Horror and Its Aftermath: Reconsidering Theology and Human Experience (Emerging Scholars) 9781451492682, 9781506416908, 1451492685

Table of contents :
Horror and Its Aftermath
Contents
Acknowledgments
Camel, Lion, Child: Narrating Human Suffering and Salvation
The Least of These: A Narration of Human Anxiety in Early Childhood
Toward a Theological Engagement of Early Childhood
“. . . the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him” Marilyn McCord Adams: Horror and Salvation
Radical Hope: This World and the Next
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Horror and Its Aftermath

Horror and Its Aftermath Reconsidering Theology and Human Experience

Sally Stamper

Fortress Press Minneapolis

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH Reconsidering Theology and Human Experience

Copyright © 2016 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights/ or write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.

Cover design: Alisha Lofgren

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Print ISBN: 978-1-4514-9268-2 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-1690-8

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.

Manufactured in the U.S.A. This book was produced using Pressbooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML.

Dedicated to Cola Barr Craig Jackson Stamper of blessed memory (1915–2005)

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix xiii

1.

Camel, Lion, Child: Narrating Human Suffering and Salvation

1

2.

The Least of These: A Narration of Human Anxiety in Early Childhood

37

3.

Toward a Theological Engagement of Early Childhood

83

4.

“. . . the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him” Marilyn McCord Adams: Horror and Salvation

143

5.

Radical Hope: This World and the Next

187

Bibliography

215

Index

225

Acknowledgments

This book arises directly from my dissertation at the University of Chicago Divinity School, where I became a theologian. Kathryn Tanner was my first teacher there and has been an extraordinary advisor and friend since those very first days in her “God in Relation to the World: Salvation” seminar. She was not only inspiring, but stalwart in her support of my early work, unflagging in her encouragement of my recourse both to clinical theory and to literature that is new to theological reflection, and it was she who suggested I pursue this project more vigorously and in particular that I explore its implications for eschatology. She afforded me the latitude to play with ideas and connections that eventually became my argument, and she encouraged me to make the dissertation a book, rather than publishing a series of articles. Moreover, when my own encounter with horror threatened to derail my graduate work, she remained a constant support, believing for me until I believed, myself, that I could get it back on track. Her confidence in my potential as a theologian and her interest in my project are largely responsible for my completing my graduate training and now continuing on into a career as an academic theologian. I am profoundly grateful for her guidance, dry wit, incisive theological eye, and friendship. Richard Rosengarten also was a singularly important presence throughout my graduate education, as both mentor and teacher, and introduced me to the scholarship of religion and literature. I have fond recollections of him, seated behind an impressively large oak desk on ix

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which stood, amid more traditionally scholarly volumes, a stack of picture books that he was reading in preparation for our discussion of my work. I often had cause to wonder how he seemed to know so much more incisively than did I what I was trying to say, and I will not forget his steadfast support for my recourse to sources that others questioned or the many occasions on which he made my time as a graduate student less daunting. Anne Carr, now of blessed memory, pushed me—gently but persistently, as was her wont—to deploy popular literature as a source for theological reflection. (She always hoped for a theological engagement of Agatha Christie, a project that remains simmering on the back burner of my mind.) It took a number of years and considerable work on a different path before I came around to her way of seeing things. I also am grateful to Susan Schreiner for the ground that is the magisterial Reformation, to David Tracy (who assured me—during an unsettling time when the contours of my project seemed particularly fuzzy—that it was a thought experiment and therefore a legitimate scholarly undertaking), and to Josh Kellman—a valued clinical colleague long before I decided to study theology, who generously brought his expertise to my project, the psychoanalytic voice among the scholars of religion. The late Herman Sinaiko was among the first friends to urge me to pursue doctoral work in theology, and eventually I became his teaching assistant in the Humanities Core at the University of Chicago. Every time I introduce students to one of the texts I watched him teach, I look down at my notes and hear his voice. He taught me to respect undergraduates, to expect from them—from the very first day—their best work, and to give them a break, already. John Howell also has been an exceptional colleague and friend, an insightful critic, and a kind face in weary times—and he is among those readers who push me toward clarity of argument and language. Above all, Janet and Brian Hoffman have been steadfast friends since long before I decided to become a theologian, peerless in their encouragement, practical support, counsel, and friendship. They and their extended family have

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embraced me and my work in an extraordinary way, for which my words of appreciation are not sufficient. This project came to fruition during my appointment as a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the University Core at Seton Hall University, directed by Anthony Sciglitano. Tony’s encouragement and oft-repeated admonition to “finish the book” were key to my submitting the proposal to Fortress. Now, as this manuscript goes to press, I have completed my first year as an assistant professor of contemporary Christian thought in the Religion and Philosophy Department at Capital University. I am grateful for the enthusiastic welcome my work has received here from faculty and students, and especially for the support my colleagues in Religion and Philosophy have offered as I make final revisions while also juggling our shared teaching and service commitments. Finally, special thanks to Marilyn McCord Adams, who graciously read and responded to this manuscript in the final stages before publication, offering not only a comment for the cover, but also extensive, thoughtful explications of a number of points, clarification of others, and correction of several details, for which I am very grateful. While we differ on several points, I clearly build on her groundbreaking insights, and it was Adams’s work that first led me to a closer consideration of divine responsibility for what she so aptly describes as horror-participation. Anyone who has read her work is well aware of her pastoral and theological commitments to human experience and to better understanding of God’s goodness in the light of human suffering. I was not able to incorporate the full breadth of Professor Adams’s comments into this manuscript, but I hope the conversation will continue. Theology was the family business in which I grew up. My father, Robert Lansing Stamper, was a Presbyterian minister and a Navy and Marine Corps chaplain, and he was awarded one of the very early doctoral degrees in what some now call pastoral psychology. His experience of the horror of combat, his ruminations and sermons on human fallenness and frailty, and his faith in the complex grace of

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God, shaped my own beliefs and inform my theology. He also gave me a love for the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where he was born, and he provided us a place there that continues to be a cherished refuge. I have dedicated this book to my mother, Cola Barr Craig Jackson Stamper, whose name itself evokes the legacy she carried through this world and into the next. She was a genteel, intelligent, and highly educated woman of incomparable grace, energy, charity, and perseverance, a mean bridge player who could rock the Charleston, and the best kind of Christian: devoted, engaged, well informed biblically and theologically, no one’s fool, and unfailingly kind. She taught me to look to the future with radical hope and—in the (uncharacteristically crude!) words of her quintessentially Southern grandmother—to spit on my hands and take a fresh grip when I came to the end of my rope. In response to the news that I had been admitted to the graduate study of theology, she immediately exclaimed, “I hate theologians. They ruin my stories.” No surprise, then, that narrative is at the center of my work and that I strive always to respect her—and others’—stories.

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At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered [Moses] and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took her flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when he let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.”

Exodus 4:24-26 (NJPS)

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Camel, Lion, Child: Narrating Human Suffering and Salvation

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 1 Cor. 13:111 Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I now tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Theodicy: Theological Meaning Making and Human Suffering One of the most haunting theological questions, for believers and theologians alike, asks how we can account for a loving, omniscient, and omnipotent divine creator, given the evil and concomitant suffering that are contingencies of human existence. The broad form of the problem is reflected in a host of specific observations: What kind of God commands a faithful follower to sacrifice his son? How can just people reconcile their proclamation of a just and merciful God 1. All biblical citations are from the New Revised Standard Version, unless otherwise noted.

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with the God who hardens Pharaoh’s heart, ultimately to the point of imposing the death of all firstborns as one of the plagues used to free the Israelite slaves in Egypt—a narrative detail so horrible that it is memorialized in the Passover Seder, when Jews affirm that the suffering of the Egyptians precludes complete joy in their celebration of freedom? How does the survivor of tragedy that takes the lives of others live with the message that God has saved her for some special purpose, given the implication that there was no special purpose for the lives of the dead? Most dramatically for Christians, what kind of God sends a Son to die a torturous death, overwhelmed with a sense of forsakenness, in order to redeem humankind from a sin committed incalculable generations before, at its very origin? Nonbelievers not uncommonly cite this paradox as the basis for their rejection of the existence of God. Non-Christians often cite it as the illogical “truth” that betrays a fallacy at the core of Christian doctrine. It becomes a plaintive cry from believers who are suffering themselves or are witness to the suffering of others. The psalms, from which comes Jesus’ cry of forsakenness, are replete with prayers begging God to offer explanation, as well as relief.2 Job’s story—the only Old Testament narrative in which “the Satan” is named and embodied—lays theodicy squarely at God’s feet. Job demands an explanation from God, having refused either to curse God or to falsely repent for a sin he knows does not exist. The Lord answers Job out of a whirlwind, with language dripping in sarcasm: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? ... Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it?3

2. See Matt. 27:45-46 and Psalm 22, for example. 3. Job 38:4-5, 12-13.

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For many believers, the import of God’s harsh response to Job’s pleas is paradoxically comforting: it affirms, at least, that there is no human rationale for who suffers and how much. For others, the proclamation of otherness in God’s response is too horrible to contemplate fully. Martin Luther, who developed a particularly ominous construction of divine hiddenness in his treatment of theodicy, was an accomplished exegete, a scholar of Old Testament scripture, and wrote extensive Bible commentaries. However, Luther, who names the hidden God “abyss,” never wrote a commentary on Job. One imagines, with theologian David Tracy, that for Luther, Job simply “cut too close to the bone.”4 Struggling with the problem—or mystery—of evil and human suffering, Christian thinkers have tried to make meaning of the inexplicable through narratives of sin and grace. Methodologically, this long and complex tradition of making meaning comprises historical, systematic, and constructive theology, in addition to practical theology, which speaks directly to the needs of the faithful and their clergy. Sources for theological analysis and reflection come from a broad array of contexts and genres: scripture, confessional literature, secular literature, the arts generally, and—increasingly —popular culture, as well as philosophy and critical theory. At the heart of this wide-ranging theological speculation are questions about the nature and source of human experience, in particular human suffering, and of the relationship of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer—to the origins of human suffering and to redemption from the consequences of that suffering. This book approaches the problem of evil from a psychologically informed hermeneutic. It addresses the need for psychological sophistication as well as theological rigor in Christian accounts of divine culpability (or lack thereof) for the exigencies of human existence and of the possibility of human redemption from the suffering that inheres in what Paul Tillich calls the human situation. 4. David Tracy, unpublished comment in “The Hidden God,” co-taught with Susan Schreiner at the University of Chicago Divinity School.

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The project builds on and responds critically to Christian theologians’ common appropriation of psychological constructs and language, often implicitly and apparently without full recognition of the nature and force of the psychological—especially the clinical— presuppositions at work. In short, I contend that many Christian theologians write in these psychological terms, making use of psychological constructs, with inadequate understanding of human psychology. I assert that a flawed mastery of clinical theory, as opposed to the critical theory that commonly informs theological research, has given rise to Christian accounts of suffering and redemption that too often are psychologically destructive, failing to address the human condition in ways that both resonate with the realities of human existence and offer meaningful recourse to Christian understandings of healing grace. My aim, then, is to articulate the groundwork for a fresh alternative that is faithful to Christian thought and understood through a clinically informed hermeneutic. The book thus engages two closely related questions. First, how can Christian theologians best understand and narrate human suffering and its relationship to God and faith? Second, and more specifically, how can theologians best relate human suffering and its consequences to divine salvation? I approach these ancient questions with the presupposition that psychological—and more particularly psychoanalytic—language and theory are more effectively appropriated from a perspective that is clinical, as well as critical, in focus. As noted, theologians, like other scholars, commonly write from a position of implicit (or assumptive) expertise in this sister discipline without any clinical expertise, as if a psychoanalytic hermeneutic, arising from theoretical familiarity, is sufficient for accurate and effective appropriation. Affirming the long theological tradition of attention to human personhood, particularly as it arises after the nineteenthcentury turn to the subject, I aim to address weaknesses in theological appropriations of psychoanalysis. I capitalize in particular on retrospection as a means by which we seek to understand remembered suffering, a methodology on which both theology (especially, but not

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exclusively narrative theology) and psychoanalysis rely. I build my argument around the human experiences and the consequent choices that shape our participation in and response to evil. Methodologically, I develop two innovative sources for constructive theology—early childhood development and literature for young children—which I then bring to bear on an exemplary contemporary soteriology. I begin by gesturing toward a theology of early childhood in the narrative tradition, proposing object relations theories of human development as a new and fruitful source for theologians who engage human psychology. I supplement that discussion in a turn to narrative as a constructive tool, developing a critical reading of picture books that address the young children whose lives and experience I engage developmentally. I bring both of these methods, psychological and literary, to bear on my critical reading of Marilyn McCord Adams’s soteriology, which I present as a significant exemplar of contemporary theologies of redemption. Theologies of Human Psychology: Foundations in Mysticism and Augustine Premodern Christian thought is not “psychological” in the contemporary social scientific sense, and the scriptural and patristic significations of psychē (often translated “psyche” or “psychology”) are absent strong correspondence to the contemporary disciplinary domain or even to the proto-disciplinary thought of the nineteenth century. In the original Greek, psychē refers to the soul, roughly speaking, or to that which enlivens being. In the New Testament, for example, psychē is closer in meaning to the Hebrew nephesh, a living being. Subsequent patristic texts generally use psychē in a more technical sense, related to its Platonic signification. Plotinus, for example—whose third-century philosophy was a key influence in Christian neo-Platonic thought—designates the upper level (the Universal Soul) of the two-tiered soul, psychē, and the lower, embodied tier, physis (Nature), both of which transcend visible creation. 5 Language notwithstanding, however, the Christian canon narrates 5

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and engages the robust range of human emotion and behavior that today are included under the umbrella of “psychology.” Both the Old and New Testaments recount human foible and disgrace, happiness and triumph, guilt and forgiveness. The gospels recount Jesus’ response to critical and varied social and personal contexts, his own and others’, and the Pauline epistles offer socioculturally nuanced portraits of new convert communities, informed by differing religious and social values. Postcanonically, a metaphysical psychology emerges in early Christian thought. From its foundations, Christian mysticism, for example, can be read from the perspective of a metaphysical psychology. Furthermore, while the mystical texts themselves do not engage human psychology in the modern sense, they gesture toward it, and contemporary scholarship on mysticism retrospectively identifies mystical experiences as psychological, at least in part. Bernard McGinn describes Plotinus as the subtlest of the ancient writers on “the psychology of mystical states with their complex passages between the consciousness of duality and unity,” and he includes an entire section on comparativist and psychological approaches to mysticism in the first volume of his authoritative series.6 Speaking of later Christian mysticism (after the seventeenth century), McGinn cites Michel de Certeau’s articulation of an analogical relationship between the increasingly “scientific” mystical tradition of individual experience and psychoanalysis itself.7 Nonetheless, there is a clear distinction between the inward focus of traditional Christian mysticism and the introspection of contemporary psychoanalysis, perhaps most clearly understood in teleological terms. The mystic turns inward toward union of the self and the divine, while the traditional analysand pursues self-knowledge in the externalizing context of the therapeutic dyad. Furthermore, while both practices are grounded in an introspective process, only the mystic hopes to find actualization in the beatific vision that arises from union of self and 5. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (London: SCM, 1992), 46. The other transcendent levels are the One and Intellect. 6. McGinn, Foundations of Mysticism, 45 and 326ff. 7. Ibid., 312.

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divine. Moreover, whereas psychoanalysis emphasizes the subjective continuity of child and adult, mysticism reflects the essentially exclusive focus on adults and adulthood of patristic and medieval theological anthropology. In early Christian thought, in particular, Jesus’ attention to little children—commanding that they be allowed to come to him and pointing to them as models of the kingdom of heaven itself—is singular in its tacit acknowledgment of the human subjectivity of children.8 Augustine’s Confessions bridges these distinctions between earlier Christian thought and contemporary theological appropriations of psychology. It is groundbreaking in terms of self-reflection, retrospective self-analytic narrative, and serious theological attention to childhood. In this testimonial on his life and associated exegetical and speculative thought, Augustine lays out a remarkably contemporary outline of human development, beginning in infancy and progressing through childhood and adolescence to adulthood. He describes behaviors and emotional responses typical of the progressive stages of development in terms that vividly evoke contemporary anxieties, challenges, stressors, and accomplishments. His narrative highlights the hungry infant’s intense frustration, the schoolboy’s confused resentment of parents who do not ally themselves with him against harsh treatment at school, an ambivalent child’s confusion between identification with authority and an emerging sense of fair play, and a teenage boy’s sheer pleasure at getting away with petty theft in the company of friends. In his meditations on his adult life, Augustine recounts the unexpected and unbidden love that a parent feels for the child of an unwanted pregnancy, devastating grief at the premature death of a soul mate, and ambivalence about the costs of social and professional success. His Confessions also evokes an emotionally ungrounded seeker’s frantic desire for inner peace, an intellectual’s restless and chronically dissatisfied exploration of various philosophies and religious communities, and his ultimate return as an adult to the faith of his mother. Augustine narrates a range 8. Matt. 19:14.

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of human experiences that are strikingly familiar, even after almost two millennia.9 Moreover, these developmental ruminations are the foundation for Augustine’s discourses on memory and time and his exegesis of the biblical account of creation.10 In the latter regard, Confessions presents an understanding of the essential goodness of creation and the “fallenness” of human nature that comes to dominate Christian thought in the West.11 An organizing trope of these accounts (as early as the Pauline epistles and articulated by Augustine) is the tradition of humankind’s fall from grace through the sin of the “first man” (Adam) and its eventual restoration through the grace of God, effected in the sacrifice of the “second Adam,” Jesus Christ. Whether the Genesis 3 account is taken literally (as is historically less common) or figuratively-but-seriously (as it has been historically by most theologians), it informs a Christian emphasis on humankind’s responsibility for its own suffering: Adam’s “original sin”—defiance of God’s law (in the traditional Christian reading)—welcomed (perhaps invited) into creation evil and the sin to which it leads. By extension, traditional accounts de-emphasize “natural evil”—those catastrophic “acts of God” for which it is more difficult to identify a human source. Orthodox theological anthropologies accordingly focus on the human inclination toward sin, in many accounts sufficiently pernicious as to be described as depraved, even “totally” depraved. Metaphysical alternatives that consider evil generically discrete from good (Manichaeism) or human nature as capable of achieving fundamental goodness without divine assistance (Pelagianism) have been rejected— sometimes violently—as heresy. Although both Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, for example, express interest in the child, at least as a kind of proto-subject, 9. In Augustine’s Confessions, see Books I and II for Augustine’s account of infancy, childhood, and adolescence; Book III for his grief at the death of his close friend; Books V (first section) and VIII for his restlessness and the relief of conversion; and Book IX for his mother’s death and Augustine’s reflection on her life and influence. 10. Augustine’s Confessions, Books X (memory), XI (time), and XII–XIII (creation, the Church, and Genesis 1). 11. Irenaeus, among others, offers a different account, to which some modern theologians have returned.

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Augustine’s successors, despite his extraordinary influence, do not share his interest either in the internal world of the human subject or (especially) with regard to the emotional lives of children. Nonetheless, Paul Tillich notes, in his argument that Christian theology legitimately draws upon psychology and the arts “in the attempt to present Christ as the answer to the questions implied within existence,” that in earlier centuries [specifically, the medieval period] a similar task was undertaken mainly by monastic theologians, who analyzed themselves and the members of their small community so penetratingly that there are few present-day insights into the human predicament which they did not anticipate. The penitential and devotional literature impressively shows this.

Tillich goes on to say, however, that “this tradition was lost under the impact of the philosophies and theologies of pure consciousness, represented, above all, by Cartesianism and Calvinism,” those who sought “to repress the unconscious and half-conscious sides of human nature, thus preventing a full understanding of man’s existential predicament.”12 Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Nineteenth-Century Turn to the Subject Hard on the heels of Kant’s highly rational, late eighteenth-century categorical imperative comes Friedrich Schleiermacher’s definition of piety as a feeling-state distinguished by “the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or, which is the same thing, of being in relation with God.”13 A German Evangelical pastor and theologian who was a contemporary of Hegel at the University of Berlin, Schleiermacher is best remembered for his thought on human relation to the divine in terms of a feeling of absolute dependence and for posing Godconsciousness, manifested perfectly in Jesus, as the more highly developed corollary to (if not level of) self-consciousness. He defined 12. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 27. 13. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 12.

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sin as that which interferes with development of this Godconsciousness or constrains its influence on knowing, feeling, and doing—a form of “arrested development.”14 Evil, which Schleiermacher describes as secondary to sin, comprises those conditions that give rise to consciousness of life’s obstacles, closely related (as I discuss at greater length below) to perception.15 Grace, for Schleiermacher, is fellowship with God, and redemption through that fellowship is Jesus’ assumption of the believer into his perfect God-consciousness or “communication of his sinless perfection” (which is to say, his perfect attunement in knowledge, action, and feeling to his Godconsciousness).16 Schleiermacher’s attention to consciousness and its centrality to sin, evil, and redemption is readily seen retrospectively as protopsychological, although more conceptually than methodologically (his Christian Faith is explicitly dogmatic, for example). Schleiermacher himself describes the Knowing-Doing-Feeling language that he deploys to define “elements of the soul” as “simply borrowed from Psychology.”17 He clarifies, however, that “feeling,” as he uses the term, is always modified by “self-conscious” in order to make clear that it does not incorporate, for example, “unconscious states.” Similarly, he notes that the modification of “self-conscious” by “immediate” underscores the distinction he makes between a feeling-state (selfconsciousness) and the representational process that he calls “objective consciousness.”18 This attention to right understanding of his terminology deflects critical reading of Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependence as a purely psychological—by which many critics mean, affective—phenomenon, a point that Paul Tillich will underscore in his mid-twentieth-century recourse to Schleiermacher. More correctly understood as psychological (in addition to the Knowing-Doing-Feeling construction of the soul) is Schleiermacher’s

14. Ibid., 271–73. 15. Ibid., 185 and 316. 16. Ibid., 262 (grace) and 424–25ff. (redemption). 17. Ibid., 7–8. 18. Ibid., 6–7.

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positing of perception as the ground from which arises the human experience of suffering. Specifically, Schleiermacher argues that “the world . . . appears otherwise to man than it would have appeared had he had no sin,” so that were all human activity “determined by God-consciousness” those conditions (whether natural or social) that we see as the cause of our suffering “could never turn out to be a hindrance to the spiritual life.”19 In other words, the true source of human suffering is the perception that there is cause for inevitable suffering, that circumstances necessarily hinder our Godconsciousness, either in its development or its influence on us (Schleiermacher’s definition of sin). Absent such sin, in the state of original perfection, for example, we perceive such conditions not as hindrances, but as opportunities for or stimuli to development of more perfect God-consciousness. In this way, Schleiermacher accounts for evil as “the derivative and secondary to” sin, a condition that does not so much “befall” man as is “inflicted upon him” by the sin that interferes with right-perception.20 Later (as I discuss below), Nietzsche will link this idea of perspective explicitly with psychology, and much like Schleiermacher (despite critical distinctions), he will define strength of character as the ability to maintain a perspective on one’s own actions (including “evil consequences”) and suffering from which one sees struggle as opportunity, rather than a cause for resentment. 21 From this understanding of sin and evil, as well as of grace as relationship to God, Schleiermacher thus defines salvation as perfect God-consciousness, into which Jesus assumes believers, and distinguishes Christianity by its teleological orientation to redemption, specifically through Jesus as its founder.22 He relates to Knowledge, Doing, and Feeling the categories by which he defines human life: abiding-in-self (Insichbleiben) and passing-beyond-self (Aussichheraustreten). The former he associates with the Knowing and Feeling

19. Ibid., 316. 20. Ibid., 318. 21. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, vol. 17 (Edinburgh and London: T. N. Foulis, 1909–1911), 28ff. 22. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, 56ff.

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domains of the soul; the latter, with the Doing domain. However, he elaborates on the complexity of the living soul, pointing out that Knowing only becomes “real” in passing-beyond-self (a Doing), whereas Feeling is instantiated only in abiding-in-self so that no superficial division of the levels of soul or the aspects of human life is legitimate. (Later, psychoanalytic thinkers will take similar care in resisting a concretized reading of the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious realms of the human psyche.) Having defined piety as the consciousness of being absolutely dependent (which is to say, in relation to God), Schleiermacher defines Feeling as “the essence” of piety, but also notes that piety entails Knowing and Doing, in that, for example, it stimulates both.23 Schleiermacher, as Sigmund Freud will do in the next century, identifies three levels (or “grades”) of consciousness, from which he infers the developmental nature of God-consciousness: 1. “the confused animal grade, in which the antithesis [of self and object/other] cannot arise,” 2. “the sensible self-consciousness, which rests entirely on the antithesis [of self and object],” and 3. “the feeling of absolute dependence, in which the antithesis [of self and object, here the divine object] again disappears and the subject unites and identifies itself with everything which, in the middle grade, was set over against it.”24 This developmental construction, resonant with classical mysticism and exegetical theory, is critical to Schleiermacher’s exposition of Godconsciousness, which he understands as achievable only by a fully developed individual in a sufficiently advanced society and culture. Children, for example, begin at the first level, which is largely indistinguishable from the other, “lower” animals (by Schleiermacher’s reckoning), and progress to the second level, which perdures simultaneously with the highest level and is distinguished 23. Ibid., 8–9; for definition of piety, 12. 24. Ibid., 18–20.

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by an object constancy in relationship to the “whence” of absolute dependence (Schleiermacher’s understanding of the “original signification” of “God”).25 In other words, whereas other objects to which the subject-self relates enter and leave consciousness, by its very nature that on which we depend absolutely is, in some way, conscious to us not intermittently, but continuously (or constantly). This language of self and object and especially of “object constancy” offers a ready corollary between Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology and the object relations school of psychoanalysis, on which I draw in this project. There also are considerable commonalities with Self psychology, a later psychoanalytic development that originates with Heinz Kohut and has much in common with object relations. Schleiermacher’s construction of consciousness is the framework from which he speculates on an additional antithesis to that of self and object: the pleasant and unpleasant. Specifically, he posits that at the highest level of consciousness there is antithesis neither of self and object, nor of the sensibly pleasant and unpleasant. The bridging of the latter antithesis is the ground on which Schleiermacher concludes that in perfect God-consciousness—which Jesus knew and into which, as savior, he redeems humankind—the subject is entirely receptive, with no reciprocal effect on the object (hence, “absolute” dependence). The effect of this unilateral existence in absolute dependence on the divine is that the believer-subject no longer distinguishes pleasure and pain based on circumstances, because God ordains all circumstances, both good and evil.26 This perception of all conditions as stimulus to the greater perfection of God-consciousness becomes the basis of relief (or redemption) from sin and the suffering that is consequent to it. Schleiermacher further deepens the construct to address the question of evil and suffering as punishment. Significantly, he categorizes social (or moral) and natural evil together in this and other contexts, positing that one suffers only to the degree that one sins by perceiving external contingencies as a hindrance to God-consciousness. Only in this way 25. Ibid., 16 (signification of “God”), 20–22 (constancy of God as object). 26. Especially see ibid., 184–86.

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does Schleiermacher consider evil (the perception of conditions as hindrances or “unpleasant”) and suffering as punishment. As the key variable here is perception, the principle applies equally to any contingency, social or natural. Elaborating on his resistance to categorizing human suffering as punishment, Schleiermacher notes that when social evil arises, the suffering it engenders is quite logically seen as a punishment for sin, but he emphasizes that these logical consequences are rightly understood as “punishment” only in a corporate sense. Specifically, he maintains that the individual cannot be understood as punished by moral evil, because the consequences of group action commonly extend beyond the direct agents of the wrongdoing (as in the sins of the father that are borne by the son). Moreover, he points to commonsense recognition that even entirely natural evil affects people without regard for their individual sin. Thus, suffering due to natural causes is not distinct in meaning from social sin, in terms of punishment, and in either case (social or natural) it constitutes punishment only to the degree that one sins by perceiving as evil a hindrance that is rightly perceived as an opportunity for more perfect God-consciousness. It is in this way that a change in perception constitutes the redeeming transition from entirely sensible selfconsciousness to that level of consciousness informed by Godconsciousness: the feeling of absolute dependence that bridges the antitheses of self and object and of sensible pleasure and pain. Friedrich Nietzsche: A Psychological Critique of Christian Soteriology Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow . . . that which is necessary does not offend me. Amor fati is the core of my nature. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

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Friedrich Nietzsche and Schleiermacher, bookends to the chronological nineteenth century, reflect its proto-psychological turn to the subject, each of them understanding personal perception as the ground of human suffering. They are useful conversation partners, in the context of my project, for two further reasons. First, Nietzsche uses Schleiermacher as an exemplar of the Christian thought he rejects, referring to him on multiple occasions, both individually and as one of a number of theologians and philosophers. In my analysis, Nietzsche’s critique of Christian thought thus functions broadly as a response to Schleiermacher’s work. Second, in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and (more broadly) much of Western culture, his methodology, like mine in large measure, is profoundly psychological, indeed in Nietzsche’s case proto-Freudian. Nietzsche is thus one of the first major thinkers to critique Christian thought (in particular, its narratives of suffering, guilt, and redemption) from the perspective of contemporary psychology. He identifies the danger Christianity poses as fundamentally psychological in nature, at its foundation constraining the growth of the individual and collective human spirit such that humankind is never free either from crippling shame and guilt or from an infantilizing (if comfortable) dependence on a mythical source of redemption. Nietzsche closes the preface to his final work, the autobiographical memoir Ecce Homo, with a long quotation from his alter ego, Zarathustra, urging his disciples to arm yourselves against Zarathustra . . . better still, be ashamed of him!...... The man who remaineth a pupil requiteth his teacher but ill. . . . Take heed, lest a statue crush you. . . . Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have found yourselves will I come back to you.27

With apparent consistency, given his wholesale rejection of religion and having spoken of his intention to overthrow the idols with which he associates ideals, Nietzsche eschews the role of “prophet . . . founder 27. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 5.

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of religions” for Zarathustra.28 Nonetheless, Nietzsche commonly deploys traditionally theological language: “disciple” not only for Zarathustra’s followers, but also for himself as “a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus”;29 insight as “revealed” to him; and “the elect” as those who have the capacity to receive Zarathustra’s message.30 Moreover, the very title of his memoir (and last book), Ecce Homo, evokes Pilate’s words to the crowd as he presents to them the battered Jesus: “Behold, the man.”31 Nietzsche’s use of this phrase also suggests that he sees himself as a Christ figure, of course, albeit in the form of an Anti-Christ. If we identify Nietzsche with Zarathustra, the latter’s parting promise that he “will come back to” his disciples (cited above) is yet another Christological reference. At one and the same time, then, Nietzsche rejects all religion, especially Christianity, and offers his alter ego as a Christ figure. At mid-twentieth century, Paul Tillich will offer Nietzsche (among others) as an example of his contention that all modern Western philosophy, even if it rejects the existence of God (or declares God “dead,” as does Nietzsche) is fundamentally shaped by Christianity, and “In [that] sense, all modern philosophy is Christian philosophy.” In other words, as Tillich observes, in order to posit an Anti-Christ (as Nietzsche does of himself—he is thus both Christ and Anti-Christ), one must necessarily acknowledge the Christ.32 The nature of Nietzsche’s opposition to religion, from his own perspective as well as Tillich’s, is thus complex, although his rejection of Christianity and condemnation of its influence on the West is not only utterly, but also in many ways violently contemptuous. Nietzsche repeatedly identifies Schleiermacher as one of many dangerously deluded German theologians and philosophers (along 28. As becomes clear, Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and his critique of philosophy are much alike; he holds Christianity largely to blame for the shortcomings of Western philosophy (especially German Idealism), although he also targets Platonism and its influence on Christianity. He advocates a return to what he perceives as the life-engendering “Dionysian” philosophy of ancient Greece. 29. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 94, 2. Also see 131. 30. Ibid., 3, 4. 31. John 19:5 (Vulgate). 32. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, 27. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 60.

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with Kant, Hegel, Fichte, and Schopenhauer, among others), referring to him singly or in such a group in at least eleven contexts, spanning four major texts (including Ecce Homo) and six fragments.33 The degree to which Nietzsche knew Schleiermacher’s work is not clear, but he does play on the name itself in Ecce Homo, where he describes a group of thinkers (this time including Hegel and Fichte) as Schleiermachers— literally, makers of veils—with reference to their obscuring rather than illuminating reality.34 Regardless of the particularity of the Schleiermacher references, however, the distinctions between Nietzsche and Schleiermacher are illustrative of Nietzsche’s chief critiques of Christianity: that it fosters human weakness and obscures (if not obfuscates) reality. In his argument that Christianity is the source of cultural, intellectual, and individual decay (and therefore weakness), Nietzsche characteristically focuses on Christian narratives of good and evil, suffering, guilt, and redemption. He inverts conventional Christian tropes of morality, insisting that they undermine human progress by denying the truth of human nature, including human greatness, and the contingencies of human existence. Representative is his condemnation of Christian and philosophical “belief in the ideal” as an error not of “blindness,” but of “cowardice,” one of the vices that Nietzsche most abhors.35 Psychology is a prominent and explicit aspect of Nietzsche’s methodology, and he elucidates a specifically psychological perspective on socially embedded morality that grows out of and is reinforced by theology and philosophy together:

33. Based on an electronic search for Nietzsche’s references to Schleiermacher of the digital edition of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke (KGW), accessed in the Intelex Past Masters database through the Mulva Library, St. Norbert College, July 18, 2011 and previously. Including fragments, these references appear in at least ten volumes of the KGW. Nietzsche refers to Schleiermacher in Untimely Meditations (1876), Human, All Too Human (1879, 1880), The Dawn (1881), and Ecce Homo (1888). (In addition, he cites Schleiermacher’s translation of Phaedre.) Generally, the references to Schleiermacher appear in a loose cluster between 1876 and 1885. As philosopher Joel Mann has noted, this is a not insignificant acknowledgment (albeit, a critical one) by Nietzsche of another thinker (personal communication). 34. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 126–27. 35. Ibid., 3.

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No one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him; to that end there were needed height, a remoteness of vision, and an abysmal psychological depth, not believed to be possible hitherto. . . . Was a single one of the philosophers who preceded me a psychologist at all, and not the very reverse of a psychologist—that is to say, a “superior swindler,” an Idealist? Before my time there was no psychology. To be the first in this new realm may amount to a curse; at all events, it is a fatality: for one is also the first to despise. My danger is the loathing of mankind.36

Although Nietzsche uses the term “psychology” in a range of contexts, overall he deploys it, both conceptually and linguistically, in an exceptionally modern manner. He identifies himself as the “first psychologist” (in particular, the first psychologist of several categories, including both women and the Dionysian Greeks) and as “a psychologist without peer.” He brings to bear on his discussion of human nature and meaning-making what he calls “psychical analysis,” grounded in the unconscious, that anticipates (and to some degree may have influenced) Freud himself, a commonality that is perhaps most apparent in their respective discussions of the Unconscious and of human sexuality.37 Nietzsche analyzes a wide range of human characteristics, articulating what will become known as defense mechanisms: love arising to contain envy (reaction formation), hostility functioning to conceal one’s own sense of vulnerability (identification with the aggressor), rage as a response to the “nakedness” of personal transparency (narcissistic).38 The force of Nietzsche’s argument against Christian narratives of sin, guilt, and (particularly) shame, is that these narratives deepen and perpetuate human suffering, in large measure by sabotaging human character (the “spirit”) itself, destroying the possibility that humankind might flourish. Nietzsche discusses at length the phenomenon of socially praiseworthy, “good” individuals who—by the Christian account—are victims of original sin and their own depravity

36. Ibid., 138 (italics original). 37. Ibid., 44, 64, 69. For Nietzsche’s pre-Freudian “deep psychology” see, for example, Ecce Homo, 49 (on the superficiality of the conscious) and 66 (on chastity as “unnatural”). 38. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 168.

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and thereby become (according to Nietzsche) paralyzed by the counterproductive regret and remorse that Nietzsche ties to Christian ideology. Ever more damning, Nietzsche points to paradoxical selfrighteousness among Christians. He posits that Christians strengthen their own status and self-image at the expense of those persons who assert their freedom from the dictates of emotion and will themselves forward by taking responsibility for their past without regret. Neighbor love—arguably at the heart of the Christian message—is for Nietzsche a central exemplar of this self-serving strategy, its adherents laying (false) claim to the Christian virtue of charity, while compounding, through pity, their neighbors’ suffering.39 He thus articulates a strong relationship between pity and counterproductive—indeed, destructive—guilt. To compound one’s own suffering and shame by seeing it as punishment for sin and therefore (directly or indirectly) divinely ordained is thus one movement in a cycle that also paradoxically includes self-perpetuating guilt and self-assurance of one’s own goodness through hostile and handicapping pity for one’s fellow sufferers. Nietzsche advocates for acceptance of the past and its consequences as what one willed (or would have willed), and he inverts the conventional view of selfishness into strength of character. He offers as an affirmative argument for this philosophy its ground in reality, which he opposes to reliance on a mythical, supernatural being. He argues that his “selfish” action drives a reciprocal relationship with others in which he is free to benefit from the friend, but also (tellingly) to benefit the friend in return. At times, Nietzsche even describes himself in terms that sound conventionally charitable, although more often than not he uses inverted language. In one such instance, in elaborating upon the attack mode that is instinctive to his warrior heart, he offers several delimiting criteria. He attacks, for example, only “those things from which all personal differences are excluded, in which any such thing as a background of disagreeable experiences is lacking,” so that “attacking is for me a proof of goodwill and, in certain 39. See, for example, ibid., 159.

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circumstances, of gratitude.”40 Here and elsewhere, Nietzsche touches on a number of phenomena that eventually will be considered defense mechanisms by psychoanalysis. These include denial and reaction formation, the defensive attempt to manage unacceptably hostile impulses by virtue of a reversal in which one insists (for example) on one’s desire to do good. In the face of shame, for example, Nietzsche points to the attempt, through Christian virtues, to defend against selfish desires, the outcome (for Nietzsche) being sabotage not only of one’s own happiness, but that of the neighbors whom one is in effect patronizing, as well. “The overcoming of pity,” Nietzsche asserts, “I reckon among the noble virtues.”41 Nietzsche thus praises those (like himself, by his account) who pursue their own desires and at the same time embrace their fate (amor fati), including—most dramatically—the eternal recurrence of all things, which I discuss below. He accuses Schleiermacher and others of perpetuating the psychologically defensive Christian delusion that reinforces guilt and shame by teaching that to seek above all one’s own happiness is evidence of original sin, a consequence of the Fall, and that pity is a virtue, rather than a (conventionally) selfish defense against overwhelming shame and despair. Nietzsche understands selfperpetuated guilt and compounded suffering as the logical consequences of Christian narratives that drive the penitent sufferer toward regret and (by Nietzsche’s account, ill-placed) remorse. Instead of regret and sorrow, Nietzsche advocates a detached acceptance, bearing the burden of eternal recurrence by embracing it and saying of the past that it is what we willed, not what we deserved or what befell us, either ontologically or punitively. Elsewhere, he expounds on how Christian “aid” to the sufferer wounds his pride such that charity is remembered, not in gratitude, but as “a gnawing worm.”42 40. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 23–24. 41. Ibid., 17–18. J. LaPlanche and J. B. Pontalis define reaction formation as a “psychological attitude or habitus diametrically opposed to a repressed wish, and constituted as a reaction against it (e.g. bashfulness countering exhibitionistic tendencies). Reaction-formations may be highly localized, manifesting themselves in specific behaviour, or they may be generalized to the point of forming character-traits more or less integrated into the overall personality” The Language of PsychoAnalysis, trans. Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth, 1973). 42. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 200–201.

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Nietzsche thus locates sinfulness in retrospective remorse, regret, and/or displacement of responsibility onto the divine. In other words, he identifies a fundamental paradox in Christianity: the Christian succumbs to (inappropriate) guilt and regret, but at the same time leverages those emotions into a reassuring sense of self-righteousness. Nietzsche attributes this paradox to the human need to deny reality and in several texts (as well as letters) elaborates an alternative philosophy of eternal recurrence (or return) that drives his understanding of what it means to confront and embrace the contingencies of existence that constitute reality. Building on other work in the nineteenth century, he postulates that everything recurs, in just the same way, endlessly. The amor fati he embraces thus goes considerably beyond perceiving all that has happened as what one willed: it means embracing what has happened as what will happen, knowing that one will relive exactly the same history repeatedly, for eternity. In pushing this proposal to the extreme, Nietzsche grapples with what Christians would understand as theodicy, although he forgoes what he considers the false comfort of Christian providence, contending that it is the source of both regret and resentment. Nietzsche thus undercuts what he describes as Christian denial of reality by positing, in lieu of providence, the crushing contingency of eternal recurrence. He argues that it is in accepting such a fate that humankind can surmount its greatest suffering. Nietzsche finds in amor fati the potential for what might be described as hope: a way to make meaning where it would seem none is to be had. Thus amor fati frees the spirit for Nietzsche’s radically new freedom and joy. In the place of suffering and remorse, he tenders eternal recurrence and amor fati; in the place of divine redemption, creativity and the will, which arise from radical freedom. Much like Schleiermacher, Nietzsche understands the ground of human suffering as one’s perception of one’s circumstances, which is overcome by what he calls “the psychology of ‘seeing through brick walls.’”43 If one can bring the “creative will” to retrospection on the “It 43. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 11.

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was” and assert that what has been is what one chose (or willed), one is freed, not only from a delusion, but also from an extraordinary psychic and physiological expense. Nietzsche (like Freud) posits a closed system in which one either must lay claim to the past as what one willed or be crushed by the effort required to sustain denial of the burden of the past and its recurrence in the future. Working from presuppositions akin to Freud’s hydraulic theory, he cautions that the denial of reality he thinks Christianity cultivates and concomitant avoidance of humankind’s greatest challenges require enormous psychic energy and leave the believer depleted and unable to exercise the will positively.44 In the freedom of amor fati, on the other hand, Nietzsche locates the capacity to say “No” that is prerequisite to fullness of human vitality. As an example of this alternative, he contrasts the failed Christian crusaders to “that invincible order of Assassins” who had found both freedom and power in the motto, “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”45 Acceptance of the human condition, which arises only in the inevitably painful confrontation with reality, dictates for Nietzsche a focus on our present, concrete natural life—on the earth and the body rather than on a mythical otherworld and afterlife. Since, by his reckoning, “eternal life” is no different, in any case, than death, he urges his reader to “remain faithful to the earth,” underscoring the sentiment with italics, “and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!”46 Nietzsche further differentiates his position from Christianity by noting that in striving toward the light, man’s roots are naturally—like those of a plant—driven “earthward . . . into the dark, the deep—into evil.”47 Later, in the section of Zarathustra 44. Nietzsche, “On Redemption,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 253. 45. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company), 108–9. Here Nietzsche is admiring what he understands to be the foundation of Islam. Elsewhere he similarly draws on Judaism and Buddhism as more vital alternatives to Western Christianity. 46. Nietzsche, Prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 158, 125. Also see Ecce Homo, 139–40. Like Augustine’s Retractiones, Ecce Homo is a retrospective account of Nietzsche’s work, in which he highlights key points from major texts and clarifies what is, for him, emblematic of each one. In some cases, his accounts match closely the text on which he is writing, but there also is the opportunity for some adjustment, perhaps arising in part from his apparently hypomanic (if not manic) state at the time he wrote Ecce Homo.

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titled “On Redemption,” he argues that evil (which he likens to the sun) is natural and, furthermore, gives rise to life.48 In Ecce Homo, he cites Zarathustra at length, at one point saying of his destiny that a formula for it can be found in Zarathustra: . . . he who would be a creator in good and evil—verily, he must first be a destroyer, and break values into pieces. Thus the greatest evil belongeth unto the greatest good: but this is the creative good.49

Nietzsche’s characteristic (and potentially shocking) language here functions to invert conventional morality (with the attendant risk of misappropriation, unfortunately). He argues that evil is a manifestation of good, in a sense; creativity is at the heart of goodness; and destruction (especially of traditional values) precedes creation. He returns repeatedly to the idea that truth overcomes (conventional) morality, so that creation can occur, and he consistently juxtaposes true reality to conventional “goodness.”50 This perspectival shift, to which Nietzsche sometimes refers as transvaluation of values, is captured metaphorically in a reference that Nietzsche himself sets apart as one of the rare times when he speaks self-consciously “as a theologian”: it was God Himself who, at the end of His great work, coiled Himself up in the form of a serpent at the foot of the tree of knowledge. It was thus that He recovered from being a God. . . . He had made everything too beautiful....... The devil is simply God’s moment of idleness, on that seventh day.51 [ellipses original]

Nietzsche makes a direct connection between embodied, earthly commitment, the creativity it engenders, and meaning-making. He urges resolute clarity as to the inevitability of eternal recurrence (an attitude he sometimes describes as fatalistic), in part as antidote to the 47. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 154. 48. Nietzsche, “On Redemption,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 255–56. 49. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 133. 50. See, for example, ibid., 134–35 and 137–38. 51. Ibid., 116. On the inversion of values, also see, for example, On the Genealogy of Morality, 21–22ff.

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empty Christian promise of an otherworld that distracts from one’s present dilemma with compensatory rituals of shame, repentance, and redemption. He urges humankind instead to face openly the horror of the human condition—represented by the inevitability of eternal recurrence—in order “to bear [one’s head] freely . . . which creates a meaning for the earth”—in other words, meaning for the reality in which humankind actually exists, rather than a false reality that believers constitute by projection of Christian cosmology.52 This earthbound meaning stands against regret and shame because personal will grounds it in relationship to reality. It therefore constitutes a present benefit (a realized eschatology, in theological terms), in contrast to the promise of some intangible (and mythical) future life after death for which one relies on the divine grace of an otherworldly god—a reliance that is not only futile, for Nietzsche, but more critically, deadening of the human spirit. Against Christian doctrine (although arguably less so against Schleiermacher), Nietzsche (like Freud) understands the human spirit, when essentially healthy, as capable of progressive change, without (again, like Freud) any real (rather than defensive) need of divine redemption. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche illustrates and celebrates the developmental nature and trajectory of the human spirit at its most noble in an analogical account of three critical metamorphoses of the “strong reverent spirit.”53 An exceptional—by definition—human spirit stands on the verge of its particular desert and in its first metamorphosis takes the form of a camel. Camel-like, then, it sinks to its knees, inviting the heaviest burden onto its back, confident in its capacity to bear it and anticipating the “exult[ation] in [its] strength” that this task will bring. Then “burdened . . . the spirit speeds into its desert.” If the spirit should face, luckily, the most daunting—the “loneliest”—of personal deserts, a second metamorphosis occurs, into a lion. The lion is necessary to the spirit’s continued evolvement into “master of the desert,” which for Nietzsche is freedom. Finding its 52. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 144. 53. Ibid., 137–39.

