” was “a really big smoking gun,”
incontrovertible evidence that his “mind is saturated with Jewish
ideas.” This reaction, and others like it, were a useful reminder that
the Catholic Church was for many decades a bulwark against the great cresting wave that Freud set flowing from Berggasse 19, in Vienna. Rome’s enmity was partly a reaction to the doctor’s own fierce
hostility to religion, including his infamous denigration of faith in
God as an infantile father projection. To Catholics and other believers, Freudianism—the caricatured version of it that they saw,
anyway—epitomized the scientific materialism that elevated the
unconscious over conscience, compulsion over free will, and sex
obsession over transcendental longing. Even into the nineteen-sixties,
lay Catholics were discouraged, and clergy were forbidden, from
undergoing psychoanalysis.

As in so many other realms, it took the Second Vatican Council, held
between 1963 and 1965, to reintroduce common sense into the Catholic
attitude toward rational introspection. Indeed, in focussing on what was
valuable about Freud’s vision, the Church could retrieve some of the
best elements of its own tradition, going back past great spiritual
directors such as Ignatius Loyola and Teresa of Avila to Augustine of
Hippo, who, with his “Confessions,” opened the mind of the West to the
healing (and sanctifying) power of “concentrated attention” on the “most
secret caverns” of memory, remorse, and self-reflection. So, after
Vatican II, Roman Catholicism embarked on a transforming encounter with
Freud and the multivalent culture he inspired. This occurred even as
Freudians themselves were undertaking the project of rigorous
self-criticism, aiming, for example, to leave the Austrian founder’s
misogyny behind.

Psychoanalysis can be understood as the guided composition of an
intensely personal story that makes sense of otherwise fragmentary
experience: the patient discovers order in otherwise dispersed memories,
sensations, and feelings. But, if psychoanalysis is a creative mode of
reimagining, so, as the Church discovered, is religion, with its idea of
salvation—history headed somewhere—as an antidote to the absurd cycle of
mere mortality. It’s not incidental here that “salvation” comes from the
Latin word for “health.” The concept was once understood as rescue from
eternal damnation, but in the Age of Anxiety salvation amounts to rescue
from meaninglessness. There are more ways to that than falling on one’s
knees. Yes, there is also reclining on the couch.

Because the Church learned from the encounter with Freud, and from the
real “in treatment” experience of legions of its own members, it yielded
its claim to primal sovereignty over human inwardness. Religious people,
including Catholics, came to see that due regard for the unconscious can
open into a more rightly formed conscience; that reckoning with
compulsions and complexes may narrow the apparent range of free will but
can also sharpen one’s sense of what moral agency actually requires;
that neurotic scruples indulged in the name of “being good” can make
authentic virtue impossible.

As for Freud’s hostility toward religion, that came to seem less
threatening when a closer look at his aggressive atheism showed it up as
shallow and misinformed—not unlike his attitude toward women. The God
whom Freud debunked was not the God of Biblical faith. Indeed, the
Bible’s God, invisible and transcendent, provided an opening to the very
same oceanic unseen of which Freud was a modern tribune. A believer,
learning from Freud, could acknowledge that his faith was grounded in
wish projection even as he insisted that the wish itself was also a
revelation. Yes, he could say, there is no evidence of the God I long
for, except, perhaps—if I choose to see it this way—my very longing.
After all, who put it there?

Jorge Mario Bergoglio appears to have undergone such an experience
before he became Pope. When he started psychoanalysis, he was in the
last year of his tenure as provincial superior of the Jesuits in
Argentina. The military junta’s Dirty War was raging, and it had put Bergoglio to the test.
“I made hundreds of errors,” Francis told an interviewer, in 2013.
“Errors and sins.” He described the period as “a time of great interior
crisis.” Lucky him that he found a therapist who, mostly with the
acutely focussed and patently empathetic listening that characterizes a good analyst, could enable his return to wholeness. “She helped me a lot,” he told Wolton. That the doctor was Jewish, as Francis mentioned to Wolton not quite off-handedly, is
indeed a salient detail. As the anti-Semitic bile of Francis’s
reactionary Catholic critics suggests, Freud’s Jewishness, and by
extension the Jewishness of numerous of his disciples, was partly to
blame for the Catholic antipathy toward psychoanalysis. To the Church,
Freud was a modern avatar of the negative-positive bipolarity that had
long characterized the Christian understanding of Judaism—law against
grace, flesh against spirit, greed against generosity, synagogue against
church, and, ultimately, the unconscious against conscience.

But that has all changed. Pope Francis, in his brief and passing note of
autobiography—self-accepting but in no way self-aggrandizing—displayed
respect for the rational inwardness of psychotherapy. He displayed
readiness, as a vowed celibate, to reveal himself to a woman. He
displayed the importance of knowing when to ask for help. He displayed
easy recognition of a Jew as a moral equal. The surprise in all this is
that anyone should be surprised. Once again, in showing us what a
distance Catholics have travelled, this good man is showing us the
distance that they, and perhaps all of us, must travel yet, until we
arrive at the place of no surprise.