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existential enemy in the desert, the spirit-as-lion violently exercises its will against its previous master, “the great dragon” named “thou shalt,” whose shining scales are millennia-old values. Defying the dragon’s ancient proclamation against the human self, “there shall be no more ‘I will,’” the spirit-as-lion says “a sacred ‘No’ to duty,” fights, and defeats this “last god.” Here Nietzsche pauses in the narrative to underscore that the celebrated achievement of the lion is not its establishment of a new value system (of which Nietzsche says it is incapable, in any event) in place of the old one it has destroyed, but the “new creation” of itself, constituted by its freedom. A beast of prey (the homologue a characteristically Nietzschean play on words), the lion, rather than the more prosaic and common beast of burden, the camel, is necessary to achieve this freedom. The preying of the lion image is more concrete, earthier, and therefore more efficacious than the homologous activity of the (deceived) praying spirit who never takes up its heaviest burden into its desert and cannot therefore experience metamorphosis.54 The capacity and will to be free are necessary, but not sufficient to progression from a spirit of prayer to one of predation; it is also necessary that the spirit face a challenge of sufficient weight to demand a beast of prey that will say the sacred “No” to duty. Thus, it is only if the spirit is confronted by the “loneliest” (that is, most challenging) desert that the metamorphosis into the superior beast of prey is possible. Much as does Schleiermacher, then, Nietzsche presents the threatening contingencies of human existence, when rightly perceived, as conditions of growth rather than as (conventionally construed) evil. Notably, and with special significance for this project, Nietzsche’s analogy does not end with the spirit’s becoming a lion, victorious beast of prey and therefore free to assert its will against the mythical dragongod who declares null and void the personal initiative of the “I will.” Instead, the lion preys in order to create for itself “the freedom . . . for new creation” that is the greatest challenge of all, for “the right 54. Ibid., 138–39. Also On the Genealogy of Morality, 22, for Nietzsche’s use of the beast of prey image.

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to new values [is] the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much.”55 Thus, the beast of prey undergoes a final metamorphosis that instantiates creation itself: “the reverent spirit” ends by becoming a child, a human antithesis to the lion. Moreover, where the lion said a sacred “No” to the old god, the spirit-as-child capitalizes on the power of its freedom to will a “sacred ‘Yes’” to the new. In response to the obvious question, “What can the child do that even the lion could not do?,” Nietzsche ascribes to the child innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation . . . a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.56

The lion creates its own freedom in self-mastery. Defeating the old conventions, in Nietzsche’s narrative the greatest human spirit buys the freedom to evolve toward what Schleiermacher would recognize as “one of these,” the children to whom Jesus likens the kingdom of heaven, whom he admonishes the disciples to allow closer to him. Nietzsche’s appropriation of childhood is developmentally quite specific, not a gesture toward some generic youthfulness: Against shame, Zarathustra reports that his “stillest hour” (“his mistress”) instructs him, “You must become as a child and without shame. The pride of youth is still upon you. . . . [W]hoever would become as a child must overcome his youth, too.”57 The reverent spirit thus returns to the stage from which its development proceeded awry: childhood—and by implication, sufficiently early childhood that a state of innocence can be inferred. Here, then, Nietzsche differs sharply from Schleiermacher, despite the biblical injunction to become “like one of these” to which the latter might aspire. Whereas Schleiermacher emphasizes the lack of God-consciousness in early childhood (at least),

55. Ibid., 139. 56. Ibid. 57. Matt. 18:3 and 19:14. Nietzsche, “On Redemption,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 259.

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Nietzsche metaphorically upholds the child as a model of the human potential for mastery and self-creation. This, then, is Nietzsche’s anagogical vision: The reverent soul enters its personal desert a camel, willing itself to bear that which is most difficult, and doing so plunges forward with confidence, by its nature equipped not only to bear, but to overcome its heaviest burden. Thereby achieving metamorphosis into a beast of prey, it goes beyond survival to defeat the mythical dragon-god of age-old values and “thou shalts,” becoming fully master of itself (and its personal desert), freeing itself not just of “thou shalt,” but (Nietzsche-Zarathustra goes on to say) of its love, its old attachments. Finally, metamorphosing into a quite young child, the spirit—if it is a “reverent” spirit—becomes a first movement, by definition radically new, willing its own will. Will, for Nietzsche, of which the “wisest” is a will to power, is thus the vehicle of freedom from suffering, “my liberator and joy-bringer.”58 In the camel-lion-child allegory, which can be read as an insightful recapitulation of optimal early childhood development, Nietzsche (as he also does elsewhere) links such a will to creation and posits as essential to a flourishing synergy of will and creation both constitution (hardness) and right perspective on suffering.59 Creation—“life’s growing light”—is for Nietzsche “redemption from suffering.” He rejects acceptance of suffering, along with regret, and understands as inevitable the human need for a sense of creation, which he attributes to the suffering and unsettling constancy of change that are contingencies of the human condition. Thus, one basis on which Nietzsche rejects divine creation is that it leaves humankind with nothing to create, thereby handicapping the spirit. The centrality of creation to initiative and vitality generally is illustrated (as noted above) by his suggestion that God is motivated to create the devil by idleness, as a “cure” for having “made everything too beautiful.”60 58. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 225. 59. I am grateful to Josh Kellman for conversation about a reading of this allegory as not only tracking an adult process, but offering as well a paradigm of optimal early development, which presumably Nietzsche would argue has been derailed by the infantilizing force of Christianity.

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Creation that is fully complete, in other words, obviates the creative initiative, here projected by humankind onto the divine, that is at the core of vitality itself. Focusing on right perspective, Nietzsche gives multiple examples from his own experience of the creative power of will that is possible not only in spite of suffering, but necessarily as a product of suffering. He describes, for example, a three-day migraine that brought him—as a consequence of his capacity and his perspective—“perfect lucidity and cheerfulness,” along with achievements that had been impossible when he was “healthier.” Rejecting morbidity as deleterious, he nonetheless argues that for the “intrinsically sound nature” illness stimulates new life.61 Thus, he embraces suffering (of which illness is one example) as what one has willed and as productive of new life (as is evil generally), and therefore intrinsic to creation. Exercise of a strong will, clearly, is requisite to such perception of one’s circumstances. Nietzsche further grounds the capacity for such a wise will in human physiology, however, with the caveat that body and soul are one. He associates this quality of perception with the detachment to which practitioners aspire in Buddhism, a tradition that Nietzsche associates not with a “precept of morality,” but with a “precept of physiology.”62 This emphasis on creative will and right perspective functions in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity, in part, to underscore the ways in which a cycle of guilt, shame, and forgiveness instantiates human impotence, rendering the spirit incapable of something equivalent, in theological terms, to sanctification. Given the implicitly closed system of what Freud will describe as drives, thwarted energy must be directed elsewhere, and in the absence of a sufficiently noble spirit, adherence to convention is sustained, and the direction of that energy becomes destructive, often powerfully so.

60. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 116. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 199. 61. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 10, 12. 62. See, for example, ibid., 20–22. The illustration Nietzsche gives in this reference to Buddhism is the “fakir” who is able to survive entombment because he “ceases entirely from reacting.” Nietzsche contends that this capacity is akin to the “Russian fatalism” with which he identifies.

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Paul Tillich’s Theology of Culture Paul Tillich’s mid-twentieth-century theology of culture is the culmination of the theological trajectory on which my project builds. Tillich systematizes theological recourse to culture, engaging psychology and the arts (for example) at length, and he lays the groundwork for subsequent engagements of the intersection of theology and psychology. Tillich defines the religious as that which is of ultimate concern, a construct with which he associates Schleiermacher’s feeling of absolute dependence.63 He understands theology as “the methodical interpretation of the contents of the Christian faith” and describes it as formally engaging the object “which determines our being or not-being,” not physically in time and space, but in terms of “the structure, the meaning, and the aim of existence.”64 He defines his theology of culture as seeking the ultimate concern “behind all cultural expressions . . . a philosophy, a political system, an artistic style, a set of ethical or social principles,” and he advocates theological recourse to “materials . . . [of] man’s creative self-interpretation in all realms of culture,” including literature of various genres and “therapeutic psychology.”65 My own appropriative synthesis of theology with psychology and cultural (especially literary) sources reflects Tillich’s broad, deep, and lingering influence on Christian theology in the West. Notably, clinical theory heavily influences his appropriations of psychoanalysis. Tillich is often read as a scholar of human psychology and meaning-making: a broad (and nontheological) readership knows him, for example, through texts like The Courage to Be.66 Tillich’s theological “method of correlation” assumes, against (for example) Karl Barth, a correlation between the questions that arise implicitly within a given sociohistorical context and answers that are implicit to the Christian message.67 Theology thus considers “the 63. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 41–42. 64. Ibid., 14–15 and 28, for example. 65. Ibid., 39 and 63. 66. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, Terry Lectures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). 67. Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 8–9. Barth is a theoretical, if not chronological, way station of

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human situation” and offers symbolic responses from the Christian tradition to the existential questions that arise from that situation.68 Tillich defines a temporal situation broadly as both “scientific and artistic, the economic, political, and ethical forms in which [human persons] express their interpretation of existence.”69 While noting the importance to theology generally of the “cautionary influence” of what he calls kerygmatic theology (which resists recognition of “common ground with those outside the ‘theological circle’”), Tillich emphasizes instead Christianity’s relevance across time and the role of theology within human culture and in relationship to the other disciplines. 70 Tillich describes a “mutual dependence of questions and answers”—“how the door determines the structure of the house, or the house the door”—as emerging out of Schleiermacher’s work.71 Within that general framework, he aims for equilibrium of theological movement between “eternal truth” and “temporal situation” that sustains the continuity of the Christian message and avoids confusion of situation with either psychology or sociology (despite his recourse to both disciplines). Associating this method with a “third way” for theology between “supranaturalistic and naturalistic interpretations of the meaning of ‘God,’” he identifies himself as working in the tradition of Schleiermacher, as well as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin.72 Tillich makes a subtle and complex distinction between the theological centrality of the divine (and divine revelation) and theological recourse to situation-specific questions and sources. He maintains an inclusive posture toward sources and methodologies, but distinguishes between those disciplines whose objects represent “preliminary concern[s]” and the “theological circle” of which ultimate concern is the defining content.73 He refers to theological sorts between Nietzsche and Tillich. His break with nineteenth-century liberal theology and his high regard for Schleiermacher, delimited by his rejection of Schleiermacher’s project, offers an interesting addition for future speculation on the trajectory I have defined. 68. Ibid., 62. 69. Ibid., 3–4. 70. Ibid., 6–7. 71. Tillich, Systematic Theology II, 14. 72. Ibid., 7.

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appropriation of psychological insights, for example, as productive and appropriate to the degree that such insights reveal “in and through their cognitive forms” something of our ultimate concern.74 Against Schleiermacher in particular, however, he cautions against limiting theology to human experience alone, wary of theology’s becoming vulnerable to insights of other disciplines in a manner that dilutes its distinctive role in the exploration of human experience. 75 Tillich categorizes both existentialism and psychoanalysis among responses to the counterproductive “primacy of intellect . . . [over] irrational will” that arises in Thomas Aquinas (and other Scholastics), then subsequently in Calvin’s highly rational alternative to Luther’s emphasis on the irrational will. Tillich points to a similar bias in Descartes and argues that industrial society amplifies a theological preference for intellect and consciousness over the existential quality of the human condition. He points out that despite Calvin’s explication of the utter depravity of humankind, his followers develop “an almost neurotic anxiety about the unclean.”76 Moreover, echoing Nietzsche’s argument that conventional evil is both a necessary and a positive aspect of the human condition, Tillich follows Martin Luther in his insistence that without the “demonic”—which is to say, when holiness is reduced to “cleanliness”—there is little to distinguish the holy from the secular. As exemplars, he offers Schleiermacher’s and Rudolph Otto’s “phenomenological descriptions of the holy,” not as primarily psychological constructs, as is often assumed, but as conceptualizations of the human “experience of ‘the ultimate’ in the double sense of . . . abyss and . . . ground of man’s being”—“abyss” here invoking Luther’s term for the terrifyingly dangerous God hidden outside revelation.77 Tillich sees both existentialism and psychoanalysis in terms of the late modern rejection of primacy of consciousness. He points to the

73. Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 10–13. 74. Ibid., 12–13. 75. Ibid., 43 and 46. 76. Ibid., 217; Systematic Theology II, 27. 77. Tillich, Systematic Theology I, 215–16.

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anticipation of the Freudian unconscious in Nietzsche’s thought and identifies Nietzsche (along with Schelling and Schopenhauer) as the turning point away from the “theology of consciousness” of which he considers Hegel the peak. For Tillich, both existentialism and psychoanalysis are among the most fruitful nontheological resources that theology rightfully brings to bear on the Christian narrative. Importantly, when he draws a distinction between the theological agenda and these secondary sources, he does so in terms of soteriology—the terminology with which Marilyn McCord Adams distinguishes her work as a theologian from her philosophical engagement of theodicy.78 Tillich argues that humankind’s existential dilemma is not adequately engaged through depth psychology or philosophical argument, as might be the case for aspects of human nature that are (in Tillich’s language) essential, rather than existential.79 However, he points to existentialism and psychoanalysis as sources by which Christian thought can “rediscover” key insights into human nature and, in particular, sin. He credits psychoanalysis with fostering an appreciation of the depth psychological nature of “Christian religious literature” and with restoring to Christian thought: (1) the construction of sin as a singular state comprising “estrangement from one’s essential being,” as opposed to “sins” that comprise human choices; (2) the “demonic” nature of those (unconscious) influences that shape consciousness and limit free will; (3) the centrality of acceptance to grace and forgiveness; and (4) the fundamental questions of the meaning of human existence to which systematic theology must show that “religious symbols are [the] answers.” 80 In his Systematic Theology, Tillich draws in some detail on both Schleiermacher and Nietzsche, whom I have suggested bookend the nineteenth-century turn to the subject. His recourse to them, together with his engagement of literature and the arts, defines the broad 78. I engage Adams in detail in chapter 4. 79. Paul Tillich, “The Theological Significance of Existentialism and Psychoanalysis,” in Theology of Culture, ed. Robert Kimball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 117 and 123. 80. Tillich, “The Theological Significance of Existentialism and Psychoanalysis,” 123–25.

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parameters of the theological ground on which my project builds. He speaks to Schleiermacher’s proto-psychological engagement of human experience and cognitive science, as well as Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian account of sin and salvation (which I have framed functionally as a response to Schleiermacher). Tillich underscores Nietzsche’s invocation of the human unconscious and his deployment of language that anticipates Freud’s psychoanalytic method and “talking cure.” He responds critically to Schleiermacher and Nietzsche (among others) and builds upon their arguments in his contextsensitive recourse both to existentialism and to “depth psychology” (or psychoanalysis).81 Tillich’s relationship to Schleiermacher and Nietzsche is particularly significant (and explicit) in his appropriation of psychology as it informs soteriology. He asks the same questions as do they, in much the same manner, about the nature of sin, its source, and the degree to which it can be ameliorated by divine healing. Tillich’s interest in Schleiermacher and Nietzsche (in particular at the intersection of theology and psychology) is prominent in his Systematic Theology, where his recourse to “depth psychology” or “therapeutic psychology” (both terms by which he identifies psychoanalysis) often dominates his argument. Here, as elsewhere, he brings psychoanalytic constructs, methods, and language to bear on post-WWII alienation in the West. Like Schleiermacher and Nietzsche, Tillich attends closely to human experience, in particular internal experience. With them, although in different language, he explores the role of human perception in suffering and evil. Specifically, he links an existential anxiety to human awareness of finitude, and he argues for depth psychology as central to theological consideration of “terms like ‘sin’ and ‘judgment,’” which he speculates . . . have lost not their truth but rather an expressive power which can be regained only if they are filled with the insights into human nature which existentialism (including depth psychology) has given to us. 82

81. Tillich uses several terms as approximately interchangeable, including psychoanalysis, therapeutic psychology, and depth psychology. 82. Tillich, Systematic Theology II, 28.

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Tillich considers Nietzsche’s will to power a key construct for theology. He links will to power and the Freudian libido to concupiscence, suggesting that in this context, it is power itself, rather than sex, to which the libido most accurately refers.83 However, Tillich contrasts psychoanalytic constructions of essential human nature (such as the libido) to theological insights into the existential quality of concupiscence in postlapsarian human nature, to which only divine grace is an effective response. He draws key conclusions about this distinctively theological project to which existentialism and psychoanalysis make significant contributions, but in which they are not of primary significance. Specifically, he speculates that the psychoanalyst can be an “instrument of salvation” (although not in terms of medical intervention). In making conscious that which is unconscious, psychoanalysis brings to awareness the patient’s concupiscence, thereby facilitating the work of divine grace. Any contribution of analytic treatment to salvation is thus (to use the language Tillich applies to disciplines outside the theological circle) of secondary concern to the ultimate concern that comprises estrangement from the divine, for which the operation of divine grace is a primary concern.84 Tillich thus distinguishes the primacy of soteriology from the secondary concerns of psychoanalysis and, as well, argues that the Freudian unconscious helpfully accounts for phenomena like the limits of postlapsarian human responsibility—the “guilty man” who suffers Luther’s bondage of the will. He calls upon theologians to draw on “practitioners,” a category within which he includes both ministers and psychoanalysts, together with existentialism and literature of various genres, to counter the Cartesian and Calvinist influence that he argues cultivated repression of the unconscious and preconscious (Tillich uses “half-conscious”) aspects of human nature.85 In this and other contexts, he speaks to literature and other arts as expressions of the depth of the human psyche, which is otherwise to such a large 83. Ibid., 53–55. 84. Tillich, “The Theological Significance of Existentialism and Psychoanalysis,” 123. 85. Tillich, Systematic Theology II, 42–43 and 27–28.

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degree inaccessible to consciousness. Drawing a distinction between “existential” (and its opposite, detachment) and “existentialist” (as opposed to essentialist), he describes therapeutic psychology as the detached methodology from which arises the material engaged existentially by the artistic process of “novelists, poets, and painters.”86 An Alternate Way Forward Building on the commonalities between narrative and psychoanalysis, and locating my project in the trajectory defined by Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, and Tillich, I argue here for a fresh perspective on theological appropriations of psychology. In chapter 2, I turn to childhood experience in order (1) to take the contingencies and experience of human existence seriously from birth and (2) to develop the groundwork for a theologically inflected and relatively accessible understanding of early childhood development. In chapter 3, I continue this engagement of early childhood and develop a second new source for theology: the literature of earliest childhood—picture books. Religion has long drawn on the arts, and in particular literature, for insight into the human condition and as a reflection of human religious experience. However, despite critical attention to literature categorized as “young adult”—C. S. Lewis’s Narnia chronicles, Katherine Paterson’s novels, and Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time trilogy, for example—scholars of religion and literature have largely (for all practical purposes, entirely) ignored literature written for much younger children. Among my organizing presuppositions in this project are the value of these texts for the insights they offer into the lives of infants and toddlers and the validity of critical attention to them as legitimate and significant literature, particularly in the twentieth century and beyond. My critical reading of four exemplar texts supplements the theological appropriation of child development toward which I gesture in chapter 2 and situates this body of literature

86. Ibid., 26.

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as a valid source for scholars of religion and literature, as well as theologians. In chapter 4, I offer a critical reading of Marilyn McCord Adams’s work on horror participation, beginning with her argument for the culpability of God in human horror and the divine healing and restoration that Adams understands as obligatory. I diverge from Adams on the redemptive narrative she poses, which is predicated on God’s being responsible for creating conditions of scarcity in which horror arises inevitably and therefore, as a loving God, owing humankind a redemptive undoing of the emotional, spiritual, and physical effects of horror. My chief concern with Adams’s argument arises from the psychological grounds of the redemption she envisions, which I read as setting her soteriology off course from its inception, and I develop an alternative understanding of the effects of suffering, which gives rise to a different soteriological vision. In chapter 5, I articulate my own soteriological narrative, drawing upon philosopherpsychoanalyst Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope as an a-theological source that grapples with the degree of horror that is Adams’s priority, while at the same time claiming a model for hope that is psychologically sound and, to my mind, readily available for appropriation into a theological context. In conclusion, I anticipate the next stage of this project and reiterate the sociocultural limits of my work, defined by my Anglo-European intellectual and religious location. Accordingly, I invite conversation with theologians working in other contexts.

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2

The Least of These: A Narration of Human Anxiety in Early Childhood

One may scan work after work on history, society, and morality and find little reference to the fact that all people start as children and that all peoples begin in their nurseries. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society By looking at some of the ways by which infants and young children learn the meaning of their worlds, we can understand a great deal about where meaning comes from and how much broader and deeper it is than most contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and language can fathom. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body For we must not pass lightly over the fact that Christ commands that the infants be presented to him, adding the reason, “for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven” [Matt. 19:14]. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Introduction Christian theology has recourse to a classically constructed kenotic God, of which the second person becomes incarnate: “who, though he

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was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”1 This radically personal God, who willingly accepts radical kenotic constraints in order to dwell among humankind, shares fully in human vulnerability—including death—in order to make a way for the created to grasp the eschatological intentions of a loving and terrifyingly other creator. In the orthodox Chalcedonian Christology that acclaims Jesus Christ fully human and fully divine, on which Marilyn McCord Adams relies, for example, Christians make a radical claim on the personhood and personal intentionality of God that underscores God’s intimate attention to and care for the human bearers of the imago Dei. In so doing, Christian thought brings down to earth (literally, of course, as well as figuratively) a God who is also traditionally understood as incomprehensibly other: omniscient, omnipotent, all-loving and merciful, and yet capable of anger and destruction beyond human imagining. Beyond time, this God also is beyond boundaries of geography or historical context, further illustrative of an ultimate alterity. If in spite of this radical otherness, Christians are earnest in their proclamation of a “personal” God, we must demand attention to the fullness of God’s incarnate human existence and the implication of that incarnation for the fullness of human personhood and experience. Such an inclusive claim on divine incarnation will span psyche and soma, as well as the soul (to whatever degree it is distinguishable from those categories). Furthermore, divine incarnation must then be understood as God’s taking up into God’s own experience the full length and breadth of the human life span, beginning with birth, if not indeed before. It is not surprising, then, that from early in the common era, theologians have availed themselves of psychological and protopsychological constructs. What is more striking, to the modern mind, is that they have undertaken that discourse with so very little attention 1. Phil. 2:7.

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to childhood, in general, and to very young children, in particular, other than in the birth accounts of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. The notable exceptions to this exclusion of early childhood and of young children are provided by Jesus himself, gathering around him little children who otherwise would be excluded, and Augustine, whose Confessions incorporate his own and others’ memories of his life, beginning in infancy and toddlerhood, as well as his observations of other young children, presumably including his son, Adeodatus. 2 Theoretical Location Even within the narrowed constraints I have suggested, the rich literature of early childhood studies is both too wide and too deep, the often-conflicting currents too treacherous, to permit any comprehensive treatment. The limits of this project permit only an initial, introductory treatment of one perspective that is particularly well suited to my purpose here. A clear articulation of that perspective will be useful not only interpretively, but also to suggest the conceptual framework within which critical engagement might productively take place. My theology is located in the Reformed tradition. Reformed thought, beginning with John Calvin, focuses on the essential depravity of human nature. It insists that despite variations in context and even conduct, human persons inevitably sin in such a way that all fall short of the glory of God and therefore all are radically dependent on grace to ameliorate a wretchedness that is never entirely overcome even by faith and earnest good intention. Psychologically, my perspective on human development is not entirely dissimilar, in that I understand the human psyche as radically vulnerable not only to being injured but also to perpetrating injury, on itself and on others, so that some acceptance of that capacity is central to ameliorating the severity of its consequences. My theological anthropology is shaped by my clinical experience, both as a social worker specializing in child welfare and as 2. Matt. 19:14; Luke 18:16; Augustine’s Confessions, Book I.

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a psychoanalytic psychotherapist specializing in treatment of children, families, and adults. Like that of many clinicians, my clinical theory tends to be eclectic and pragmatic, my chief criterion being that it “works.” My resistance to adopting a single, discrete theoretical base reflects the popular professional perception that when successful therapists are assessed, their commonalities in the treatment room—centrally, their commitment to relationship—are more apparent than their theoretical and philosophical differences, dramatically divergent as those tend to be. Nonetheless, I consider myself psychodynamic, a term that acknowledges divergence from classical, Freudian psychoanalytic thought, and more specifically I draw primarily on object relations (a term coined by Ronald Fairbairn), of which the central concern comprises the ways in which psychic meaning is made via the relationships among internalized constructs of externally “real” people and experiences. The theorists of early childhood on whom I focus here are of greatest relevance to my theological work because of the particular way in which they understand the centrality of both anxiety and relationship to the very origin of the human person, honoring internal and external realities and the experiences constituted by the relationship of the two categories. They represent primarily the British Independent school of object relations of which D. W. Winnicott is one of the most widely known proponents. At mid-twentieth century, this group of clinical theorists in the British Psychoanalytic Society asserted a “third way” against the two dominant theoretical camps represented by Melanie Klein and Anna Freud.3 (My own work is more akin historically to that of Melanie Klein.) In the present discussion of early childhood, I rely on a selection of theorists and clinicians that includes Klein and the British Independents, but also extends to the attachment theorists inspired by John Bowlby and Rene Spitz. From the latter quarter of the twentieth century—a time of dramatic forward progress in our knowledge of infants, in particular—I take recourse to the work of Margaret Mahler 3. W. Ronald D. Fairbairn, An Object-Relations Theory of the Personality (New York: Basic Books, 1954).

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and of her (sometime) colleague Daniel Stern, the latter deeply influenced by the emerging experimentalists of the 1970s and ’80s. These “experimentalists” (a term I use in the same way as did Stern) differ from the earlier empirically oriented researchers in their turn to controlled scientific method and quantitative (as well as qualitative) analysis. A paradigmatic experiment, for example, uses pacifiers designed to measure frequency and force of sucking, as opposed to recording detailed human observation. From these theorists and clinicians, I emphasize here the work of Erik Erikson, Selma Fraiberg (the “mother of infant mental health”), and Winnicott. Fraiberg’s work is especially integrative and also accessible to a broad readership: even as her writing draws heavily on research from Erikson, attachment theorists, and others, she presents the material in a way that is more engaging and expressive than that of almost any comparable thinker. She directs her classic book The Magic Years toward parents of young children, but it is explicitly grounded in the theory that informs her clinical work.4 Furthermore, the narrative skill that enlivens even her professional presentations of her own research illustrates the close generic ties between psychoanalysis and the literary works for young children of which I develop readings in chapter 3. Both Erikson and Winnicott evidence a similar capacity for interpreting early childhood to both professional and broader readerships: Erikson’s “eight stages of man” became the basis for much popular literature on human development, and Winnicott—while he was never a Dr. Spock or T. Berry Brazelton, pediatrician-champions of successive generations of parents—influenced the entire field of parenting education. He coined the phrase (and concept) of the “goodenough mother” that sets parents—especially mothers—free from the largely psychoanalytic proscription of full responsibility for children’s severe psychological problems, regardless of time or context of onset. This burden on mothers, which extended even into their children’s adulthoods, can reasonably be laid squarely at the feet of psycho4. Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood (New York: Scribner’s, 1959).

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analysis. One of the later and more egregious forms it took was that of the schizophrenogenic family, a construct that was prominent in some foundational family systems theory.5 Object Relations Introduced Classical psychoanalysis is widely applied as critical theory throughout the humanities, commonly with special attention to critical readings of Freud and Lacan: stripped of its clinical force, however, the utility of this material is significantly diminished. On the other hand, Self psychology, which grows out of Heinz Kohut’s theoretical work on healthy narcissism in the 1970s and ’80s, has been of considerable interest to theologians.6 It may be that the language of a self seems akin to that of a soul; alternately, especially in some of its more recent forms, Self psychology may seem less alien and alienating than does traditional analysis, with its relatively more rigidly prescribed boundaries.7 In comparison, theologians have given relatively little attention to object relations theory. While object relations is arguably more visibly aligned with classical Freudian thought than Self psychology, it is also (especially in terms of the British Independents on whom I focus here) considerably more accessible than classical psychoanalysis, in part because it emphasizes external relationships among human beings as much as it does the internal world of the human psyche. An additional key advantage, for me both theological and clinical, is that object 5. Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950). D. W. Winnicott, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Hogarth, 1965). Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1968). T. Berry Brazelton and Bertrand G. Cramer, The Earliest Relationship: Parents, Infants, and the Drama of Early Attachments (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990). 6. See, for example, Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New York: International Universities Press, 1971) or Miriam Elson, ed., The Kohut Seminars on Self Psychology and Psychotherapy with Adolescents and Young Adults (New York: Norton, 1987). 7. In the many communities of religious scholars in the greater Chicago area specifically, it is perhaps natural that an affinity would develop, as this is ground zero for Self psychology and still at least arguably the center of its theoretical and clinical application. Furthermore, in my experience, Self psychologists were among the earliest psychoanalysts in Chicago to assume an overtly less hostile stance toward religious belief. See, for example, the work of Arnold Goldberg and Lallene Rector.

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relations defines very early childhood as the ground of adult emotional experience. Beyond the preschool and early elementary oedipal period that is bedrock for Freud, object relations extends detailed consideration, both developmental and pathological, into infancy and toddlerhood, as well. Indeed, for both object relations and Self psychology (which developed out of object relations), infancy and toddlerhood constitute the true bedrock of the psychological dilemmas that clinicians from these traditions consider not only treatable, but also analyzable. Bedrock is a term, used by Freud and his followers, that has achieved hallmark status. It refers to the earliest point to which psychopathology of a given kind, or development itself (in later use), meaningfully can be traced. The degree to which a problem or pathology is analyzable is a measure of the feasibility of an analytic effort to ameliorate its effects (even of the ethical grounds for undertaking such a treatment). Such a determination reflects the clinician’s understanding of the developmental genesis of the problem. As noted in the discussion below of Melanie Klein’s work, Freud (at least theoretically) limited analysis to the neuroses, which he identified as problems having their bedrock in the oedipal period, when the child aligns with the same-gender parent as an ally rather than rival. Klein (largely based on her treatment of two- to four-yearold children) introduced the idea that normal pre-oedipal emotional processes actually develop in close parallel to psychotic processes. The practical effect of this insight is that an oedipally grounded neurosis does not “bridge” the two categories and that therefore it is not necessary to approach the more serious problems that arise from pre-oedipal conflicts through a secondary neurotic symptomology, which may never develop if the psychosis is sufficiently severe. Rather, analysis is appropriate as direct treatment for a psychosis, even absent a neurotic overlay. As a result, in part, of this shift, some analysts began to undertake direct treatments of these more serious, “psychotic,” conditions (not to be confused with schizophrenia as it is defined today). Margaret Little, herself a prominent figure in the British

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Psychoanalytic Society, gives a particularly engaging and accessible illustration of her own such analysis as an adult analysand. Little’s clinical narrative illustrates vividly the level at which emotional processes may be disturbed to the point of psychosis, even in a highly functioning individual, and the capacity of the analytic process to ameliorate even such a fundamental disturbance.8 Infancy and Early Childhood: Emergent Personhood Human infants enter the world with their own individual temperament, the precursor of personality or self—for a theologian, perhaps, evidence of a particularity of soul, and that particularity immediately begins to affect the relationships between the child and her environment, most notably her caregivers.9 The newborn emerges from a highly specialized time and place devoted to the epigenetic unfolding of physical development. Sensory input has been limited and filtered through the dampening effect of a fluid environment in which sounds of the mother’s heartbeat and circulatory system provide a buffering constancy. Immediately after birth, however, the infant is faced with an unimaginable range of new—and potentially overwhelming—stimuli: variations of light, temperature, sound, tactile sensation, even a dramatically increased range of motion, all impinging in an entirely new way. New internal sensations also arise: for the first time, the baby requires nourishment through oral means, rather than a shared blood supply, and the sensations of hunger, instinctive sucking behavior, and the nipple are new, as is a range of gastrointestinal sensations. Optimally, the intrauterine environment has been marked only by the occasional hiccup or less than felicitous response to something the mother has eaten. Certainly, sounds have been distinguishable, but always muted by the fluid-filled sac and accompanied by that 8. Margaret Little, Psychotic Anxieties and Containment: A Personal Record of an Analysis with Winnicott (Northvale, NJ: J. Aronson, 1990). I highly recommend this account, which to my mind has been oddly underappreciated, perhaps because it cuts too close to the bone. 9. For a concise and empirically grounded overview of innate (or “genetic”) temperament, see, for example, John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment (London: Hogarth, 1969), 265ff.

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mediating constancy of the mother’s biological rhythms. Abruptly, the neonate is faced with a rapidly escalating onslaught of new “information”—sensory input—at a rate that is inconceivable to an adult. New neural tracks are laid down at a frantic pace. In the process, this beginning to human life puts the baby on a track that will inform the most dynamic and critical stages of human development. The capacity for memory itself is only nascent at this point, so memories of this time will not survive. The baby’s negotiation of this new state of affairs also must take place without benefit of language, the newborn communicating her status and needs only through the flailing of limbs and initially inchoate sounds, alternating with stillness and silence that are themselves open to interpretation, regardless of the degree to which they represent moments of relief for the caregiver. The human infant is thus both radically dependent and vulnerable on almost every front. A caregiver is necessary to provide for the exigencies of hot and cold, cleanliness, nutrition, even sleep for some babies. But more even than these obvious demands, humans from their earliest moments require relationship for their very survival. In addition to this radical vulnerability, however, by virtue of the distinctive temperament with which they arrive on the scene, newborns have their own profound impact on the families into which they are born: . . . this weak and changing little being moves the whole family along. Babies control and bring up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact, we may say that the family brings up a baby by being brought up by him.10

Thus, from birth (and perhaps before), human development and emotional well-being are tied to relationship, and even as neonates, human beings are subject to emotional trauma, especially to real or virtual abandonment. Furthermore, even before the infant fully comprehends the separate existence of the other and distinguishes his own body parts from those of others with whom he interacts, 10. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 65.

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the influence of infant and primary caregivers is a reciprocal process. Attunement of parent to child, innate temperament, and the child’s epigenetically determined physical development combine over time with social and environmental factors to shape this new person. What, then, can this most contingent of creatures, who also wields such unexpected influence, teach us about what it is to be human and to be human before God? In particular, what might we learn about the fundamental human experience of anxiety, which even in an optimal infancy includes a kind of premonition of the annihilation to which all humanity is vulnerable? Melanie Klein and the Emergence of Object Relations Theory From almost the beginning of psychoanalytic practice, early childhood was largely the province of women, often social workers who by formal definition were commonly considered “lay analysts” until they began to be welcomed as equals starting (slowly) at around mid-century. These women often supplemented their formal training with practical experience—sometimes, but not always, as mothers. Melanie Klein, interestingly, subsequently argued that masculinity is dissectionist, while the maternal is integrative, assembling observations and intuitively making connections among them.11 Accordingly, Klein, who with Anna Freud was one of the first women clinician-theorists, built on Freudian postulations about infancy, applying a phenomenological approach not unlike the one that neurologists Freud and Breuer had brought to the earliest exploration of the talking cure. Klein used this approach to flesh out the psychoanalytic model of infant and toddler development. Although much of her theory rests on extrapolation from observations of toddlers and (primarily) preschoolers in her clinical practice, rather than infants themselves, Klein’s methodology in this respect represents a critical improvement over Freud’s extrapolations from his adult patients. 11. Juliet Mitchell, Introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein (New York: Free Press, 1986), 30–31. Mitchell’s introduction, on which I rely here, gives a helpful overview of Klein’s work. Unless otherwise noted, references are to this edition of Klein’s essays.

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In one of her major departures from Freudian thought, Klein’s argument pulled the earliest proto-oedipal experience back to the first year of life. In so doing, she posited a radical shift in clinical theory such that its scope expanded beyond the neuroses that classically had been considered “analyzable” (all of which are more or less related to the oedipal crisis of late early childhood) to include psychic disturbances originating in the earlier years of development—Freud’s pregenital stages of oral and anal cathexes. As I noted above, this shift to a less linear model of infant psychological development implies a much less rigid gap between neurosis and psychosis. Specifically, Klein argued for a direct relationship of normal ego development to psychosis, in contrast to the neurotic bridge that Freud had postulated. An additional implication of this argument that psychological development is a more recursive than linear process is that in addition to adults “revisiting” early developmental challenges through regression, the “stages” of development overlap, unfolding (more or less) in parallel, rather than serially. Thus, for example, at the time when the baby is weaned—the earliest and arguably most dramatic of the normative traumas—Klein observes a glimmer of oedipal feeling in the child who is facing this profound separation from the mother. Furthermore, these feelings, integration of which is so central to psychological stability, are then at least latently implicated in the next critical trauma (the demand for anal, especially, and urethral control), thereby psychologically joining the two crises. Klein argued that these intertwined oral and anal concerns then shaped the course of the subsequent oedipal crisis proper, rather than being set aside as development progresses.12 The full significance of the child’s experience of such transitional challenges is illustrated by Klein’s proposal that much of what we observe in disturbances of pregenital development can be tracked back to what she calls the (normal) infantile depressive position, which is most intense at weaning.13 For my purposes here, the significance of 12. It is largely in this context that Klein’s infamous descriptions of the sadism of infants arise. 13. See Klein, “Mourning and Manic-Depressive States” (1940), in The Selected Melanie Klein.

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this construct—which Klein observes unfolding as a grieving for the loss of the closest attachment to the mother—is that this is a normal, transitional state in human development. Just as we will consider it normal for adults to grieve significant losses, including the death of a loved one, Klein insists that it is normal for babies to grieve the loss of their most intimate (post-natal) relationship with their primary caregiver. Indeed, for Klein, the broader process in young children that takes much the same path as adult mourning is the child’s long coming to terms with her location in (real, external) reality—a task that eventually is accomplished as the primary school child leaves behind what Selma Fraiberg calls “the magic years.”14 Phantasy and the Uses of Enchantment Klein (and the Kleinians who embraced and built on her work) focused on the child’s relationship to her internal reality: . . . an inner world . . . built up in the child’s unconscious mind, corresponding to his actual experiences and the impression he gains from people and the external world, and yet altered by his own phantasies and impulses.15

Phantasy is a particularly Kleinian construct: she used this peculiar spelling to distinguish the relationship between internal and external realities (object relations, broadly construed) from the child’s more self-conscious, externally directed “fantasies.”16 Phantasy suggests the contiguous relationship of primary and secondary mental processes and distinguishes the child’s thought in much the same way that Selma Fraiberg (in the 1950s) and Bruno Bettelheim (writing some forty years after Klein) describe the relevance of fairy tales to children’s mastery of their feelings, in particular fear. Bettelheim’s understanding of children’s fantasies as the equivalent of adult thought, and specifically problem-solving thought, informs my appropriation of children’s literature to illustrate early childhood experience. 17 14. Fraiberg, Magic Years. Also see my discussion, below, of Fraiberg’s take on these issues. 15. Klein, “Mourning and Manic-Depressive States,” 148. 16. Mitchell, Introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein, 22.

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Indeed, Bettelheim’s perspective shares the recognition of a dark side to human nature that is a popular hallmark of Klein’s theory and that has much in common with Calvin’s strong early modern argument for the utter depravity of postlapsarian human nature. Erik Erikson, in fact, will draw on a similar sensibility to define the consequences of early conflicts around love and hate as the source of the Fall narrative in Genesis 3. One of the major distinctions, of course, is that the twentieth-century theorists do not understand this aspect of human nature in a normative framework or as literally divinely determined. Klein understood both love (the drive toward life) and hate (the death drive) as innate, preexisting, and providing the affective ground for the maternal relationship, which they inform. Furthermore, in another departure from classical theory, she normalized anxiety as arising, not from repression of a sexual impulse, but as a warning mechanism of sorts, arising from the (innate) death drive, and defined two categories of anxiety: persecutory (which informs what she called the infantile paranoid-schizoid mode) and depressive (the infantile depressive mode).18 As is true of psychoanalytic sources generally, Klein’s darkly inflected language is sometimes difficult to swallow for some readers, especially when it is in reference to early infancy. Although substantive, her language is exceptionally colorful and overwrought by most contemporary standards, but for that very reason is highly descriptive and evocative. It serves—with the strong caveat that we not reify it—to provide a picture of the infant and young child that is valuable as we consider how their experience can relate to that of human suffering generally. Early Attachment Theory As we have seen, despite her phenomenological bent, Klein focused less on the child’s relationship to the actual (i.e., external) object—people, things, and events—and more on phantasy: the relationship between 17. Fraiberg, Magic Years, for example 12; Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, 1st ed. (New York: Knopf, 1976), 121 and note. 18. Mitchell, Introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein, 14–15, 21–22.

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his experiences of that external world and the roughly correlative world comprising internalized representations of people and environment (objects and events). By mid-century, however, clinicians and theorists increasingly emphasized external relationships, focusing on the relationship to the primary parent. After the Second World War, as early childhood became more and more an object of study, and as the English were emerging from their long national trauma, the field of attachment theory had its (now almost legendary) origin in the research of John Bowlby (working with John Robertson) and Jewish refugee Rene Spitz, based on their observations of patients separated from their mothers for prolonged periods for medical reasons. 19 These babies were given meticulous hospital care: nutrition, diapering, burping, any necessary medical intervention, a carefully maintained environment. Nevertheless, many of them (in a phrase that was to become a watchword of infant welfare) failed to thrive, in some cases to a life-threatening degree. Those who were reunited with their mothers recovered and resumed apparently normal development; those who were restored to a parental relationship after too long a separation, however, passed through despair into an apparent recovery of equanimity that in fact masked a profound psychic injury that irretrievably undermined future relationships. It became apparent that the necessity for human life these infants were missing was relational—not just the effective touch that accompanies feeding and diapering, bathing and dressing, but the kind of loving caress, embrace, and eye contact that communicate something beyond that attention to more obviously physical needs. Similar responses were noted in older children who were separated from their parents during the Blitz: although they were evacuated in order to provide a physically more secure environment, the psychological effects of the Battle of Britain were radically compounded by separation from parents, rather than minimized. Children who remained in heavily bombarded urban

19. See Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 1969 and Rene Spitz, The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965).

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communities fared better than did their counterparts evacuated to the relatively safer countryside. So necessary to survival is the human need for relationship that today newborns who cannot be with their mothers are “prescribed” special attention. Neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) routinely make it possible for parents to touch and relate to their babies (even when equipment poses a challenge) as soon as possible, to the greatest degree possible; when parents cannot be present, NICUs take pains to provide volunteers whose job it is to hold and (often) rock tiny patients. For the same reasons, when newborns are abandoned or must be separated from their families, child welfare workers, whenever possible, now place them immediately, not in modern, professionally maintained nurseries, which would be more convenient and easier to maintain, but in infant foster care. The foster parent, when available, provides not just for the infant’s physiological needs, but literally serves as what Winnicott (see below) will describe as a holding environment, providing human touch and relationship. From Bowlby forward, supported by the work of the experimentalists who emerged in the 1970s and beyond, attachment theorists clarified and reinforced the centrality to a young child of a stable and secure relationship with her mother.20 It became increasingly clear—on every theoretical front—that disruption of an infant’s relationship to the primary parent threatens the very fabric of existence for the child. Accordingly, as no parent can attend either constantly or perfectly to the child, some anxiety about their continued existence is typically—to a greater or lesser degree— common to almost all infants and young children. As the child’s sense of separateness emerges, so do the inescapable ramifications of radical dependence. My own work resonates with the concurrent interests of Daniel Stern and others on the seamless connections among developmental arenas. Working within a framework loosely defined by Margaret 20. See below for discussion of Daniel Stern’s contributions, which draw heavily upon attachment theory and the experimentalists’ project, as well as object relations.

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Mahler (see discussion below), my graduate research in early development supports the supposition that the emotionally secure progression of emotional development is inseparable, for example, from language acquisition and motor development: delay in any one of these arenas, whether pathological or not, is linked to delays in the other two arenas. It is this globally experienced sense of self that makes the infant susceptible to a profound insecurity (what in adults we consider anxiety).21 Erik Erikson and the Stages of Humankind Like theoreticians Bowlby and Spitz, clinicians at mid-century (other than the most loyally classical Freudians) began more and more to take a broader, relational perspective, emphasizing the child’s development in situ, irreducibly connected to his primary caregivers, family, and society. Erik Erikson, in particular, aimed to draw connections between the developing person and her broad social context.22 Erikson remains most popularly familiar, however, for his articulation of the “eight stages of man,” which roughly parallel the psychoanalytic model of development up to adulthood (at which point his innovation includes division of adulthood itself into three distinct stages). 23 Erikson’s contribution is his organization of these stages around descriptive identification of key developmental crises that are essential to the successful negotiation of each one. Infants—the oral stage—must develop a sense of basic trust (v. basic mistrust) and basic evil. Interestingly, the latter task—developing a sense of basic evil—is almost entirely absent in the popular presentations of Erikson’s theory.24 In my own work, this construction of infant development becomes centrally important, as it highlights the foundational quality 21. Sally Stamper, “Interdependency of Separation-Individuation and Language in the First Year,” MA thesis, University of Illinois at Chicago, 1984. 22. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950. 23. As I discuss below, I have preserved the language of primary sources without acknowledging gendered language, although in my own material I randomly alternate between male and female pronouns when the context does not call for a specific gender. Also see pp. 79–81. At the publication of this book, I have not yet decided on how to incorporate non-gendered pronoun usage. 24. See Erikson, Childhood and Society, 74ff.

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of the human experience that the potential for evil coexists with the potential for good. The texts for young children that I read in chapter 3 suggest that even in the most benevolent, normative circumstances, a knowledge of something threatening presents itself on at least a preconscious level. Erikson’s developmental trajectory posits that this knowledge actually coheres—is essential—to the fundamental sense of trust in the goodness of things that is necessary for continued psychology (and physical, as I discuss below) development. Theologically, the knowledge of evil can be considered essential to full appreciation of necessity of grace. Its inherent quality supports Marilyn McCord Adams’s argument that creation itself is structured such that human horror-participation is inevitable. Jonathan Lear will argue that knowing recognition of the consequences of catastrophe is a necessary ground for radical hope, and Erikson’s earliest, preverbal knowledge of the reciprocal relationship of good and evil, trust and mistrust in the environment, is the developmental ground for the capacity to sustain that acknowledgment. Erikson continues through the developmental crises with the toddler, who—at the anal stage—is challenged to acquire a sense of autonomy (v. shame and doubt), and the preschooler (on the threshold of the genital stage), who finally experiences fully confident independent locomotion and optimally develops a sense of initiative (v. guilt). The later stages, which succeed those on which this project focuses, are industry/inferiority, identity/role diffusion, intimacy/ isolation, generativity/stagnation, and ego integrity/despair. Erikson’s major contributions include his focus on the continuous nature of human development throughout life, represented in his division of adulthood into three stages. For my own project, a broadly construed application of this model is useful in particular for Erikson’s attention to the early traumas experienced even (indeed, necessarily) in optimal development and for his evocative pairing of the optimal psychological outcome of each crisis with the problematic alterative. While his theoretical model can reasonably be criticized as becoming somewhat mechanistic, his grasp

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of the changing cathexes in the context of the relational shifts experienced by the child is clear and vividly articulated. (It also usefully illustrates the division among adherents of the British object relations school, eventually, into three camps: [Anna] Freudian, Kleinian, and the third way Independents.) In considering early experiences of anxiety, Erikson, like most theorists, focused on the infant-mother dyad, describing the function of the dyad itself as “mutual regulation.”25 This phrase evokes the reciprocity that Erikson emphasized as central to this earliest relationship. 26 Melanie Klein identified weaning as the most severe of the normative traumas, and Erikson describes the often-concurrent teething process as one of the most severe of the traumatic experiences.27 However, he identifies the process by which the infant masters his first awareness of separation from the mother, not as a trauma, but as his “first social achievement . . . his willingness to let the mother out of his sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an inner certainty as well as outer predictability.”28 Erikson then asserts that the “most severe test” of the mutually regulating relationship of mother and child occurs in the mother’s response to toileting during the anal period, when the child’s positive sense of autonomy, her comfort with self-control, develops.29 At this point, Erikson observes of the prerequisite establishment of basic trust that “basic faith in existence [itself] . . . is a lasting treasure saved from the rages of the oral stage,” which is, however, vulnerable to the upheaval of the anal stage, when the child experiences a “sudden violent wish to have a choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to eliminate stubbornly.” The alternative outcome, shame, “is essentially rage turned against the self.”30 As Klein argued, Erikson understands each developmental crisis to 25. Ibid., 78. 26. Also see note 5. 27. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 74. 28. Ibid., 219. Erikson’s descriptive emphasis here has much in common with Margaret Mahler’s later construction of object permanency, discussed below. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 223.

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develop along a path largely determined by the outcome of the preceding crisis. The earlier rage associated with the oral stage will resolve into a defining lens through which (absent any significant intervention) the developing person’s worldview, that lens through which she perceives all objects and experiences, will either be one of essential trust or of irrevocable mistrust. Erikson describes the adult experience of basic trust as “a sense of being ‘all right,’ of being oneself, and of becoming what other people trust one will become.”31 Key to fully understanding basic trust, however, is Erikson’s tying it developmentally to a concomitant distinction of basic good and basic evil, arising out of the trauma associated with teething, which is complicated (and therefore rendered more traumatic) by the coincident pain of teeth that “bore from within,” weaning, and consequent greater separation from the mother. In Erikson’s view, this powerful conjunction of challenges leads to the first, albeit primitive, distinction of good and evil (or at least their precursor states). The source of greatest pleasure now becomes a source of persistent pain from within the child’s own self (what Erikson calls a “masochistic dilemma”), but the only relief is in biting, which when directed at the breast both takes on a [proto-]sadistic quality and precipitates the mother’s withdrawal. Erikson describes the child’s mental construct for this sadomasochistic climax as producing “an evil dividedness,” in which the baby is psychologically entangled (simultaneously) in anger at her teeth, her mother, and her own impotence to do anything about any of it.32 The perduring residual effect of this experience is “the general impression that once upon a time one destroyed one’s unity with a maternal matrix,” a division of evil from good mythologized in the narrative of the Fall. The best protection from significantly disruptive effects of this struggle is a close relationship to the mother, both before and during the painful

31. Ibid., 221. 32. Aside from the descriptive quality of the language of primitive sadism and masochism, it is in this context that assessment of homosexuality as both “immature” sexually and as pathological arise (although these ideas are not original to Erikson). Erikson briefly engages the question in his discussion of anal play (80).

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transition from toothless complete dependence to toothed protoindependence. This is the context in which Erikson understands anaclitic depression to arise, absent sufficient “mother-love.” Even when that supportive holding environment (to anticipate Winnicott’s language) is provided, however, there remains “a residue of a primary sense of evil and doom and of a universal nostalgia for a lost paradise.”33 The basic trust of the oral stage and autonomy of the anal stage together inform the preschooler’s negotiation of the third stage, roughly comparable to the classical genital stage, when the child’s development takes an outward, aggressive (in the broad sense) direction, expanding into broader social engagement.34 Erikson recognizes the new awareness of genital differences that arise at this age (roughly three years and forward), but organizes his description of it around locomotion. The preschooler’s increasing mobility and “exuberant enjoyment of new locomotor and mental power” is grounded in a sense of “mastery when gravity is felt to be within, when the child can forget that he is doing the walking and instead can find out what he can do with it.”35 The positive outcome of this new capacity and its deployment is a confident sense of initiative, rather than “guilt over the goals contemplated and the acts initiated” through this dramatically greater independence.36 Selma Fraiberg and Early Childhood Magic When does the child first experience anxiety in relation to the outer world? . . . When he first learns to love. Here is a riddle for the poets! Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years

In many ways, Selma Fraiberg’s greatest contribution was her capacity to illustrate developmental and clinical theory with engaging narratives. Fraiberg, an American-born and -trained social worker and

33. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 64–75. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Ibid., 81. 36. Ibid., 224.

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(primarily child) psychoanalyst, is most widely known for two key publications. Her seminal and still widely read article “Ghosts in the Nursery” is a classic of infant welfare and mental health. More widely known popularly is her compelling and intentionally accessible (as well as self-consciously theoretically grounded) book for parents, The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood (1959), which is also used in training clinical social workers. 37 In The Magic Years, Fraiberg’s presentation of the first six years of life virtually instantiates the relationally grounded theories that by mid-century were becoming increasingly central to much of the psychoanalytic community. Fraiberg not only defends, but also advocates for the practical value of theory and alternates between theoretical explications of early childhood and vignettes drawn both from her practice and from the lives of her younger acquaintances. Also considered a founding figure in the field of infant mental health, she engages the function of anxiety in preparing the young child for perceived danger, this anticipatory anxiety actually equipping the child to manage his helplessness without enduring traumatic effects. As is true for Erikson and others, Fraiberg contends that anxiety is (1) significantly uncomfortable, even painful, for the child, (2) inevitable, and (3) productive (assuming it does not exceed the limits of the child’s capacity and that of her environment to manage it). Indeed, she describes anxiety as central to, even defining of, what it is to be uniquely human and ties it to the young child’s proto-guilt. Fraiberg emphasizes that in the proper sense, conscience and therefore guilt do not emerge until much later and points out that misguided attempts to spare the young child any guilt at all actually constrain healthy development.38 Fraiberg is also exceptionally effective in her presentation of the complex and often paradoxical unfolding of early childhood experience. She vividly evokes the life of the infant in the last quarter 37. Selma Fraiberg, “Ghosts in the Nursery: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Problems of Impaired Infant-Mother Relationships,” 1984, with Edna Adelson and Vivian Shapiro, originally presented at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, May 23, 1974. 38. Fraiberg, Magic Years, 28–29; 139 and 147.

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of his first year as simultaneously challenging, even “lonely,” and grounded in a profound zest for exploration and investigation. For example, she asserts of an infant first standing independently that “the child’s achievement of the upright posture is truly heroic,” while at the same time noting that a personality change accompanies this capacity (evidence of mind-body integration), so that the baby now “can’t tolerate being flat on his back and passive, and is impelled by the most irresistible urge to upright himself. . . . It’s an inner necessity.”39 At the same time, she observes, “There must be a solemn and terrible aloneness that comes over the child as he takes those first independent steps.” . . . that first step is a brave and lonely thing to do. For it is not a fear of falling, as such, that creates apprehension in the child . . . it is the fear of a loss of support that looms big at this age.40

Again, however, Fraiberg, who routinely refers to young children as “scientists,” celebrates at length the (usually younger) infant who with the onset of crawling is driven by an impressive urge to explore, responding to a “self-starting, self-perpetuating mechanism,” so that “this adventurer is stopped by nothing,” pausing briefly for a bandage to be applied to the inevitable injuries, perhaps for a rest or a bite to eat, then off again to doggedly engage and map out the environs. 41 Fraiberg also extensively develops her metaphor for the first years of life as organized by magic. In a manner that is consonant with Bettelheim’s work on fairy tales,42 Fraiberg describes the unconsciously transmitted intergenerational influences that all families experience as not only “ghosts in the nursery,” but also “uninvited guests at the christening,” “unfriendly and unbidden spirits,” who under all favorable circumstances . . . are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. The baby makes his own imperative claim upon parental love and, in strict analogy with the fairy 39. Ibid., 58–59. 40. Ibid., 60–61. 41. Ibid., 56–57. 42. See chapter 3 for further discussion.

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tales, the bonds of love protect the child and his parents against the intruders, the malevolent ghosts.43

Further comparing the wish-based “feelings of earliest childhood” to wish-granting genies and other magical helpers of fairy tales, Fraiberg writes vividly of the young child as a magician who makes the world appear and disappear by opening and closing her eyes.44 The young magician also learns the power of words (beginning with “mama”) to arouse powerful feeling in his most central relationships and (in the case of “mama”) to magically compel the primary caregiver’s presence.45 This magical quality preexists agency in the “long sleep” of the first two months of life, when the child inhabits a dreamlike world: Dim objects swim into view, then recede and melt into nothingness. A human face hovers over him like a ghostly mask, then dissolves. Events in his life have no connections. Even the satisfaction of his hunger has not yet been connected with the face of his mother, not to mention [her] person.46

The magical quality of sleep persists beyond infancy, even into adulthood: “. . . in sleep states or states bordering on sleep our mental processes regress to primitive modes of thought. . . . In dreams themselves, language is represented largely in pictures.”47 For preverbal children, however, this primary process is the single mode of thought. It is the unavailability of language that necessitates, for example, (magical) rituals, notably at bedtime, actions that eventually will be replaced by verbal processes.48 In large part, it is the acquisition of language that eventually will precipitate the end of the child’s predominantly magical worldview, but this transition does not take place fully until well into language development: So the world of the two year old is still at times a spooky twilight world 43. Fraiberg, “Ghosts in the Nursery,” 100. 44. Fraiberg, Magic Years, 12. 45. Ibid., 107, 112. 46. Ibid., 35–36. 47. Ibid., 123. 48. Ibid., 117.

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that is closer to the world of the dream than the world of reality . . . [and] the child who lives mid-way between the world of magic and the world of reality does not see that one world excludes the other. 49

Again in common with Bettelheim, Fraiberg clarifies the young child’s complex distinction of reality and unreality. In discussing the imaginary friend phenomenon, for example, she points out that “almost any two and a half year old will admit, if pressed, that there isn’t really a tiger under the couch. And he very sensibly deals with his imaginary tigers by means of imagination.” Nonetheless, the child lives a full—and “real”—life in relation to fantasy. Indeed, “the imaginative play of children serves mental health by keeping the boundaries between fantasy and reality,” boundaries that cannot be maintained if the child is not allowed to (really) live with the fantasy. 50 This evocation of magic as the native mode of early cognition provides a crucial insight into the function of literature for very young children. I appropriate the descriptive nomenclature of “magical thinking” to account for the young child’s normative sense that reality operates, first, with herself at its very center and, second, with her agency as its first and efficient cause. For the emotionally healthy young child, there is a growing, and adaptive, sense that it is she who is the first mover and is therefore accountable for all that she perceives around her. Reconciliation of the dissonance between this worldview and the frustration she experiences is one of the first adaptations she must effect, and its successful resolution itself initially calls on a magical construction of the world. Indeed, it is not until the very latest of the developmental stages I engage in this project that the child begins to grasp the full extent to which the world operates according to properties she does not control, and even then the full appreciation of the implications of that principle lie ahead. Melanie Klein’s phantasy and its appropriation by Bruno Bettelheim point to this same quality of the young child’s experience, in which the environment operates in 49. Ibid., 125–26. 50. Ibid., 22. For the fuller discussion of imaginary friends, see the “Laughing Tiger” vignette (16–23), especially 21–23. For an application of the theory to a literary source, see chapter 3, specifically my reading of “What was I Scared of?”

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ways that are magical and therefore more coherent to the youngest minds than to the healthy adult. Such a perspective renders the young child vulnerable to the kind of shattering consequences that Jonathan Lear describes in adult terms as the catastrophic collapse of the very means by which an individual (or culture) makes meaning. The successful (and magical) negotiation of an adaptive sense of one’s relative influence on one’s surroundings thus becomes a kind of bedrock on which Lear’s “radical hope” rests.51 D. W. Winnicott (as discussed below) will emphasize the quality of “illusion” that is central to the transitional phenomena that make such hopeful adaptation possible, in adults as well as young children. The Infant Mental Health Program that Fraiberg was instrumental in establishing developed a treatment methodology that engaged infants and mothers together and incorporated psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and social work. Because the primary setting for intervention was the home, this program also engaged fathers, siblings, and extended families (as well, occasionally, as broader communities of which the family was a part). As a consequence of this approach—later appropriated and adapted by family systems theorists and child welfare agencies—Fraiberg and her colleagues were able both to capitalize on their observations of young children and parents (particularly mothers) and to extend those observations. The landmark cases presented in “Ghosts in the Nursery” speak to the relationship of maternal pathology, especially depression, and the affective and developmental health of children. These findings resonated with those of Bowlby and Spitz, for example, but focused on addressing parental mental health as a means of providing protective intervention for at-risk infants. All else being equal, child welfare workers note that neglect is often more damaging emotionally than abuse (further evidence of the power of early loving relationship), but when both neglect (in the extreme, abandonment) and abuse occur, the ensuing devastation is complex to the point of being almost incomprehensible, making intervention both challenging and rarely 51. I discuss Lear’s account of radical hope in chapter 5.

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successful. One of the cases presented in “Ghosts” centers on a mother, originally referred as a “rejecting mother” (at one time considered the root cause of autism and schizophrenia), for whom the underlying problem was that she was actually a “depressed mother,” whose own childhood was marked by abandonment and abuse. Once the mother’s own depression and anxiety were relieved, eventually leading to disclosure of family secrets that at the time were not as widely reported as they began to be in the 1990s, she and her infant daughter were able to form a bond, and thereafter “nearly everything else could find solutions.”52 Indeed, Fraiberg places especially strong emphasis on love as the force that propels development. As noted in the epigraph to this section, she identifies the key moment in the infant’s experience of anxiety relative to the larger world as growing out of her attachment to—love of—her primary caregiver, now understood by the infant for the first time as a somehow separate, and therefore contingent, individual. Moreover, Fraiberg uses this conjunction of what Margaret Mahler will call object permanency with love and anxiety to make her point that “the very process of development creates problems for the child, produces anxiety.”53 This is the optimal anxiety that is prerequisite for the child’s ongoing development of increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding and managing her relationship to her environment. Indeed, Fraiberg points to the infant’s maturation into “object relationships” as “the achievement of the human family through ties of love.”54 This broader relational community begins, however, with the infant-mother dyad, in a manner that Fraiberg (resonating with Erikson’s emphasis in Childhood and Society) clearly sees as fundamental not only for the individual and the family, but for the broader society, indeed, as “proof” that “civilization begins with love.”55 The infant enters “personhood” in a manner entirely fitting for a civilized person—through love of 52. Fraiberg, “Ghosts,” 112. 53. Fraiberg, Magic Years, 48. 54. Ibid., 56. 55. Ibid., 47.

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another person, for he discovers himself and he discovers the world outside himself through his mother.56

D. W. Winnicott and the British Independent School There is no such thing as a baby . . . the unit is not the individual, the unit is an environment-individual set-up. . . . In other words, without a goodenough technique of infant care the new human being has no chance whatever. D. W. Winnicott, “Anxiety Associated with Insecurity”

Unlike the medical doctors who preceded him as psychoanalysts, Winnicott was a pediatrician (rather than a neurologist): like Klein, to a lesser degree, and especially Fraiberg, he applied his “real life” observations of infants and young children to his analysis of human experience. Indeed, of all the analysts who were medical doctors, Winnicott is the one who is colloquially thought of by social workers as being the most like them in this regard. Unlike both Klein and Fraiberg, however, he self-consciously sought out means of standardizing his observations of healthy infants and children, for example of the examining room set-up and procedures he used with clinic patients. His lectures and written work have a distinctive quality that is more accessible than Klein’s sometimes shocking turns of phrase and more technical than Fraiberg’s much more narrative, even colloquial, style. In both lectures and written texts, however, Winnicott brought to bear, in particular, his observations of the relationship of infant and mother, the incarnate dyad within which the internalized objects that people the adult psyche originate, and in his standardization of these observations in his clinic, he anticipates the later, more highly structured work of Margaret Mahler and the experimentalists.57 Indeed, Winnicott understands the reciprocally defining relationship of mother and infant as sufficiently foundational to the identity of each participant in the dyad that he is remembered for a statement that 56. Ibid., 45. 57. For a prominent illustration, see “The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation,” (1941) in D. W. Winnicott, Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1958, 52–69. This work anticipates to some degree that of the attachment theorists, but Winnicott is roughly a contemporary of Bowlby and Spitz.

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apparently took even him by surprise the first time he said it: “There is no such thing as a baby.”58 Winnicott also coined the now-common phrase “good enough” to describe the level of care that is actually requisite for the human infant to grow and thrive: not perfection of attunement or provision, but “good-enough” parenting. Indeed, closely related to the idea of the good-enough mother is the idea that I already have noted in relation to Erikson, Fraiberg, and attachment theory: it is in normative rupture of care and its resolution that development arises. The child who never experiences any frustration is handicapped emotionally, unable to manage normal stress, much less trauma, in much the same way as the child who experiences frustration at a level of severity that exceeds her capacity to tolerate and therefore learn to manage. So fundamental is this supposition, that rupture and repair within the therapeutic relationship also plays a key role in psychoanalytic treatment, particularly for clinicians whose theoretical ground is either object relations or Self psychology. A key aspect of good-enough care (and one that translates into clinical theory) is provision of what Winnicott called “holding” or a “holding environment.” While holding has come to have significant metaphorical connotations, it originates conceptually in Winnicott’s understanding that the newborn’s earliest experience of a kind of proto-anxiety (which cannot be considered anxiety proper for developmental reasons) arises from not being securely held in the physical sense. For the newborn who must quickly accommodate to a suddenly dramatically less physically constraining (and therefore supporting) environment, and who is incapable of maintaining physical equilibrium independently (of which the baby’s “floppy” head is the most familiar exemplar), to be supported physically is both somatically protective and psychologically essential. Literal holding of the newborn in particular, however, also includes for Winnicott “infant care” broadly construed—feeding, diapering, bathing, burping, 58. See “Anxiety Associated with Insecurity” (1952) in Collected Papers, 99. Based on Winnicott’s comments in this presentation, it would seem that he first made this comment in about 1942.

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soothing—all activities that engage the earliest psyche, which at this point is indistinguishable from the soma. As Winnicott notes, he is indebted on this point, in part, to Anna Freud, also a member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, who founded and ran the legendary Hampstead Nursery for working-class children.59 Winnicott associates failure of infant care for neonates with a range of symptomology that includes, for example, disintegration and a “sense of depersonalization” that arises from “lack of relationship of psyche to soma.” What sets these counter-integrative states apart from anxiety, however, is that the infant “feel[s] awful,” but does not experience the (psychic) “pain” that Winnicott identifies with anxiety. Instead, the baby has not developed the sense of bodily integrity—sometimes called a “body ego”—that produces normative, healthy anxiety in infants who experience minor failures of infant care after having had the good-enough neonatal care that is prerequisite for development of a body ego. Winnicott’s distinctive point (against Rycroft, among others) is that (1) the effects of insufficiently secure holding extend beyond the way the neonate is supported in arms and (2) these effects are not “just a matter of semi-circular canals and physiology,” but are states that “group naturally under the word mad, if they are found in an adult.”60 Winnicott’s interest in management of normative anxiety also gives rise to another of his most influential contributions: as explicated in his seminal presentation to the British Psychoanalytic Society in May 1951, Winnicott identifies and addresses an intermediate area of experience, between interpersonal reality and inner reality, constituted by transitional objects and transitional phenomena. He associates this intermediate space with illusion, “a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related.”61 Winnicott himself does not extend this language to describe transitional space, as do I, although his 59. See “Anxiety Associated with Insecurity,” 1952, in Collected Papers, given orally in response to C. F. Rycrost on vertigo, 97–100 (especially 98). 60. Winnicott, “Anxiety Associated with Insecurity,” 98–100. 61. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1951, in Collected Papers, 230.

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description of the relevant experience supports such usage. Such a space is more than a little akin to Kohut’s self-state—one of many such resonances between the two theorists, although Self psychologists (to be fair) are at some pains to refute a reading of Self psychology as primarily a reworking of object relations.62 Transitional phenomena emerge at any time between four and twelve months. They play a key stabilizing role as the infant experiences the progressively more challenging frustrations that come with greater independence from a primary caregiver and often are first manifest in babbling or singing while falling asleep.63 The sound, word, mannerism, or object that functions in this way provides a continuity that allows the infant to manage anxiety, especially the kind of anxiety that Winnicott (like Klein) described as depressive. In some instances, the primary caregiver—for whom transitional phenomena represent a psychic stand-in—serves this function directly, but Winnicott posits that only in cases of extreme mental disturbance (anaclitic depression, for example) does the infant never develop a transitional object. Typically, transitional phenomena are most intensely related to an object—the blankie or a soft stuffed animal is paradigmatic—that the infant begins to associate with the comfort derived from the thumb sucking that brings the object into the infant’s mouth. Older children may continue to use it for comfort at bedtime or when stressed or depressed, but in general the object itself gradually loses its powerful signification as the child progresses toward experience of external reality as distinct from internal reality.64 The need for a “personal intermediate area” is lifelong, however. Indeed, Winnicott understands that need as peculiarly human: . . . the task of reality-acceptance is never completed . . . no human is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and . . . relief from this strain is promised by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged.65 62. See Howard A. Bacal and Kenneth M. Newman, “D. W. Winnicott,” in Theories of Object Relations: Bridges to Self Psychology, Personality, Psychopathology, and Psychotherapy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 185–206. 63. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 229–42. 64. Ibid., 23–33.

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The idea of “a neutral area of experience which will not be challenged”66 is the lifelong corollary of the child’s becoming “lost” in play, and its developmental origin hinges on the infant’s illusion—magic—that allows her to bridge the emotional space in which frustrated needs are managed. Winnicott sees the essential nature of such a liminal space in adult experience as the “positive value of illusion.” In adult life, this function is served by experiences that by their very nature are not fully open to reasonable challenge. Winnicott includes in these experiences the arts and religion, but also “imaginative living,” philosophy, and “creative scientific work.”67 Specifically, Winnicott understands transitional phenomena as the developmental precursor of symbolism, which he notes has “at the very best a variable meaning” that cannot arise independent of individual experience.68 This aspect of transitional phenomena is of particular relevance to my project as it relates to my appropriation of children’s literature. Separation-Individuation: Margaret Mahler and Fred Pine Roughly a contemporary of Winnicott, Margaret Mahler also grounded her work in close observation of children with their mothers, her methodology something of a cross between that of Bowlby and Spitz and that of the experimentalists whose work blossomed after hers. Her work thus forms an important bridge between the earlier theorists and the experimentalists, represented below by Daniel Stern. More than most of the theorists and clinicians on whom I focus here, Mahler’s work arises from the theoretical ground of ego psychology, growing out of classical Freudian thought. Furthermore, unlike Winnicott, who retained a narrative tone despite his medical background, Mahler articulated a highly structured schema of the pregenital stages of 65. Ibid., 240. Winnicott himself also directs the reader’s attention to Joan Riviere (roughly his contemporary), “On the Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Earliest Infancy,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 17 (October 1936). 66. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 239. 67. Ibid., 242. 68. Ibid., 234.

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development, built on her controlled observations of young children and their mothers, complete with extraordinarily precise (and therefore, easily both reified and contested) age markers for each stage. For Mahler, development hinges on the young child’s capacity to tolerate and master progressive stages of separation from the caregiver, specifically to manage the accompanying anxiety. In her classic text The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, she does not focus on the earliest months of life—which she describes as a normatively symbiotic stage—and highlights instead the significance of the object permanency acquired (by her quite precise calendar) in the last quarter of the first year, as well as the “rapprochement” that marks the high point of separation-individuation at around eighteen months. Although she understands the process she called separationindividuation to continue on some basis throughout life, she limits the separation-individuation stage proper to the first three years of life, culminating in the object constancy that finally allows the child, who now has thoroughly internalized the maternal object, to carry that primary object with her always, so that launching forth as a separate individual becomes an empowering, rather than traumatic, experience.69 Mahler’s colleague Fred Pine later wrote a treatment of clinical and developmental “phenomena” that is notably less schematized than the earlier material presented in Psychological Birth, which he co-authored with Mahler and Anni Bergman. Drive, Ego, Object, and Self is selfconsciously integrative, pointing to the reductionist consequences of partisan loyalty to any one of the four major schools of analytic thought (classical, ego psychology, object relations, and Self psychology). While defending the claim that subjective experience can be pushed back as far as infancy (common ground among the thinkers on whose work I rely here), Pine argues that each of the distinct, and by definition synthetic, models of psychoanalytic thought risk losing 69. Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975). The Introduction and Historical Review and Chapter One: Overview together offer a helpful sense of the context for this project.

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sight of the human person whom they seek to understand and assist.70 Pine sums up his foundational critique by pointedly comparing the four schools of thought to the proverbial blind men describing an elephant.71 Daniel Stern and the Experimentalists Daniel Stern’s Interpersonal World of the Infant develops a late twentiethcentury alternative to earlier “developmental and psychoanalytic” constructions of infancy and early childhood: Stern organizes his theory around the “sense of self,” defining sense as “simple (non-selfreflexive) awareness,” and self as “organizing subjective experience.”72 Stern aims to integrate clinically and empirically derived psychoanalytic and attachment theories with the experimental research on infancy that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. An associate of Margaret Mahler’s group,73 he took a more comprehensive approach to child development, colored by his attention to correcting persistent resistance in much of the classical psychoanalytic community to attachment as the central, organizing process of early development. In particular, he rejected Mahler’s premise that the earliest months of life represent a kind of “normal autism,” during which the infant and primary caregiver share a “symbiotic” relationship. In both instances, Mahler’s language aims to communicate not something abnormal, but a radical normative sense of the young infant’s self-contained experience, processed through a normative merger with the primary caregiver. Nonetheless, there is some indication from Stern himself that subsequently Mahler reconsidered her use of normal autism to denote the first stage of infancy, based on her review of his research videos of children. 74 Stern draws upon experimental investigations of infant response 70. Fred Pine, Drive, Ego, Object, and Self: A Synthesis for Clinical Work (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 8–9. 71. Ibid., 4. 72. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 7. 73. Including, most prominently, in addition to Mahler herself, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman. 74. Also see the discussion of Mahler’s separation-individuation construct, above.

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to develop several organizing principles that he articulates in setting himself apart, especially from the classical Freudians, (to a somewhat lesser degree) Erik Erikson, and Margaret Mahler.75 Stern points to a set of capacities common even to neonates that are prerequisite for interpersonal relationship, including turning the head while prone, sucking, and looking. He emphasizes the degree to which these capacities evidence the baby’s “alert inactivity,” which informs the social embeddedness of the infant despite his being “physically quiet and . . . apparently not taking in external events,” pointing out that a young infant will turn his head to indicate a recognition of and preference for his own mother’s milk, and that infants generally demonstrate a preference for the human face over other patterns and for the human voice over other sounds.76 Furthermore, Stern points out experimental results that demonstrate that human infants are born with the capacity to make connections both between visual and tactile experiences (i.e., recognizing the same shape whether experiencing it visually or tactilely) and, similarly, between auditory and visual connections.77 From a study of the experimental data, Stern posits certain “general principles” that ground his argument about the early, primary role of a sense of self (and by implication, self-other) in infant development: • “Infants seek stimulation.” • “They have distinct [innate] biases and preferences with regard to the sensations they seek and the perceptions they form.” • They experiment, forming hypotheses and developing categories. • “[Their] affective and cognitive processes cannot be readily separated.”78 75. Alma Halbert Bond, Margaret Mahler: A Biography of the Psychoanalyst (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), 211–14. In Bond’s verbatim excerpts from an interview with him, Stern recounts an eventually reciprocal fondness he shared with Mahler (following his initial fear of her . . .), along with confirming evidence of his work on her theory. 76. Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant, 39–40. 77. Ibid., 48.

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From these principles and the experimental data that he engages, Stern articulates his own developmental schema, organized around “epochs of great change,” those “quantum leaps” that are characteristic of early development, separated by periods of quieter consolidation. Stern identifies certain developmental transitions that are commonly identified experimentally: 2–3 months, (to a lesser degree) 5–6 months, 9–12 months, and 15–18 months. He notes that the developmental shifts that take place at each of these significant junctures are marked by a dramatic change in who the infant seems to be and how she presents to the other.79 Using these experimental data, his own observation, and clinical reconstruction, he outlines four key developmental progressions, which are cumulative rather than serial (a characteristic he thinks sets his own schema apart): • Birth–2 months: emergent self • 2–6 months: sense of core self • 7–15 months: sense of subjective self • 15 months: forward sense of verbal self80 Central to Stern’s perspective is that there is no time of “total self/ other undifferentiation,” no “autistic-like phase.” Furthermore, he insists that “the subjective experiences of union with another can occur only after a sense of core self and a core other exists,” rather than as an original state of predifferentiation.81 In other words, the “sense of core self” (the first of Stern’s developmental achievements) emerges before the infant can experience a sense of union with the primary caregiver (a perspective that offers interesting possibilities for conversation with apophatic theology and experience of the beatific vision, for example). Prior to that time, in the earliest months of life

78. Ibid., 40–41. 79. Ibid., 8. 80. Ibid., 11. Stern discusses each stage in Part II of the same text. 81. Ibid., 10.

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that precede the first developmental shift at age two to three months, the infant is experiencing the “alert inactivity” I describe above. Psychoanalytic theory had long incorporated the precursors of these insights, particularly that even very young infants have the capacity to relate to and be affected by their caregivers in a relational (rather than simply physiological) context. As noted, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein, among others, emphasized the effects of parenting and environment on infant development; thirty years before Stern, Selma Fraiberg routinely referred to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers as “scientists.”82 Stern, however, while acknowledging the important role of “clinical reconstruction” (inferences about normative development drawn from treatment of adult and older children) as a necessary supplement to direct observation of preverbal children,83 insists that his own project differs from that of earlier theorists because he divorces normative development from “specific clinical issues such as orality, attachment, autonomy, independence, and trust.”84 More apt (from my perspective) is his turn away from the classical Freudian insistence that physical needs, in particular the dependence on caregivers for physiological regulation, are the sole ground for the infant’s earliest interactions, as opposed to any “human social relatedness.”85 Even here, however, there is the danger of concretizing Freudian drives in a way that ignores the embeddedness of psyche in soma, which Stern himself emphasizes. Referring to the work of Paul Ricoeur and others on psychoanalysis as narrative, Stern details a further epistemological departure from classical psychoanalytic accounts of infancy that re/construct an understanding of infancy entirely from adult analyses: “A clinical infancy is a very special construct . . . created to make sense of the whole early periods of a patient’s life story . . . that emerges in the course of its telling to someone else.” As Stern points out, inevitably the telling of the story (as is true of any “history”) changes the story 82. Stern acknowledges Anna Freud’s thought, in particular, ibid., 34. 83. See, for example, ibid., ix and 14. 84. Ibid., 10. 85. Ibid., 43–44.

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itself, so that “history” becomes that which is recounted (and analyzed), not some objective report of the “actual” events. As Ricoeur makes clear (and Stern acknowledges), however, these subjective stories of infancy that arise clinically are recounted and analyzed within objective frameworks, so that psychoanalytic narratives are not entirely without “external validation.”86 Furthermore, especially in object relations, but also in classical theory, the analysis of patient accounts and re-creations presumes that these narratives are profoundly shaped by the patient’s experience of them—there is no general assumption of historical accuracy. This dilemma around historicity and its importance to analysis and an analytic hermeneutic continues to inform controversies over how to understand (and potentially, act upon) memories of early abuse. Freud famously changed his mind about the historicity of his female patients’ reports of early sexual abuse—especially incest—and there is ample research that suggests both that sexual and other abuse is more widespread than is popularly perceived and that memory generally, and of trauma especially, is notoriously pliable and (therefore) unreliable. 87 These questions about the objective validity of any accounts of infancy and early childhood, beyond the (appropriately) quite narrowly focused experimental research upon which Stern also reports (and even there, one can raise critical philosophical questions of objectivity), will have central importance in chapter 3, in which I discuss the engagement of older infants and very young children in the literary texts that adults share with them. Interestingly, these questions inform Stern’s project, as well. Just as he recognizes the requisite contribution to early childhood studies of what he calls clinical reconstruction, he illustrates his predilection for careful study of infant experience with a (by nature, subjective) memory of his own early childhood. In the anecdote, he recalls as a seven-year-old boy

86. Ibid., 15–16. Also Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of Proof in Freud’s Psychoanalytic Writings,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 25 (1977): 835–71. 87. Duane Schultz and Sydney Ellen Schultz, A History of Modern Psychology, 10th ed. (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 2011), 299–300. Gary Wells and Elizabeth Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

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puzzling over an adult’s inability to communicate effectively with a much younger child, at which time the young Daniel realized that he, himself, was still in a certain way “bilingual”—able to understand both adult and child—and then wondered if he would forget the language of the toddler as he became older. That experience, Stern suggests, is informed by a much earlier one when, as a very young child himself, he spent considerable time in the hospital, and in order to know what was going on . . . became a watcher, a reader of the nonverbal. I never did grow out of it. So when halfway through my residency I finally discovered the ethologists, it was with great excitement. They offered a scientific approach to the study of the naturally occurring nonverbal language of infancy. And this struck me as the necessary complement to the analysis of verbal self-report as described by the dynamic psychologies. One has to be “bilingual” to begin to solve the contradiction. 88

The difficulty, of course, is determining who is to be considered bilingual and on what basis. It seems unlikely, for example, that any theorist who devotes much attention to early childhood does not share with Stern some defining experience (remembered or not) that produced a lingering affinity for and interest in the world of preverbal experience—and by definition, those experiences generally will not be accessible to verbal memory. How, then, beyond the experimental model that he himself cautions is inadequate to the task, shall we interpret for the preverbal child? Stern does unprecedented work in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, integrating the phenomenological, empirical, and experimental literature on early childhood, especially infancy, and I rely on his work, applying the same data to an aspect of relationship that he does not engage: literature for these youngest children. But at the same time, with the benefit of hindsight and less investment than Stern in the distinction between schools of thought, I am less convinced than is Stern that his project represents such a radical break from those of 88. Stern, Interpersonal World of the Infant, ix. Pinning down this account is illustrative of a broader problem of language in discussion of early development: like the theorists who precede him, Stern uses infant rather broadly in comparison to contemporary usage, extending infancy through at least age two. Thus when he says he was hospitalized as an infant, it is difficult to know the precise stage of development at which the hospitalizations occurred.

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earlier theorists, especially the British Independents. As noted elsewhere, my own previous research on infant development, which relied heavily on Mahler’s project and which I completed just prior to Stern’s publication of The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985), resonates with Stern’s concern that early infant development be more fully explicated on empirical grounds and better integrated into clinical care. The question of the theoretical originality of Stern’s work is somewhat complicated by his genetic ground in the work of Mahler and ego psychology. In a sense, rather than offering an original theory, Interpersonal World of the Infant brings the classical-object relations debate into an experimental context. Annihilation Anxiety and Anaclitic Depression For the young child, the absence of the primary caregiver can threaten her very existence. Before object permanency develops, there can be no assurance that the caregiver will return, because there is no assurance that she still exists when she is not obviously present. In some sense, however, object permanency brings its own problematic challenge, as now that the infant knows that the caregiver still exists, there is the dawning awareness of agency beyond the self: What if she just doesn’t return? The process of repeated frustration and goodenough provision of relief slowly builds a child’s sense of confidence that his environment is safe and stable, that there is no danger that a need will go unfilled. Nonetheless, a lingering awareness of profound dependence on a caring other informs the child’s inchoate knowledge that without appropriate support affective life rapidly degenerates into an experience that is frustrating to a degree so extreme as to be painful—for the youngest child, life threatening. In fact, while infants and toddlers are most vulnerable to failure to thrive, in extreme cases, it also sometimes arises in older children, especially those who were abused or neglected as infants. The youngest child, of course, is more vulnerable simply because he is more dependent and less capable of communicating effectively.89 When needs are met to a sufficient degree that life is sustained, 75

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but not with good-enough consistency, a more persistent annihilation anxiety can develop, which—if sufficiently prolonged and severe—can develop into what some theorists (using Rene Spitz’s term) would call anaclitic depression, a haunting state that can present as an affect beyond even despair (which implies the possibility of hope, after all). Those clinicians who use this term consider anaclitic depression in children difficult to ameliorate, much less resolve entirely. Depression exists along a continuum of considerable length, perhaps even along multiple noncontiguous continua. The term anaclitic depression is not widely used and is not standardized, for example, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) that aims to offer a common language for clinicians (and—more pointedly—insurers); nor is it used outside certain fairly narrow communities of psychoanalytic clinicians, especially in reference to adult affect. It is, however, highly descriptive and especially useful in distinguishing the affective picture I describe here from the more common depressive states. Although Spitz used the term specifically in relation to very young children, some clinicians also use it to describe a comparable state in older children and adults. Typically, depending on the clinician’s theoretical ground, such manifestations are understood either as regressions to an attachmentrelated depression that is preexisting from earlier childhood or as the emergence of such a state, precipitated either by a psychic reinjury or by the treatment process itself. Increasing knowledge of the chemical profile of severe depressions has given rise to remarkable treatments, both medical and psychotherapeutic, that were unimaginable in the mid-twentieth century. It continues to be clear, however, that depression is not a monolithic phenomenon and that not all depressions are equally amenable to treatment. One possibility is that what psychoanalytically might be described as anaclitic is a depression of particular resistance

89. The ramifications of the relative vulnerability based on age are practical, as well as theoretical, of course. For example, older children, who are therefore physically hardier and more verbal, are sometimes returned to abusive or neglectful parents before their younger siblings as a kind of test-case compromise when case managers and the court system disagree about disposition of a case.

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to intervention, perhaps because it has its origins in a preverbal stage of development. Such a depression leaves those who experience it (and often their therapists, as well) facing a seemingly insurmountable sense that there is no help to be had. Like the milder and more common dysthymia, anaclitic depression is often experienced chronically, coexisting with a capacity for daily functioning, albeit with considerably less satisfaction and pleasure than is optimal. On the other hand, like major depression, anaclitic depression can be paralyzing, either intermittently or for sustained periods. It may arise without any apparent precipitant and seems to emanate from the deepest core of one’s being, narrowing one’s perspective sufficiently to exclude any sense of hope or light, even of agency. However, unlike the more widely acknowledged major depression, anaclitic depression generally does not seem to respond well to medical intervention, leaving relationally grounded, long-term therapies as the primary treatment option. Aims and Limitations of a Theological Appropriation of Early Childhood This project aims to reconsider theological appropriations of psychology, bringing a fresh sensibility to soteriological and eschatological reflections on human experience and its exigencies. I limit this reconsideration of the ways that theologians have appropriated psychology to psychoanalysis, but even this categorical restriction leaves open a massive, long-range undertaking. My limited, initial purpose in this project, then, is (1) to raise questions that are sufficiently pointed to further an ongoing conversation, (2) to introduce possibilities for appropriating early childhood, specifically, as an untapped theological resource, and (3) to initiate a philosophically and psychoanalytically rich conversation—grounded in recent work by Marilyn McCord Adams and Jonathan Lear—that expands our eschatological vision of divine response to human suffering. In the present chapter, I introduce an object-relations inflected reading of early childhood development, focusing on what I 77

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consider a normative human experience of annihilation anxiety, the fear that one will cease to be. Building on this theoretical outline, in chapter 3, I engage picture books, literature for the youngest children, to illustrate and amplify the developmental theories I present here of early childhood and to flesh out my proposal that a premonitory awareness of horror is at the foundation of human experience and informs human responses to anxiety and, non-normatively, to trauma. Finally, I broaden my engagement of human experience beyond childhood and beyond normative anxiety to a discussion in chapter 4 of the restoration of shattered meaning and meaning-making capacities posited by Marilyn McCord Adams and my gesture in chapter 5 toward Jonathan Lear’s related work on meaning-making in the face of catastrophe. My own contribution is to put these two thinkers in conversation informed by clinical psychoanalytic theory, bringing to that conversation the insights I develop from the relationally contextualized internal lives of very young children. From that conversation, I suggest an eschatological vision grounded in my perception of divine grace as radically other and radically integrative of human experience. Choice of Theorists Clearly, my own work, like that of the thinkers on whom I draw most extensively, is profoundly indebted to the ground defined by Sigmund Freud. However, this project relies on clinically informed developments that follow Freud, but are not confined to his own hypotheses and conclusions, either philosophically or clinically. (Indeed, it seems that Freud himself was never quite as confined to those limits as some representations seem to imagine.) Without question, another person approaching the same topics would choose a different—perhaps even entirely different—selection of thinkers on whom to draw. The selection on which I rely represents those who engage and represent the dynamic and defining force of early childhood in ways that are closely tied to direct observation and research with infants and toddlers and who (from my perspective) 78

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most productively interrogate the relationship of the first years of life to human experience as a whole. These theorists invite us to engage more seriously with the lives of young children, to see them as charged with particularity, even from birth, and as influencing, as well as influenced by, their familial and social contexts. However, even within very narrow theoretical parameters, it is not possible to address early childhood comprehensively within the limits of a single project. My aim here is to develop (in a theologically informed framework), a picture of the first years of life that is useful for theologians and scholars of religion and literature, with particular emphasis on those aspects of development that relate specifically to anxiety. I posit that this material offers helpful insights into human suffering and its remediation, as well as being suggestive of how vulnerability to more traumatic injury operates, concerns that I also engage using literary sources that illustrate the theoretical material I have presented. I thus synthesize here object relations and related material that I think is of special interest to theological anthropology, offering fruitful possibilities for our consideration of what it is to be human before God, in particular in tandem with the literary sources to which I take recourse as illustrations of the same human location. “Mother” and Other Complexities of Gendered Parenthood It is surprisingly common, given the roughly mid-century context in which some of these theorists and clinicians worked, that very frequently they make the point that any primary caregiver—including the father or a caregiver paid to provide constant care, for example—might elicit the relationship with an infant that is usually attributed in their narratives to “mother.” For example, in speaking to the “mother’s” primacy among the narrow range of faces to which an eight-month-old is likely to respond happily, Selma Fraiberg’s language reflects a certain confusion on this matter that is typical until well after mid-century: she notes that “if father has had close contact with the baby and if there are sisters and brothers, these faces will be differentiated, too,” but immediately goes on to say, “We use ‘mother’ 79

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as a convenient reference point and with the understanding that for the period of infancy she will be the primary love object.”90 Similarly, Fraiberg points to one of the few commonalities among all the various schools of thought of her time (this text was published in the 1950s): all of them, she asserts, concur on “the importance of the mother from the first days of life.”91 Interestingly, however, at this point Fraiberg is contrasting “mother” to the mechanistic care that is most often associated with a severely rejecting mother (who is not supplanted by another primary caregiver) or institutional care, not with a primary caregiver of either gender who relates to the baby in the “mothering” role. Anyone who discusses or writes about early childhood confronts the dilemma of referring to the critically important earliest primary relationship without reifying the tradition that this relationship will be with “the” mother or, alternately, using a linguistic tangle of terms that not only distracts from the content at hand, but also fails to evoke the powerful associations that accrue at present culturally to mother. I am not satisfied that I have mastered this problem, but at least I can lay out my approach to it. When summarizing a specific theorist’s work, I have used his or her language, and I have not noted gendered language within direct quotations with sic, which I find distracting. In my comments based on that theoretical or clinical material, and in my own work, I have used a range of designations, largely determined by context: (primary) parent, (primary) caregiver, and mother (when the reference is specifically to nursing, for example). Similarly, I use gendered pronouns randomly, where gender is not specified, throughout this book and elsewhere.92 An additional question arises here of the distinction that may be inferred, despite my own intention, between biological and adoptive parents. Here, when I use parental language, whether gender-specific or not, I am not making any such distinction. Furthermore, the great 90. Fraiberg, Magic Years, 41. 91. Ibid., 36. Also see Fraiberg’s clinical account of the complexities that are elided in the term “rejecting mother” in “Ghosts in the Nursery.” 92. Also see footnote 23.

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majority of references to nursing or breast-feeding apply equally to bottle-feeding, if it takes place in a comparably intimate context (as Winnicott, for example, makes explicit). Inevitably, some aspects of breast-feeding are difficult to achieve with bottle-feeding. Except in those rare instances, however, I have used references to feeding and to the nipple with deliberate ambiguity as to anatomical or mechanical specifics. Inescapably, the thoughtful reader will note the presupposition in this chapter that parental relationships that do not originate very close to birth will not follow the developmental trajectory that I describe here. Just as it is not possible in a single project to incorporate all theoretical positions, it is not possible to engage all the paths that a healthy parent-child relationship can take, particularly those that begin after the child is past the newborn stage of development. Nonetheless, I would like to make very clear that the focus of this first stage of my project on children who begin life in the same parental relationships in which they complete childhood does not indicate that I think this is the only context in which a healthy psyche can develop. It is, instead, the clearest beginning point, and I think that the conclusions I draw will suggest broader implications, despite that limitation. The Language of Human Anxiety and Suffering The language of human suffering is rich and varied. Trauma and traumatic evoke different connotations depending on speaker and context. Various thinkers and theorists apply this terminology to varying degrees and differing qualities of psychic (as well as physical) injury. My intention is to communicate the genuine, profound injuries that arise in certain junctures of normal development, as well as the non-normative injuries that arise when these transitions are not adequately managed or when circumstances or actions that are by definition unmanageable impinge on the individual’s psychological stability and/or well-being. I will discuss further this matter of vocabulary in chapters 3 and 4. 81

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Picture Books as a Theological Resource: Bringing Early Childhood to Bear Theologically In chapter 3, I will engage books written for young children in order to explore further the ways in which the potential for horror is present even for those children whose early development unfolds optimally. An organizing premise of that discussion is that evidence of such anxiety is apparent even in the superficially benign “picture books” that adults read to and with infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. In particular, I will develop close readings of five representative texts from this canon: Time for Bed, Goodnight Moon, My World: A Companion to Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and “What Was I Scared Of?” from The Sneetches and Other Stories. The elements of early childhood I have discussed here, my readings of stories for these children, and the ways the two discussions inform one another, together will define an introductory framework for my engagement of the narratives of shattered meaning and hope offered by Marilyn McCord Adams and Jonathan Lear.

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The unconscious is the source of raw materials and the basis upon which the ego erects the edifice of our personality. . . . Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment . . . the Poetry proceeds whence it ought to do, from the soul of man, communicating its creative energies to the images of the external world. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Both theology and psychoanalysis draw upon narrative in their common search for greater understanding of human weakness and the possibility of human wholeness. In theology, such narratives range from biblical to confessional literature, as well in the twentieth century to the positing of narrative theology either in place of or as complement to systematic theology.1 Theology has as its chief end greater understanding of the divine and of the relationship of the divine to creation, in particular to humankind. That project has led 1. See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974); Hans Frei, George Hunsinger, and William Placher, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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theologians to consider human nature and behavior at great length, often with impassioned interest, although not always with an investment in the particularity of the personal subject. In a striking exception to less personal theological anthropologies, Augustine develops in his Confessions the “first autobiography,” in which his theological speculation extends from human development and the ways of infants and children through constructions of human memory and the experience of time. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, crafting what is more clearly the first modern autobiography, narrates his own subjectivity beginning with a detailed presentation of his young childhood and youth.2 To the degree that theologians seek to address “the whole person,” to incorporate the entirety of human personhood and experience into stories of redemption from the exigencies (including evils) of this life, culminating in the resurrection of the individual person and of creation itself, greater attention than has consistently been brought to bear must be paid to the lives and personhood of infants and young children. D. W. Winnicott’s work has been relatively little appropriated by theologians, but it is foundational to my project, as it speaks vividly to early childhood development and—of special relevance to those theologies that have not seriously engaged childhood—relates the experience of children to that of adults. For psychoanalysis, forms of narrative are central to the clinical process itself, as well as to clinical theory. Like theology, psychoanalysis seeks to engage the grounds of human suffering, whether internal or behavioral, and to pursue wholeness. In so doing, it operates in a category of experience that includes one of the central objects of theological discourse, Winnicott’s transitional phenomena, defined (as I have discussed in chapter 2) as “an intermediary area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute” and described as “the substance of illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and religion . . . the intermediate area between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived.”3 Winnicott’s 2. See Augustine’s Confessions (c. 400 CE) and The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (c. 1769).

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evocation of a transitional space, in which the ephemera of religion and art (for example) arise and can be experienced, is a key intersection of theology and psychology. A caution is in order here, however: Winnicott’s evocation of illusion is not a commentary on “reality” as opposed to “fiction.” As his inclusion of art in this category suggests, he is evoking a quality of experience, not asserting what is and is not objectively “real.” In this chapter, building on Winnicott’s understanding of the significance of transitional phenomena to human experience generally, I engage literary texts of early childhood that speak to the foundational, preverbal experiences of the potentially traumatic anxiety that I described from a developmental perspective in chapter 2. Through these literary texts, I continue to examine the normative and anticipatory anxieties of early childhood that define the grounds from which arise human experiences of radical vulnerability, particularly vulnerability to annihilation. For the young child, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, there is a unitary quality to experience, in which psyche and soma are not distinguished. Consequently, for the infant or very young child, physical and psychic annihilation are of a piece. This integration of psyche and soma (along with soul, in Adams’s work) also is evident in Marilyn McCord Adams’s soteriology, which I engage in chapter 4. There, I bring to a critical reading of Adams’s work my analysis of human anxiety (and the more extreme psychological distress that it anticipates), which I develop from both clinical and literary narratives of early childhood. In these narratives of an anxiety that is constitutive, in part, of early human development, I find a normative antecedent to the traumatized response that Adams describes relative to what she calls horror-participation: participation as either subject or object in experience that gives one reason to doubt that one’s life as a whole has meaning. My presupposition is that a richer appreciation of this normative antecedent supports an 3. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 230–31 (italics original). Also see chapter 2 for discussion of Winnicott’s theoretical project, including transitional objects and phenomena.

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eschatological vision of salvation that is more closely tied to human experience and therefore more powerful. The texts I read here were published between 1942 and 1993, and all are still in print (My World after some decades out of print) and critically acclaimed. They include two explicitly “bedtime” stories (Time for Bed and Goodnight Moon) and three books that engage separation and individuation (The Runaway Bunny, My World, and “What was I Scared of?”). Three of them, Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and My World, are from the author-illustrator partnership of Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, a singular pair in the emergence of this twentieth-century genre.4 I propose to read these texts as a trilogy, although that is not how they were conceived or published. The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon are often paired, but my location of the two more popular texts in a trilogy with My World is a construction in service of this project, as together they illustrate so clearly many of the theoretical observations that I narrated in chapter 2. I first read Time for Bed and “What was I Scared of?,” a pairing that provides an introductory frame for my critical readings and my appropriation of this literature to illustrate the theoretical material I discussed in chapter 2. These two texts define the extent of the developmental stages on which I focus, Time for Bed a book that appeals to young children beginning even in late infancy and “What was I Scared of?” dramatizing the ambivalence with which even a confident child negotiates the inevitable psychological solitude of individuation. Following that introduction, I will engage the three Brown-Hurd books. Rather than ordering them according to the primary developmental transitions around which each of them is organized, however (Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, My World: A Companion to Goodnight Moon), I will follow Goodnight Moon with its “companion,” My World, then return to The Runaway Bunny, which offers a kind of developmental linchpin for the trilogy.

4. Their partnership began with Bumble Bugs and Elephants (1938), “the first modern board book for babies.” http://www.bookologymagazine.com/resources/authors-emeritus/1-template-5/ accessed April 10, 2016.

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Time for Bed Bedtime stories, like bedtime routines, vary widely in both form and content, and often a child latches onto a specific story for reasons that are not readily apparent. Certain picture books focus explicitly on bedtime and sleep. Mem Fox’s Time for Bed is a beloved example of this category of texts, a visually and verbally soothing collage of baby animals gently falling asleep in the presence of their mothers.5 Fox and illustrator Jane Dyer provide a rhythmic and rhyming litany of animal mothers telling their child that it is time for bed. The pictures are lush, soft, and detailed, many featuring the night sky with stars, a motif introduced in the end papers and highlighted in the dedication, “For Allyn and Louise, because this book needs two more stars—M. F.”6 From the very beginning then—as we will see again in Goodnight Moon—nighttime darkness is paired with illumination of some kind. Facing the title page, in an introductory position, is an illustration not of the animals we are about to see in sequence, but of a small child on mother’s lap, sleepily following along as she reads—what else?—Time for Bed, recognizable by its star-strewn pages. As I discuss below at length, this self-referential strategy also operates in The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon, and it mirrors the child’s own conflation of the worlds represented by the book, by the life she shares in the moment with the adult reading to her, and with her internal world. In Time for Bed, the image of the book itself becomes a frame for the story, to which the text returns in the final two pages. At the conclusion of the story, the reappearance of the human pair (evoking the child’s reality and certainly his final moments in bed before mother leaves, an experience the little reader is about to share) is also marked by a shift in language: for the first time, the two-line verse begins not “It’s time for bed . . .” or “It’s time for sleep . . . ,” but “The stars on high are shining bright . . . ,” a return not only to the pressing 5. Mem Fox, Time for Bed, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1993). 6. This dedication from Fox is followed by one from the illustrator, “And for Barry, because this book needs a bear –J.D.” Dyer frames the dedication page with a polar bear against the star-filled sky. One imagines that Barry had objected to there being no bear within the body of the text.

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reality of nighttime and sleep, but to the moderating illumination that accompanies them. This closing verse is also the only one that continues from an ellipse onto the next page: “The stars on high are shining bright –/ Sweet dreams, my darling, sleep well . . . ,” then (next page) on the first one-sided illustration since that first cover page, facing the starlit night sky, the sleeping child, alone (the only character that appears outside the mother-child dyad), and “good night!” It is clear that the (conveniently androgynous) little one has successfully made the same transition that all the animals must make at nighttime. In the penultimate image, mother is seen only in partial profile, her face turned away from the reader to the child, who is the central figure. The little face captures that expression of sleepy resistance that will be familiar to many who have shared this moment with a child, but almost immediately (since the language continues over to the next page, which after all, it takes only a second to turn), the story closes with the child sleeping soundly, face relaxed and lips slightly parted. Between the human bookends, the text comprises a series of mother-child animal dyads, realistically represented in their own habitats. First the reader sees a tiny mouse, outdoors where (the text emphasizes) “Darkness is falling all over the house,” followed by a goose, whose mother also mentions the night sky—“The stars are out and on the loose,” a faintly ominous reference that is underscored by the little star that forms the pupil of mother goose’s only visible eye. The third spread shifts attention momentarily to a more familiar domestic scene of a house cat, curled on a flowered fabric, and in this indoor vignette, there is no mention of the dark or its ancillary lights: “It’s time for bed, little cat, little cat, /So snuggle in tight, that’s right, like that.” Just past the halfway point of the book, the language shifts, appropriately paralleling the reader’s real-time experience, from “It’s time for bed . . .” to “It’s time for sleep.” In the latter half of the book, there is one brief return to a more familiar domestic scene: the little pup and mother, almost asleep, again on a fabric of some kind. Less explicitly than in the other texts I engage here, a sense that

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there might be something potentially threatening about the dark is subdued in Time for Bed, but present nonetheless. Little goose is hurried along with the phrase “The stars are out and on the loose,” and it appears that one of those loosed stars has come to rest in the protective mother goose, visible as the pupil of her eye. Little foal is clearly a bit wobbly-legged, and its mother speaks of an unspecified secret to be kept, a secret that somehow is associated with nighttime, the dark, and sleep. Little fish, urged to “hold your breath and make a wish,” is visibly making an effort to do so, puffy cheeks in evidence, but one is prompted by the image of a tiny fish holding its breath to imagine the implications for a child of breathing (and holding his breath) in what is portrayed as quite deep water. The coiled little snake’s mother offers no caution, but the two are, after all, snakes. . . . And in the next illustration, little pup, eyes sagging but open, is warned that an opportunity is about to be lost: “If you don’t sleep soon the sun will be up!” Finally, just before the reappearance of the human mother, who will bend to embrace a rather sad-eyed child, mother deer cautions her fawn that “The very last kiss is almost here.” As with the human mother’s goodnight to her child, the scene is warm and certainly cozy, but the cautionary tone signals a loss: the last of something is about to pass. As a whole, Time for Bed is a warm text, and the illustrations are lovely, soothing in themselves. It is not, however, by any means insipid, and it captures something vaguely ominous about the night and loss of consciousness in sleep. There is, however, a reassuring sense of shared experience between the human child and the world of animals that populates most stories for young children. Time for Bed narrates a routine that it suggests all little ones must master, the settling into the night for sleep. Having associated nighttime and bedtime with unarticulated concerns, it makes clear that there is something about the darkness, some connection between it and the mystery of sleep, but it does so in the context of natural illuminations in the night: the nearly ubiquitous stars.

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“What was I Scared of?” Whereas Time for Bed is a quiet and gentle text, with faint undercurrents of something unsettling in the night, Dr. Seuss books are typically energetic and populated by older children and other creatures. They often are read to and by older children, in the preschool and kindergarten years. The Sneetches and Other Stories is a collection of Dr. Seuss stories best known for its account of bigotry and misperceived otherness in the opening tale of Star-Belly and PlainBelly Sneetches, who are conned by a particularly inventive entrepreneur and his machine that both applies and removes belly stars. The final story in the collection is a departure from the others, however. “What was I Scared of?” is set in a nighttime that is illustrated in the first edition entirely on a midnight blue background and is distinguished from the stories that precede it by its first-person perspective, which signals a closer identification of the protagonist and young reader with one another, and begins with the protagonist’s (smiling) assertion that he (she? it? Seussically, it’s hard to say) sees “nothing scary/For I have never been afraid/Of anything. Not very.” 7 The protagonist’s claim comes despite, or perhaps more accurately because the character is walking in the dark night through what appears to be a large wood, faintly lit by a quarter moon. Predictably, that of which the protagonist turns out to be scared appears just as the reader turns the page: “. . . a pair of pale green pants/With nobody inside them!” (44). Admirably undaunted, the hero continues on: hesitant, surprised, but calm, until—the pants begin to move: So I got out. I got out fast As fast as I could go, sir. I wasn’t scared. But pants like that I did not care for. No sir. (47)

The fright they elicit building, the pants reappear over the course of 7. Dr. Seuss, “What was I Scared of?” in The Sneetches and Other Stories, Grolier book club ed. (New York: Random House, 1961), 43. Unlike the other picture books I am engaging here, Sneetches is paginated. Subsequent citations will be within the text. I note that in later editions of the book, the background is not the same midnight blue as in the first edition.

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several nights, arising from an apparently growing darkness. Although the quarter moon remains (or has returned) a week later, it disappears in the two intervening vignettes. The protagonist sees the pants the very next, now-moonless night, while out in a rowboat fishing, prompting him (no longer denying his full-blown fright) to hide the rest of that night and the next in a brickel bush. The following (still moonless) night, he ventures out again, now to a remote-looking cliffside “. . . to pick a peck of Snide.” The Snide-picker’s wide eyes, darkrimmed from lack of sleep, reinforce our sense of his fearful isolation within an enormous space: the “dark and gloomy Snide-field/That was almost nine miles wide,” but he chants reassurance to himself and the reader, alike: “I do not fear those pants/With nobody inside them,” finally admitting I said, and said, and said those words. I said them. But I lied them. (54–55)

The terrified protagonist’s expression turns to despair and then panic in the following pages. The empty pants, inevitably it seems, are also in the Snide-field, which the little protagonist discovers, to his horror, when he reaches into a bush. As he inadvertently touches them from behind, the pale green pants, startled (indeed frightened, as the reader discovers shortly) whirl around, and finally the two night-walkers come face to face (so to speak: there is, of course, no one inside the nonetheless-animated pants to provide a face). The moment of narrative climax is intense, although in Dr. Seuss’s typical style, that intensity is moderated, made manageable, by rhyme and a nonsensical tone: I yelled for help. I screamed. I shrieked. I howled. I yowled. I cried. “Oh, save me from these pale green pants With nobody inside!” (59)

Further moderating the terrified affect, the fearful climax passes almost immediately to the denouement, albeit more rapidly for the reader (who need only turn the page), than for the protagonist, pinned 91

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against the Snide. Indeed, it is the pants, not the humanoid protagonist, that give way to fear, collapsing in sobs before the stunned hero, who is quickly and touchingly moved to put his arm around them in a gesture of comfort and solidarity. Tellingly, the mutuality of the fear is lost in the hero’s unilateral capacity to recognize what is happening and offer reassurance to his former adversary. His fear has immediately given way to compassion. His is the upper hand, emotionally, and his, the clearer and more masterful agency. Reciprocity is restored, however, now of a friendly sort, in the final two-page spread. The quarter moon has reappeared, bringing with it illumination of the dark, and we see the two characters greeting each other cheerily, each newly equipped with courage for a solitary nighttime stroll. The closing break in the poetic meter, which up to this point has been quite consistent, promises better times going forward and signals a departure from the previous state of affairs: And, now, we meet quite often, Those empty pants and I, And we never shake or tremble. We both smile And we say “Hi!” (64)

“What was I Scared of?” is an intriguing conclusion to this collection of Seussian takes on alterity: no question that the green pants are Other, in so many ways, both to the nonhuman narrator and to the reader. But the greater force here seems to be the context in which protagonist and perceived threat encounter one another: always at night, in the dark, alone. And the empty pants—while active and affectively valent—are, after all, by definition not anybody. Like the Other of adult psychological experience, they are difficult to imagine as a personal subject. Even in the world of Seuss characters, the empty green pants are particularly nonhuman, almost (although not actually, of course) inanimate. They are like the bogeyman in the closet (or under the bed or in the hallway) whose presence the child so clearly senses, even

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perceives, but who just is not there when a skeptical adult enters the room or the light is turned on. Despite the efforts of Monsters Inc.8 to represent the perspective and alternate, if intersecting, universe of monsters who haunt children and are foiled by their laughter, Dr. Seuss seems to have hit on a more psychologically robust account: it is the children who have agency, even substance, not the monsters, although clearly monsters are “real.” Here, the secret to warding off the fears the monster represents and precipitates is to instantiate the child’s position of greater knowledge and efficacy. That the frightening other should be an empty shell—pants with nobody inside them—emphasizes, too, the power of the child’s subjectivity. This is a fantastic presentation of a developmental consolidation of subjective empowerment akin to “The Laughing Tiger” vignette in Selma Fraiberg’s The Magic Years, which I discussed in chapter 2.9 The fantasy world that Dr. Seuss narrates here is more dream-like and spare than in many of his stories: no frenetic activity, only two characters, the plot unfolding entirely at night. Overall, there is somehow less a nonsense quality, and the resonance with a child’s inner life is vivid. This is a haunting little account of a familiar experience that is evoked by Psalm 91 in more intense form: fear of the terror of night and of the arrow that flies by day.10 Here, the reader cannot escape the awareness that to be alive—certainly to experience forward movement, developmentally or otherwise—is to skirt the borderland between confidence and fear, as much a part of life as is the day that follows night, the security of home to which we return after an adventure into the wider, relatively more risky world.

8. Pete Docter and David Silverman, directors, Monsters Inc. 9. Selma Fraiberg, The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood (New York: Scribner, 1959), 16–23. 10. Psalm 91:5.

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Bunny’s First Appearance in the Brown-Hurd Trilogy: Goodnight Moon Goodnight Moon (1947) is perhaps the best known of the texts I read here, and while it has an older sensibility than Time for Bed, more spare in both visual and verbal style, it has become, arguably, the most popular of the “bedtime” books. In age, stature, and excess of meaning, it is a classic of its genre. Here, as in many children’s books, the soothing bedtime theme has a complex flavor. There is a faintly dark quality to the words and pictures that describe a little bunny’s room as it is slowly transformed toward sleep, and the text is evocative of the dream-state for which bedtime prepares the child. The first page of the text announces its spatial location: the great green room. In addition, both the little bunny protagonist and the child watching on from outside the frame of the book are able immediately to locate and track the scene temporally: nighttime and impinging darkness are apparent through the windows that frame the rising moon and stars, which move in their courses in a methodical and natural progression. As in so many of these texts, the characters in Goodnight Moon are not human. Rather, they comprise both the great green room itself, which the reader gradually comes to understand as having a life of its own somehow, and rabbits, stock characters of this genre. Oddly, there is not an explicitly parental character here: an “old lady whispering hush,” who has an unclear role, is not identified as either mother or nanny or friend; she simply passes in and out of the room, sitting in the rocking chair and knitting. Indeed, her description seems to preclude the assumption we make about the dyads of Time for Bed, that they represent a mother and child. In further distinction from Time for Bed, although the two books are addressed to a common readership of small children at bedtime, there is a sense here of the child protagonist’s being essentially alone. The old woman is present for part of the hour over which the narrative unfolds, and judging from the presence of her knitting in the rocking chair, seems to have been present before. Yet there is no evidence that she interacts at all with the little bunny

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who is meant to be falling asleep, other than to whisper an apparently admonitory “hush.” The verbal text does not name the little bunny outright or otherwise mention him, but the reader gathers from the visual text, secondarily by way of the name engraved on the hairbrush, that his name is “Bunny.” While the narration is not clearly first person, Bunny, like the child who is watching on from outside the book, is subject, not object of the narration, which focuses instead on all that passes into his roaming ken. The text itself, in both verse and image, seems to announce the great green room as a co-protagonist and therefore a companion of sorts for the unnamed little bunny, who engages it thoroughly from the confines of his bed. The room does not “speak,” but it is an allbut-animate, magical partner to what happens therein. The opening line of the written text names it not “a,” but with greater particularity “the great green room.” Furthermore, there is something enigmatic about the room: the mantel ornaments and telephone (notable in 1947) indicate that it is not a stock-in-trade nursery, although the pictures on the wall and other furnishings seem appropriate to a small child’s room. Like many of the enigmas in this text, the mystery of the room’s décor is never solved. The illustrations in Goodnight Moon alternate between color and black-and-white renderings with each turn of a page, a convention that the Wise-Hurd team had established earlier in The Runaway Bunny, and which recurs in My World (both discussed below). The first four twopage spreads describe the room and rehearse its furnishings, including a mouse and the old lady whispering hush. Also evident in the illustrations are two cats, who are mentioned later but not included in this initial catalog, and the little bunny preparing for sleep. Over the final five two-page spreads, a goodnight ritual unfolds, beginning with “goodnight room” and “goodnight moon,” then progressing in verse through the occupants and furnishings. Punctuating the little bunny’s solitude, the narration continues by bidding goodnight to “nobody” and in a move outside the room (for the only time) to wish “goodnight

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stars” and “goodnight air,” before moving further beyond the realm of the concrete to “goodnight noises everywhere.” Bunny himself only appears in the alternate two-page spreads that are rich in both detail and color, although rendered in deceptively simple lines. The full room also appears only in two-page color spreads and only twice. The reader first sees it in full at the midpoint, which is the first page on which the “goodnights” begin (with “goodnight room”). On the final two-page spread, it appears in full again, darkened, with the little bunny at last asleep, as the final goodnight, to “noises everywhere,” names one of the least tangible and most mysterious and potentially frightening of nighttime realities. Other than in these two climactic instances, the reader has only partial views of the room and its inhabitants, mirroring the limits of the little bunny’s attention at any given moment. The orienting recitation of the room’s furnishings and its occupants echoes in the cadence of the narrator’s bidding goodnight to each of them. Goodnight Moon is gentle and soothingly familiar, but it unfolds nonetheless in a liminal world between waking and sleep, between the two realities that the child reader must negotiate: internal and external, light and shadow. The illustrations make clear that two worlds—natural and somehow not natural—are unfolding simultaneously for the little bunny. The moon edges slowly into the frame of the window just before the goodnights begin, rising to become clearly apparent on the page at which the text wishes “Goodnight room,” and passing across the window in a clearly intentional, natural progression, as do the stars. Time also passes in what seems a natural way, reflecting actual (which is to say, internal to the story) time, rather than the time required to read the book: the two clocks in the room match one another, beginning at 7:00 and showing 8:10 on the final page. There also is evidence of natural causality: a bowl of mush is partially eaten between the illustration in which the little mouse (an active inhabitant of the great green room) is seen peering over the edge of the bowl (8:00) and, two turns of the page later, is gazing out contentedly from the nearby window ledge (8:10). Similarly, the

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old lady whispering hush arrives (7:20), apparently returning, as her knitting has already been lying in the rocking chair. She drops her ball of yarn when she sits down, prompting two kittens to play with and unravel it (7:40), before the old lady picks it up (8:00) and leaves, at which point the kittens take over the chair (8:10). In a co-temporal plot, Bunny engages in age-appropriate bedtime wriggles: he begins tucked in, but alert—looking toward the bedside copy of Goodnight Moon, in fact. Apparently hushed by the old lady who has entered the room, he lies down, still wide-eyed. He and the mouse appear to be attending to the old lady and perhaps the kittens playing with her yarn (7:20). Next, however, we see him out from under the covers, turned to partially stand, apparently looking up at the picture of the three little bears above his bed (7:30), then—when next seen—sitting, knees pulled up to chest, again interested in the old lady, who is—again—whispering hush. At this point the mouse (perhaps an alter-ego?), who is more mobile, has crossed the room to gaze directly down on the old lady from atop a bookcase, where rests a copy of The Runaway Bunny, just under a picture on the wall drawn directly from that earlier text (7:40). As Bunny twists about, the goodnights unfold (expressions of adult hope for a speedy resolution, perhaps?), addressed to the comb and brush on a table near the bed, and the mouse is now contentedly sitting before the fire (7:50). Goodnight to nobody (!) and to mush precede a penultimate “And goodnight to the old lady whispering ‘hush,’” who—with Bunny now apparently settled under the covers, although still wide-eyed—has gathered up her knitting to leave (8:00). Finally the text speaks more expansively, wishing “goodnight stars” and “goodnight air,” before at last the little bunny has fallen asleep, with the final “goodnight noises everywhere” spoken into a now dramatically darkened room (8:10). Bunny Becomes a Big Boy: My World: A Companion to Goodnight Moon My World: A Companion to Goodnight Moon opens with a self-referential

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allusion in the first illustration, two copies of My World itself, one large (apparently “normal” size); one, small: My book. Mother’s book. In my book I only look.

As is the case with so many picture books for young children, the reader is immediately prepared for the familiar mother-child dyad as protagonist. The next illustration, a two-page spread, confirms the impression, showing mother and son sitting in front of the fire (an almost ubiquitous element in Hurd’s illustrations, at least in this trilogy), in a comfortable, paneled room, a child’s blocks strewn across the carpet, one of the lamp shades tilted to offer better light for mother’s reading. The room is plain, strikingly less decorated than similar scenes in either Goodnight Moon or The Runaway Bunny. Mother’s feet are propped up on a pillow, her legs too short for her chair, and she and a bunny-child, whom one imagines from the title to be Bunny grown a bit older, are gazing directly at one another, despite the book that mother rabbit is holding and is apparently in the midst of reading. The effect is of the illustrator’s having captured the pair at some telling moment, although the written text does not give the reader any specific indication of what the significance of the moment might be: The fire burns. The pages turn.

This couplet is followed, with a turn of the page, by the organizing conceit of the text: a reflection on what is mine, what is not, and how the two categories are related within the limited world of the immediate family. Each of the facing pages, illustrated sparely with black-and-white line drawings, rehearses ownership: “Mother’s chair./My chair.” On the facing page: “Daddy’s slippers./My slippers./My pajamas./Daddy’s pajamas.” The first-person narrator (Bunny has developed a voice!) adds clarification in each instance, however: “A low chair./A high chair./But certainly my chair.” “Even my teddy bear/Wears pajamas.” The narrator seems to be reviewing

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both particularity of ownership and its ubiquity, which extends even to his (but his!) teddy bear. The reader is lulled into anticipating a series of such declamations, which in fact will occur periodically throughout the balance of the text. However, as the reader turns the page, the second two-page color spread brings a surprise: no text at all, and the central figure is not female, but (evidently) Daddy, here in the slippers and pajamas to whose ownership the narrator has just spoken. This two-page spread is evocative on a number of levels. It depicts daddy checking on his sleeping son. As in Goodnight Moon, there is a temporal reference, here the father’s pocket watch, which he has taken out: it appears to be just past 11:00. Appropriately, Bunny (for it must be Bunny, as this is a “companion” to Goodnight Moon) is fast asleep in a bed and room that unequivocally represent a nursery. The differences between My World and the text to which it is positioned as companion are particularly stark in the comparison of this room with the great green room. The color scheme for the My World nursery is a reversal of the great green room: here, the walls are variations of deep red; the floor and curtains, green. Whereas the great green room has pops of red color (the floor, woodwork, and bed, most notably), much like the living area that opens My World, the My World nursery is uncomfortably red, an effect heightened by the depth of the red tones. In this setting, the moonlit hills visible through an open window suggest a kind of relief from an oppressive indoor atmosphere, and the protagonist’s faithful teddy bear seems to confirm that impression, sitting on a rocking horse by the window, his head and arms extended upward toward the moon. In a further difference from the great green room, the reader’s attention is drawn here to the vignette composed of the window and teddy bear, in part by the absence of any decoration on the walls. Where Goodnight Moon included visual references to The Runaway Bunny, both in its presence on the shelf and the picture on the wall that is taken from among its illustrations, there is no wall décor here and therefore no such explicit reference. A subsequent fishing scene clearly echoes a similar scene in Runaway Bunny, and that same iconic Runaway Bunny

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scene hangs on the wall of the My World dining room, but the nursery walls are empty. The overall effect of the setting is that the room in which Bunny is sleeping soundly is not particularly interesting. It is not unattractive and is perfectly suitable (more so, in fact, than is the great green room, at least as a child’s room), but this is not the setting in which one expects the narrative to unfold or around which it is likely to center. The pajama-clad Daddy’s implied action in the nursery is unclear, especially as the illustration is unaccompanied by written text. The hour is well beyond a little bunny’s bedtime, and it is something of a puzzle that the father rabbit is checking his pocket watch at this particular moment at all. His hand is resting on the side rail of the crib, which is lowered, but it is not clear whether he has just lowered it or is about to raise it. Paired with the opening illustration (which is also the cover art), this image of the nursery introduces the reader to childbunny and his two primary relationships, with his mother and daddy. In neither scene is the nature of the interaction clear, although there is an immediate sense of its being significant in some way. The text as a whole goes on to narrate (verbally and visually) two days in the rabbit family’s life, measured sunset to sunset, interestingly. The initial scene seems to be evening: although there is no temporal cue either from a clock or from a window, the fire and lamplight evoke evening, and this impression is confirmed by the next two turns of the page: following the narration about “Mother’s” and “my” chairs, the references to slippers and pajamas, then the nursery scene. The next (black-and-white) illustration is a meditation on the night: a scene lit by the full moon is framed by a windowsill on which rest two spoons (perhaps this is the kitchen window?). The moon is shining down on what the narrator identifies as Daddy’s dog, who (the narrator notes) once caught a frog. The facing page is exemplar of both the kinds of associations a young child might make and of the lyrical quality of the written text: My spoon. Daddy’s spoon.

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“The moon belongs To the man in the moon.”

With another turn of the page, the sun has risen into a cheerful, lightflooded color illustration of the rabbit family at breakfast (the kitchen clock marks the time as almost 7:25), complete with dog and cat. Again there is no explanatory text, but gaze is again significant here, as it was in the opening illustration of mother and son. Both Daddy and Bunny are sitting at the kitchen table (Bunny in his high chair this time), eating, but they are looking toward Mother, who is busily continuing to cook. Her back is turned to them, coffee and sausages are cooking on the stove, and her own food is untouched. This first breakfast scene is followed by a sequence of illustrations of different family activities, leading to a dinner scene and another bedtime vignette. First there is a (black-and-white) drawing of the Bunny, holding his teddy bear by the hand, flanked by Mother and Daddy, who naturally loom over him. This is clearly a scene that precedes Daddy’s leaving for work, as Daddy is wearing the same suit as in the breakfast scene. Now, however, Bunny has changed into his own little herringbone suit (with short pants) and is smiling expectantly (one can almost imagine, triumphantly) up at Daddy, his little hand tucked, adult-like, in his coat pocket. Mother has her arms crossed; Daddy, his hands folded: their faces are set in expressions that the reader does not recognize from any illustration in either Goodnight Moon or The Runaway Bunny (save one, in The Runaway Bunny, discussed below). Hurd has drawn the parental eyebrows arched in a shape that telegraphs annoyance, perhaps anger; one even can make a case for hostility. Emphasizing immediately the disparity between the adult world to which Daddy is headed, and the world of home to which Bunny is yet limited, the facing page illustrates “My car./Daddy’s car.” The former is small, nailed together somewhat awkwardly, although with a crank handle evident. The latter—Daddy’s car—is large, spacious, and sleek. It is well equipped for the wider world. The written text that accompanies the vignette of Mother, Daddy, and Bunny as Bunny hopes to head off to Daddy’s work moderates any discomfort the visual image might evoke:

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Daddy’s boy. Mother’s boy My boy is just a toy Bear.

This potentially portentous spread is followed immediately by the centerfold illustration of the book, a two-page rendering of Daddy and Bunny, in color, the significance of which is not immediately clear. The previous vignette clearly suggests Daddy is headed off for work. Here, however, immediately following, are Daddy and Bunny, on opposite sides of the illustration, their backs turned to one another, both now with eyebrows set in apparent anger. The setting is outside the family garage (this is a rural location, in the late 1940s: standing by the garage is a gas pump). The pink cloud above the horizon suggests it is late in the day. On the left, Daddy is in coveralls, the hood of his car up, banging on something with a hammer. To the right, in front of the open garage, Bunny (looking vindicated, as well as hostile, judging again from the eyebrows), in matching blue coveralls, is hammering away at a protruding nail on the top of his car, teddy bear lying nearby. The couplet provided with the illustration speaks nothing of Daddy’s car: Bang Bang Bang—My car. [on the side of the spread that shows Daddy effecting repairs] My car won’t go very far. [accompanying Bunny’s repair of his little car]

As in any thick text, the reader may draw a range of conclusions. What is inescapable, however, is that it is not only Bunny who is banging away: Daddy is doing the same, and the reader might reasonably infer that it is not Bunny’s car alone that “won’t go very far.” After this relationally rather intense sequence, the text offers the reader an emotional break: a series of illustrations of belongings and activities that are more mundane. Black-and-white drawings of toothbrushes and combs are followed by a two-page spread, showing all three family members in the bathroom: Mother is styling the fur on her ears in front of one mirror; Daddy is in a sudsy bath; and 102

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Bunny is perched on a stool on the opposite side of the room, in front of the sink, brushing his teeth. Again, gaze and focus are notable: Bunny (looking none too happy) has his back to the room; Mother is looking at herself in the mirror, her eyes (the reader sees in the mirror) focused on her grooming; but Daddy is looking back over his shoulder at Mother, a somewhat roguish (truth be told) expression on his face. Bunny narrates the scene thusly: My soap. Daddy’s soap. My soap will make soapsuds, I hope.

The first and most obvious point the reader notes is that Bunny is actually using toothpaste, not soap of the kind with which Daddy is scrubbing his back. The second is that Mother seems utterly oblivious to both of them, focused as she is on her toilette. This first full day in the text finishes out with Daddy and Bunny fishing, a determined (and perhaps competitive) Bunny with a little fish on his line; Daddy (looking more relaxed), about to hook quite a large one. The function of the fishing scene becomes immediately clear in the following, color spread: Bunny’s family are seated around what seems to be the dining room table, hosting friends who have brought along a baby bunny-in-arms. Daddy is carving the large fish, served splendidly whole on a platter, while Mother—without making any eye contact with the cat—is feeding him a (the reader assumes, the) little fish from the table. Their gazes suggest that Bunny and the adult guests are attending to Daddy; baby guest is looking rather forlornly directly out of the frame of the book at the reader; and Mother seems to be gazing off the page to the left, at something the reader cannot see, perhaps to deflect attention from her interaction with the cat, who is intent on the little fish in her hand. On the wall behind Daddy hangs a picture that the reader recognizes from the great green room, the iconic fishing scene from The Runaway Bunny. The story finishes out with scenes of Bunny and Mother in their respective beds and a color spread depicting Mother reading in the rocking chair, orange rays from the rising sun lighting up the red room

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as Bunny plays with a red balloon in his crib (a reference to Goodnight Moon, in which a red balloon is one of the first elements of the great green room that is introduced). A black-and-white gesture toward a second breakfast is paired with a sketch of Daddy heading off, briefcase in hand, to the city the reader sees on the horizon: this time he is on foot (that car repair perhaps unsuccessful), and he is accompanied by “Daddy’s kitty,” as Bunny’s kitty watches from the corner. The text does not explain there being two kitties, but it also does not include any reference to a troubling goodbye scenario. The final color illustration takes us to the third evening, the close of the second full day, the temporal location signaled by clouds pink from the reflected sunset, the slightly deepening blue of the sky, and the long shadows cast by the house. Night will be falling soon. The two-page spread gives us a full view of the rabbit family homestead—reminiscent of those uncommon full views of the great green room in Goodnight Moon. Daddy and Mother are on the porch, where the kitten is fascinated by a butterfly; Bunny is in a tree swing, his legs clearly too short to touch the ground. The green grass and flowers contrast oddly with the completely bare trees: perhaps it is spring, as at least some of the flowers are daffodils, but the lush scene and variety of other flowers would not bear out this conclusion. Daddy is still in his work suit, and behind the car parked by the house stretches away over the neighboring hill the road that must carry him back and forth. Oriented in the same direction, away from the homestead and over the hills, are train tracks, and a steam train is chugging by. Beyond the garage, there is a pond, which has not previously been shown, complete with a toy sailboat and ducks. Bunny’s teddy bear sits under the swing, his arms reaching up, although whether to push or to take a secure hold is not clear. Facial expression comes into play again: Mother looks at Daddy askance, and Bunny’s face seems a bit wistful. The initial effect of the illustration is of a bucolic, peaceful scene, a happy family at the close of day, and this seems a reasonable reading, but the illustration also evokes something more unsettling. The homestead is less cozy, shown here in

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the great expanse of the wider world, and the empty tree branches are prominent, looking dead in relation to the colorful scene—especially in contrast to the vibrant flowers that surround the bright red house with its yellow trim. The verbal text for this panorama communicates a significant shift in voice: for the first time, the narrator uses the second person, reaching out directly to the reader. The expansive tone of (what appear to be) the closing couplets suits the expanse of wider world (within which Bunny seems a bit smaller) and Bunny’s growing awareness that others populate and lay claim to his world, even those beyond his immediate family, including the reader to whom he has told his story. Your world. My world. I can swing Right over the world.

On the flyleaf of this final color spread, completing the alternating pattern of color and black-and-white illustrations, are two small drawings, facing one another across the fold. They are much smaller than previous illustrations, placed within wide expanses of white page. On the left is a miniature, spare sketch of the tree and swing, a bird visible in a high branch. The verbal text reads, a closing acknowledgment of common ownership of a single object, “My tree./The bird’s tree.” Centered on the facing page, life-size (in contrast to the miniature tree), is a bumblebee in flight and a nonsense verse: “How many stripes/On a bumble bee?” And on that enigmatic note, the text does come to an end. Bunny Begins to Individuate: The Runaway Bunny The Runaway Bunny (1942) is the earliest of the books I discuss here from the Brown-Hurd partnership. It was published five years before Goodnight Moon and differs from Goodnight Moon and My World in a number of ways. While the other two texts are set in a profoundly

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human environment, The Runaway Bunny bridges the human world of the child reader and the natural habitat of real bunnies. It is also more fantastic, using imaginary vignettes (which is to say, imaginary even to the imaginary protagonists), rather than the routine, “real world” settings in Goodnight Moon and My World. The cover, title page, and opening illustration of The Runaway Bunny are simple drawings of a mother rabbit and her child. Its two rabbit protagonists thus first appear to the reader in their natural environment, not unlike the one in which a reader finds Peter Rabbit and his family, living “underneath the root of a very big fir-tree” in the opening illustration by Beatrix Potter for The Tale of Peter Rabbit.11 Indeed, in the final scene of The Runaway Bunny, the reader will see mother and little bunny living among the roots of a tree, just like Peter’s family. The transitional quality of the text is immediately evidenced, however, when on the first page drawing of mother and child rabbits, apparently running about in a field, the verbal text announces the little bunny’s agency by way of his announcement to his mother that he is running away. The narrative is joined as the mother bunny assures him in response that wherever he goes, she will be present, and there ensues a dialogue in which the bunny posits a variety of escapes: he will become a fish, a rock on the mountain high above her, a bird, a sailboat, and so forth. His mother parries these thrusts with a series of strategies that maintain her connection to her child: she will become a fisherman, a mountain climber, a tree that he will come home to, a wind to blow him where she wants him to go. Finally, in a twist that subtly collapses the worlds of the bunny and the child “reader,” the little bunny exclaims that he will “become a little boy and run into a house.” Undeterred, the mother bunny says she “will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you.” In the end, he is convinced, announces he will stay her little bunny, and we last see him, snug at home receiving a carrot from his mother. This, then, is (for the most part) a day-lit story with a happy ending, 11. Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Peter Rabbit (London and New York: Frederick Warne & Co., Ltd., 2002), 7.

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depicted in the closing illustration of mother and little bunny, snug in their den at the base of a tree, mother offering her little one a lovely carrot. As in Peter Rabbit, however, there is no father bunny. Moreover, as The Runaway Bunny ends, the sense of unease is heightened in more direct ways: night is falling and a full moon peers through thin clouds onto a field of vegetables and flowers, guarded by a windswept scarecrow. Inside the rabbits’ den, we see what appears to be a variety of vegetables, likely picked from the adjacent garden, and an unidentifiable source of illumination seems to cast shadows on the wall. The coziness of the evening scene is intruded upon—subtly—by several choices made by illustrator Clement Hurd: the scarecrow as depicted offers a bit of menace, and one is reminded of the violent response of Mr. McGregor, in Peter Rabbit, to a similar appropriation of his produce. Lettuce, one of the treats that Peter Rabbit covets—is also featured rather prominently in the garden by the runaway bunny’s home. An allegorical fishing scene that first appears in The Runaway Bunny is one of the strongest links among the three Brown-Hurd books I read here. As I have noted, it is one of the illustrations on the wall of the great green room, and in My World a very similar picture hangs on the dining room wall. No other illustration is common to all three books. Moreover, a scene that is quite similar to The Runaway Bunny episode occurs in My World: father and boy bunny are fishing. Both father and son, facing one another across the stream, have a catch: Bunny is just pulling in what one takes to be a little fish, while the bigger fish is about to take father bunny’s hook. In stark contrast, The Runaway Bunny image of the first imaginary encounter of mother and runaway child suggests a quiet menace that underlies even mother bunny’s loving pursuit. The scene (here, in its original manifestation, in color) unfolds in a lightly wooded meadow, just at dawn, apparently, as night will be falling at the end of the book. But as the runaway bunny (turned fish) leaps toward his mother from beneath the surface of this idyllic stream, we wonder how, after all, he will get into her waiting net other than via the hook that is presumably hidden within the carrot-

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bait that has attracted his attention. And what might we make of the representation of the tree closest to us (and little bunny’s fisherman mother): cracked in two, fallen away from the stream (over which it otherwise would form a bridge)? The little bunny’s figurative escape from this proposed rescue is to become a rock, high on a mountain. Out sets his mother, equipped as a mountain climber. She carries a sharp climbing stick, in addition to her rucksack and hat, as well as a rope. (“Look!” observed one reader in excitement and relief, “The mom-mom is bringing a rope so he won’t fall!”12) That the mountain, on which little bunny has joined himself organically with a barren rocky crag, is alpine in dimension is further reinforced by what appears to be a sprig of edelweiss in the mother bunny’s hatband. Nonetheless, here as elsewhere, we see mother bunny from a child’s perspective: she looms in the foreground, well equipped and capable of surmounting this otherwise daunting obstacle. Clearly, this is not a simple mountain hike, and furthermore, the darkening sky seems to be clouding over. Next, little bunny becomes a crocus in “a hidden garden.” No hiding from mother, of course, as out she comes to this walled flower garden (from within which we do not see the sky), dressed in gardening overalls, with a basket of what looks like lettuce and a hoe over her shoulder. Now little bunny transforms into a (Pegasus-like) bird, but mother counters by becoming a tree “that you come home to.” This is a shift in the dynamic of their relationship: now mother is in a passive form and the agency is left to the little bunny-bird. However, our awareness that the separation is not complete is heightened by the fact that the shape of the tree that mother assumes is not just that of a (very large—disproportionately so to the flying bunny) mother rabbit, but of a mother rabbit reaching forward, her ears swept back, anticipating the return of the runaway. In the next two scenarios, the menace (while still subtle) seems to escalate. First the runaway bunny exaggerates his ears into sails 12. I acknowledge with serious and genuine appreciation the contributions of Jonas and Rorik Cordell, astute readers of many books (including the Brown-Hurd texts I engage here), who as four-year-olds generously read many books with me and discussed their responses to the texts.

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and sets out across the sea. The swells are clearly high enough to rock, even swamp, such a small vessel, however, and one wave rises ominously behind him, at the far left of the illustration. Mother has parried little bunny’s threat that he will become a sailboat and sail away by assuring him that if he does so, she “will become the wind and blow you where I want you to go.” With all the bunny’s agency lost (a developmental regression)—much the opposite of the immediate previous illustration—we see here that mother is the largest of the menacing dark clouds, looming on the left side of the two-page spread, and is producing the wind that is both raising the waves and determining the bunny-ship’s path. The darkening sky from the previous illustration is now frankly stormy, it and the water deep purple and gray-blue, against which the white- and peach-colored little bunny in boat form struggles forward in stark contrast. Retreating from nature to the world of the human, bunny shifts to running away with the circus: this time flying away on a trapeze! And mother has a curious response: she becomes a tightrope walker and promises to “walk across the air to you.” Indeed, we see in the illustration that mother is, in metaphorical fact, “walking across the air” on an appropriately anchored tightrope, umbrella in hand for balance. However, the significance of the tension between the literal language, to which the child reader is arguably best attuned, and the metaphorical turn of a phrase is emphasized by the distinction between the mother’s relative stability on the tightrope and the little bunny-acrobat’s intention to leap into the air, unsupported: he is swinging off the far left of the two-page spread, towards the edge of the book, beyond his mother’s reach. Worse, if we study the picture with care, it is not clear that the trapeze is going to swing back to the platform mother is approaching; in fact, the trapeze has no visible anchor or means of dismount. Mother will not be able to reach the child, nor is there a partner to catch the runaway. The tightrope platform toward which mother bunny is “walking across the air” is barely large enough to hold her, not to mention the grinning monkey climbing toward it, and no one except mother, who seems to hold the

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crowd’s attention, even seems to be watching as the runaway bunny swings away from her. This scene is the first introduction of an exclusively human setting, is the most frankly dangerous of the duo’s proposed scenarios, and is the one in which the mother bunny seems least effectively protective. The runaway’s final feint after this harrowing turn of events is to enter even further into the human world, to “become a little boy and run into a house”—not a place, surely, where a mother bunny is allowed! Here the translation of one species to another becomes complex—as would be the identification of the child-reader with the text—and the mother bunny responds, “I will become your mother and catch you in my arms and hug you.” In the black-and-white illustrations that introduce the conceit, the boy-bunny’s mother stands in the doorway, awaiting his return. Although on the previous page, balancing on the tightrope, there has been a tension in her face, here her eyebrows are arched in visible anger, the only illustration in the book in which she is shown with this reaction. Perhaps she is finally reaching the end of her patience, or perhaps in the human scenario there is less patience to be had overall. Whichever might be the case, in the following color spread, her face has relaxed again. This illustration is compelling for a number of reasons. Again, mother is disproportionally larger than the child. A seemingly very little bunny is sitting on her lap, much as many of the children reading this story with an adult will be, drawing more explicitly the connection between the child’s own world and the world he has entered in the text. However, although now “being” human and in a familiar human setting, neither little bunny nor mother has taken human form, only dress. Their security has progressed from the previous setting, however, and the narrative is more clearly located in time and place, because (as is not true of a circus tent) there is a window through which we have a sense of time and see that night has fallen, explaining the lit lamp that is casting shadows in the room. Here in the penultimate scene of The Runaway Bunny, mother and child bunny, in human dress, in a human living room, are in a rocking

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chair, both evidently ready for bed, and this peaceful scene leads into the prospective runaway’s pronouncement that he “might as well stay where I am and just be your little bunny.” It is this decision that takes us to the concluding image of the text and back to the natural world of rabbits where the story began: night having fallen, snug in their den, as mother offers a carrot to little bunny, while outside the scarecrow keeps watch under a moonlit, starry sky, swept with thin clouds. The deep shadows in the den hint at the unease of the narrative that is now concluded, but the greater menace is outside the rabbits’ den, of course. The complex relationship of normal anxiety and its mastery is evident in this closing vignette. The sky is now clearing, the full moon is visible, the flowers and evidently bountiful harvest just beyond the rabbits’ doorstep bespeak not only dangerous temptation, but abundance, and the slightly menacing scarecrow—intended to keep anyone other than the gardener away, is also an oddly comforting presence. Reading the Brown-Hurd Texts One of the best-known books written and illustrated by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd (if not, in fact, the best known), Goodnight Moon (1947) speaks to the very young child’s ken in the nursery. The lesser-known My World: A Companion to Goodnight Moon (1949) has as its protagonist the bunny-child who has emerged from the confines of the house and finds evidence of a wider world, albeit from the confines of the home’s immediate surrounds. The Runaway Bunny (of which the protagonist seems unrelated to that of Goodnight Moon and My World) sets its protagonist in a world that is much wider than those of the other two texts, the little bunny running far afield in pursuit of his independence. However, this breadth is entirely imaginary. Bunny remains in the great green room because that is an imposed limit on his circumstance, but it is a rich context for someone so small. Older Bunny doesn’t leave the farm, constrained to rambling about the house and immediate environs, but he glimpses the broader world in several different ways: Daddy’s leaving for work, the mobility provided by 111

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having one’s own car (and gas pump!), the road stretching far into the distance, and the passing train. The three texts intersect on several levels, with a number of connections that will be apparent to an astute young reader. By publication date, The Runaway Bunny is the earliest of these texts, but if we consider the texts developmentally, an argument can be made that Goodnight Moon and My World provide a narrative and developmental frame for the older text. Goodnight Moon, for example, rehearses the developmental challenge of object permanence, by which the infant learns that an object continues to exist even when out of his eyesight. The Runaway Bunny illustrates a stage of what Margaret Mahler describes as separation-individuation, in which the toddler rushes away from the parent and intensely resents parental limitation on his physical and emotional autonomy, while at the same time requiring a steady awareness of the caregiver’s presence. A common behavioral marker of this developmental stage is the toddler’s running ahead of the adult, particularly delighted if the adult gives chase, but checks back frequently to make sure of the adult’s continued presence. Ultimately, this is part of the developmental process that Mahler argued leads to object constancy: a firm sense of the caregiver’s continued support and availability, even when the caregiver is physically absent. It is object constancy, from this developmental perspective, that is the foundation for confidence in one’s capacity to manage the world independently. Finally, My World gestures toward the oedipal crisis that begins to emerge in the preschool years. The presence of Daddy in the story signals a child’s relational expansion beyond his primary caregiver (presumed traditionally to be Mother). Furthermore, it sets up the dynamic of a loving father and son who begin, by all appearances at the little boy’s instigation, to compete, not only for the wife-mother’s affections, but also in a general sense. 13 The three texts intersect and overlap visually, sharing a liminal, 13. Jean Piaget and Bärbel Inhelder, Memory and Intelligence (New York: Basic Books, 1973); Margaret Mahler et al., The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975); and Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1st ed. (New York: Norton, 1950). Also see chapter 2 for my discussion of early childhood development.

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transitional space, so that especially when read together they begin to take on the unitary quality of a trilogy, in illustration if much less so in verbal text. This visual continuity is a reminder that the illustrator of picture books shares authorship in a way that is not common in other genres, the closest approximation being graphic novels, in which illustrator and “author” are one and the same. The Runway Bunny vignette in which mother and little bunny, in the guise of a human mother and child, sit cozily by the fire establishes an overt continuity among The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon, and My World, which the child reader often notes. A framed picture of the fishing scene from The Runaway Bunny hangs on the wall of the great green room in Goodnight Moon, along with two vignettes from traditional nursery literature. One of the other two pictures in the great green room, of the three little bears, doesn’t appear in either The Runaway Bunny or My World, but the third is almost identical to the picture hanging in the human living room in The Runaway Bunny: the cow jumping over an upturned crescent moon. The fishing scene from The Runaway Bunny is again recalled in My World, first subtly in the fishing scene where Daddy and Bunny are catching that evening’s entrée, but more obviously in the dining room, where the illustration of the fishing scene in The Runaway Bunny hangs on the wall, as it does in the great green room. Although clearly not the same, the human living room in The Runaway Bunny is very much like, arguably is a precursor to, the great green room in Goodnight Moon, where Hurd offers a franker conflation of the human and animal worlds. In addition to the commonalities of décor, each room has a similar fireplace and is occupied by a woman (albeit identified in Goodnight Moon only as “the old woman whispering hush”) in a rocking chair. Two little mice looking on from the far left edge of The Runaway Bunny room are also much akin to the one who is active in the Goodnight Moon nursery, and an unraveling ball of yarn is on the floor by each of the rocking chairs. The two rooms share a color scheme, although the dominant and accent colors are reversed (red with green in The Runaway Bunny, green—of course—with red in Goodnight Moon). Extending the commonality, in My World the

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predominance of red and green recurs, the nursery a particularly vivid example, and is reinforced in the garage vignette, where cans of paint standing along the back wall show dried evidence of the illustrator’s preferred palette. The richness and level of detail in each of the texts conveys a mindfulness on the part of both Clement Hurd and Margaret Wise Brown that supports my contention that these are far thicker texts than is commonly assumed, worthy of close reading and valuable as sources for any study of human subjectivity, including theological anthropology. Their relevance to my project in particular, for example, is their engagement of the human subject in terms of a developing ethical horizon, which Jonathan Lear will engage in his Radical Hope. There are striking differences among the three texts, as well, in addition to their developmental foci. One of the key devices that sets the best-selling Goodnight Moon apart from the other two thematically, as being about (perhaps even set in) the nether world of sleep (in addition, of course, to the title) is in the story told by the illustrations, which belies the simplicity of the written text, suggesting a magic that is not immediately clear on the surface of things. As is consistently the case with literature of this genre, the verbal and visual text are at least equally important, so that one who only reads the written words (or only looks at the pictures) will have missed much of the richness offered by the narrative as a whole. Here, one would miss the subjectivity of the room itself, in which the protagonist little bunny finds himself struggling to go to sleep. The written text is a narration of a young child’s critically important mastery of object permanence, when at last she internalizes the existence of her surroundings in such a way that they continue to exist for her, even when she cannot see them. The rhythmic identification of the child-bunny’s surroundings speaks to a small child’s assurance that the objects around him continue on, even when he does not see them, thereby speaking to the human need for familiarity and comfort in which to take refuge from the unknown, here the night and the loss of consciousness in sleep. The litany of furnishings and inhabitants is not unlike Homer’s catalog of ships in Book II of the Iliad: an expressive

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literary device that provides important details of the setting at hand, richer than is first apparent, that rings with familiarity to those who already know the story. Like Homer’s catalog of ships, this inventory of surroundings will resonate with greater significance for the inhabitant of the room (or each home country, for the Achaeans), to whom these details are familiar and have cumulative meaning. Like the reader of the Iliad who interrogates the catalog of ships and situates it within the broader epic, the child who comes to know well the great green room at the heart of Goodnight Moon will develop associations to each item in the long (from a child’s perspective) list. The state of being that Goodnight Moon narrates is suggestive of a self-state dream, a construction articulated by Heinz Kohut to describe what Winnicott would consider a transitional space (or state).14 The child-bunny (and perhaps the human child reader, as well) is both grounded in the physical world and at the same time experiencing a psychological space in which, for the lack of any better descriptor, magic allows for transformation, in this case the strengthening of defenses that hold together the child’s object world. The Goodnight Moon narrative is both reassuringly (and many parents must hope, hypnotically) familiar and at the same time suggestive of a liminal world, perhaps a dream-state. As time passes, moon and stars rise, mush disappears, apparently nibbled by a mouse, and mouse and kittens do what mice and kittens do. A fire burns in the fireplace, flames flickering and changing, even dying down a bit, but here the reader begins to notice something less familiar: the logs are never consumed. Furthermore, the flames do not visibly cast shadows—although the lamp does so, dramatically changing the lighting in the room when it is no longer lit on the last page. Furthermore, the bright yellow windows of the little [doll]house, not particularly notable when it appears in the first two-page color spread, take on a distinct and uncanny glow when there is no light source within the green room: there is actually some form of 14. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New York: International Universities Press, 1971).

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illumination within the little house, which does not, however, extend either light or shadow out into the darkened green room. We also do not see any evidence of illumination within the room from the fire or from the full moon, although once the lamp is not lit, it becomes clear how bright the outdoors must be, as the color of the sky itself has lightened with the moonrise. The text comes to a close as bunny slumbers peacefully, surrounded by more than a little of the numinous. So powerful is the evocation of this early experience, that even in adulthood, now-grown-up readers of Goodnight Moon bring it to bear in a range of settings. Goodnight Moon is explicitly satirized, in form and content, in Goodnight Bush, for example.15 It also appears in a haunting Shivaree recording that narrates the denouement of Kill Bill II, when The Bride is reunited with the child of her innocent hopefulness, whom she has believed dead for years.16 Neither of these appropriations belittles the original text. Indeed, both read it as seriously menacing, to a greater or lesser degree, evidence that there is more here than many adults realize. Certainly, the care that Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd brought to this book, along with its continuing valence in adulthood and bestseller status, belies any argument that the subtleties of this text are unintentional. Rather, Brown and Hurd have managed, for whatever reason, in whatever way, to capture an uncannily evocative and deceptively simple aspect of the way very young children perceive and inhabit their world, presenting it in a way that resonates intimately with the young children for whom these texts are so important. The world of Goodnight Moon is neither innocent of shadow, nor naïvely confident that all will unfold logically and under the control of caregiving adults, much less small children. There is no explicit cause for fearfulness, but ample intimation that human life unfolds in a liminal and vulnerable space. Such is the uncertainty with which humankind initially faces the world, that as infants we must learn (despite all evidence to the contrary) that our environment, all that 15. Erich Origen and Gan Golan, Goodnight Bush: An Unauthorized Parody (New York: Little, Brown, 2008). 16. Various artists, Kill Bill: Volume Two Original Soundtrack, 2004.

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is around us continues to exist, even when it is out of the frame of our vision or we are asleep. The implication of such an assurance is that we in fact have our own, real, existence and agency, just as do the moon and stars that pass across the window. The reassuring quality of this and similar texts relies heavily on their acknowledgment that the world is not a simple, nor entirely safe place and that human existence and security are contingent in ways that we cannot entirely understand or predict. In contrast to Goodnight Moon, My World (1949) is the least well known of the three Brown-Hurd books I read here, coming back into print in 2001 after being out of print for more than thirty years. In addition to its publishing history, My World is immediately set apart from The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon in a number of different ways: its title locates it as a “companion piece,” it includes a dedication, the settings in which the narrative is set extend beyond the protagonist’s home and suggest places even further afield, a full family of characters is deployed, and the father rabbit plays a major role. This final distinction takes on a special poignancy relative to the dedication, which is from Hurd: “For John Thatcher Hurd/When he comes,” qualified by “(He’s here).” The copyright information found just under this dedication notes that a new color palette is copyrighted in 2001 by Thatcher Hurd, the son to whom Hurd dedicated the 1949 edition. This edition thus has layers of relationship to the illustrator and the Hurd family. My World is more realistic than the other two books with which I am bracketing it as a trilogy: the characters are rabbits, but they live entirely as a human family would, in dress, housing, daily activities. The text is more active and plot-driven, although also more lyrical. Overall, it gives more detail and uses more varied and expansive settings. A question arises about the degree to which the key to these differences might be located in the dedication to Thacher. My World is also distinguished from the other two texts by two psychological themes, both driven by developmental progression. The first of the themes that are particular to the text is the growing child’s self-

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location in an expanding world, which he confidently claims as his own, although in the end he comes to acknowledge that others also have a share. More subtly, although also more dramatically, potentially, the narrative—in particular, Hurd’s illustrations— incorporates an oedipal resonance within the triangulated relationship of Mother, Daddy, and Bunny. One could argue that it is this oedipal tone to the story that necessitates the inclusion of a Daddy along with the more usual mother-child dyad. Among other things, these themes locate the text developmentally at late preschool or even kindergarten age. In the story, Bunny does not go to school, so presumably the earlier age is more likely for him. However, the dedication indicates that the text is written before Thacher Hurd was born (although perhaps only shortly before). Thus, like Augustine, Clement Hurd is basing his depiction of young children here on his own instinct, perhaps his impressions of his own childhood, and his observations of other families’ children. Margaret Wise Brown, whose written text accompanies the more psychologically intense visual text, did not herself have children. Some reports suggest, indeed, that she was possessed both of an uncanny intuitive sense of young children’s interior lives, as evidenced by the degree to which her books resonate for them, and at the same time a dismal practical sense of how young children live.17 Further underscoring the sense of realism of this particular book and raising additional autobiographical questions, critics have ample commentary and information about his parents’ lives and work from Thacher Hurd, himself an author-illustrator of children’s picture books, and whose mother, Edith Thacher, was an author of children’s books and sometimes partnered with Hurd. Thacher confirms that the homestead in My World is based on the farm at which his family spent summers. He recently offered a compelling reflection on his experience of it: Sometimes my parents would take me with them to visit their friends on Lake Champlain, wildly wealthy people with famous paintings on the 17. Leonard Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (Boston: Beacon, 1992).

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wall and family pictures in their living rooms in perfectly polished silver frames. Then we came back to our little house late, down a dirt road, and the house was dark and an owl screamed in the distance and I had a tiny blue tin kerosene lamp in my room and I huddled around it, terrified that the bogeyman was coming down the attic stairs into my room. Then I went to sleep in the dark spooky night and in the morning it was all new again, and the sun was shining and the grass was shining and it was all new and joyous and everything was right with the world.18

More than either Goodnight Moon or My World, The Runaway Bunny is a kind of textual inkblot, perhaps because its story takes place almost entirely in the fantastic world of its fantastic creatures’ imaginations. Its varying reception reflects (among other things) the adult or child’s experience of her mother as either consistent or intrusive. Some older children and adults beam with pleasure at the memory of this story and as parents eagerly read it to their own children. Others find it so abhorrent that they do not even have it in their home (and some actually shudder at the memory). This wide range of strong responses reflects both the sensitive nature of the developmental challenges this text evokes and the powerful accuracy with which it does so. As I have noted, on a developmental trajectory, The Runaway Bunny might be located between the other two Brown-Hurd texts I read here, more oriented toward separation than Goodnight Moon and far less aware of the separations that define a wider world than is My World. The Runaway Bunny narrates the emerging drive for independence and autonomy that arises in toddlerhood within the facilitative constancy of what Winnicott calls a “holding environment.” Here, the protagonist is not yet able to enact his independence at the level of his imagination, but he is game for engaging his mother around its emergence. Parents of children a few years older than the ones to whom this book is usually read for the first time, often face a pronouncement or threat that the child is going to run away. Advice as to how best the parents might respond varies according to whom one asks and also—as is the case with the reception of The Runaway Bunny—according to 18. Thacher Hurd, thacherhurd.com, “In My Little Room—Going to Vermont Every Summer as a Child,” Thatcher Hurd (blog), 2 May 2011, accessed at http://thacherhurd.com/blog/in-my-littleroom-going-to-vermont-every-summer-as-a-child, no longer available at date of this publication.

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the particular child and parent. Some parents swear by packing (or offering to pack) the child’s bag and offering a ride to the destination of choice. Others—and this seems generally more appropriate and effective—express real regret that the child is going away and hope that she will change her mind, but affirm their acceptance of her (autonomous) decision—or at least recognition that it is hers to make. Such a strategy is often crowned with parental assurance that the child will always be loved and wanted, always have a home, regardless of her decision. In most cases, happily, the child experiences this response as comforting and decides to stay. The allusions to The Tale of Peter Rabbit in the closing vignette of The Runaway Bunny bring a number of unhappy associations. Peter Rabbit, one of the earliest paradigms for children’s stories featuring bunnies, opens with Peter’s mother reminding her four little rabbits that their father had “an accident” in Mr. McGregor’s garden and was made into a pie by his wife. Its climax then takes the form of Peter’s barely escaping with his own life after raiding the same garden where his father met his end.19 Reinforcing the resonance of the two stories, despite their superficial differences, is the strong resemblance I mention above between the closing illustration of the runaway bunny’s home, in the base of a tree, and the opening representation of Peter Rabbit’s home (also in the base of a tree).20 In The Runaway Bunny, however, the viewer has fuller access to the rabbits’ home, because Hurd offers us a cutaway view in a double-page spread without any verbal text. Surrounding mother, little bunny, and their well-stocked larder are the roots of the tree and of the flowers that are sprinkled through the grass. The effect is of a natural world presented from an unnatural perspective. The less-than-felicitous features of and associations to this closing illustration echo earlier, similarly subtle suggestions that all is not entirely settled in the world of the little bunny who wants to run away—which would make sense, of course, to a small child who is 19. Potter, Peter Rabbit, 10 and 33–34. 20. Potter, Peter Rabbit, 8.

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restless in the supportive constraints of the post-toddlerhood years, even if nervous about the consequences of growing separation from that support. In addition to the general unease precipitated in children and adults who have experience of intrusive or smothering caregiving, even for those who simply resonate with the normative tension between competing drives for independence and security, in more than a few instances the vignettes themselves have an ambivalent quality. This sensation of an underlying threat of some kind seems most clear in the two-page, full-color illustrations that cap off each new exchange between little bunny and his mother. Notably, as is the case with other developmental tasks, the one we see illustrated in The Runaway Bunny will recur (for both parent and child), in evolving forms, many times. The infant beginning to crawl experiences the first intimations of what it is to be on one’s own and move away from the parent’s protective embrace. At around eighteen months old, the child is beginning to experience the first urge to go off into the still-wider world (as did the runaway bunny or the poky little puppy, who felt compelled “to see what he could see”21). At this point, however, exploration is limited to the exhilaration of a mad run away from the attending adult, a glance back assuring the child that she is not actually alone. A little later, the same child is faced with the growing realization that she will be expected to operate more independently, often for the first time in a group setting (like preschool) for extended periods. Still later, the child moves on to grade school, with increasing demands for autonomy and more complex expectations. The process continues at least to adulthood—and many adults rework the whole sequence vicariously through their children, a mutually beneficial process when it does not involve overidentification of the parent with the child. The Runaway Bunny first speaks to the child in the toddling stages of this trajectory. Where the Wild Things Are, “What was I Scared of?,” and The Friend, for example, speak to the subsequent, increasingly demanding negotiations of 21. Janette Sebring Lowrey and Gustaf Tenggren, illustrator, The Poky Little Puppy (New York: Simon & Schuster/Little Golden Books, 1942).

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autonomy, rebellion, independence, and the need for a steady, supportive presence.22 Transitional Phenomena, Separation, and Trauma As my juxtaposition of Time for Bed and “What was I Scared of?” illustrates, the distinctions between bedtime and later, more subtle of forms separation are not stark. All transitions necessitate separation, both psychic and physical, and in both of these texts there is a sense of launching forth into the unknown: there be dragons here. This sense of nurturing courage to face the unknown with hope will be central to the construction of valorous courage that Jonathan Lear develops in Radical Hope: the courage to press on beyond the ethical horizon that limits one’s existing tools for making meaning. Even when significant changes take place later in life, early development shapes the direction and boundaries of those changes, so that in a “reading” of early childhood we find insights into both the genesis and the management of different levels of anxiety and, ultimately, what Marilyn McCord Adams will call horror-participation. The stories that I read here narrate precisely these experiences: the emergence in very young children of anticipatory anxiety and the defenses that develop in response to it. Time for Bed and Goodnight Moon, for example, evoke human responses to the dual separation implied by night (the darkness isolating) and the unconsciousness of sleep, in which we are submerged into the Unconscious. In The Runaway Bunny, a mother-child dyad enact the ambivalent quality of the fundamentally solitary nature of human independence, and in Dr. Seuss’s “What was I Scared of?” human fears of the unknown arise in the tension between awareness of our essential aloneness and desire for the relatedness that carries with it hope for solid ground amidst the exigencies of life. My World addresses head-on the complexities of the child’s transition from the security of his own home to the wider environment that he must share with others, eventually on his own, and which he discovers, 22. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Sarah Stewart, David Small, illustrator, The Friend (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).

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with both fascination and a sense of exclusion, is primarily the province of adults. Children’s texts like these illustrate Winnicott’s transitional phenomenon (or space), both in the sense that they are themselves works of art—generated in relation to the authors’ and illustrators’ transitional experiences—and also in that they give rise to the transitional space in which the reader and child together encounter them. In so doing, oral narratives like the stories of Br’er Rabbit and his associates and books like Goodnight Moon or Where the Wild Things Are both enlighten the function of such transition space and provide access in verbal form into the internal lives of preverbal and newly verbal children, years away from the capacity to reflect upon their experiences in abstract terms. I focus here on the glimpses these texts offer into the anxiety that arises from the child’s earliest apprehensions of horror, in particular experiences and fear of abandonment, helplessness, and loss of control—what at its most intense can be considered annihilation anxiety. It is in part within the context of these earliest affective experiences that the child’s primitive defenses against emotional threats emerge—the defenses that ultimately shape the adult’s psychological experience and management of both normative and traumatic anxiety. 23 The presumption, on which I rely, that these texts accurately represent the inner lives of children too young to engage that life verbally—in other words, the presupposition that these texts function to provide articulation for the child for whom that articulation is impossible—also constitutes their utility for adult experience. The relevance of these texts for theological anthropology extends from their diachronic construction: they are texts written by adults for young children, from the adult’s perspective on childhood. In reading them with young children, the primary way these texts are experienced, adults both share the child’s response and in some way revisit their own early response to the challenges young children face. 23. Joel Chandler Harris, The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955). Sendak, Wild Things.

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The texts’ resonance for children can be established both theoretically, according to their consonance with the developmental theories I have rehearsed in chapter 2, and phenomenally, as adults observe children’s responses to the books. The texts thus instantiate the bridge between childhood and adult experience in a particularly rich and accessible form, in terms both of content and of the relational context in which adult and child together experience them. Indeed, read as they are (at least originally) by an adult and child together who share concomitant experience of the text, the reading process itself gives rise to a physical context in which a child’s and an adult’s perspective coexist in a relationship of reciprocal influence. Moreover, to the degree that these texts resonate with human experience, they function reparatively for both adult and child. In revisiting early childhood through the children they nurture, adults have the opportunity to rework their own early experiences of anxiety, now from a perspective of greater mastery and therefore greater security. The child, at the same time, through repeated readings of books that engage her, encounters externally, both visually and verbally, situations that threaten her internal sense of mastery. When a picture book (like any book) strikes the familiar chords of experience in a way that safely balances vulnerability and security (in part by virtue of the child’s reading the book with an adult whose mastery is available for sharing), the child may rehearse the challenging situation as many times as the reading adult’s patience will allow. This pattern of titration, of repeatedly approaching a state of anxiety without being engulfed by it, allows the layers of mastery to build slowly but surely, in a physical context of safety and caring.24 The texts thus both reflect the normal anxiety of young children and its remediation and are themselves tools of that remediation. As in my discussion of development, I explicitly exclude here children’s experience of pathological or otherwise traumatic 24. See chapters 4 and 5 for further discussion of amelioration of post-traumatic symptoms, including Don Catherall, Back from the Brink: A Family Guide to Overcoming Traumatic Stress (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), and Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum; Toronto and New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994).

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environments or events. Rather, my argument hinges on the relevance of normative childhood development in a “good-enough” (to use Winnicott’s language) context. I articulate here a reading of the earliest human premonitions of loss and suffering, foundational components of horror, illustrated by this literature that reflects and reflects upon children’s early emotional experience. This literature reflects the earliest stages of the human capacity to make meaning, which hinges on verbal and social development, and it suggests the profound relationship between meaning-making and hope. The conversation I develop with Adams and Lear hinges on related questions of extremity, rather than normative transitions: how hope can be sustained when the adult capacity to make meaning of one’s life has been shattered. Trauma and Storytelling Serene Jones’s Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World illuminates the adult challenges that these children’s books presage, and her work on trauma is facilitative of my aim to bring theological appropriations of psychology into closer proximity to the clinical grounds of that sister discipline. Speaking of adult experience in particular, Jones outlines the foundational elements of trauma theory in a way that (although this is not her stated intention) resonates vividly with what I describe as nontraumatic childhood premonitions of horror. She highlights the (nonverbal) “absolute silence that sits at the heart of the trauma experience” and advocates for a liberal Protestant reclamation of storytelling—to which I refer here as narrative—as a powerful medium of response to traumatized communities and individuals.25 Storytelling is a medium that speaks to all ages, of course, which accounts for one aspect of its suitability for Jones’s purpose. However, storytelling dominates the literature of early childhood in a special way, so that young children’s relationships to storytelling offer insight into its function for human persons of any age. 25. Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2009), 29–30.

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Starting with the well-known work on trauma of Bessel van der Kolk, Jones outlines seven defining characteristics of trauma (13–15): 1. distinguishable orders of magnitude 2. internal, subjective experience of the event as life-threatening 3. although subjectively experienced as traumatic, grounded in some real (which is to say, externally verifiable) event 4. inclusive (potentially, at least) not only of “immediate victims,” but witnesses, as well 5. affecting not only individuals, but potentially whole communities 6. secondary not only to single, horrific events, but also to ongoing circumstances or repetitions of similar events (as in abuse) 7. related to events that are “‘overwhelming’ insofar as they are experienced as inescapable and unmanageable. They outstrip our capacity to respond to and cope with them.”26 My connecting these characteristics to the normal lived experience of children is prompted in particular by the second, third, sixth, and seventh of these criteria. Furthermore, I read these criteria as bridging both normal early development, with its attendant anxieties, and nonnormative responses to trauma. I share Jones’s and van der Kolk’s stress on the overwhelming quality of trauma, for example, which leaves the sufferer without recourse to her previously effective defenses, whether temporarily or recurrently. I distinguish trauma, however, from Adams’s horror-participation (although I am not certain Adams would do so), as I understand horror in the way she uses it as referring to a wide range of intensity. Thus, horror, for Adams, while participation in it is defined by a reasonable sense that the participant’s life is not meaningful, can extend from the sort of catastrophic collapse that Lear engages in Radical Hope to death of old age. One of the benefits of my bringing normative anxiety to bear on these questions is that doing so bridges these various categories. Normative early childhood anxiety is the ground from which develops 26. Jones, Trauma, 15. Also see Bessel van der Kolk, ed., Psychological Trauma (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1987).

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the capacity for radical hope that Lear describes. It is representative developmentally of the broad category to which Adams intends to speak. Its mastery or lack thereof is responsible in part for the adult’s relative vulnerability to being psychically and/or neurologically overwhelmed, to which Jones and van der Kolk refer. The criteria Jones outlines speak descriptively to the normal anxiety of young children, to the quality of that anxiety that renders it so ominous and, when unmanaged, potentially devastating. As I discussed in chapter 2, very young children naturally experience a sense of what adults would call dread or, more specifically, annihilation anxiety—that sense that they are vulnerable in the extreme, which of course they are, and furthermore unable to escape or manage independently. This is a recurring experience in the first years of life, albeit optimally less and less intense if the child’s needs are both met and allowed to develop with sufficient frustration that she has repeated opportunities to develop a range of coping skills. The child becomes increasingly capable of and eager to meet some of her needs herself (“I do it!”). Furthermore, as she matures physically, she is better able to escape a situation she perceives as threatening, physically (biting back, wriggling away, going slack) and also via verbal complaint (“bottle now!” in response to what the child initially experiences as threatening, then later as potentially unbearable, and finally just frustrating hunger). Consider, however, what it means that human persons begin their lives in what easily becomes a chronically traumatizing circumstance of utter dependency. This vulnerability and the horror of the consequences when it is exploited are, after all, why we invest socially in child welfare systems and why injury to children is considered especially heinous. Further commonality between normal early childhood experience and the aftermath of trauma that Jones describes so clearly is the silence to which Jones alludes as central to an experience of trauma. I take Jones’s emphasis on this—very apt—observation to refer in the case of adults to the loss of language that results from the sense of being cognitively overwhelmed, both in the moment and in

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retrospection. At its most extreme, as Jones points out, this sense of being suspended outside time and circumstance, without the language with which to communicate one’s experience or even to make sense of it, is dissociative—an experience that is common among those suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The great danger for the youngest child, of course, is that his internal life is itself a normal dissociative state: while newborns have a greater capacity for awareness and relatedness than was once thought, they are suspended in a liminal world in which (arguably) even the distinction between self and other is unclear, and until well into the second year they have only limited verbal capacity. Even when language is more solidly mastered, the child cannot clearly communicate complex emotion or accurately detailed accounts until school age. Indeed, children’s normally developing language skills also are paradigmatic of Jones’s observation about the silence that is characteristic of traumatic experience. Infants and toddlers are only beginning to acquire language, primarily through interaction with caregivers. While they are not without voice, they lack clear expressive language, certainly verbal language, with which to express themselves clearly. They are thus—verbally, at least—largely alone with their anxieties. Indeed, picture books first operate in concert with the receptive language (the comprehension of verbal communication that precedes expressive language) to mirror the child’s experience. The visual text resonates even earlier, which makes its centrality to these books theoretically as well as aesthetically clear. The importance of picture books to young children’s normative mastery of anxiety extends further, however. In the very act of sharing the story, adult and child often are in close physical proximity, itself comforting, and the two commonly share observations in addition to the verbal text, whether about the illustrations or the storyline. The books are therefore a medium for acquisition of two of the skills that are key to managing either normal anxiety or trauma: intimate relationship and verbal expression. Furthermore, as there is little or no distinction between fiction and nonfiction for the youngest children, storytelling

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flourishes in a context that celebrates its relevance to all aspects of human experience, internal and external. In addition to supporting my recourse to childhood for insights into adult management of horror, Jones’s text raises a number of questions of language and focus that are central to any work on this topic. I distinguish life-threatening events from annihilation, for example, the latter suggesting to me an undoing of the soul in a way that the former does not. Jones, however, equally appropriately, seems to use the two interchangeably. For the purposes of the text I am engaging, Jones uses the 9/11 attacks as paradigmatic, as does Catherine Keller in her Apocalypse Then and Now.27 Marilyn McCord Adams, on the other hand, focuses on individual horror-participation, as do I. Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, in a third paradigm, deals primarily with communal—indeed, cultural—catastrophic loss. In my appropriation of his work, however, I argue that it is also appropriately and productively applied to individual experience. My own, pragmatic, conclusion is that in the sources I use, horror and trauma are roughly analogous, and I use them as such. As I have said, however, I set annihilation into a category apart from life-threatening, as one’s life can be threatened without evoking a sense that one’s very being is at risk of vanishing or collapsing. Lear’s catastrophic collapse of the resources by which a culture has made meaning is explicitly something of another dimension, which he juxtaposes, in a dramatically clarifying example, to the Holocaust. Text and the Inner Lives of Young Children The literature of early childhood illustrates—verbally and visually—the developmental challenges (traditionally referred to as developmental “crises,” an indication of the intensity with which children experience them) that demarcate the early stages of human experience. Beginning with birth itself, one of the unifying themes among these challenges is transition. Indeed, transition is paradigmatic of developmental 27. Catherine Keller, Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World (Boston: Beacon, 1996).

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challenges and continues in adulthood to represent a point of significant vulnerability, a juncture at which we are both more challenged—by suffering, for example—and are more likely to regress emotionally when challenged. In this project, I focus on two major and daily transitions that a child necessarily negotiates early in his life: bedtime and other (progressive) stages of separation from the caregiver. I read texts that track the developmental theories that I discussed in chapter 2 as descriptive of these same transitions. In tracing this work on mastery of transition-related anxiety to its origin, I propose to offer insight into adult experience, not only of normal anxiety, but of horror, as well. The narrative strategy I pursue in the present chapter, reading picture books that resonate with the normal anxiety of early childhood transitions, mirrors the narrative form of the discussions of early childhood that I cite in chapter 2. Along with Adams, although in her case in less detail, a turn to narrative also undergirds Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope, in which he takes recourse not to a fictional literary source, but to a historically grounded account, more akin to memoir. Lear retells and analyzes the experience of Plenty Coups, the last great Crow chief, whose life and visionary leadership Lear poses as a story of courageous perseverance in the face of the catastrophic collapse of individual and communal resources for making meaning. I propose Lear’s radical hope as complement to Adams’s eschatological and soteriological project, bringing to Adams’s work an exemplar of unforeseeable revitalization of meaning in the face of horrors that have shattered the very basis upon which individuals and societies make meaning. Based on that synthetic discussion, I gesture from my present work in theological anthropology toward an eschatology that builds on Adams’s insights into divine culpability for horror, together with Lear’s proposal for courage at the ethical horizon. The present chapter thus aims to offer an accessible and vibrant link between theoretical engagement of early childhood through object relations theory and the anthropological and soteriological conversation I develop between Adams and Lear on hope. As my

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discussion of child development in the previous chapter illustrates, close psychoanalytic study of young children invariably incorporates a narrative voice. Along with whatever phenomenological, clinical, or quantitative tools are deployed by the sources I cite there, all of them tell stories. Minimally, as in the quantitative methods, these stories narrate the behavioral observation on which the research draws. More commonly, in the qualitative sources, rich narratives articulate not only behavior observed over many encounters with children and their families, but also affective extrapolations and theoretical conclusions about the inner lives of young children as they are manifest in those encounters. In the present chapter, I read texts that amplify children’s inner experience through fictional, sometimes fantastic narrative. These “picture books” illustrate children’s anxieties and their mastery of it, which I posit are essential prerequisites of the adult’s hope for revitalization of meaning-making in the face of catastrophic horror. Careful reading of picture books, then, is the methodological common ground that I develop between narrative theology and the narrative ground of clinical psychoanalysis. The Literary Texts The development of psychology as a distinct discipline and the emergence of literature for children of the kind I discuss here are both twentieth-century phenomena. In the twentieth century, at the same time that psychoanalysis and related disciplines begin to burgeon, narrative texts for children become both more common and more diverse. The complexity of texts within this genre does not necessarily correlate with the ratio of written text to illustration: indeed, visual and verbal text are equally important in these books. Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman, for example, while it relies entirely on illustration, is a powerful text written for older, preschool children.28 Furthermore, these texts cannot easily be categorized according to readership. Older children return to books they loved as infants and toddlers, and 28. Raymond Briggs, The Snowman, 1st American ed. (New York: Random House, 1978).

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younger children can and do participate in more complex texts with a mediating adult’s help. Adults who grew up after this category of picture books became commonplace often have vivid, even intense, memories of their childhood books and turn to them for pleasure (along, in some cases, with others more recently published), whether to share with their children or to read on their own. The Genre The children’s texts I read here are not explicit with regard to any particular purpose. They tell a story, one way or another; some over time have passed into the ranks of classics. On the other hand, most self-consciously educational texts, to which I refer as didactic, are not highly prized over time. The emotional valence they develop, if any, is usually derived from cadence, from the child’s constructed and projected narrative frame, or from shared experience of the text: if Mommy reads the alphabet book every day at naptime, child (and parent) may develop a fondness for it, but the lasting fondness is situational, not directly textual. There is not a narrative in these didactic texts that is engaging in its own right, often no identifiable author (implied or otherwise), no implied reader so much as an implied pupil, no facilitation of a world either magical or concrete into which the child enters. It makes little sense to read such a didactic text critically, then, regardless of its popularity or its importance to any given reader, as its valence for the reader is to such a great degree dependent on the particular context in which it is encountered by child and adult. I organize the kind of children’s texts that I do engage critically into several rough (and not mutually exclusive, in most instances) categories: • bedtime stories (Goodnight Moon, Time for Bed), • cautionary tales (Peter Rabbit, The Poky Little Puppy), • reassuring accounts of challenges mastered—especially separation

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and darkness (Stellaluna, “What was I Scared of?,” The Runaway Bunny), • celebrations of curiosity and independence (“Br’er Rabbit,” Eloise at the Plaza, Where the Wild Things Are), and • narrations of the common lives of children (Pat the Bunny, The Snowy Day).29 As is true of most rich texts, few of these can be categorized into a single type, and in many instances the text generates controversy over its “message.” It is sometimes difficult to distinguish a cautionary tale from a celebration of curiosity and independence, for example, and texts like Stellaluna tread more or less successfully the line between educational and fictional. More clearly distinguishable are the two generic categories I define: literary texts and didactic texts. While there are some texts that might fit both of these categories, broadly construed, those for which only the latter type is appropriate are excluded from my consideration, for the reasons to which I allude above. Didactic texts might include alphabet and number books, “how to read” primers, and teaching stories or accounts of science or simple morality and etiquette. Thus, Pat the Bunny teaches a very small child something about self/not-self relationships, engages the baby verbally through both sight and touch, and offers an important frame for early caregiver-child interactions. To the degree that it does so in a way that generates a narrative, I would categorize it as both a didactic and a literary text. To the degree that it serves a particular child-parent dyad as a teaching tool for vocabulary, for example, its function is more narrowly didactic. Similarly, a wonderful alphabet book may engage a child’s (and parent’s) imagination and become the springboard for a shared narrative that emerges between them. However, its function is almost always narrower: teaching children the letters that eventually they will use to read and write. 29. Janell Cannon, Stellaluna (New York: Scholastic, 1993); Kay Thompson, Eloise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955) Maurice Sendak, Wild Things, 1963.

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On the other hand, there are some texts that are literary, having no explicitly didactic function (although all operate in terms of the child’s learning spoken and written language). All of the texts I read here reflect upon human experience in a way that is enlightening, even facilitative of certain emerging psychological defenses and skills, but that is neither their primary nor their clearly apparent purpose—indeed, I would argue that much of their “practical” effect hinges on the absence of self-conscious didacticism in these literary texts. Similarly, a sufficiently imaginative child-parent dyad might make a passable narrative out of almost any text. However, something that has as its primary purpose instruction is neither produced with narrative as its organizing style, nor concerned with anything other than a reasonably attractive packaging of information that the publisher has reason to believe parents (and sometimes teachers) will find worthwhile—and worth a financial investment that ranges from small to quite significant. Here, then, my entire focus is on literary texts, which I argue have the potential for a thickness that is lacking in even the most effective didactic texts. Implied Author—Implied Reader—Implied Narrator: Questions of Author, Text, and Reader Fiction for young children, much like autobiographical nonfiction, represents a generically distinct case of the relationship among author, reader, and text, and this critical issue illuminates the significance of this literature to studies of early childhood and to theology, given its focus on the human as socially situated and in personal and corporate relationship to the divine. Wayne Booth emphasizes that the text itself generates author, reader, and context, and he coined the phrase “implied author” to emphasize the constructed quality of each perspective other than that of the text as text. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction is the classic reference for this language of implied author, which I am extending here to adult narrator and child recipient—a dual readership for the text—as together constituting an “implied reader.”30 Booth describes the phenomenon in which the writer creates himself 134

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in the person of the narrator, so that “however impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in [the manner manifest in the text]—and of course the official scribe will never be neutral toward all values.”31 Here I am expanding this concept to the reader to whom the author seems to be writing, including (in this instance) the adult “narrator” of the text. A similar generic problem arises in autobiography, in which the more obvious question relates to the unity of writer, implied author, and narrator in that—at least on the manifest level—they are the same person. Indeed, even when one begins to make distinctions among them, the ready argument presents itself that at the very least they represent conscious and/or unconscious aspects of a single individual. In literature for young children, a particular question arises in terms of the duality of authorship that is inherent in the need for a mediator between writer/implied author/narrator and the child recipient of the text, who is not (at least in terms of the verbal text) a reader. This relationship of text to reader is singular: the same dynamic does not apply to texts that are shared with those who are nonreaders for other reasons, whether illiteracy or significant disability, although there may be some commonalities in regard to the relational context of oral reception of text. A similar qualification would apply to circumstances in which the text is read aloud either for aesthetic reasons or because the difficulty of the text exceeds the primary recipient’s competence. The mediating reader emerges as a kind of co-creator: even when she exhibits little actual creativity in reading aloud, at the very least her inflection will affect the child’s reception of the text, whether positively or negatively. The best mediating reader provides rich embellishment to the text, whether actually augmenting the plot (less common), providing dramatic inflection and sound effects that shape the child’s experience, or giving commentary on the written text and illustrations (perhaps the most common contribution). The nature of 30. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 71–76 et al. 31. Ibid., 71.

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this mediation is such that in optimal (or good-enough) circumstances, the relational aspect of the contextualizing shared experience (which always drives reception of the narrative) is a potent complement to the text. In young children’s experience of these books, therefore, the question of authorial identity is further complicated by the powerfully mediating role of the adult reader. The adult mantra to a frightened child, “it’s only a story—a movie—pretend,” aims to reassure, but it also reflects a broader and surer grasp of experience of what is and is not real. The author is never present to the child (other than as a name that is read as prolegomena to the story), even in the sense to which the author is present to an adult, as the child will experience the text independently of what an adult might consider mediating or editorial factors (for example, point-of-view or reliable/fallible voice), which the child’s cognitive skills do not yet permit him to grasp at an abstract level. The early phenomenon that comprises both affect and thought, which I have referred to as “magical thinking,” is a construction that attempts to capture this early perception of the world (including literature); Winnicott’s transitional phenomena also bespeak the liminal conjunction of child, reader, and the sounds, language, and images that together constitute the text.32 While many writers of adult literature—certainly autobiography— identify themselves as author-narrators and stipulate the reader both to and for whom they are writing (as well as their pedagogical purpose), the children’s texts I consider here are more ambiguous in this regard. As I have noted, the implied author is neither readily apparent to nor readily distinguishable by the child. Indeed, for the child—as for many older readers, in fact—such theoretical concerns are neither of compelling interest nor relevant to her experience of the text. Instead, the text exists in what may be the purest instance of any text-to-reader relationship: for the child, the text stands on its own. It simply is, independent of any efficient cause. To the young child the very idea of an other who is the source for her books is at 32. See chapter 2 for an introduction to magical thinking, which I also discuss below in more detail.

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best irrelevant. Even the matter of an implied reader of these texts is complicated by the duality of reception, the audience consisting of both child (hearing and seeing the text) and adult (reading it aloud, perhaps providing running commentary). Problematizing the Sources The psychoanalytic canon and literature for young children on which I draw are equally fraught with the singular constraints presented by adult retrospection and observation as grounds for knowledge of the internal lives of very young children. Young children’s verbal life is dramatically different from that of adults, they lack the capacity for abstract thought, and they have limited resources for communicating their experiences directly. The quantitative research to which I refer in chapter 2 has made impressive contributions to developmental studies. Still, to some degree theories of early childhood, which burgeoned in the twentieth century much as did literature for young children, depend upon speculative theory. To a greater or lesser degree, theorists of early childhood rely on extrapolation from observations of older children and adults. In addition, however, there is an impressive phenomenology of child behavior based on children’s interaction with the researcher, observation in situ (in a nursery setting or with a parent, almost always the mother), and the clinical observations of child analysts and psychotherapists (commonly, play therapists). At best, these sources are reciprocally informed, so that abstraction and empirical (or experimental and phenomenological) data are placed in active and complex communication with one another. Daniel Stern, for example, has made clear the empirical validity of this class of research. Nonetheless, even more than in other arenas of psychological human research, descriptions of the experience of young children are inevitably of secondary, if not tertiary, relationship to the children who are having and processing the experiences.33 33. See chapter 2 for discussion of the trajectory of the early childhood theorists’ work.

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The roots and progression of the field are represented in early classic texts I have cited: Selma Fraiberg’s The Magic Years and Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society, as well as D. W. Winnicott’s work, Margaret Mahler’s developmental research on the process she named separation-individuation, and John Bowlby’s on attachment theory. In addition, Virginia Axline’s classic Dibs: In Search of Self (1968) is a rich and accessible account of problematic development and of play therapy, classically construed. It speaks to the powerful plasticity of the human self in the face of psychic challenge, a capacity that Jonathan Lear exploits at its most extreme limit in his analysis of human resilience even in the face of catastrophic loss of meaning, to which I turn in chapter 5.34 Robert Coles’s late-twentieth-century work on the spiritual life of children provides a more “religious” perspective, but it is my contention, as I argue particularly in chapter 5, that theology is well served in particular ways by recourse to sources that are explicitly nonreligious, a-theological. 35 Autobiographical accounts of early childhood (literary, therapeutic, or otherwise) and books written for very young children instantiate this theoretical quandary. Inevitably, they represent the child’s psychological life through the mediation of adult memory and perception: at best finely attuned, self-reflective, and therefore of sufficient accuracy to be serviceable; at worst, so skewed as to be of no use at all, except as a representation of what the adult wants the child to feel (or have felt) or to want. Furthermore, books written for young children presuppose a double audience: the child, who is (at least arguably) the primary intended audience, and the adult who will select the specific text, make it available, and read it to the child. These are liminal texts, in other words: initially they must attract the attention of the adult, as executive arbiter for the child, which implies an appeal beyond simply what the child “might like.” In addition, however, they must appeal directly to the child, who may initially 34. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 35. Virginia Axline, Dibs: In Search of Self (New York: Ballantine, 1964); Robert Coles, The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).

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accept the adult’s choice at face value, but increasingly will have a say in which book the two read together. “What [then] has Goodnight Moon to do with Jerusalem?” The answer to Tertullian’s classic question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” turns—as do so many questions—on one’s perspective. For many believers and scholars of religion, the answer has continued to be, “nothing.” On the other hand, for a wide range of theologians and believers alike, theology and philosophy, theology and culture, theology and ethics, theology and the arts—all these partners join appropriately in conversations that appear to be inexhaustible. Efforts to treat religion from an essentially a-religious perspective seem insufficient to the human drive to identify and explore relationships between the human and the divine. For Christianity, the divine persists as a personal God, willing even to become incarnate in order to further intimacy with humankind and instantiate the promise of eternal life beyond death, leaving theologians, academic and practical, to wonder and to be asked to explain how our work so often can seem so arid. Friedrich Schleiermacher, who championed the role of human affect in salvation, has been called the father of modern Protestant theology—indeed, he was beloved even of Karl Barth, who condemned Schleiermacher’s theology in his rejection of the optimistic liberal theology that largely collapsed in the face of the horrors of WWI.36 When Schleiermacher died in 1834, enormous crowds lined the streets to pay tribute as his funeral procession passed. Skeptical of Christian orthodoxy, in particular of its limitations on the breadth of God’s saving work, Schleiermacher had served as a chaplain and parish pastor, as well as an academic. He found resolution for his own skepticism in absolute dependence on God—revealed through Jesus Christ—and his passion for the depth of human emotional experience must have informed his preaching and pastoral relationships. The 36. See chapter 1 for a discussion of the relevance of Schleiermacher’s thought to this project.

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compassion and sense of shared experience engendered by that commitment to both the human and the divine invited the kind of popular attachment that on the one hand is not common to many theologians, and on the other, would seem to be a logical response to those who generate narratives of salvation by a loving, engaged—personal—God. It is a happy outcome of the attention to the practitioner of which Paul Tillich speaks, categorizing together both pastor and psychotherapist.37 The texts for young children that I have foregrounded here have the advantage of being some of the clearest, arguably most basic, personal expressions of an anxiety that recurs throughout our lives, at a level of intensity that one hopes is manageable, but that one understands may well become overwhelming. A contingency of human experience is the premonition that there is a darkness just beyond the light, that we must be equipped to bring some self-sufficient order to bear on the unknown that faces us, literally or psychologically, on a recurring basis. In search of wholeness, reassurance, salvation, Christians and non-Christians alike sense the need to be prepared, as best we can, for the trauma that to a greater or lesser degree impinges on the lives of most human beings: in the midst of life, we are in death.38 Equipped with the right strategies and skills, we can for the most part survive those threats. Part of what makes these children’s texts such striking illustrations of human experience is that their undeniably positive, even soothing, spirit is informed by visually engaging illustrations of an undercurrent of something darker, or at least the potentiality of something darker. As Serene Jones has suggested, as Adams and Lear will suggest, it is in making meaning—giving language to our experience, warding off the silence of nonverbal isolation—that we manage these threats most successfully and recover most effectively when we have been overwhelmed. Jonathan Lear will assure us that somehow there is a goodness in the world that grounds hope in the face of the most shattering 37. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 42–43. 38. From the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, 1662, Rite for the Burial of the Dead.

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circumstances, hope that meaning can be revitalized beyond the ethical horizon. Marilyn McCord Adams insists that God will make good on a contractual obligation to heal that which God has allowed to be broken. Each tells a story.

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“. . . the Lord encountered him and sought to kill him” Marilyn McCord Adams: Horror and Salvation

Calvin’s reading of Job anticipates a perceptual Götterdämmerung. In twentieth-century interpretations of Job, this twilight has become all enveloping. Here is an encroaching darkness that is not held back by light of revelation, immortality, or illumination. Susan Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? . . . that broken, partial, stuttering quality our theological discourse must take, perhaps above all in the face of the mystery of evil. William Placher At a night encampment on the way, the Lord encountered [Moses] and sought to kill him. So Zipporah took her flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched his legs with it, saying, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” And when he let him alone, she added, “A bridegroom of blood because of the circumcision.” Exod. 4:24-26 (NJPS)

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Introduction If anxiety is an aspect of human experience that testifies to a darkness we sense threatening to envelop us—just over the horizon, perhaps, or crouching under the bed (biding its time), the worst moments are those when one’s inchoate (one hopes, sometimes in vain, irrational) fears become real, are concretized in external experience. At these junctures, the most profound manifestation of human darkness is evidenced in the horror that touches on human life, even on the happiest lives, to some degree, and that at its worst would seem to destroy all possibility of hope. The effects of infant failure to thrive constitute one of the earliest exemplars of such psychic devastation, but even for adults who emerge from childhood intact, perhaps thriving, there is always the possibility that catastrophic horror will precipitate a personal (or corporate) darkness “that is not held back by light of revelation, immortality, or illumination.” 1 There are certain human horrors that will not give way to what we understand as natural human intercession or intervention, and the relationship of the divine to these horrors both renders them more terrible and offers (for some thinkers, at least) a hope that they might be redeemed. In the face of such devastation, the human psyche no longer apprehends what is taking place outside increasingly narrow confines of the self, and in the worst of such circumstances, the very ability to believe one’s life has meaning and to sustain hope slips away or is wrenched violently out of the easy grasp with which such underpinnings of basic trust are carried in better—more humane—times. The very lesson of the children’s books I read in chapter 3 is lost: the insipient darkness does prevail; the world is not safe; in the end, one cannot trust that one’s initiative will issue in a more-or-less productive outcome; there are, after all, no words that capture the horror. It is the wordlessness of such a state of existence that Marilyn

1. Susan Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?: Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Modern and Medieval Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 156.

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McCord Adams’s definition of horrendous evil captures: the participant, Adams says, has prima facie evidence to doubt that her life has meaning, and evil of this kind and magnitude arises because the perpetrators of such horror cannot conceive (much less articulate) the extremity of consequence that attaches to their actions. These qualities track the affective manifestations of the most pernicious major depressions, certainly, but in the face of horror, they arise inexorably from the contingencies of human experience, which may or may not lead to or from a major depressive state or episode. Theology and psychoanalysis alike engage this state of affairs, in which the requisite sense of a sure ground is lost, and the struggle to recover that sense—or that ground, for it is often the ground itself that has crumbled—is urgent and unfolds not intellectually or theoretically, but in the spaces to which D. W. Winnicott would refer as transitional.2 Negative theology might invoke such spaces as the wordless void in which the divine can be known, in an awesome otherness that may be both profoundly good and incomprehensibly threatening. Martin Luther will conceptualize such an unknowable God as the deus nudus, outside revelation, from whom humankind should flee to the cross as material evidence of the love that inexplicably accompanies a fearsomely other and unknowable divinity. For believers (and theologians), Winnicott’s transitional spaces are liminal conjunctions of the human and divine; for Marilyn McCord Adams, these are spaces in which there is the potential for humanity to experience a halting, premonitory sense of the beatific intimacy that awaits in the fullness of time beyond this life. Marilyn McCord Adams: Laying the Foundation The PhD dissertation that theologian, parish priest, and analytic philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams wrote to conclude her graduate training in philosophy of religion at Cornell University offers a telling backdrop to her subsequent work—especially her work on human

2. See chapter 2 for a discussion of Winnicott’s description of transitional phenomena.

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experiences of horror, to which I take recourse here. In the dissertation, Adams develops a philosophical proof that Ockham’s account of God’s determinate foreknowledge from eternity of future contingents in terms of his revised notion of “determinate truth” is adequate to render (1) the completeness of God’s determinate foreknowledge from eternity compatible with free will; but, given Ockham’s understanding of the doctrine of infallibility . . . it does not preserve (2) the infallibility of God’s determinate cognition from all eternity of all things.3

Adams then deploys this proof to assert, of a potential “incompatibility between God’s omniscience and human free will,” that such an incompatibility derives from four assumptions: 1. “God has determinate cognition of all things in the created world whether past, present, or future.” 2. God’s judgment that a given future event will occur at a given future time is either timelessly true or true given actual events and circumstances either in the past or the future, relative to the event in question. 3. God’s judgment that a given event will occur (i.e., God’s determinate cognition) means that the event actually will occur—which is to say that God’s determinate cognition is infallible. 4. Human free will exists in such a way that future acts of that will are not yet determined and will occur within additional future contingencies that are not yet determined. Adams makes explicit the further implication of this conclusion: while a theologian may offer arguments against any combination of these assumptions, if the theologian accepts the validity of all four, she “renders God’s omniscience incompatible with human free will.”4 In

3. Marilyn McCord Adams, “The Problem of God’s Foreknowledge and Free Will in Boethius and William Ockham,” PhD dissertation submitted to Cornell University, 1967, 214. 4. Adams, “God’s Foreknowledge and Free Will in Boethius and William Ockham,” 225.

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other words, in order to preserve the integrity of divine omniscience, some one or more of these assumptions must be false. The significance of Adams’s central argument for my project is that it lays a foundation for her speculation about God’s relationship to human suffering and vulnerability—particularly with regard to what Adams eventually begins to call “horrendous evil.” Furthermore, Adams defines a path, along which I work for some distance before diverging from it, that makes explicit the link between divine creation and the existence of evil, in particular, horrendous evil. She argues against the analytic philosophical tradition generally—and Christian analytic philosophers, in particular—that (1) it is not only logical, but even preferable to deploy religious (in her case, Christian) language and constructions in engagement of human suffering and that (2) the strategies adopted by analytic thinkers (like Alvin Plantinga), as well as process thinkers (like John Cobb Jr.), fail by virtue of excluding consideration of the worst evils that impinge on human existence, whether by frankly declining to engage them (Pike, Plantinga) or by sidestepping divine responsibility by divorcing the good that God brings, even within or out of horror, from the existence itself of the horror. Adams posits a peculiar (perhaps unique) and compelling role for Christianity in the salvation of all people. Early in her career (1975), she is already arguing for universal salvation, grounding her position in rejection of the existence of hell (as “inconsistent with God’s love”) and therefore of the traditional presupposition that “God’s perfect justice” necessitates eternal condemnation for some sinners.5 Instead, Adams argues that justice does not preclude, for example, God’s treating someone better than he deserves, as long as this applies universally—i.e., as long as all are treated better than they deserve.6 She goes further to assert that (if one takes eternality seriously) eternal condemnation would be an excessive consequence, and therefore 5. For a critical response to this position, see, for example, John Cobb Jr., “Theodicy and Divine Omnipotence,” in Philosophy and Theological Discourse, ed. Stephen T. Davis (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). 6. Marilyn McCord Adams, “Hell and the God of Justice,” Religious Studies 11, no. 4 (1975): 433–34.

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positively unjust, pointing out that “total and everlasting unhappiness” [much less misery!] always exceeds the ancient level of an eye for an eye.7 Eternality by definition offers sufficient time, Adams notes, for the condemned to have paid in kind (that is, in suffering) for even the most heinous type or severity of crime.8 This argument anticipates several themes that recur in Adams’s corpus, including her critique of philosophers and theologians who apply “our ordinary moral standards” to divine activity (or lack thereof).9 She continues her critique of Christian soteriological exclusivism in (for example) “The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians,” decrying as “at best incongruous and at worst disingenuous” the following conjunction of propositions: 1. “God exists, and is essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good. 2. Some created persons will be consigned to hell forever.” 10

Here the eschatological—indeed, apocalyptic—moment in Adams’s project is clear: If there must be, in the end, a final defeat of evil, with or without intermediary defeats of particular evils in individual lives, how can there be a hell at all? For Adams, indeed, “traditional hell is [itself] a paradigm horror,” so that (and because) by definition one condemned to hell has reason to believe evil (i.e., hell itself) remains undefeated.11 Furthermore, she points out, “damnation is a horror that exceeds our conceptual powers,” which makes such punishment by its nature unjust.12 This emphasis on the implications of a natural or supernatural consequence of which the human subject literally cannot conceive will become prominent in Adams’s account of God’s responsibility for the horrendous evils that impinge on human existence. 7. Ibid., 436. 8. Ibid., 438–39. 9. Ibid., 447. 10. Marilyn McCord Adams, “Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Theologians,” in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 302. 11. Ibid., 304. 12. Ibid., 310.

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Working along similar lines, Adams points out that Christianity has always acknowledged the “evils without”—those in which humanity has no initial agency—but has focused on the “evil within,” in other words, one’s own contribution to evil (theologically speaking, sin).13 In shifting our focus to the evil without—that for which humanity cannot be held fully responsible—Adams proffers in “Redemptive Suffering” one of the earliest and most extensive illustrations of her analytic methodology. In so doing, she continues to lay the groundwork she begins in her dissertation for the argument that she will develop fully in Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) and Christ and Horrors (2006). Her presuppositions include her understanding of God’s primary interest as being in rational creatures, most notably human beings, specifically for the purpose of generating between human beings and between humanity and God “non-manipulative relationships of self-surrendering love [for God] and . . . self-giving love [of] others.” This emphasis on reason as that which defines humanity, as well as that human quality to which God is most attracted, will become foundational to (and characteristic of) Adams’s theodicy and soteriology. She consistently distinguishes the two categories as philosophical in the former case, theological in the latter, but considers the questions raised by each of these disciplines comparable to one another. While it is not always clear in which instances she would locate her work in each of these categories, Adams seems overall to prefer the soteriological characterization of her project. Over time, her focus trends toward the grounds by which humankind may expect—demand, actually—divine restoration of wholeness, rather than on less-teleological arguments that theoretically reconcile God’s loving goodness and the perdurance of human suffering. Her theodical arguments, beginning with the dissertation, thus function toward a soteriological end. Nonetheless, whether philosophically or theologically, Adams works from an analytic methodology. In “Redemptive Suffering,” the 13. Adams, “Redemptive Suffering,” in Rationality, Religious Belief, and Moral Commitment: New Essays in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Robert Audi and William J. Wainwright (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 252–53.

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significance of her dissertation argument becomes clear, as Adams asserts that such a relationship 1. necessitates an incompatibilist free will, 2. implies that not even God can create [or, at least, has created] in a way that precludes not only the possibility, but the probability of sin, and 3. dictates that reconciliation—not punishment or avenging of divine honor—is the central aim of God’s relationship to human error.14 Notably, Adams clearly rejects the “martyr model” of Christian intimacy with God as insufficient (for the same reasons discussed at length by feminist and other liberation theologians), and her work makes clear her profound pastoral and theological resonance with the human experience of suffering, its origin, and the possibility of its being ameliorated by God’s shared experience of it. However, Adams points to the Christian mystic tradition as evidence of the possibility (at least) of a “logically necessary connection between temporal suffering and a very great good.” Specifically, she makes the sufferingdivine good connection because “the inner life of God [to which humanity is drawn] itself includes deep agony as well as ecstatic joy,” so that humanity’s shared experience of such temporal suffering can be a kind of beatific vision.15 I will present one reading of Adams’s model for divine horror-defeat that I argue points to a striking parallel to models of abuse in intimate relationships. The fine line that Adams draws around an ecstatic experience of suffering becomes even more clearly problematic in that context. Here in “Redemptive Suffering,” Adams goes beyond positing human suffering as a pathway to beatific vision, laying out a series of twenty propositions in support of her linchpin conclusion: “Intimacy with God [is] the incommensurate good,” which, she will say in her later work, defeats evil.16 This strong construction of God’s goodness is the salvific 14. Ibid., 253–54. 15. Ibid., 264.

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foundation on which Adams relies. As I have illustrated, she makes an analytic argument that by definition precludes God’s being both omnipotent and willing to allow horror-participation to run its course unchecked. God’s goodness, then, since in fact the evidence of horrorparticipation comprises physical and psychic wounds of extraordinary depth, must be of such a quality and dimension that it exceeds human conceptual skills. In other words, just as the consequences of horror, by definition, exceed the capacity of the human imagination, the goodness that defeats those consequences (“undoes” them in Adams’s language) must be incommensurate to any good the human imagination can envision. However, Adams will insist that this good has the capacity not only to defeat evil, but also to undo its physical effects, indeed to reconstruct the relationship of human to material environment in such a way that even the human vulnerability to woundedness is undone. Thus, the goodness of God is incommensurately more powerful than any human goodness, functioning as a re/creative force. Nonetheless, to the degree that wholeness is represented physically in Adams’s model, divine goodness also operates within the bounds of the (by definition limited, as Adams notes) human imagination. As will continue to be the case in her later work, Adams explicitly avoids asking why this state of divine-human affairs would arise in a context of God’s creating humanity with a not only probable, but inevitable propensity to act in ways that cause suffering. Instead, she urges an “aporetic” (rather than explanatory) approach to soteriology, arguing that acceptance of aporia in this regard bridges two key divides that she perceives in the work of Alvin Plantinga and other Christian analytic philosophers: between theology and philosophy and between theory and practice. As I have noted, she specifies that as a theologian, her interest is explicitly soteriological, rather than theodical, and offers this further distinction as illustration of what it is to bring a practical theological perspective to the philosophical consideration of human suffering.17 16. Ibid., 262–63 (italics original).

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Maintaining a bridge between theoretical and practical theology is of perduring importance to Adams, who holds fiercely to the pastoral tension between acknowledging (what she comes to call) horrendous evil and affirming the goodness of God. She provides detailed analytic (and therefore, sometimes dry) arguments for her position, but regardless of method or language, remains vitally—and admirably—engaged in the lived experience of her parishioners (representing humankind), which she narrates in vivid detail. Of particular note in the development of her theodicy and soteriology is Adams’s experience in Los Angeles, where her parish included the community that was battered by the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, men whom she describes as (at best) looking back at her from the pews with ghostly faces turned gray-green by AZT treatment.18 These accounts having illustrated her objections to the explanatory approach to theodicy, Adams goes on to make an aporetic move that is either brave or foolhardy, depending on one’s own perspective: she takes God’s loving goodness sufficiently seriously to argue that the incommensurable good of a relationship (especially an intimate relationship) with God can ensure for each individual a life that (a) is a great good to him on the whole, and (b) includes no deep suffering that is unredeemed or meaningless. 19

This conclusion—that through intimate relationship with God, each life as a whole is assured great good—is essential to Adams’s developing argument that the redemption of horror participants through beatific intimacy is sufficient to account for (although not justify) God’s having created us in such a way that our participation in horror is inevitable. The consistency of Adams’s focus and relative continuity of her argument across time (with the notable exceptions of her shift to 17. See Adams, “Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Theologians,” 141. 18. For an account of this commitment written between Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999) and Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (2006), see Adams, Afterword to Stephen Davis, Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (2001). 19. Adams, “Problems of Evil: More Advice to Christian Theologians,” 136.

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inclusive language and to the language of horrendous evils and horror participants, rather than of perpetrators and victims) makes it possible to read her corpus as a whole, as I do in this project. To her considerable credit, Adams perseveres in a decades-long process of recovering human dignity by way of seeking to distinguish divine responsibility for inevitable human participation in evil from primary responsibility for that horror-participation (which rests with humanity). Her approach to human dignity thus defines it largely in terms of culpability for sin. Another route she might have taken would be recourse to the imago Dei, the creation of humankind in the divine image and likeness, which suggests an inherent dignity and worth. For Adams, however, human dignity is established and reified via God’s sharing human experience in the incarnate second person of the Trinity. While she locates divine responsibility in God’s relationship to the world as creator, she moves to Christology as the ground of her divine restoration or salvation. This difference of emphasis becomes one of the key distinctions between my project and Adams’s work. Much of Adams’s critical struggle arises from her—to my mind, admirable—insistence that any theodicy or soteriology must account for the worst (“horrendous”) evils that impinge upon the human capacity to make meaning. Her arguments are not without flaw, as I will argue, but they do address and to a large degree alleviate (if not entirely avoid) the problem that Adams identifies in the work of Alvin Plantinga and other Christian analytic philosophers: the explicit exclusion of the worst of human suffering from their theodical calculus. William Placher’s review article on Horrendous Evil makes this point especially well. Placher praises Adams for, among other qualities, her commitment to the struggle to make sense of human suffering in the presence of God. His critique of her work, on the other hand, is informed by his desire (shared with other contemporary theologians, including Anne Carr, for example) that Adams (and perhaps all philosophers) should be “messier,” less confident that she has wrapped up loose ends and developed a solution to the “problem” (Placher, along with Carr, prefers “mystery”) of evil.20

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Although in her response to Placher’s review Adams states unequivocally her agreement that theological and philosophical questions about evil must remain unanswered, that a neat and whole “solution” is not possible, her language in “Chalcedonian Christology: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil” (published two years before Horrendous Evils) suggests something different.21 There, she explicitly links Chalcedonian Christology to “a Christian solution to the problem of evil.”22 One might—as I do—read as a strength Adams’s willingness to proceed willy-nilly (an adverb of which she, herself, is fond), not allowing the broader project to be derailed by agonizing debates over specifics of language (and other particulars, for that matter). This assessment is complicated, however, by Adams’s own analytical methodology, which dictates an excruciatingly detailed, algebraic form that seems less than compatible with her blowsier conclusions. As noted, Placher specifically argues for a “messier” tenor to theological discourse than he finds in Adams’s work. My own reading of her work supports Adams’s retort that she fully appreciates and shares his perspective, but left unanswered is the disparity between her messier conclusion and the tightly constructed method by which she arrives at it. Furthermore, her own writing confirms that she seeks a re/solution to horror-participation, despite her insistence that she eschews the language of “solution” with regard to evil. Her own considerable accomplishment in developing a philosophical analysis of the problem inevitably raises expectations that her conclusion will be similarly precise, a goal that Placher (and Adams, herself, to a degree) understands as inherently flawed. In response to the methodology and propositions that Adams articulates, John Cobb argues that Adams would be better off reconsidering divine power altogether. He complains that her approach to the relevant questions ends up not being a theodicy at

20. William Placher, “An Engagement with Marilyn McCord Adams’s Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 4 (2002): 461–67. 21. Adams, “Horrors in Theological Context,” Scottish Journal of Theology 55, no. 4 (2002): 468–79. 22. Marilyn McCord Adams, “Chalcedonian Christology: A Christian Solution to the Problem of Evil,” in Philosophy and Theological Discourse, ed. Stephen T. Davis (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 173.

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all, but a restructuring of the question to avoid the thorny question of how an omnipotent and loving God is compossible with the evil that is manifest in the world around us. There is at least some legitimacy to this critique. As I will comment below, Adams herself ends up sidestepping suffering that is resistant to her model in a manner that not only illustrates Cobb’s point but weakens Adams’s criticism of Plantinga’s exclusionary theodicy. Cobb also points out that—oddly, given her commitment to universal salvation—Adams’s conclusions regarding the value of suffering do not seem logically to extend to nonbelievers, or even to non-Christians, necessarily, as they will not have the benefit of a beatific intimacy of shared suffering ante mortem.23 However, prior to Cobb’s 1997 critique, Adams already had explicitly endorsed a shift in Christian philosophy (and theology, presumably) to her “aporetic” approach, from the prevailing approach that she reads as apologetic. Her project relies on her firm belief that Christian theodicies are weakened by the kind of apologetic posture that one might associate with Cobb’s critique, for example, as opposed to making a firm stand based on “our” (which is to say, Christian) value theory. Adams is insistent both that salvation is universal and that Christians have “in our theological treasure chest . . . the only good big enough to defeat horrendous evils—viz., God Himself.”24 Here Adams seems to suggest that God’s being known in the Incarnation is significantly more efficacious than other ways in which God might be known. This posture is particularly problematic for the interreligious dialogue that a universal soteriology presumably would endorse. Adams seems to be claiming that a sufficiently strong construction of a divine salvific process will have greater relevance beyond the Christian community than does an apologetic account. I will argue a middle ground that Christian accounts are strengthened by nonChristian, in particular secular sources. At the same time, I will hold to

23. John Cobb Jr., “Theodicy and Divine Omnipotence,” in Philosophy and Theological Discourse, ed. Stephen T. Davis (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 201–3. 24. Marilyn McCord Adams, “The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians,” in Reasoned Faith: Essays in Philosophical Theology in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 301–2.

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the principle that a Christian account must remain Christian in order to retain its cogency, but that its Christian shape can be exemplar—an approximation—rather than a purportedly inclusive model. Horrendous Evil and Human Psychology In her essay “Praying the Proslogion,” Adams distinguishes Anselm’s Proslogion from his Monologion by noting that in the former, addressed specifically to believers, belief is primary, leading to understanding, while in the latter, rationis necessitas and sola ratione operate to deploy understanding in support of faith, a strategy that Anselm intended to engage nonbelievers and believers, alike.25 This approach offers Adams one avenue of refutation to Cobb’s critique of her apparent exclusivity, should she have chosen to deploy it. Interestingly, Adams makes an intriguing further distinction by connecting the reason-based strategy (that Anselm directs to nonbelievers as well as believers) to human psychology. In so doing, she links the psyche—here, “psychological, artist, and mental-speech analogies”—to reason, rather than to faith.26 Indeed, in describing Anselm’s sense of the relationship between human and divine, Adams’s language continues to draw on reason as the basis of human particularity: she emphasizes Anselm’s reliance on the incapacity of human intellect to engage “the prima facie inconsistency between [divine] justice and mercy,” pointing to “the cognitive inaccessibility of Divine goodness.”27 This psychological (broadly speaking) talk does not extend to Adams’s account of Anselm’s engagement of “the exercise of understanding itself” as a form of prayer, which Adams clarifies is neither meditation nor dialogue, but “alloquium, in which the soul speaks to God,” the implication being that simply in speaking and being heard—not dialogue—one comes to greater understanding of difficult questions. Adams suggests an analogy to this model of prayer of a 25. Marilyn McCord Adams, “Praying the Proslogion: Anselm’s Theological Method,” in Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith: Essays in Honor of Wallace P. Alston, ed. Thomas D. Senor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 26. Ibid., 25. 27. Ibid., 31.

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philosophy student asking her (presumably Socratic) teacher for help, in the process answering her own question. A similarly useful analogy (indeed, I would think more useful), and one that stays closer to the language of psychology that Adams uses elsewhere, might be drawn to psychoanalysis. The analysand, albeit with occasional, appropriate prompts in the form of interpretation, comes to greater understanding in the very process of speaking from her psyche (or soul, as I would suggest is equally accurate) to the receptive analyst. 28 Indeed, the analogy to psychoanalysis seems increasingly apt as Adams addresses self-knowledge, in particular. She notes that Anselm, like Benedict, Cassian, and Origen, aims in his prayers “to stir the mind out of its inertia to thorough self-knowledge, which produces a wound in the heart compunctio cordis,” spurring the believer on to greater humility and reliance on God. Here the dual emphasis is on the essential role of self-knowledge and the importance of both prayer and intellectual inquiry to the whole person. “God is to be sought with the whole self”: mind, tongue, heart, mouth, soul, flesh, whole substance. Further supporting the psychoanalytic analogy, Adams makes clear that for Anselm, cognition and affect are inseparable and mutually influential—and, furthermore, that love is key to intellect and perception itself, as well as emotion.29 From my perspective, Adams identifies here a potential recourse to psychoanalysis that would illuminate her model, although she does not pursue it. In this regard, Lear’s psychoanalytically grounded construction of radical hope offers a complement to Adams’s work for which I will advocate in chapter 5. While her focus in the Proslogion essay differs from that of Adams’s later work, which relates more directly to my project, it suggests the complexity and subtlety of attention to human psychology that is integral to Adams’s entire corpus, as it should be to theology more generally, I would argue. Psyche, after all, refers (roughly speaking) in the classical Greek to the soul. Similarly, despite the standing 28. Ibid., 18–19. 29. Ibid., 15–16. For a further exploration of the centrality of love to the psychoanalytic process, see Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis, 1st ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990).

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translation of Ich as ego, in the original German Freud seems to be referring simply to the “I,” that which represents who we are as developing and mature persons. Questions about how the human psyche (by which Freud seems to have meant something akin to the soul, rather than a discretely psychological component of the human subject) stands before and is perceived or received by God are central to Christian theology. The relationship between the objects of the two disciplines, especially between psychoanalysis and theological anthropology, might have been clearer had not anglophile psychoanalysts so embraced the concretizing (and therefore almost inevitably counter-spiritual) language of ego psychology in describing and analyzing the Ich. Augustine’s famously enigmatic dictum that “our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”—indeed his entire Confessions—is powerful psychologically (even developmentally) as well as spiritually, because (I would argue) the two categories are less disjunctive for him than for modern thought. For theologians, such speculation raises questions as to how our appropriation of psychological—here, specifically, psychoanalytic—language can most effectively carry beyond modern categories to those less bound by pseudo- or proto-scientific models. Certainly, recognition that Freud himself wrote in language that is more benign with regard to the existence of the human soul than may be apparent in English translations of his work will render his clinical and theoretical speculation and conclusions more palatable to many theologians. 30 Theological Anthropology and the Preservation of a Beneficent God: Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God Over the five years following “Praying the Proslogion,” Adams continues to develop her posited universality, not only of salvation, but also of the relevance to humankind and the human condition as a whole of the Christian God’s activity in response to horror. In Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God, she offers her fullest aporetic account to that 30. See Mark Solms, “Controversies in Freud Translation,” Psychoanalysis and History 1 (1999): 28.

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point of both the depth and intensity of horror that is endemic to human existence. She locates this horror as a direct consequence of God’s choice (1) to create humankind such that human persons are vulnerable to scarcity and (2) to place humankind in an environment defined (in Adams’s account) by scarcity.31 For Adams, there is a metaphysical mismatch between a created environment in which human need cannot be fully satisfied and the limitations of the human capacities to tolerate frustration and to understand the full consequences of its actions. The aporetic quality of this account arises from Adams’s insistence that such a set of divinely engendered contingencies is compossible with a loving, benevolent God. Adams’s account in Horrendous Evils largely centers around understandings of purity and defilement. For example, it is through the ritual defilement of the crucifixion that Adams understands God’s sharing a commonality of experience with the perpetrators, not only the victims, of horror.32 Here, God Incarnate (and therefore fully human, although—for Adams—without sin) takes up into Godself a humankind that is less fallen than devastatingly wounded by the contingencies of God’s creative choices. Rejecting, for example, what she considers Alvin Plantinga’s “influential free will defense[, which] promotes Divine goodness at world-producing to the neglect of God’s goodness to created persons,” Adams insists that humankind from its very inception by God was fatally vulnerable to material creation, such that human horror-participation, while still blameworthy, was inevitable.33 In a sense, then, Adams’s is a mixed theological anthropology. Her insistence on emphasizing the inevitability of human horror-participation implies an infringement of free will that might be read either as a low estimation of human capacity or as a claim that human nature is not depraved (as John Calvin and others would have it), so much as vulnerable, a relatively high estimation.

31. Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 32. See, for example, Adams, Horrendous Evils, 98–99 and 166. 33. Ibid., 32 and, for the broader discussion, chapter 3: “The Dignity of Human Nature?,” which begins on that page.

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For Adams, innate limitations constrain physical and intellectual freedom. Similarly, humankind does not operate from a robustly free will. Adams appropriates developmental psychology to argue that adult freedom of will is “impaired” by the maladaptive strategies acquired during a childhood in which human persons are particularly vulnerable to environmental inadequacies or hostilities. She builds on this observation to posit an “entrenched propensity” toward horrorparticipation, which arises from the conjunction of actual environmental scarcity, perception of even greater scarcity that is secondary to anxiety about death, and an incapacity both to foresee and to appreciate retrospectively the full depth and scope of horror that arises from our actions. Adams presents these practical constraints as “built into” the human psyche.34 The implication of these constraints extends beyond theological anthropology, however, to a doctrine of God. Specifically, once Adams has established that the human will is significantly impaired, the foundational argument for her assertion that humankind cannot be held entirely responsible for horror-participation, the question becomes how God’s will operated to choose where and how to establish those constraints and whether they might have expanded, for example, to preclude evil. After all, if God can constrain (through the nature of creation) the human capacity to fully appreciate and also avoid the consequences of action, could God not also have operated to constrain those human actions that inevitably give rise to horror? Against theologies of postlapsarian human depravity, Adams thus offers a less dark assessment, not of human experience, but of human nature. The theological anthropology that arises from Horrendous Evils is predicated on Adams’s assertions that (1) God can defeat evil within every human life, in part because (2) God carries much of the responsibility for the existence of the horror. Specifically, from creation (not from the Fall), humankind is vulnerable to horror of a greater magnitude than can he humanly imagined. Humankind has thus been created with the capacity to perpetrate acts of horror, the 34. Ibid., 36–37.

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full consequences of which we cannot imagine—indeed, cannot fully apprehend even in retrospect. Such consequences demand divine intervention, because (1) only God’s infinite goodness is sufficient to address them, and (2) God, whose free will is absolute, carries the responsibility for our capacity to do what we cannot choose, because we cannot conceive it (consequences beyond the scope of humankind’s delimited free will, in other words). Soteriology: Christ and Horrors In Christ and Horrors, Marilyn McCord Adams goes on to present a thought experiment predicated upon the idea that Jesus Christ came, not to save us from our sins, but to rescue us from the horrors of this world. She argues that in creating the particular world in which we are placed, God has “set humanity up” by creating us with a vulnerability to inevitable horror-participation. The chief soteriological aim of the Incarnation, then, is to join with the human experience in order to rescue us from horror. Further, Adams posits that God owes us resolution of horror, both before and after death. This obligation extends to the material level, in Adams’s account, as she reasons that God’s love of all creation obligates God to make all of it whole.35 It is on this matter of spiritual, psychological, and material wholeness that her soteriology (as well as her eschatology) seems to turn. To her credit (and against Plantinga), Adams refuses to shy away from the worst horrors. She lists serial murder, genocide, and the inadvertent death of a child at a parent’s hands among the events that fit her definition of horror as that which shatters the participant’s capacity to make positive meaning of her life. Furthermore, she insists that anyone who explores horror philosophically or theologically must engage and confront head-on the most inexplicable assaults on human dignity and meaning-making capacity.36 However, as noted above, Adams locates humankind’s distinguishing 35. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 36. Also see Adams, Horrendous Evils, 189.

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characteristics in human intellect and, furthermore, makes intellect (as she understands it) the primary means of divine-human connection. As a result, she leaves open the question of how those persons of limited or immature intellectual capacity may be included in humankind. Adams also includes in her broad sense of horror natural evil, including death. Adams does not develop this point, instead bracketing it as an open question (much as does Plantinga with the worst horrors). However, her inclusion of natural, timely death, along with her attribution of the human propensity for horror in part to awareness of death’s inevitability, suggests that she may be invoking something akin to a Tillichian (or Niebuhrian) anxiety secondary to human finitude. That anxiety, which Adams relates to scarcity rather than finitude (although the two constructs must be closely related), drives humankind toward horror-participation. Such an anxiety is further complicated by the mismatch Adams postulates between the human capacity to do evil, the breadth of evil that is possible in the environment in which humankind finds itself, and the human capacity to know fully the consequences of human action. Stages of Horror Defeat Beginning by at least 1993 and consistently thereafter, Adams defines horror as evils [including natural evils] the participation in (the doing or suffering of) which constitutes prima facie reason to doubt whether the participant’s life could (given their inclusion in it) have positive meaning for him/ her on the whole. . . . Participation in horrors furnishes reason to doubt whether the participant’s life can be worth living, because it engulfs the positive value of his/her life and penetrates into his/her meaning-making structures seemingly to defeat and degrade his/her value as a person. 37

This language of “horrendous evils” first appears in “The Problem of Hell: A Problem of Evil for Christians.” Subsequently, Adams consistently uses the same definition (indeed, usually the same 37. Adams, Christ and Horrors, 32–33 (italics original).

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exemplars) throughout her corpus. She thus places the resources—“structures”—by which one makes meaning at the very heart of the injury done by horror-participation. For Jonathan Lear, a similar emphasis on the capacity and resources with which to make meaning informs his use of “catastrophic collapse,” to which only radical hope can be a meaningful and revitalizing response. As I have discussed in previous chapters, I consider Adams’s “horror” a category that effectively includes what others might define as trauma or evil. While human suffering arises and is experienced along a continuum of intensity and may or may not be traumatic, the very existence of conditions in which human suffering becomes ubiquitous constitutes a horror at the ground of human contingency. For Adams, these conditions are the basis for her contention that God is appropriately held responsible for the inevitability of human horror-participation. Moving into salvific remediation, Adams goes on to articulate three stages of horror-defeat: • Stage I, in which Divine horror-participation makes human horrorparticipation an occasion for personal intimacy with God, affirming that we have ante mortem the resources needed for positive meaningmaking. At this stage, which optimally will be completed prior to any horror-participation—a kind of prophylactic knowledge—human persons learn that by way of the Incarnation, God too has suffered the horror and degradation to which humankind is vulnerable. We thus have common ground with the very creator of all that we know. • Stage II, in which the horror participant receives, both through human intervention and in relationship to the second person of the Trinity, “the healing and coaching” needed to recognize and make use of the available resources for making positive meaning, so that “wholesome Divine-human relations [are either] established or restored,” along with a fundamental sense that one’s life has value. Here the connection is made (or remade) between the horrorparticipant and God, facilitated by the Real Presence of Jesus Christ

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in the Eucharist and the sacramental suffering and degradation that entails. • Stage III is marked by God’s renegotiating the relation of embodied persons to our material environment “so that we are no longer radically vulnerable to horrors.” This is the state that Adams describes as plot-resolution into a “happy ending.” It is at this point, which is only consummated post mortem, that Adams foresees the horror-participant’s retrospective appreciation of the horror as ultimately engendering an opportunity she would not forfeit. 38 In Stage I, the horror-participant experiences an intimate “organic unity” between her own horror-participation and her relationship with God, most clearly manifest in the Incarnation. This is to say that God’s direct sharing of human experience suggests a kind of cellular commonality that naturally (literally) bespeaks a capacity for mutual knowledge and trust between human and divine at an intimate level. Because God experienced human life, there is a basis for powerfully meaningful human-divine correspondence and communication. Adams understands the Incarnation as essential to the human capacity for making this connection: Jesus was born and progressed through the “messy” stages of human development, suffering a common human vulnerability to physical and emotional horror. This incarnate presence of God is the source of shared experience on which horrordefeat builds, and is vividly illustrated in Adams’s understanding of the Eucharist, which she explicates fully in her closing chapter, “Christ in the sacrament of the altar: Christ in the meantime.” Adams’s explicit and shocking engagement of the physical vulnerability of the sacramental Body of Christ is provocative and compelling, as well as for some illuminating and/or (appropriately enough) horrifying. The model relies intriguingly on Adams’s recovery for theology of the medieval doctrine of impanation: a hypostatic union of (the real presence of) Christ and the sacramental bread.39 38. Adams, Coherence, 47–48ff. and 66ff. 39. Ibid., 296 and 304–7. Also see Marilyn McCord Adams, “Biting and Chomping Our Salvation: Holy

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On the one hand, Adams avoids the kind of literalistic reading of transubstantiation by which the communicant must avoid biting the sacramental body, lest it bleed. She thus leaves space free for an analogical—perhaps more appropriately, anagogical—account of the Eucharist. On the other hand, however, she describes with gusto the communicant’s ripping into Christ’s flesh, and she outlines the passage of the Body of Christ through the digestive system, a process she characterizes as necessary (and sacralizing), in that it constitutes God’s physical sharing in the worst human degradation.40 For Adams, in Christ’s human (which is to say, ante-mortem) experience of horror and in the sacramental repetition of that horror, the believer is privy not only to Christ’s incarnate suffering and the overcoming of that suffering (which establishes the organic unity central to Adams’s Stage-I horror-defeat), but also to eschatological hope in “intimations” of the more profound healing to come in StageII and Stage-III horror-defeat. That is, the suffering and degradation instantiated first in the crucifixion is followed by the (bodily!) resurrection of Christ, which anticipates our own corporeal resurrection. The Eucharist, likewise, recalls (or, for Adams, repeatedly reenacts) the sacrifice of Jesus Christ until he comes again, a return that is prefigured in the resurrection. At the same time, it constitutes Christ’s real—and present—presence. Thus, the human suffering in which God shares by taking up into Godself the most horrible human pain and degradation is inextricably tied to God’s triumph over suffering and horror. Such triumph is guaranteed not only (in Adams’s account) by virtue of God’s relationship to humankind as creator, but also by the promise of the Incarnate God that God will not leave us comfortless, indeed goes to prepare a place for us, a place in which we will be whole and free from the vulnerability to horror that is a condition of our ante-mortem existence.41 She relies in the latter regard,

Eucharist, Radically Understood,” in Redemptive Transformation in Practical Theology, ed. Loder et al., 2004. I discuss Adams’s use of impanation below (see “Adams’s Psychology of the Eucharist”). 40. Also see Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 41. See, for example, John 14.

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nonetheless, on the continuing presence of the second person, rather than the instrumental presence of the third person of the Trinity, to which the relevant passage in John refers. It is unclear to what degree, for Adams, the non-Christian, absent participation in the Eucharist, or for that matter the Christian for whom transubstantiation (much less impanation) is not conceptually cogent, has reassurance of the salvific present presence of Christ. Given her commitment to universal salvation, one might speculate that either an alternate avenue of such assurance exists or that salvation proceeds absent any present reassurance, but the open question weakens the strength of Adams’s argument for radical inclusivity. In Stage-II horror-defeat, which for Adams can be accomplished ante mortem only partially (although it may and optimally does commence ante mortem), the horror-participant experiences the healing through which she regains the capacity to see her life as meaningful, although the horror-participation narrative itself has not yet resolved into the “happy ending” that Adams anticipates. (Note, again, that Adams does not assert that the horror-participant’s life is not meaningful, only that the participant reasonably doubts that there is sufficient ground on which to consider it so.) Adams understands this meaning-making to be facilitated by community and by professional intervention, for example by pastoral counseling or psychotherapy. She foregrounds the capacity to perceive one’s life as meaningful as necessary but not sufficient to “recogni[tion] and appropriat[ion]” of the unitive commonality between one’s horror-participation and one’s relationship with God, a unity that is signaled by the Incarnation. Thus, until the capacity to understand one’s life—even if radically altered by horror—as meaningful, no further healing can take place. Meaning, apparently primarily made intellectually, is at the heart of salvation for Adams. The limitation of restored wholeness at this stage underscores the strong sense of healing to which Adams is aiming in her soteriology. It is not enough just to make meaning, an important adaptive accomplishment that Don Catherall describes in Back from the Brink. For

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Adams, finding one’s own life meaningful in all its fullness is at the heart of wholeness and therefore must be accomplished at a level of profound wholeness: adaptive, even high, functioning is not sufficient to be considered redemption. The limits Adams places on what can be accomplished at the stage ante mortem acknowledge the degree to which the consequences of horror-participation linger, perdure, coloring our entire existence. Nonetheless, the approximation of meaning-making—a gesture toward it—is a major accomplishment for a horror survivor, and for Adams is prerequisite to the final progress the survivor makes toward restoration. A key means by which this stage of horror-defeat becomes accessible to the horror-participant is knowledge of and identification with the horror-induced suffering that Jesus Christ shares with her. As noted earlier, Adams is cautious about valorizing suffering. Against Simone Weil (at least as Adams reads her), for example, she is wary of affirming “the true character of affliction as Divine embrace.” Nonetheless, Adams does not entirely reject such a notion, but “prefers” to “combine” it with affirmation of God’s preserving life post mortem, so that human suffering in this life may be “concretely balanced off” by the ultimate good of beatific intimacy.42 Moreover, while Adams seems to waiver on the degree to which Stage-II horror defeat may progress ante mortem, she is clear that “our eventual post-mortem intimacy with God is an incommensurate good for human persons,” such that antemortem horror is “defeated”43—and she further suggests that antemortem intimations of that defeat play a key role in Stage-II horrordefeat. Ultimately, Adams’s Stage-III horror-defeat (always post mortem) takes the form of divine “plot-resolution” (her language), through which the horror-participant experiences what seems to me a kind of cosmic, narrative undoing of her horror-participation. Adams describes the provision by God of this “happy ending” (again, her language) either to consist of or issue in a re-creation of “our relation 42. Adams, Horrendous Evils, 161–62ff. 43. Ibid., 166–67ff.

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to the material world so that we are no longer radically vulnerable to horror,”44 indeed insisting that this renegotiation of material vulnerability is essential to the horror-defeat that is her soteriological paradigm. The radical construction of this healing is clear in Adams’s vision of an actual and material undoing and reconstruction. Thus for Adams it is not sufficient that healing occur; rather, God must undo the injury altogether, along with human vulnerability to reinjury. Hence, the centrality of bodily resurrection for Adams: we must be transformed bodily in order that our invulnerability to material contingencies be fully meaningful. Redemptive wholeness on the level of the soul (or psyche) is insufficient. This radical centrality of wholeness in relation to the material world is puzzling, at least to the degree that Adams also defines human particularity not in terms of the physical, but as the capacity for reason and, thereby, for reasonable assessment of one’s life as meaningful. This reordering of relationship to the material world post mortem pushes Adams’s vision toward the eschatological (if not apocalyptic). She focuses more immediately, however, on the intense intimacy with God that issues from the healing resolution of a horror-participation plot. Adams goes on to argue that the horror-participant, having experienced this beatific intimacy, understands it as an extraordinary—indeed, incommensurate—good that she would not be willing to forfeit in order to have foregone the horror that God has now defeated utterly. Why, then, must this salvific healing, as Adams would have it, include an undoing of the physical as well as emotional and spiritual scars left by the wounds of horror-participation? Cannot the incommensurate goodness of God overwhelm and defeat the pain of the scars left by horror-participation, literally redeeming them from horror? In considering these questions, further, I find myself hoping for a fuller explication by Adams of a clear route to such a profound appreciation of beatific intimacy, other than through horrorparticipation. While Adams does not specify that horror participation is the singular route to profound beatific intimacy (and indeed, I do 44. Adams, Coherence, 66.

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not think that is her intention), the incommensurate good that arises in shared participation in horror to which her framework points is suggestive of a fuller relationship to God, one that offers a kind of preferential option for the horror-participant. Soteriology: Creation—Non-Optimality—Rescue Adams’s focus on the language of horror, rather than of evil, is a strategy that both concretizes evil in an instructive way and, at the same time, shifts the burden of responsibility from human depravity to divine design. Where John Calvin, for example, posits total depravity as emblematic of postlapsarian human nature, a consequence of free human choice to sin against God, Adams emphasizes God’s own free choice to create humankind in such a way as to make that human sin—by Adams’s account, as we shall see, grounded in created scarcity—inevitable. For Adams, then, human depravity (which she neither minimizes nor discounts in terms of its consequence) is secondary to a divinely engendered created vulnerability to scarcity and, therefore, horror-participation. The ubiquity of this vulnerability is made especially clear in that Adams includes in her exemplars of horror-participation normative (which is to say, following upon a long and healthy life) death. Adams grounds these reflections in what she calls the “non-optimal” nature of (1) human existence and (2) the relationship between God and humankind, and she defines the soteriological aim of the Incarnation as defeat of the vulnerability and horror that ensue from these non-optimalities. While Adams considers her “diagnosis of human non-optimalities” ontologically of a piece with Christian traditions of sin and evil (again, language she avoids), she departs from the tradition in her a priori assertion that material creation is prima facie good because God loves it.45 She locates her understanding of evil within the generally Platonic tradition that considers it a falling short or failure of fit, for Adams the “metaphysical mismatch” that arises 45. Adams, Coherence, 49.

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from the tension between physical embodiment and the human psyche and between humankind and God.46 She rejects, however, the related idea that evil is a consequence of privation or nonbeing. Rather, as suggested above, the metaphysical mismatch is a consequence of God’s own choice 1. to create humankind as embodied in such a way as to be vulnerable to scarcity, a strategy that is complicated by God’s further choice 2. to place humankind in a created environment of scarcity, setting up competition and anxiety to which horror is secondary, and, furthermore, 3. to create a humankind subject to finitude, yet capable of participating in horrors that exceed its necessarily finite imagination. In summary, then, for Adams • creation (including humankind) is good by definition, because God loves it, • God is solely responsible for creating in such a way that scarcity inevitably drives humankind to participate in horror, and therefore, • by God’s own design, it is not possible for humankind to avoid participating in horror. Adams stops short of making God entirely responsible for human horror-participation, holding to the more traditional tenet that humankind is ultimately responsible for its choices. She clearly affirms the reality of sin, but questions (at least) its primacy in human horrorparticipation. Nonetheless, unlike Reinhold Niebuhr (for example), she posits that from its creation, prelapsarian humankind was inevitably given (if not driven) to horror-participation. The avoidance of such

46. Ibid., 37–38, 48–49, et al.

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horror-participation is thus not even theoretically or aporetically (as Niebuhr would have it) possible for humankind.47 As I have suggested, Adams’s soteriology emphasizes divine restoration of the horror participant’s meaning-making capacity, in the fullest and most complete sense, only post mortem. On the one hand, then, Adams develops a “fundamentally ontological” soteriological vision in which, although it may be anticipated ante mortem, redemption is predicated on post-mortem divine intervention. On the other hand, however, her eschatology implies (at the very least) a kind of here-and-now eschaton, in the temporal-material world, rather than a future eschaton (so that, for example, she places great weight on the Eucharist as an avenue of realized, not anticipated, grace). Furthermore, this eschatology emphasizes renegotiation of human vulnerability to material creation. As a consequence, it is not clear whether for Adams the eschaton might be separable from salvation and, in fact, precede it. In other words, we may be living the eschaton in the material, temporal present, but only able to realize fully our salvation from the effects of horror-participation in a post-mortem future (which, however, will have material—not simply spiritual— consequences). Similarly, Adams’s a priori claims include God’s loving unitive and assimilative aims for creation. However, her creation theology centers on the claim that God has created in such a way that human horrorparticipation is inescapable. Indeed, it is both the inevitability of horror-participation and God’s loving obligation to God’s creation, together, that for Adams issue in the necessity for the incarnation, even within an utterly contingent creation. These tensions reflect both the complex subtlety of Adams’s project and the vulnerabilities that open it to the questions I raise here.

47. See ibid., 270ff.

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Response to Adams: Prolegomena to an Alternate Reading of Horror-Defeat From my perspective, Adams clearly makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates about theodicy (and its implications for soteriology, her preferred identification as a theologian). She reviews and engages the history of theological thought on related questions, opening windows into alternative readings and understandings (although I will argue that one of the few traditions she excludes, that of Martin Luther’s hidden God, would enhance her vision). She insists that consideration of horror must include the cases that are most difficult to comprehend, and she, herself, is brutal in her choice of exemplars. She does not shy away from holding God responsible for what transpires in God’s creation, redefining fallenness and sin as horror-participation that is inevitable given the nature of creation. The stages of horror-defeat that she defines illuminate the human as well as divine process that is at work in the redemption of humankind from the suffering of this world. As I have suggested, however, Adams articulates a reluctance to address horrors such as profound, congenital retardation that might preclude (rather than destroy) a capacity for making meaning. Indeed, one could read into her struggle (although her forcefully articulated concerns in this regard make clear her own resistance to this conclusion) a quandary over the degree to which some lives have meaning at all. Certainly, there are some lives that from birth present naturally (that is, without postnatal intervening circumstances) her hallmark prima facie reason to doubt that they have meaning. This difficulty in Adams’s vision points to a profound weakness: her contention that a largely intellectual capacity for making meaning is the human foundation of a redeemed state in which the effects of horror-participation have been undone. This strategy brings into question a number of issues, including redemption of nonhuman creation, such as Irenaeus describes (which would seem a logical extension for Adams, given her soteriological

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emphasis on resolution of human vulnerability to the material world). More pressingly, Adams does not account for those human persons who have profoundly limited intellectual capacity, including healthy (that is, cognitively intact) young children—the very category in terms of which Jesus defines the kingdom of heaven. Furthermore, as noted, Adams’s references to normative human contingencies like timely death raise questions about her definition of horror and bring into relief her decision not to develop further her treatment of human finitude in her discussion of human suffering, for example, other than as a precipitating contingency. Most notably, these exclusions weaken her critique of those philosophers and theologians (like Plantinga) who refuse to address the worst horrors (and who grant the point explicitly), but it also raises substantive questions around the broader utility of Adams’s own work. Adams’s Psychological Ground Early on, Adams makes a powerful foundational observation that ties her project inextricably to her conception of human psychology. It also seems in particular to account for her insistence that the experience of beatific intimacy arising from human suffering is a gift of sufficient goodness to defeat horror—a tie that is especially significant, because the gifted divine intimacy in many instances is predicated on the horror itself. As I have noted, she resists any reading of her work as giving horror-participants special consideration in terms of an intimate relationship with God, based on their shared experience with God of intense suffering. However, to my mind, her reluctance to endorse this reading, while compelling, is not in and of itself sufficient to divert her argument onto a different path. Significantly, Adams invokes the following analogy (albeit briefly and in passing) as the organizing inspiration for her project: In describing the value to a horror-participant of the intimacy that arises from God’s plotresolution, Adams recalls WWI veterans’ narratives of the powerful, enduring ties among comrades who shared foxhole (perhaps, more accurately, trench warfare) experience. She observes that although 173

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they “might admit that they would never have prospectively willed the horrors of war as a means to such friendship,” retrospectively, the participants would not sacrifice these profoundly important, unique relationships in order to have foregone the horror. By Adams’s own account, then, this human experience of shared horror and survival seems to have inspired her insistence that intimacy with God, the ultimate instance of shared suffering and survival, is of sufficient value to resolve into restored wholeness the horror participation narrative within which the human subject in the relationship has suffered. 48 Simply put, my chief concern with Adams’s argument is that this organizing principle is itself profoundly mistaken. First, I take issue with her methodology, as I find it problematic that in a question of this importance Adams would draw such a close analogy from human relationships to human-divine relationship. Indeed, Adams’s analytic reliance on the “size gap between Divine and human agency” seems to call for a more profound sense of divine otherness generally. Furthermore, given this tack, I would like to see a more robust account of the basis for her psychological presuppositions, and to my knowledge (after an extensive review of her corpus), Adams does not offer such an account. It is clear that she has a compelling interest in human psychology: for example, she acknowledges gratefully, in multiple texts, the influence and assistance of James Loder (with whom she studied at Princeton), which she variously describes as a “quick overview of human development” and a “crash course in the conceptualization of developmental psychology.” While I am appreciative of Adams’s early and continued recourse to psychology, which evinces the centrality of that material to theology, her appropriation of psychological language and constructs illustrates a common problem in the interdisciplinary project (or even in strictly theological projects) by which theologians in general appropriate psychology. Indeed, the conclusions that Adams draws from the case of combat survivors run counter to much of the clinical literature about trauma 48. Ibid., 40.

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and its aftermath, relying as the force of that anecdote does on positive constructions of shared experience that render combat itself something of positive value. The psychological danger of valorizing such a construction is that it denies the full horror of the traumatizing experience, acknowledgment of which is key to recovery from the trauma.49 It is especially troubling to me that Adams comfortably—even casually, perhaps—asserts that horror-participants as a group (including combat veterans) would not choose retrospectively to avoid the horror they have experienced, were that possible. Absent any clinical citations, Adams’s argument is left grounded in this anecdotal evidence alone. While no position on this question applies absolutely to all horror survivors, it is my intention, as I judge it is Adams’s, to describe a representative exemplar of the experience of combat survivors as a group, one that brings me to a different conclusion than Adams describes.50 I am unaware of Adams’s warrant for her claim beyond the anecdote she offers (in itself interesting, given her meticulous attention to the details of her philosophical analysis), but I can offer a warrant for my own opposing position. Like Adams, who has served as an Episcopal parish priest as well as philosopher and theologian, I have heard recounted (as a psychotherapist, consultant, pastor, and family member) the traumatic memories of a great many individuals and have shared their efforts to work through and move beyond those memories. Perhaps most specifically to the point of Adams’s foundational narrative, I have close familial ties with combat veterans from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. The closest analogy in my own vicarious experience to Adams’s WWI combat analogy (assuming here that she intends to invoke the infamous trench warfare of the Great War—and that must surely be her intention if she intends to confront 49. See note 52. 50. I note, with appreciation, Adams’s response that it was not her intention to generalize about the experience of combat veterans, but rather to illustrate the contrast between prospective and retrospective evaluations of experience, specifically with regard to the integration of horrors. (Marilyn McCord Adams, personal communication, April 25, 2016.) Although I am not able to engage the point at greater length in this text, I hope to have further opportunities to explore the significance of this anecdote, which I continue to think has broad implications for Adams’s project.

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the worst horror) is the WWII battle for Iwo Jima, of which my father was a survivor. There is no question that for many Marines who survived the battle for Iwo Jima, profound and treasured bonds grew out of their shared experience. This is not the case universally, however, and furthermore, my observation is that the survivors absolutely would sacrifice those bonds, even retrospectively and in light of the value with which they endow the consequent intimacy, in order to have avoided the horror. Indeed, there is a fundamental inconsistency in Adams’s own reasoning in this regard: given the value she posits that comrades in arms have for one another, one would reasonably predict that the survivors would wish the horror never to have transpired. Within the framework she delineates, they would yearn to have avoided the massive loss of life and wholeness among the very friends and comrades with whom they had close ties that—to invoke Adams’s imagery—were forged in earlier horrors. It is furthermore ironic, given Adams’s relationally structured soteriology, that the psychic scars that these survivors carried rendered many of them, in fact, unable to sustain meaningfully intimate relationship, even with their fellow survivors, and there is ample documentation that a very large percentage (if not all) of them experienced diminution of some aspect of their capacity for relationship. My personal experience in this regard, arguably no more salient than Adams’s, need not be the primary source for narratives that differ fundamentally from the one she offers. The story of the Marines who posed for the picture of the flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi offers a welldocumented case in point, only one of them apparently living out a full and peaceful life, the cost of which seems to have been, in part, that he never spoke of his involvement in the flag-raising.51 Accounts 51. James Bradley and Ron Powers, Flags of Our Fathers (New York: Bantam Books, 2000). Also the movie adaptation of Bradley’s book, the movie based on it directed by Clint Eastwood (2006), and The Outsider (1961), a fictionalized account of flag-raiser Ira Hayes’s tragic and ultimately selfdestructive life after he was returned stateside from Iwo to participate in a military PR campaign and War Bond promotion. As this manuscript goes to print, Bradley has expressed his growing conviction that his father was not, in fact, one of the flag raisers pictured in the iconic photograph taken by photojournalist Joe Rosenthal, Associated Press. Bradley conjectures, instead, that his father recalled his participation in the first flag raising, involving a smaller flag, an event that was

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of combat veterans of the Vietnam era, like those of Don Catherall and Jonathan Shay, similarly recount social isolation and maladaptive, even violent, reactions to those closest to the veteran, as well as in more peripheral relationships.52 Indeed, based on the personal and clinically grounded accounts of mental health providers like Catherall and Shay, as well as my own clinical and personal experience, I would argue that rupture in the capacities to make meaning of their lives and to establish and sustain intimate relationships is a hallmark of these veterans’ experiences. On the one hand, the psychological perspective to which I take recourse here supports Adams’s sense that social isolation is most effectively overcome for many combat veterans by their continued connection to comrades in arms, when a sufficient number of those comrades have survived the war. (Don Catherall, for example, reports that one of the greatest traumas he personally experienced was the loss of his closest friends.) On the other hand, the significance of these relationships grounded in shared experience is not sufficient to a lifetime lived posttrauma. It does not obviate the extended reality that both the combat itself and its aftermath are exemplars not only of horror-participation, but also—pace Adams—of the essential injustice of a suggestion that those horrific narratives might be “resolved” via “undoing,” whether predicated on beatific intimacy or otherwise. This distinction between post-mortem healing and material undoing is thus key to the differences between Adams’s soteriological vision and the one I would suggest. Further illustrative of this quarrel I have with Adams is one of the five categories specified by the DSM IV-TR among the criteria for a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a category that

not recorded. (Michael S. Schmidt, “Flags of Our Fathers Author Now Doubts His Father Was in Iwo Jima Photo,” New York Times, May 3, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/us/iwo-jimamarines-bradley.html?_r=0, accessed May 4, 2016.) Confusion around who was involved in each of the flag raisings arose concurrently with the Rosenthal photograph’s being widely published in 1945. While I appreciate efforts by Bradley, the Marine Corps, and others to clarify the historic record, the point I make here remains valid: accounts of the lives of those identified as flag raisers offer a particularly poignant example of the effects of combat-related trauma. 52. See Don Catherall, Back from the Brink: A Family Guide to Overcoming Traumatic Stress (New York: Bantam Books, 1992) and Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum; Toronto and New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994).

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developed largely out of clinical experience with Vietnam-era veterans.53 The criterion articulated as “avoidant/numbing” offers seven symptoms, of which three or more must be present to justify the PTSD diagnosis. Of these seven symptoms, three relate explicitly to the capacity for relationship: • Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others, • Restricted range of affect (e.g., unable to have loving feelings), and • Sense of foreshortened future (e.g., does not expect to have a career, marriage, children, or normal life span) In addition, a fourth symptom may manifest in relationships, ironically specifically with those comrades on whose bonds of comradeship Adams builds a significant aspect of her argument: • Efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that arouse recollections of the trauma In principle, I do not discount the possibility that increased intimacy with God might profoundly shape one’s view of past experience (indeed, I think it does precisely that). Certainly, this can be read as the force of Romans 8:28, which is commonly cited in the face of incomprehensible suffering: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” My objections, rather, both substantive and methodological, focus on Adams’s inadequate familiarity with developmental and clinical psychology (as evidence of which I have offered her constricted understanding of combat survivors’ experience), despite her repeated recourse to both subdisciplines, and (theologically) her insufficient distinction between human and divine relatedness and intimacy. One key example of the concern I have for Adams’s use of psychology is the relational frame of her horror-defeat schema. She 53. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, edition IV-TR, the standardized resource for mental health diagnosis used by the vast majority of healthcare providers, including the Veterans Administration.

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articulates an unfolding relational progression between the human and the divine that is deeply flawed, at least in the human psychological context from which she is operating: 1. First, she argues that it is not possible for humanity to be fully accountable for perpetrating horror, because God created us in such a way that we cannot avoid horror-participation. 2. Second, for this reason, God alone can and must resolve horrorplots in a way that makes the participants whole. (Thus God’s creative choice subjects humanity to horror, only God can redeem humanity from that horror, and by God’s own design plotresolution only comes post mortem, so that the participant lives indefinitely with the after-effects of horror.) 3. In spite of all this, the horror-participant—according to Adams—is so grateful for the eventually deepened intimacy with God that the horror endured actually takes on positive value. Not only, then, as I have argued above, does the psychological narrative on which Adams’s project rests weaken with close reading, in addition, logically, her position raises a number of questions related to the dynamic it describes, which can be read as profoundly abusive. Indeed, something like this pattern is common in chronically abusive intimate relationships: 1. I, from a position of incommensurate power in our relationship, cause you to suffer terribly, with random and therefore unpredictable frequency, which renders the suffering even more horrible. 2. I leave you to suffer the lingering effects of this abuse for an unpredictable duration, living in hyper-vigilant fear of its recurrence. 3. I then initiate an intensely intimate reconciliation, which has the

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effect of restoring the sense of wholeness that you associate with our relationship, and 4. in your gratitude that I have assured you of an end both to the suffering I, myself, have engendered, and to the relational distance between us, you, in effect, minimize my culpability (even taking the blame yourself), and reframe or deny the severity of the abusive behavior.54 There is an odd convergence of strategies here. On the one hand, Adams invokes human psychology as the source of her redemptive vision and models divine redemption on human relationship. On the other, her conclusion presupposes a human response to God’s salvific plot-resolution that departs radically from human experience in this life (other than in chronically abusive relationships). Given Adams’s frank recourse to psychology and specifically to the WWI combat survivor analogy, her entire argument is undermined by the vulnerability of this foundational analogy to logical, psychological, and ontological refutation. Furthermore, her ancillary uses of psychology, in a number of instances, misconstrue fundamental tenets of that discipline. Adams’s Psychology of the Eucharist As noted above, the force of Adams’s argument, which she has developed over some decades, gathers to a kind of critical mass in the closing chapter of Christ and Horrors, “Christ in the sacrament of the altar: Christ in the meantime.” The very title of the chapter speaks to the temporal shape of Christ and Horrors. After two prolegomenal chapters that define the methodological issues related to “Christology as natural theology” and articulate Adams’s chief biblical ground, “beginning with Job,” each chapter locates Christ in a different role or 54. In my analogy, the distinction between divine responsibility and human culpability is blurred, necessarily limiting its utility. With regard to human experience of and relationship to God, however, I consider the elision of responsibility and culpability reasonable, although Adams does not concur. (Marilyn McCord Adams, personal communication, April 25, 2016.) Also see footnote 1, chapter 5.

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relationship: “as horror-defeater” (chapter 3); “as God-man” (chapters 4 and 5); in the hearts of all people (chapter 6); as “the One in Whom all things hold together” (chapter 7); as “the first fruits” (chapter 8); and “as priest and victim” (chapter 9). In the text’s final chapter, Adams progresses to a full-on sacramental treatment of the “meantime.” She turns to the finitely embodied temporal and material state in which an injured—indeed, horrified—humankind suffers and awaits the reparation and reconciliation to its material context that will be fully realized only post mortem, when presumably we have moved on to a new context of abundance and optimality. Adams relies on the essential nature of the present and ongoing, physical presence of Christ. She does not find adequate recourse either in the Incarnation, held in memory and memorialized in the Eucharist, or in Christ’s perduring promise of presence through the Holy Spirit. Instead, for Adams, Christ the Godman is (and effectively must be) physically present to humankind “in the meantime” through impanation, by which Christ repeatedly reexperiences in the Eucharist the worst of human physical degradation resolution of which is anticipated in resurrection. Not only Christ and Horror, but Adams’s entire corpus, as well, builds to this point. Here her most vivid analogy is impanation, but she also draws upon the psychological discussion she has previously engaged, most extensively in chapter 4 (“Psychologizing the person: Christ as Godman, psychologically construed”) and also, as I have discussed, in her foundational analogy. It is in laying the foundation for her recovery of impanation that Adams engages for the first time, to any significant degree, either Martin Luther or John Calvin, the only previous reference of any note being to Luther’s thought (and subsequent “continental Lutheran and Reformed theology”) relative to kenotic divinity, a reference from the psychologically focused chapter 4.55 Adams first offers Brian Gerrish’s presentation of Calvin’s eucharistic theology as contrast to the scholastic perspective that she finds more convincing, generally, and 55. Adams, Christ and Horrors, 85–86.

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that offers some measure of support for her appropriation of the “Ego Berengerius” in defense of impanation. Berengar of Tours was forced to swear to this statement of faith in the eleventh century, his eucharistic theology having been condemned by Leo IX, Victor II, and Gregory VII (twice!), all between 1050 and 1079. The statement confesses that the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are after consecration not only a Sacrament but also the real body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that with the senses [sensualiter], not only by way of Sacrament but in reality, these are held and broken by the hands of the priests and are crushed by the teeth of the faithful.

Despite the church’s rejection of impanation, here in the eucharistic reform of the eleventh century Adams finds it justified by the church itself!56 Having rehearsed the doctrine of impanation, Adams progresses to Luther’s eucharistic theology as an exemplar of ubiquity (the coexistence of the body and blood of Christ with the bread and wine on the altar), which is significant to her argument primarily for the contrast it offers to impanation. The major force of this recourse to Luther, however, seems to be his rejection of both Zwingli and Calvin on the Real Presence, a conjunction in which Adams comes perilously close to conflating the latter two theologies. Having articulated these more familiar alternatives, Adams rigorously defends her recourse to impanation with Scotus and Ockham. Along these lines, Adams notes (by way of warrant) that Ockham surpasses even Scotus in his high estimation of the hypostatic powers of God—powers upon which Adams relies for her assertion that the hypostatic union of Christ and the elements of the Eucharist is theologically (and, as we shall see, pragmatically) feasible. Nonetheless, Adams must confront in contemporary terms the same objection that this doctrine raised in its medieval form: its concretization of the post-ascension body of Christ, which is so useful for Adams’s purposes, threatens to conflate the hypostatic union of the

56. Adams, Coherence of Christology, 296–97.

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God-man and the posited hypostatic union of the second person with the elements of the Eucharist (on which impanation relies). In other words, if Christ’s Real Presence in the eucharistic bread is as strong as Adams claims, so that through its ingestion Christ materially and repeatedly shares in the human experience of physical (and, one would think, psychological) degradation, that union must be utterly complete in the same way as was the union of human and divine in the God-man. Fully divine, fully embodied human; fully Christ, fully and materially bread, except that in this instance, the second person of the Trinity is fully present both at the right hand of God (which Adams takes care to read metaphorically, against Calvin) and on the altar. Otherwise, the repeated, common degradation of both Christ and humankind loses the vivacity on which Adams is relying. For Adams, this aspect of impanation is precisely the point: it preserves Christ’s physical presence to believers, which offers what Adams describes as a “pragmatic advantage.”57 Adams argues that human persons cannot benefit fully from human relationships that are not “embodied person to embodied person,” as if a relationship becomes entirely inaccessible when one (embodied) partner is no longer materially accessible. Certainly, it is a challenge to apprehend the full humanity and continued relationship to us of one who lived two thousand years ago. Nonetheless, that those whom we love die is part and parcel of the human condition, and the significance, even the ongoing influence, of intimate relationship to those loved ones survives even physical separation in death. Their continued material presence, while cherished, is not the essence of their importance in our lives. In Adams’s words, “How does the Spirit make it possible for us to meet or be united embodied person to embodied person when Christ’s body is not located within the range of any of our sensory faculties?”58 But it is precisely because human persons are not limited to their physical being that we relate spiritually at all, whether it be in relationship to God (whom Adams has emphatically asserted has 57. Adams, Christ and Horrors, 301. 58. Ibid., 299.

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limitless powers), through the Holy Spirit, or in relationship to a loved one who is temporarily or permanently absent to us in physical form. Our mothers continue to be our mothers, for example, with all the signification of that relationship, even after they die. And it was Jesus, after all, who—while physically present—promised to send a spiritual Advocate in his place. It is the theologically pragmatic advantage she perceives in impanation that is of greatest value to Adams’s constructive proposal. Adams’s model of horror-defeat relies on an immediacy of common suffering that is shared by humankind and God, through the Real Presence of the second person of the Trinity, rather than on the presence of the third person and memorialized common suffering. It also calls for material resolution of the human vulnerability to which horror-participation is secondary. Pragmatically, both premises operate most effectively, from Adams’s perspective, if Christ continues to be materially present to creation. Adams raises a further, critically important pragmatic consideration that is secondary to her insistence on a continued, material Real Presence: the material effect of biting and digesting the material body of Christ as one does “raw meat.”59 It is not just that Christ suffers repeatedly in the Eucharist: Christ suffers through the agency of the communicant. Here Adams turns to the quandary facing those priests who must respond to a communicant’s distress that—having inadvertently bitten down on the consecrated wafer—she has caused Jesus Christ to bleed. Adams asserts that in addition to preserving the “embodied person to embodied person” encounter with Christ that is essential to her model of horror-defeat (and that she considers possible only if Christ continues to be materially present), impanation also invokes (only) a “pragmatic desideratum.” The pragmatic nature of the hypostatic desideratum is that—while somehow not akin to either a Lutheran or a Calvinist understanding of the Real Presence—it avoids the problem of reducing Christ’s ongoing material presence to that of raw meat. From my perspective, however, Adams has, albeit elegantly 59. Ibid., 304.

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and inadvertently, provided a compelling illustration of the theologically and pragmatically superior nature of either a Lutheran or a Calvinist theology of the Eucharist, over and against a transubstantive (or impanative) Real Presence. This dog simply will not hunt. Furthermore, if what God can do (hypostatically or otherwise) becomes the criterion for the quality of an argument, as Adams seems to suggest by her recourse to Scotus and Ockham, one wonders why Adams needs such an elaborate argument at all. First, it would then seem sufficient simply to say, because we know that God can do so, that God does provide an incommensurate good that overwhelms the damage done by horror—an assertion that Adams rightfully avoids as unsatisfying or incomplete. Second, this strategy directs us back to the original question: If God can do anything, why has God not created in such a way to preclude at least the worst of the horrors? Why would God, as Adams suggests God does, create in such a way as to make human horror-participation inevitable, then offer a foretaste of beatific intimacy in the Eucharist to establish the promise of restored wholeness? Why not wholeness that is preserved to begin with or that is (at least) not apparently predicated upon human participation in horror? Why not understand the Real Presence in the consecrated elements as the agent of a wholeness that is restored through the Eucharist, much as sacramental reconciliation is understood to restore a state of grace? Despite Adams’s steadfast resistance to a reading of her proposal as grounded in a kind of preferential option for the horror-participant—and her concomitant commitment to the wider availability of the incommensurable good of divine intimacy, she does not explicitly articulate a clear alternative means of experiencing it, certainly not of anticipating its power. Absent such an explication, a tension remains around the implication of her argument that horrorparticipation and beatific intimacy are inextricably related, even mutually dependent.

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And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. Gerard Manley Hopkins . . . he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. Rev. 21:4 Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life . . . ; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. . . . And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light . . . Rev. 22:1-5

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a finite creation: picture books that evoke what I have called the normative anxiety of early childhood; Serene Jones’s narration of trauma and its aftermath; the accounts of combat survivors and the families to whom they return; Adams’s own narrative of divine rescue from horror in plot resolution that hinges on spiritual and material undoing, and her invocation of eucharistic participation in human horror by way of the Real Presence. Focusing on what is most compelling to me in Adams’s account, and what I appropriate for my own work, I have pointed to the disruptive and unsettling—rightfully, anxiety-producing—narration of God’s sudden attack on Moses in Exodus 4. I turn now to a decidedly different narrative that I put in conversation with Adams: Jonathan Lear’s account of the Crow nation’s survival beyond not just catastrophic assault on the meaning it had made traditionally, but the utter collapse of the very structure of the values by which the Crow could make any meaning of the events that engulfed them. Like the narratives captured in picture books, Lear’s account is not manifestly religious, certainly not Christian. Indeed, his reading of the religious aspect of the Crow national response to Euro-American incursion is self-consciously and strategically secular. Like the picture books I read in chapter 3, this narrative and Lear’s treatment of it have the potential to expand the breadth of theological relevance. By virtue of their nontheist worldviews, these sources increase the resonance of theological discourse with conversation partners from outside the tradition. That greater breadth also strengthens the resonance of Christian narratives for those within the fold. Having loosened the constraints of tradition and theological precepts that have become inherent to the Christian narrative, these alternative sources offer us as a means of spitting on our hands and taking a fresh grip. Their common emphasis on making meaning as that which defines human wholeness is key to my putting Adams in conversation with Jonathan Lear and his narrative of radical hope. As I discussed at length in chapter 4, for my purposes Adams’s account of the Creator as responsible for humanity’s vulnerability to inevitable horror-

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participation (whether as perpetrator or victim) is an important theological representation of the incipient darkness that I have asserted informs human existence and experience from the very beginning of life.1 However, the psychology on which Adams seems to base her soteriology, centered around God’s obligation to make injured humankind whole, is problematic, particularly what I consider her conflation (or equation) of human and divine capacity for relationship. It is this critique that I address by putting Adams in conversation with Lear. I am especially interested in the theological advantage to be had from Lear’s constructive analysis of the Crow response to the catastrophic assault on their culture by the westward expansion of the Euro-American United States. While Lear remains silent on the religious or spiritual significance of his work, I read as profoundly theological his construction of radical hope as “commitment to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to hope.” 2 Opening the Conversation: The Nature of Adams’s God Central to Marilyn McCord Adams’s understanding of the nature of God is her presupposition that God’s primary systematic function, in addition to creation, is to defeat horror. Identifying her conversation partners, sources, and critical opponents in this regard, Adams separates existing (particularly contemporary) “models of explanation” of uniquely Divine agency into those that focus on “[i]ts role in conferring being” and those that conceptualize Divine agency in terms of “[i]ts world-organizing exemplar function as the root of all goodness.”3 She offers three exemplar categories:

1. Elsewhere I have referred to divine culpability for our vulnerability to horror-participation. Philosophically, Adams herself uses the language of responsibility, a philosophical distinction that she (quite reasonably) considers fundamental, but one that I tend to elide in my own work. Also see footnote 54, chapter 4. 2. Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 100. Also see 92. 3. Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 63. The discussion is developed primarily in chapter 4, “Divine Agency, Remodeled.”

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1. those thinkers who describe God as the source of all being (e.g., Paul Tillich, David Burrell, and Kathryn Tanner), 2. C. E. Rolt and others who focus on God’s suffering to redeem creation, and 3. process theologians (e.g., Charles Hartshorne and David Griffin) for whom “God is [both] the universal subject, who as a perfect knower has a perfect grasp of all occasions” and “the universal object of experience insofar as God’s conception of the most beautiful integration is among the data fed into each occasion.” 4 In a foundational move that Adams correctly characterizes as “unsurprising,” she distinguishes herself from all three groups. My own reflections about Divine power and agency are driven by a third systematic consideration: God must be not only the source and sustainer of being and goodness, but also the defeater of horrors. My question thus becomes, what would it take for Divine power and agency to be able to guarantee created persons lives that are great goods to them on the whole, and to defeat their participation in horrors not just globally, but within the context of their individual lives?5

The personhood of the Trinitarian God is richly present in Adams’s model, and it is not insignificant that she brings “systematic consideration” into play explicitly. Her account of the Divine (her capitalization) shares with Richard Swinburne, in her words, a “distinct metaphysical bias” towards the presupposition that “persons—that is, agents who act by thought and will—are metaphysically fundamental,” and her inclusion of the Divine in this category arises in part from the corresponding assertion that “Divine personhood offers systematic advantages where the problem of horrendous evils is concerned. For horror-defeating power is meaningmaking power, and meaning-making is personal activity par excellence!” This is a reasoned argument, aiming in part at philosophical coherence, and notably, it is when Adams emphasizes

4. Ibid., 76. 5. Ibid., 80.

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Divine meaning-making that she makes a linguistic shift from Divine to God as signifier, moving from the categorical signifier to the personal. If Divine agency is personal, God, too, is a meaning-maker, indeed, mainstream Biblical religion contends, the One Who decisively settles the meaning of history (Rev. 5–6). It is then straightforward to credit God with superlative imagination needed to make sense of horrors that stump us, and to think of the meaning-making God as also the Teacher Who coaches us to recognize and appropriate objective meanings already (Divinely) given, Who heals and helps us to make new meanings ourselves. . . . Surely the prospect of Divinely fostered meanings and individualized syllabi are less of a stretch if divine agency is personal, too.6

Lear’s Contribution: Radical Hope Martin Luther urges Christians to flee to the cross, clinging to it as a defense against the despair that is precipitated by a close encounter (vociferously to be avoided) with his deus nudus, the God outside revelation. His theology of the cross offers an alternative access to the second person of the Trinity. In the cross, Christ continues to be present by way of memorial, which both sustains the believer’s sense of the profundity of God’s sharing human experience in the Incarnation and at the same time avoids some of the technical problems that arise from Adams’s deployment of impanation. The two models share an emphasis on a profound material commonality between humankind and the divine, although in different forms. Like Adams, Luther understands Christian constructs of redemptive divine love as uniquely useful to all of creation, as creation yearns and strives for remediation of its profound woundedness. Also like Adams, this preferential (in fact, exclusive) reliance on Christian theology both constrains the believer’s reach for meaning and gives rise to obstacles in the dialogue between Christian theology and many Christians, not to mention non-Christians. Jonathan Lear, on the other hand, offers a narrative that is self6. Ibid., 81–82. It is not clear why Adams, who in this text emphasizes the first person of the Christian Trinity, uses the phrase “mainstream Biblical religion” followed by a specifically Christian reference. She is, of course, a Christian theologian, writing an explicitly Christian text, but it seems an oddly exclusive phrase, nonetheless.

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consciously accessible to Christians and non-Christians alike. He predicates hope for individual and corporate meaning-making—the classical foundation for excellence and Adams’s conception of human wholeness—in fresh understandings of virtue that privilege the courage to hope when hope is no longer meaningful and to do what is necessary to restore the capacity to make meaning when that capacity has been catastrophically assaulted. The constructive force of Lear’s project is that it develops a new reading of courage as the paradigmatic virtue, in which courage instantiates not warrior excellence, but radical hope and in so doing, makes the possibility of a future plausible. Where Adams anticipates a divine undoing of horror narratives in the eschaton (whether corporate or as manifest by individual death), Lear points to the possibility of a culture’s (and by extension, an individual’s) revitalization strategies for making meaning, even when the apparently bedrock psychic tools for doing so have been utterly lost. Thus, like Adams, Lear focuses on the importance of here-and-now restoration, in the material world. He does so, however, without regard for any potential benefit post mortem. In my assessment, this presentworldly focus is central (perhaps ironically so) to the theological benefit that accrues to appropriation of Lear’s work on radical hope. In focusing on this world and the possibility of hope herein, Lear develops a clear-eyed proposal of what it might mean to have hope when all capacity to make meaning has been lost—and he does so from psychologically solid ground. The construction can be read theologically as representation of what might lie beyond the ethical horizon (using Lear’s phrase) of death. A particular advantage of appropriating Lear’s vision eschatologically is that it comes without theological baggage. Rather than speculating on what an unforeseeable future will “look like,” it describes what such a future will accomplish in terms of revitalization. Indeed, a defining quality of Lear’s model is that it specifically engages the kind of future that by definition cannot be conceived. In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, Lear grounds

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his argument for the possibility of hope, even in the face of catastrophic cultural collapse, in an Aristotelian framework for human excellence. His argument is informed by his psychoanalytic expertise and arises from a sensitive, historical case study of the Crow nation’s response to Euro-American incursion and the consequent destruction of the foundational cultural context in which the Crow made meaning of their individual and communal lives. Lear organizes his narrative and analysis around the life and leadership of Plenty Coups, the last great Crow chief, a contemporary of the better-known Sitting Bull. He is sensitive to the Crow spirituality with which Plenty Coups’s worldview is imbued, although he maintains what he considers a Wittgensteinian silence on the divine. As a result, this text offers a rich resource for theodicy and soteriology, sympathetic to religious belief, but unhampered by sectarian religious or theological agendas. Like Adams, Lear briefly narrates the origin for his project, in his case in a paper he heard presented some twenty years before the publication of Radical Hope, in which he was introduced to Plenty Coups’s observation regarding the disappearance of buffalo that accompanied Anglo-American incursion in the Plains: “After that, nothing happened.”7 Plenty Coups’s assertion originally appears in Frank Linderman’s book-length account of Plenty Coups’s life, based on his long acquaintance—and then friendship—with Plenty Coups, who entrusted his story to Linderman so that it might be recorded and preserved. Lear, who draws on Linderman’s biographical account in addition to other anthropological and historical sources, notes that decades after he first heard it, he “recognize[d] that those words lodged within me and never left.”8 Searching out Plenty Coups’s seminal words, Lear finds in Linderman’s text that . . . the words that haunt me are not part of Plenty Coups’s story, though they do come from his mouth. In an author’s note at the end of the book, Linderman says that he was unable to get Plenty Coups to talk about anything that had happened after the Crow were confined to a reservation: 7. Lear, Radical Hope, 180. Lear notes that the paper was given by Professor William Cronon. 8. Ibid.

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HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH Plenty Coups refused to speak of his life after the passing of the buffalo, so that his story seems to have been broken off, leaving many years unaccounted for. “I have not told you half of what happened when I was young,” he said, when urged to go on. “I can think back and tell you much more of war and horse-stealing. But when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened. There was little singing anywhere. Besides,” he added sorrowfully, “you know that part of my life as well as I do. You saw what happened to us when the buffalo went away.”9

Lear rehearses several readings of Plenty Coups’s assertion, including the (arguably) most “plausible”: that it articulates depression experienced by Plenty Coups and by the Crow community as a whole. Lear makes a convincing argument, however, that such a reading requires that we shift the subject of Plenty Coups’s statement from “the world”—the exhaustion, as Lear puts it, of history—to an individual and corporate psyche. Lear resists the more facile reading, pursuing instead a work of philosophical anthropology that explores what it might mean to take Plenty Coups’s assertion that “After this, nothing happened” at face value, as articulating the aftermath of a catastrophic end to meaning and therefore to personal and corporate history.10 Lear makes a convincing argument for the plausibility of his reading, based upon which he asks, “What is it about a form of life’s coming to an end that makes it such that for the inhabitants of that life things cease to happen? Not just that it would seem to them that things ceased to happen, but what it would be for things to cease happening.” In articulating the question, he points to the universality of human vulnerability to cultural catastrophe.11 Lear offers a detailed and compelling account of Crow warrior culture, in which courage in battle—instantiated in counting coups—is the highest virtue. This recourse to a warrior code of conduct and warrior construction of courage neatly reflects the focus in Adams’s (and consequently, my) work on what can be learned from the experience of combat veterans. The account includes a convincing 9. Lear, Radical Hope, 2, quoting Frank Linderman, Plenty Coups: Chief of the Crows (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 311. 10. Ibid., 1–8. 11. Ibid., 8.

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argument that in the Crow warrior culture specifically, cultivation and pursuit of such courage in battle inform and give meaning to every aspect of communal life: childbearing and rearing, provision of nourishing food, prayer. Indeed, Plenty Coups’s own name, while it also can be translated “Many Achievements,” itself celebrates the traditional means by which the Crow claimed and communicated success in battle: tracking and displaying evidence of the warrior’s coups. Lear cites anthropologist Robert Lowrie’s observation that military allusions pervade even those religious rituals that are unrelated to war, including (for example) the Tobacco ceremony on behalf of the community’s general well-being.12 War and preparation for war together were the defining telos of the Crow, individually and communally. Lear describes the ritualistic planting of the coup-stick in battle, a declaration that the enemy will not be allowed past that point. As Lear notes, given the realistic potential for enemy incursion, in asserting the impossibility of such incursion, the Crow warrior has made an existential claim, specifically that “There is a fate worse than death”: his living with the failure to protect his nomadic tribe and the territory it claims as its own, through which it travels. 13 This narrative of Crow culture illustrates, as Lear makes clear in compelling and convincing detail, the Aristotelian mean: “counting coups—as Aristotle would say, in the right place, at the right time, and from the right motivations—does count as brave.”14 Lear, a scholar of Aristotle’s ethics, brings together that classical analysis of virtue with Plenty Coups’s story, thereby articulating a new paradigmatic virtue for “ethics at the horizon”: courage to hope for existence beyond the point at which our ethical resources no longer apply. Such a virtue, Lear argues, is a practical necessity when the resources on which practical reason relies have failed.15 Such a virtue, should it exist, would ground the possibility of hope for an individual or a culture faced with catastrophic collapse of the very tools for making meaning. Such a 12. Ibid., 12. 13. Ibid., 14. 14. Ibid., 21. 15. Ibid., 56ff.

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collapse of meaning-making capacity effects on the personal level a paralyzing “rip in the fabric of one’s self,” but given the kind of courage the Lear perceives in Plenty Coups, one might discover—against all reason—“a certain plasticity deeply embedded in [one’s] thick conception of courage.” This plasticity is not anticipated in models of the human psyche that present the laying down of characterological bedrock that is by its nature rigidly resistant to change. A classical construction of early childhood development postulates a psychological tenacity of acquired strategies for making meaning, and particularly for understanding what is virtuous, that would preclude the kind of psychological and ethical flexibility necessary to discern a future in the face of catastrophic ruin of meaning-making tools. Lear, however, observes plasticity in Plenty Coups’s character that he concludes can be cultivated in others, even after meaning-making (and other adaptive) resources and defenses are firmly in place. 16 Lear engages such plasticity, from the perspective of practical reason, as a form of courage and a paradigmatic virtue—an approach that brings home vividly the relevance to our times of the questions he raises about vulnerability to catastrophic cultural collapse. His stated objective is to identify such a virtue and to understand it sufficiently that we might cultivate it, as we have traditional courage. Such an objective is supremely (and admirably, I would argue) this-worldly. For my purposes, however, it is especially intriguing to consider Lear’s treatment of the dream-vision from his adolescence that informs Plenty Coups’s decision to ally with the United States against the Crow’s ancient enemy, the Lakota Sioux. That alliance, culminating in Crow defeat as US allies at Little Big Horn, became the basis for the Crow national policy of acceptance and adaptation to US policy, devastating as it was. Plenty Coups’s adolescent dream is legendary among the Crow. As Lear notes, “What is striking about young Plenty Coups’s dream—and the interpretation the tribe gave to it—is that it was used not merely to predict a future event; it was used by the tribe to struggle with 16. Ibid., 65–66.

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the intelligibility of events that lay at the horizon of their ability to understand.”17 In the dream, Plenty Coups (guided by Man-person, who first appears as Buffalo-bull) sees vast numbers of buffalo emerge from a hole in the earth, pouring out to cover the plains. When the buffalo finally stop emerging from the hole, all of them have abruptly disappeared: the plains are empty. Next, Plenty Coups sees buffalo of a different sort emerge and spread across the plain. These buffalo, however, are oddly unfamiliar: they vary in color and size, lie down differently than the familiar buffalo, and graze in small groups. “They were not buffalo. They were strange animals from another world . . .” (They were, of course, as additional details in Plenty Coups’s account make plain, domesticated cattle.)18 The dream continues as Plenty Coups notices a feeble old man—himself, he learns subsequently—sitting under a tree. Finally, a violent storm blows up, destroying almost everything in its path. The only tree left standing, from a vast forest, is the one in which the little chickadee lives, a small bird who succeeds through his intelligence (especially by listening), rather than his physical might. A voice assures Plenty Coups’s grasp of the dream’s message: “Develop your body, but do not neglect your mind, Plenty Coups. It is the mind that leads a man to power, not strength of body.” The ensuing consideration of the dream by the tribal elders, pondering a vision that must have been startling in a warrior culture, issues in confirmation that the dream anticipates the ascendency of the white man, in the face of which intelligence and strategic listening—habits cultivated by the chickadee—will be more important to the Crow’s survival than military might.19 Lear develops a secular reading of the dream that aims to support its credible significance to atheists as well as to the believers who (Lear assumes) will be more open to the legitimacy of such a vision. Lear’s psychoanalytic training is central to his reading of the dream, and the secular strategy is crucial to his practical objective: development 17. Ibid., 68. 18. Ibid., 69–70. 19. Ibid., 70–73.

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of radical hope as a “necessary constituent” of courage “in times of radical challenge”—times, he suggests (as does Adams), to which humankind is inevitably vulnerable.20 For Adams, this vulnerability arises from the metaphysical mismatch that leaves humankind in a context of scarcity, with a capacity to precipitate horrors beyond the human capacity to anticipate. For her, this is at foundation an individual, indeed largely psychological, problem. Lear, on the other hand, develops a culturally grounded model of human vulnerability to catastrophic loss of the capacity to make meaning. Nonetheless, he develops this model out of Plenty Coups’s individual experience, both of the dream-vision and of leadership in the face of such a catastrophe. Not surprisingly, then, given Lear’s background in clinical as well as theoretical method, the relevance of this text goes beyond communal anxiety to individual experience and is pertinent not only in terms of the threat of social catastrophe, but also personal devastation. The application of the model to individual horror thus evokes a correspondence that, while not precise, is meaningful. In a departure from his thoroughly secular interpretation of Plenty Coups’s dream, however, Lear uses distinctively religious language in other contexts. For example, he contrasts Plenty Coups’s courageous willingness to lead his people in a radically other direction with Sitting Bull’s refusal to allow the Lakota to collaborate with or capitulate to US government incursion. Lear describes the former as pursuit of a vision of “salvation” from destruction: Plenty Coups’s “astonishing imaginative transformation . . . [of] the destruction of a telos into a teleological suspension of the ethical,” thereby permitting the emergence of a new ethic.21 In contrast, Lear describes Sitting Bull’s refusal to allow the Lakota to give any quarter to, much less collaborate with the US government as paradigmatic of “a danger for all forms of messianic religions: a wish can easily be mistaken for reality.”22 Lear illustrates the contrasting responses with a series of narratives, the final of which is an account of the “apocalyptic” Lakota Ghost 20. Ibid., 123. 21. Ibid., 146. 22. Ibid., 151.

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Dance. As Lear notes, it is not clear that Sitting Bull was instrumental in the development of the Ghost Dance, a new ceremony that the Lakota warriors came to believe rendered them impervious to bullets. However, the dance built on Sitting Bull’s messianic prophecy that the white incursion could be resisted by a relentlessly Lakota opposition, which was destined to succeed. The outcome, of course, in which the Lakota defenders died in a slaughter, was a fatally tragic demonstration of the triumph of military hardware over the Lakota’s profound wish to defeat the US incursion.23 Notably, Lear also narrates in this context the Crow’s loss and recovery of the Sun Dance. In the transition from a nomadic warrior culture to an agrarian one, the Crow form of the Sun Dance, no longer needed to prepare for seeking revenge in battle, was forgotten, irretrievably lost. In its place, however, almost sixty years after its last celebration in 1875, the Crow recovered the Sun Dance—a prayer for revenge—in the form used by their traditional enemies, the Shoshone. Lear argues that this revival of a warrior ceremony, in no way a retreat into nostalgia, instead illustrates the potential for a revitalized culture that Plenty Coups kept alive, making possible the preservation of “some of the traditional warrior ideals in this radically new context.” It is not courage itself, after all, that Plenty Coups relinquished, but a thick construction of courage defined paradigmatically by combat. One needs to recognize the destruction that has occurred if one is to move beyond it. . . . It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened—the collapse of happenings—and then decide to dance. 24

At the end of his life, Plenty Coups himself declares his leadership vindicated: Our decision was reached, not because we loved the white man who was already crowding other tribes into our country, or because we hated the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe, but because we plainly saw that this course was the only one which might save our beautiful country for us. 23. Ibid., 149. 24. Ibid., 152–53.

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When I think back, my heart sings because we acted as we did. It was the only way open to us.25

The Adams-Lear Conversation Adams and Lear make an interesting and effective pairing for a number of reasons, in addition to their common emphasis on meaning-making as that which defines human wholeness. Both are trained as philosophers, indeed as analytic philosophers, and that training shapes their respective projects. In addition, both Adams and Lear evince interest in human psychology, explicitly, and both of them draw heavily on narrative. In fact, in the work to which I take recourse here, each of them builds on a specific narrative that is, in each case, tied to the significance for meaning-making of combat. Adams, as I have discussed at length in chapter 4, takes as her foundational paradigm the intimacy felt by surviving comrades-in-arms. Lear, as we have seen here, richly narrates the traditional (which is to say, pre-EuroAmerican incursion) organization of Crow culture around counting coups, from which the protagonist of his narrative, Plenty Coups, takes his name. More subtly, the two thinkers each work from an intellectual and scholarly location that bridges theory (philosophy and philosophical theology, respectively) and practice. As I have noted, Adams is an Episcopal priest who has significant parish experience, including pastoral care; Lear is a trained clinical psychoanalyst. Not coincidentally, given my choice of thinkers around whom to build this conversation, my own scholastic subjectivity arises from all three categories that Adams and Lear bring into play: (philosophical) theology, clinical practice, and practical theology as it plays out in parish ministry. Furthermore, both thinkers’ projects turn on human devastation at the extreme end of the continuum of human suffering. Adams engages not just evil, daunting in itself, but horrendous evil. The hope that Lear analyzes is radical to the degree that it answers the questions raised not just by devastation—he explicitly excludes the Holocaust from the 25. Ibid., 142–43, citing Linderman, Plenty Coups, 78.

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category he describes, for example—but by catastrophic shattering of the very means by which an entire culture is able to make meaning. As is true in other ways, Adams tends to highlight individual experience; Lear, community. Nonetheless, each project has relevance for both individual and communal life, as Adams and Lear alike engage the extremity of human experience in the form of those contingencies that wipe out all others. The value to my work of Lear’s thinking, in complement to Adams’s model, becomes evident in these dynamic distinctions between their projects, along with their common potential for application to both individual and communal suffering, although for my immediate purposes here, the individual is central. A major discontinuity between Adams and Lear—and a glaring difference it is—is that, while both are analytic philosophers by training, Lear’s work is also informed by his clinical psychoanalytic training, while Adams is a theologian, in addition to philosopher, with practical experience as a parish priest. Key to my putting them into conversation with one another is my contention that Adams’s soteriology benefits significantly from the psychological substance that Lear offers, as well as my reading of Lear’s conclusions as compatible with (if noncommittal on) a frankly theist—here, Christian—context. Lear’s work with the Crow nation, in particular, reflects sympathy with religious meaning-making, and I think it is not unreasonable for theologians to rely on that sympathy in our appropriation of Lear’s work. Toward an Alternative Model of Horror-Defeat My objective here is to gesture toward a model for theological consideration of extreme human suffering that engages horror-defeat ante mortem, but relies finally on a transcendent fullness of horrordefeat that is experienced only post mortem. It is my strong understanding of transcendence and my reliance on it as the source of restored wholeness that distinguishes my model most clearly from the one Adams develops. In addition, just as Adams works to push theodicy beyond the limitations Alvin Plantinga defines in terms of the 201

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worst evils, I aim to be more inclusive than is Adams of those persons for whom a profoundly intellectual reading of meaning-making is relevant, including (paradigmatically) very young children. I envision a continuum of recovery from horror-participation that is roughly analogous to Adams’s Stage-I horror-defeat (in which God’s incarnate horror-participation joins God’s experience to our own) along with Adams’s Stage-II work of appropriating material resources that support our recovery of positive meaning. In my model, as I judge it is in Adams’s, this central psychological process, optimally, is integration. I go further, however, to pose a transcendent, post-mortem integration categorically to Adams’s undoing, which she posits formally as divine defeat of horror. I build on Lear’s reading of catastrophe (and anticipation of catastrophe) at the ethical horizon, but I incorporate into that horizon both the this-worldly catastrophes, on which Lear focuses, and death itself, which as Adams notes is a kind of paradigmatic horror. I understand the God-man as transgressing the horizon of finitude that is constituted by death, instantiating a breaking through of the transcendent, radically other Creator into a finite world that—unable to contain such an Other—is rocked by its nearness, for good as it has been for ill. In a later project, I will explore the implications for the creation of such a radically Other Creator; here, I point instead to the ameliorating effect of that Creator’s return in finite form, bridging the abyss that sets apart Martin Luther’s unapproachable deus nudus. Death, then, is a rupture of the human person’s capacity to make meaning or have meaning made, whether intellectually or otherwise, and that rupture is repaired by the profound human connection to the divine constituted by the Incarnation. Pace Adams, however, I do not identify any positive value in a continued physical presence of the second person of the Trinity, instead making a spiritual and psychological claim on the God-man through memory and narrative: a Calvinist theology of the Lord’s Supper and a Lutheran theology of the cross. I understand that memory and that narrative to be vitalized in this world by the third

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person of the Trinity, whom Adams de-emphasizes, but I locate final and full healing of human woundedness not in this material world—in which humankind finds only reassurance of a forthcoming fullness of restoration—but in the next world. I posit a radical transcendence, beyond the horizon of death, by which God restores wholeness in a way that by definition is not and cannot meaningfully be material or thisworldly. Just as Lear trades in a radical hope for revitalization beyond the ethical horizon that delimits our speculative anticipation, I rely on hope for a radical, integrative transcendence that we cannot envision, other than in the promises of Jesus Christ, which are sustained for us by the Advocate he sent. Clinically, undoing is a defense mechanism by which the individual protects himself from a reality too threatening to process. I take Adams’s use of the term to indicate something more concrete, presumably without the potentially negative connotation, but I resist her appropriation of the construct as a model of wholeness. On the other hand, by “integration,” which I oppose to Adams’s “undoing,” I invoke here the psychological process by which the effects of horrorparticipation are incorporated—in such a way that the horrorparticipation is neither denied nor defining—into the narrative one constructs for one’s own self: the meaning each one of us makes of his or her life. As Adams notes, many horror survivors experience significant recovery of their capacity to see positive meaning in their lives, usually with the assistance of individuals and communities. In some instances, this recovery (at least as far as it extends in this life) relies on compartmentalization or denial—integration is not always possible. For many survivors, building a life within which they wall off the horror is the only recourse. Although this allows them to have a life, often a very productive one, it drives the effects of the horror underground, in ways that maintain its toxicity. The danger of this toxicity is one of the cautions I offer in response to Adams’s combat veteran analogy. Integration, on the other hand, operates instead to dilute the toxin. As Nietzsche and Schleiermacher each argued in his own way, perspective on that which we experience defines the degree

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to which we relate to experience as evil or as simply (to the degree that horror can be simple) a contingency of human existence in response to which we are called upon to muster whatever meaning we can.26 As I noted in chapter 4, Don Catherall and others have described recovery from trauma—the return “back from the brink”—as restoration of the capacity to look back on one’s experience and understand it in a way that does not destroy one’s capacity for moving forward productively and adaptively.27 This is the corollary, of course, to Adams’s restoration of the capacity to understand one’s life as having meaningful value. Central to the hope for integration is the capacity to recognize, at least on some level, the horror that is to be integrated. Regardless of whether we locate it in this world or the next, temporally or spatially, full horror-defeat assumes a full acknowledgment of what has been lost, an account of the depth of injury that has been suffered: Lear’s account of the Crow dancing a ceremony that recalls a lost past, in celebration of a revitalized future, which is meaningful beyond nostalgia only because the extent of loss has been fully recognized. One key element of the capacity to recognize what has been lost is repeated, nontraumatic prior experience of integrating significant, but not shattering, experiences of horror.28 Clinically, this integrative process often relies on a titration of memory and affect, through which the traumatized individual slowly progresses toward full acknowledgment of the trauma. The capacity for such an integrative response to horrorparticipation lies in the plasticity that Lear describes as the ground of radical hope. In other words, it is in managing nontraumatic horror that we develop the capacity to withstand (or are inoculated against), albeit often with great injury and consequent scarring, deeply traumatic horror. The earliest and most benign (I have used the description “normative”) of these experiences are those that I have 26. See chapter 1 for my discussion of the trajectory of theological appropriations of psychology that includes both Schleiermacher and Nietzsche. 27. Don Catherall, Back from the Brink: A Family Guide to Overcoming Traumatic Stress (New York: Bantam Books, 2002). 28. Again, see Catherall and Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum; Toronto and New York: Maxwell Macmillan, 1994).

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described in the infant’s or toddler’s recognition that underlying even the most contented life is the possibility of something darker that threatens one’s self in a profound way. Management of the anxiety that is secondary to that early awareness contributes to an integrative ground from which arises the capacity Lear describes relative to an unexpected plasticity of character. Thus, the small child’s rehearsal of premonitory horror (along with subsequent developmental tasks) lays the foundation upon which adult plasticity depends. The rehearsal, of course, is not an intellectual process as Adams understands intellect. Rather, the kind of liminal narrative represented by the picture books I read in chapter 3, along with play, the process by which young children (and sometimes adults) work through emotional experience, including injury. As Lear argues, given that capacity, humankind—at its best—is able to let go of one defining ethos in order to pursue, with a hope that is realistically optimistic, the possibility of a possibility beyond the ethical horizon at which the human imagination is confined. I am suggesting here that Christian thought, represented by Adams’s impressive soteriology, give up the ethos that invokes a human—which is to say, finite—conception of the wholeness that is restored to us in divine redemption. This wholeness, which is only viable in the strongest sense beyond the horizon of death, is of such a radical dimension that it can be constituted only by a God who is radically Other, radically transcendent. Lear’s radical hope comes into play as we reach for the capacity to trust, realistically, that such a revitalized (resurrection!) future is possible, in ways of which we cannot conceive. This, then, is the juncture at which it becomes essential to my argument that both Adams’s and Lear’s paradigms be relevant to both individual and group, and for believers as well as nonbelievers. It is the inadequacy of Adams’s argument for the nonbeliever against which I posit Lear’s self-consciously secular account as essential. And it is the breadth of Lear’s vision, which renders it compelling to human experience broadly construed, and therefore to believer as well as nonbeliever, that I commend to theologies of salvation and of the next

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world. A narrative that arises, at least, from ground that is shared by believer and nonbeliever alike is strengthened by that broader intelligibility—the plausibility to which Lear refers. Even when it does develop, psychological integration (a decidedly human and therefore finite process) by definition is never absolute or horror-defeating in Adams’s Stage-III sense. It is in place of Adams’s Stage-III plot-resolution (her “happy ending”), then, that I propose the integrative transcendence of God as the ultimate horror-defeat. This is the role for me of Lear’s realistic hope for existence beyond the horizon of one’s imagination, and it is the point at which I stretch Lear’s hermeneutic to encompass the possibility, or hope, for revitalization even beyond the horizon of death. Calling on the radical otherness of God, as Adams does not (and of course, as Lear would not), I suggest that by its very existence transcendent, divine goodness defeats horror in both this world and the next. Post mortem, we experience it in radical fullness in the revitalizing, beatific presence of God. Ante mortem, we know God’s presence through the Holy Spirit, in remembering the Incarnation and in narratives of God’s love. Divine transcendence functions in this world, then, as an opposing force that contains horror and its aftermaths, optimally by rendering their effects subject to integration through spiritual and/or psychological means, but minimally by offering the promise of revitalizing restoration in the next world. In response to Adams’s evocation of a material redemption in which the physical effects of trauma are undone, extending salvation beyond the soul (and even the psyche) to the soma, I draw on Kathryn Tanner’s argument for a spatial—rather than temporal—understanding of eternal life.29 I build on her suggestion that we are living the gift of eternal life continuously, before as well as after death, and I find it not incompatible with Lear’s present-, this-worldly engagement of human history. Accordingly, I posit that the transcendence thus brought into our ante-mortem lives brings with it the inevitable divine defeat of 29. Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001).

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horror, with the critically important caveat that as finite creatures we cannot experience the full knowledge and therefore efficacy of that defeat until after death, death being the ultimate horizon beyond which our paradigmatic virtues cannot sustain us. The breakingthrough into our present reality that I emphasize (as does Adams, from a slightly different perspective) is the incarnation of a singular, omnipotent creator in Jesus Christ, the God-man. This becomes, then, the shape of my own response to the classic question, Cur deus homo? In this emphasis on transcendence as final horror-defeat, I part from Adams’s insistence on the total material efficacy of horror-defeat. I argue that although horror itself is defeated ultimately, horror plots defy resolution, even post mortem, and that in demanding the material undoing of wounds and scars, Adams invokes a divine response to horror that inadvertently minimizes the destruction left in horror’s wake and that risks resistance to full recognition of the extent of horror-inflicted damage. Let me be explicitly clear that I do not think Adams intends this outcome: she joins, for example, in Ivan Karamazov’s assessment that “once horrors have happened, it is too late for justice.”30 Yet, to my mind, the “happy ending” on which Adams insists retrospectively alters the valence of horror in the very way that she and Karamazov reject with regard to justice. As Lear notes in contrasting the responses of Plenty Coups and Sitting Bull, the wish for preservation of one’s previous wholeness, in the face of the loss of those values that sustained it, is dangerous. Realistic, if radical, hope looks instead toward a wholeness the shape of which we cannot visualize, perhaps cannot imagine possible. Hope for this new, inconceivable wholeness supplants in my theology the wish for restoration to what-was that I understand to be the driving force in Adams’s soteriology. The radical hope for horror-defeat I envision does not focus on the particularities of our post-mortem form; indeed, my insistence on the radical otherness of God distinguishes ante- from post-mortem wholeness. Furthermore, as I have suggested, although I anticipate and 30. Marilyn McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors, unpublished manuscript, 2005, chapters 2, 6.

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hope for a radical wholeness post mortem, I think the very otherness of God in whose image we claim to be made precludes full wholeness in the finite existence we live ante mortem. It is the radically transcendent Otherness of God that for me promises restoration of wholeness: perhaps a fuller wholeness than we have ever known in this world, one that depends on our being taken up into God’s radically transcendent self, as we cannot be ante mortem. Furthermore, I do not value physical wholeness in the way Adams seems to. Here, I value the lesson that Lear draws from Plenty Coups and the Crow: we are not at our bedrock as rigidly limited to existing paradigms of hope as that term might suggest. Our capacity for wholeness in spite of catastrophic assault on that physical self and for revitalization of the ground on which we make meaning are plausible even in the most extraordinary circumstances. As Adams rightly demands it must be, the sense that one’s life has meaning can be revitalized psychically, not without regard to physical injury, but in spite of it. The ethical horizon to which this meaning-making activity is pushed might usefully be thought of in some of the ways that Luther thinks of God’s hiddenness: what lies beyond is not perceptible until we face, or are forced to face it intimately. We can anticipate such a horizon, as did the Crow, and (as Lear urges we do) begin to cultivate the virtues with which to meet it head-on. Nonetheless, I see it as an inevitable consequence of our finitude that we will experience physical effects of various kinds, those that result from aging, as well as from the trauma of horror in which we participate as either perpetrator or object, whether as a consequence of natural or moral evil.31 Just as I juxtapose integration to undoing of psychic trauma, I am reluctant to wish away the physical scars that mark my life experience, as Adams seems to do. I do not cultivate or idealize scarring: when I have experienced injury, I have not hesitated to pursue vigorously the best possible restorative and remedial care. However, I also recognize the inevitable scars as representative in part of how my life has shaped me. The physical trauma that left the scars 31. See chapter 2 for the distinction I make between trauma and horror.

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cannot be undone; there is, as Adams says, no full satisfaction to be had once the horror has unfolded: I will never not be who I am as a result, in part, of my experiences. In a way that Adams does not intend, she advocates denial of the narrative of my life, not just the horror-plot in which I may have participated. For me, acceptance of that part of me and of my life that is represented by those scars is part of acknowledging the horror itself, so that it might be integrated in a form that supports a changing ethic—or faith. The Crow cannot recover their traditional form of the Sun Dance, but they can dance with commitment and perhaps happiness the form that they have been given by their traditional enemy, the Shoshone. I cannot be who I was or might have been had horror not arisen in my life, but my self as it has been shaped by my life can accommodate new, perhaps similar forms as I move forward. It is that new form with which God is in relationship and which (I believe) will be made whole, to an extent limited by my finitude in this life, and with unbounded revitalization in the next. A central question in my own work relates to God’s creating a world in which horrors occur, and I would like to think that God regrets this. Given that creation is what God has made it, however, I demand that it stand and be judged as it is, for what it is, horrible as well as wonderfull. I would be angry if I anticipated that God in retrospect will “fix” my physical body, having stood by as I suffered. In short, I see no way that God—having allowed the trauma—fully can make good on it ante mortem (although I claim the hope that post mortem I will transcend the woundedness of this life), and I reject any consolation from a physical undoing of its effects. This centrality of the radical otherness of God to my soteriological paradigm accomplishes several purposes. It frees us from the demand that God resolve our woundedness in human terms. It incorporates the ultimate horror-defeat for which Adams so compellingly advocates. It respects the physical or psychic scars that represent healing of the wounds sustained in horror-participation, rather than requiring—even demanding—they be undone. Finally, as we shall see, it draws upon

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the Incarnate God in our ante-mortem lives as a signal of the divine capacity to bridge the horizon beyond which it is not possible for us to hope. As I, with Adams, value the ante-mortem role of horrordefeat, I suggest that in order for a transcendent, largely nonmaterial paradigm such as mine to offer any hope other than post mortem, it must elaborate on how transcendent goodness is instantiated against horror ante mortem. It is in part for this purpose that I turn to Martin Luther’s understanding of the Hidden God outside revelation, the deus absolutus, and God-with-us, the God-man, Jesus Christ. Luther’s Deus Absolutus As noted, I bring theological resources to bear that Adams (to my mind, inexplicably) does not pursue. Despite her extensive review of the history of Christian thought on questions related to her own, she makes very little reference to and no use at all of the Hidden God tradition, whether in Pseudo-Dionysius, Martin Luther, or others. Among other advantages, Luther in particular offers a sense of God’s radical otherness that I think would moderate Adams’s dependence on ultimately flawed analogy to human experience. Luther’s God hidden outside revelation (deus absolutus or deus nudus) also is useful here as we struggle to put into words God’s horrible involvement in human suffering, while at the same time seeking assurance (through the revealed God—deus revelatus) of God’s love for creation. I take issue with Luther’s paradigm, however, in my understanding of how the God outside revelation can assist us in confronting horror, especially in the context of the theodicy question that so commonly attends our experience of suffering. Luther stridently urges us (as only Luther can be strident) to stay clear of this Hidden God, to which he refers, ominously and evocatively, as the abyss.32 It is in this context, among others, that Luther “flees to the cross,” clinging to its revelation of God’s love. As I have suggested, I think (and I believe Luther’s own life experience affirms this) that we find healing, to whatever degree 32. The impersonal pronoun here distinguishes the hidden God—the abyss—and the personal, Trinitarian God of revelation.

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possible ante mortem, not in denying or fleeing the abyss, but in integrating its existence into our spiritual and psychological experience. Such integration does necessitate, one way or the other, consciously or unconsciously, that we in fact approach the abyss, albeit in greater or lesser proximity and with the safety of the incarnate (crucified, but also resurrected) God as our companion. Adams relies extensively on Chalcedonian constructions. One reason the Chalcedonian God-man is so critically important, systematically, ties closely to the abuse paradigm I offered in chapter 4. If we understand Jesus Christ as fully distinct from the first person of the Trinity, such that God has sacrificed a son, we are left with a horribly challenging recapitulation of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, in which a sinful humankind is complicit, but which it does not initiate. Among other effects of that sacrificial model is the potential (against Luther’s and Calvin’s intention) for human receptivity to restorative grace to be dampened. If instead, we understand the Incarnation, including Jesus’ suffering, as God’s kenotic willingness to sacrifice God’s self, we have a powerful model of God’s willingness to be present to us, regardless of the consequences. God’s own sacrifice of Godself is horrible enough, but as Adams rightly observed, incarnate suffering of human contingency joins us with God in an otherwise implausible way: suffering of human contingency by a son, no matter how “special” a son, too readily seems to be one order removed from the source of life and of new life. Perhaps one could say that in addition to fleeing to the cross with Luther, we also must carry it with us in the companionship of the God-man and as a talisman of the promise of resurrected life in which—like the resurrected Jesus—we carry the scars left by horrorparticipation, but are no longer subject to the trauma they represent. Conclusion And I heard the mourner say: Give me Jesus, give me Jesus You can have all this world, but give me Jesus. Traditional Spiritual

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is the product, I posit that even in a postmodern age, Calvin’s Götterdämmerung is held back for us, not by revelation or illumination or even immortality, but by incarnation itself. Because we believe that God became man, dwelt among us, suffered, died, and was resurrected bearing the scars of his human form, Christians can know that our redeemer lives and has been enfleshed to us. And while I cherish the abundant goods of this world and grieve the material wounds humanity inflicts and sustains, when willy comes to nilly (as Adams might say), I turn to the ethical horizon beyond which I cannot see hope of a future and claim the goodness that runs through creation, despite all that works against it, a goodness for which Lear argues even from a secular perspective, to “the dearest freshness deep down things”: The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs— Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 33

Lear’s image of a horizon, at which our deeply held, indeed defining and sustaining values no longer hold, evokes the Götterdämerung that haunts us as it haunted Calvin. Even when we are not faced with the horizon itself, we live (as Lear suggests) with the premonition that somewhere it exists and that we are subject to its horror. The traditional gospel lyric that I have cited above as epigram to these final thoughts suggests a deceptively simple mantra for facing 33. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur.”

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such a horizon with the realistic optimism of which Lear assures us humankind is—inexplicably—capable. This world—the ethical context in which we have lived, that has seemed the bedrock of our values and our existence as people of honor—may be eclipsed; our misbegotten grasp on the God who remains outside our ken, largely hidden to us, inevitably will be revealed as insubstantial. In that moment when the horizon beyond which we cannot see draws closer, the spiritual commends to us the God-man who has crossed (in both directions!) and now bridges that horizon, in the very creation of which Christians believe the second person of the Trinity participated, long before it was incarnate in male form. “You can have all this world, but give me Jesus.” As the spiritual suggests, the horizon across which realistic optimism leads us to look for Jesus is multivalent: it transects a life of wholeness and brokenness in this world, as it transects the borderland between this world and the next.

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223

Index

9/11, 129

Evils and the Goodness of God, 149; evil, 163, horrendous, 162,

Abuse: sexual, 72; domestic, 150

metaphysical mismatch, 169,

Achilles in Vietnam, 124n24, 176

natural, 162; horror 161,

Adams, Marilyn McCord: xi, 5, 32,

defined, 158, 162; finitude, 162;

36, 38, 53, 77–78, 82, 85, 122, 125,

horror–defeat, 162–71, stages

126, 129, 130, 140–41, 144–85,

163–71, stage I, 164–66, stage II,

187–91, 198, 201–4, 205, 211;

165–67, stage III, 167–68, [as]

analytic method, 149, 154;

meaning–making, 190–91;

[against] analytic philosophy

horror participation, 153, 154,

and theology, 147; anxiety, 160,

160, death as, 169, inevitable,

secondary to scarcity, 162;

152, 159, 170, human

aporia, 151, 158, aporetic v.

responsibility, 170; incarnation,

apologetic, 155; childhood, 160;

155, 161, 163; impanation, 191;

Christ and Horrors, 149, 161–71,

intimacy with God as

180–84; Christology, 153,

consummate good, 150–51, 168,

Chalcedonian, 154, 211;

185; [and] Lear (Jonathan), 200;

continuity of thought, 152;

meaning–making, 162; [against]

creation, 159, 160; crucifixion,

Niebuhr (Reinhold), 170; prayer,

158; death as paradigmatic

156–57; psychology, 173–80;

horror, 202; divine goodness,

purity and defilement, 158;

152; divine responsibility for

questions raised by her

human capacity for evil, 160;

argument, 184–85; salvation,

embodiment, 163; Horrendous

[as] plot resolution, 167, [from]

225

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH

horror, 161, [as] remediation, 163, universal, 155, 158, [as]

Apocalypse Then and Now. See Keller, Catherine

wholeness, 161, 165; scarcity

Aquinas, Thomas, 7, 30–31

and human limitations, 158, 160,

Aristotle, 195

162; soteriology, 85, [and

Attachment, attachment theory, 50,

theodicy] 149, 151, 153, 155, 161; theodicy, 153, 154, aporia, 152; theological anthropology, 160; trauma, 163; [human]

76, 138 Augustine: 118; Confessions, 39, 84, 158 Author, implied: extended to

vulnerability, 163–64. See also

implied reader and narrator,

Eucharist, Hypostasis, Real

134–37; in picture books, 134–35

Presence

Autobiography, 134, 135, 138

Adoption, adoptive parents, 80–81

Autonomy. See Agency

Agency (personal), autonomy, 93,

Axline, Virginia, 138

108, 120, 121, 149; divine and human, 190; free will, 150, 159 Analysis of the Self, The. See Kohut, Heinz Anger, 102, 110 Anselm, 156–57 Anxiety: 78, 79, 81, 122, 123, 128,

Barth, Karl, 29, 139 Bedtime, 66, 86–87, 89, 94, 97, 100–101, 122, 130, 132. See also Nighttime Berengar of Tours. See Ego Berengarius, 181

160, 205; annihilation, 75, 123;

Bergman, Anni, 68

annihilation anxiety as dread,

Bettelheim, Bruno, 49, 60, 83; fairy

127; depressive, 66;

tales, 58; fantasy and

development, 57; guilt, 57;

problem–solving, 48

holding environment and, 64;

Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of

human personhood, 40; infancy,

Fiction,134. See also Author,

49, 51, 52, 62, 64, 85; managed

implied

with picture books, 124, 128;

Bowlby, John, 50, 138

normative, 49, 77, 111, 188;

Bradley, James, 176n48

normative v. non–, 126, 127, 130

Breast– and bottle–feeding, 80

Apocalypse, 148, 168; Ghost Dance, 198

226

Br’er Rabbit, 123, 133 Briggs, Raymond, 131

INDEX

Brown, Margaret Wise, 86, 111, 114, 116, 118; non– and continuity among Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny, and My World, 113. See also Goodnight Moon, My World, Runaway Bunny Bunny, –ies (including the

Courage, 195, 198. See also Lear, Jonathan Creation, divine, 153, 159, 160, 171, 209; goodness, 212 Cross, 37, 145, 191, 202, 210; fleeing to v. carrying, 211 Crow, 208; counting coups, 194–95,

character, Bunny), 94, 98, 99,

200; Sun Dance, 199, 209;

106, 107, 110; and humans, 117

warrior culture, 193–95

Burrell, David, 190

Cultural collapse, 196. See also Lear, Jonathan

Calvin, John: 39, 159, 169, 181–82, 184, 211, 212; human depravity, 39, 49, 169; [in] Tillich, 31

Darkness, 89, 91, 94, 96, 111, 122, 133, 140, 144, 189; dark sky, 109;

Cannon, Janelle, 133

[and] illumination, 88, 92, 107,

Carr, Anne, x, 153

116

Catherall, Don, 124, 166, 176, 204

Death, 202, 207, 209

Childhood and Society. See Erikson,

Defense mechanisms. See

Erik Children, childhood, 202; abuse v. neglect, 61; horror, 205; kingdom of heaven, 172 Christ and Horrors: The Coherence of

Psychoanalysis Dependence, absolute, 29, 139. See also Schleiermacher, Friedrich Depravity, human. See Calvin, John Depression, 194; anaclitic, 56,

Christology. See Adams, Marilyn

75–76, 77; childhood, 75;

McCord

depressive anxiety, 66;

Christology, 153; Chalcedonian, 38,

dysthymia, 77; infantile, 49, 50,

154, 211. See also Adams,

56, 75; maternal, 61, 62. See also

Marilyn McCord

failure to thrive

Clinical theory: methodological

Deus absolutus. See Luther, Martin

significance, 39; psychoanalysis,

Deus nudus. See Luther, Martin

40; relationship theory in, 40

Deus revelatus. See Luther, Martin

Cobb, John Jr, 147, 154–55, 156

Development, 35, 159–60, 206;

Coles, Robert, 138

abuse, 179; [and] adult life, 122,

Combat, 200. See also specific war

123; ante–natal, 44; cumulative

227

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH

in Stern, 71; epigenetic, 55;

Eucharist, 164, 180–84; hypostasis,

frustration and, 64, 75;

182; transubstantiation, 164–65;

loneliness, 58; mind–body

ubiquity of elements, 182. See

relationship, 58; neonatal and

also Impanation, Real Presence

development, 51; neonatal

Evil, 145, 147, 148, 150, 153, 169,

relationship in Stern, 70;

200, 204; external and internal,

neonatal wellbeing, 51, (in

148; good and, 55; [sensed in]

Stern), 72; plasticity, 196;

infancy, 52; “problem” v.

progression, 52; recursive, 47;

“mystery,” 153; horrendous,

relationship, 52; rupture and,

162, defined by Adams, 145;

64; trauma, 127

moral, 208; natural, 162, 208;

Dibs: In Search of Self. See Axline, Virginia Dignity, human, 153

[and] trust in early childhood, 53. See also Adams, Marilyn McCord

Divine, divinity. See God

Exodus, 1–2; 4:24–26, xiii, 188

Domestic violence. See Abuse

Experimentalists, 41

Dream: dream work, 197; self–state, 115 Dr. Seuss, 90, 122; Sneetches and Other Stories, 90

Failure to thrive (infant), 50, 75, 144 Fairbairn, W. Ronald D., 40 Fairy tales, 59

Duns Scotus, 182

Fall, The, 160

Dyer, Jane, 87

Father, xi, 61, 79, 99–100, 107, 112, 117, 120, 175, 176n48

Ego Berengerius, 181

Fear, 91–92, 93, 119, 122, 144

Eloise at the Plaza, 133

Finitude, 169, 172, 205, 207, 208

Embodiment. See Incarnation

Flag of Our Fathers, 176n48

Erikson, Erik: evil, 53, 55, 138;

Fox, Mem, 87

epigenetic development, 55;

Fraiberg, Selma, 56–62, 72, 78, 93,

Fall, 49, 55; mutual regulation,

138; fairy tales, 59; family

54; stages of development,

systems theory, 61; “Ghosts in

52–56

the Nursery,” 57, 59, 61–62;

Eschatology, eschaton, 77, 78, 86, 130, 148, 165, 168, 171, 192

imaginary friends, 60; infant mental health professionalized, 57; Infant Mental Health

228

INDEX

Program, 61; language as magic,

transcendence, 20. See also

59; love and development, 61;

Creation: abyss; Luther

magic, 58–60; Magic Years, The, 57; narrative, 56; [young child

God–consciousness. See Schleiermacher, Friedrich

as] scientist, 58; sleep as magic,

“God’s Grandeur”, 212

59

Good–enough parenting. See D. W.

Free will. See Agency

Winnicott

Freud, Anna, 46, 64–65, 72

Goodnight Bush, 116

Freud, Sigmund (Freudian

Goodnight Moon, 94–97, 98, 104, 105,

thought), 12, 15, 18, 22, 24, 28,

111, 114–17, 122, 132

32–34, 39, 40, 42–43, 46–47, 52,

Gotterdammerung, 212

54, 64, 67, 69, 72–73, 78, 157–58;

Graphic novel, 113

bedrock, 4. See also Unconscious Friend, The, 121

Hartshorne, Charles, 190 Hell, 147–48; as horror, 148

Geisel, Theodore. See Dr. Seuss

Hidden God, 210

Gender: language, 52, 90; parental,

Holding environment. See D. W.

79; women as child analysts, 46 Genesis, 22, 211

Winnicott Hope, 122, 125, 127, 140–41, 192,

Gerrish, Brian, 181

195, 200, 205, 207, 210, 212;

Ghost Dance, 198–99

radical, 157, 163. See also Lear,

God, 31, 202, 211; beatific vision,

Jonathan

150; condemnation, 147–48;

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 212

creator, 209; [and] evil, 147;

Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of

God–man, 213; goodness, 150; hiddenness, 208, 210, 213;

God. See Adams, Marilyn McCord Horror, horror–defeat,

horror–defeater, 190; imago dei,

horror–participation, 78, 82, 85,

53; incarnate, 210, 211;

122, 125, 144, 204, 206, 208;

intimacy, 164, 167, 173; love,

childhood, 205;

191, 206; otherness, 3, 38, 145,

horror–participation v. trauma,

174, 206–8, 210; paradoxical, 38;

129; transcendence as

personal, 38, 139–40;

horror–defeat, 207. See also

self–sacrifice, 211;

Adams, Marilyn McCord

229

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Hurd, Clement, 86, 98, 107, 111, 114, 116

Jesus, 4–11, 13, 16, 37–39, 139, 161, 163–67, 172, 180–84, 191, 202–3,

Hurd, [John] Thacher, 117–19

207, 209–11, 213; and children,

Hypostasis, hypostatic union, 164,

26

181, 184

Job [biblical text], 2–3, 143, 180 Jones, Serene, 140, 188; Trauma and

Iliad, 114–15

Grace: Theology in a Ruptured

Illusion: defined by Winnicott, 65,

World, 125–29

67; in adult life, 67; [v.] reality,

Justice (divine), 147–48, 207

84 Illustration, illustrator, 86, 87–89, 95–96, 98–99, 100–102, 104–7, 109–10, 113–14, 117, 118, 120–21, 123, 131, 135, 140 Impanation, 181–84, 191; [and] transubstantiation, 164–65 Incarnation, 153, 155, 159, 163–65,

Karamazov, Ivan, 207 Keller, Catherine, Apocalypse Then and Now, 129 Kenosis, 37–38, 181, 211 Kill Bill II, 112 Klein, Melanie, 46–49, 62, 72; drive theory, 49; [against] Freud, 47;

169, 171, 181, 191, 206, 207,

phantasy defined, 48, 48–49;

210–13; embodiment, 163, 169,

psychosis corollary to normal

180. See also Adams, God,

early development, 47

Kenosis Infancy, 44–46; dependency, 45; depression, 49, 56; evil sensed,

Kohut, Heinz, 42, 115; self–state, 65–66, 115; self–state, 65, 115 Korean War, 175

52; infantile depression in Melanie Klein, 47–48 Infant mental health: professionalized, 57 Integration (psychological), 203;

Lakota, 198 Language, 128, 140, 144–45, 147, 154 Lear, Jonathan, 36, 53, 61, 77–78, 82, 114, 122, 125–27, 129, 130, 138,

capacity, 204–5, 211; divine, 206;

140–41, 157, 162–63, 191–201,

[v.] undoing, 208

202, 204–8, 212–13; [and] Adams

Intellect. See reason

(Marilyn McCord), 200–201;

Interpersonal World of the Infant, The.

catastrophic collapse, 163;

See Mahler, Margaret Irenaeus, 172

230

courage as virtue, 192; death as ethical horizon, 192; radical

INDEX

hope, 61, 130, 157, 163, courage

McGinn, Bernard, 6

as, 198, plasticity and, 204;

Magic, magical thinking, 62, 67, 95,

Radical Hope, 126, 130, 192–200;

114, 115. See also Literature,

religious language in, 198

early childhood

L’Engle, Madeleine, 35

Mahler, Margaret, 63, 67–69, 75,

Lewis, C. S., 35

111, 138; Psychological Birth of the

Linderman, Frank, 193–94

Human Infant, 68

Literature, early childhood

Meaning–making, 18, 23, 29, 61, 78,

(including picture books), 35,

122, 125, 130, 131, 140, 160, 162,

77–78, 82; 20th c., 131, 137, 205;

163, 166–67, 170, 172, 178, 188,

adult experience of picture

190–92, 195–96, 198, 200–202,

books, 123, 124; magical

208; horror–defeat, 190–91; [as]

thinking, 62; picture books

virtue, 192; [and] intellect, 202;

against anxiety and trauma,

[and] wholeness, 166, 188, 200

124, 128, 219; picture books and

Memory, 8, 73, 74, 84, 138, 202, 204

narrative, 130; picture books

Methodology, 123–25, 130–31

problematized as a source,

Mind–body link, 58, 85, 197

137–39; picture books and

Monsters, 93

relationship, 128; reading

Monsters Inc., 93

picture books, 124

Moon, 90–92, 94, 96, 99, 100–101,

Literature, religion and, 79

107, 111, 113, 115–17. See also

Little, Margaret, 43–44

Stars

Loder, James, 174 Love, 149, 157; [and] development, 62; divine, 191, 210 Lowrie, Robert, 195 Luther, Martin, 30–31, 34, 181–82,

My World: A Companion to Goodnight Moon, 95, 97–105, 107, 111–22; compared to Goodnight Moon, 99 Mysticism: 150; [and] psychoanalysis, 5–7

184, 191, 208, 211; abyss, 3, 31, 202, 210; deus absolutus, 210–11;

Narrative, 72–73, 200, 203, 205, 209;

deus nudus, 145, 191, 202, 209;

[v.] didactic text, 132; oral, 123;

deus revelatus, 210; hidden God,

picture books, 130;

171, 208, 210; [in] Tillich, 31

psychoanalysis, 35, 73, 131; storytelling, 125 Narrative theology, 83–84

231

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 162, 170

Pat the Bunny, 133

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14–28, 203;

Paterson, Katherine, 35

amor fati, 21, 22; child, 26; childhood and allegory, 27;

Perception, 10–11, 13–14, 15, 21, 28, 33, 70, 136, 138, 157, 160, 203

[against] Christianity, 18;

Personhood: love and, 62

Christianity paradoxical, 21;

Peter Rabbit, The Tale of, 106, 132;

creation, 26–27; duty, 25; Ecce

compared to The Runaway

Homo, 15, 22n46; eternal

Bunny, 120

recurrence, 20; evil juxtaposed

Phantasy, 47–48, 60

to good, 23; freedom, 24–25, will

Philosophy, analytic, 151, 153, 201

and, 27; innocence, 26; Islam,

Piaget, Jean, 112n13

22n45; meaning–making 23;

Picture books. See Literature, early

metamorphosis, 27; On the

childhood

Genealogy of Morality, 22n46;

Pine, Fred, 68–69

prayer, 25; predation, 25;

Placher, William, 143, 153–54

psychology, 17, 18 and n. 37;

Plantinga, Alvin, 147, 151, 153, 155,

reverent spirit, 27; Schleiermacher, 17 and n. 33, 21, 26, 31; Tillich on, 16, 33; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 20, 24 Nighttime, 87, 88–89, 90, 92, 94, 96,

159, 161, 162, 172, 201 Play, 55n32, 60, 67, 104, 205; play therapy, 137–38 Plenty Coups, 130, 193, 200, 207, 208; dream, 196–98

100, 104, 107, 111. See also

Poky Little Puppy, The, 132

Dream, Sleep

Post–traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 128, 177–78

Object constancy, 112

Potter, Beatrix, 106

Object permanence, 75, 112, 114

Prayer, 156–57

Object relations theory, 40, 42–44,

Process theology, 190

130; British Independent school,

Psalm 91, 93

63–65; [and] theology, 42

Pseudo–Dionysius, 210

Ockham, William of, 146, 182 Oedipal (crisis and period), 43, 47, 112, 118

Psychoanalysis, 193, 201; clinical theory, 78; critical theory, 42; defense mechanisms, 203, 209;

Optimism, 213

dream work, 197; Ich

Otherness, 90, 92

(translation), 157–58; [and]

232

INDEX

theological anthropology, 158;

Religion and literature, 79

[and] theology, 157–58

Resurrection, 165, 168; material

Psychology, 156, 178, 200; Adams, 173–180; ego psychology, 67, 75; [and the] soul, 157; theology, 174

redemption, 206; material undoing, 209 Rhetoric of Fiction, The. See Wayne Booth

Psychosis, 43; analyzable, 47

Ricoeur, Paul, 72–73

Psychological Birth of the Human

Rolt, C. E., 190

Infant, The. See Stern, Daniel

Romans 8:28, 178

Psyche (Psyke), 157, 168

Rosengarten, Richard, ix–x

PTSD. See Post–traumatic Stress

Rousseau, J. J., 84

Disorder

Runaway Bunny, The, 95, 98, 99, 103, 105–11, 119–22, 132; compared

Rabbit(s). See Bunny, –ies

to The Tale of Peter Rabbit, 120

Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. See Lear, Jonathan Reader: adult mediator of books for children, 135–37, 138; co–creator, 135 Real Presence, 163, 182, 183, 184, 188. See also Adams, Eucharist

Salvation, 171; redemption, 205; Trinity, 165; universal, 147, 166, 205–6; wholeness, 165, 205. See also Soteriology, eschaton Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 9–14, 33, 139, 203 Schreiner, Susan, 143

Realism, 118

Self–psychology. See Kohut, Heinz

Reason (and intellect), 149, 156,

Self–state dream. See Kohut, Heinz

166, 168, 197, 205; [and] affect,

Separation,

157; [in] divine–human

separation–individuation,

relationship, 161; [and]

67–69, 112, 119, 121, 122, 130,

redemption, 172; [in] Tillich, 31

132. See also Margaret Mahler

Reformed thought, 39. See also Calvin, John Relationship: clinical theory, 40;

Seuss, Dr. See Dr. Seuss Shay, Jonathan, 124n24, 176 Shoshone, 199, 209

development, 45; human, 183;

Shivaree, 116

mother–infant, 63; paternal,

Sin, 149, 150; inevitable, 168

112. See also Father

Sinaiko, Herman, x

233

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Sitting Bull, 198–99, 207

81, 84, 125, 130, 147, 149–53, 155,

Sleep, 89, 114, 122

163–65, 167, 172–73, 178–79,

Sneetches on Beaches and Other

184–85, 190, 200–201, 210–11;

Stories, The. See Dr. Seuss Snowman, The, 131

[and] divine good, 150 Sun Dance, 199, 204, 209

Snowy Day, The, 133 Soteriology, 85, 86, 130, 166, 167, 169, 170, 176, 193, 201, 207, 209;

Tale of Peter Rabbit, The. See Peter Rabbit

exclusivism, 148; [v.] theodicy

Tanner, Kathryn, ix, 190, 206

for Adams, 149, 151; [in] Tillich,

Thacher, Edith, 118

34

Theodicy, 146, 171, 193; v.

Soul, 85, 157; psykhe, 157 Spitz, Rene, 50, 76 Stars, 87–89, 90, 94, 96–97, 115, 117. See also Moon

soteriology for Adams, 149 Theology, aims, 83; narrative, 83–84; negative, 145; [and] philosophy, 151; practical and

Stellaluna, 133

theoretical, 151–52; process,

Stern, Daniel, 69–75, 137; [against]

190; [and] psychology or

British Independents, 74;

psychoanalysis, 157–58;

ethology, 74; [and]

theological anthropology, 79,

experimentalists, 41, 67;

84, 123, 130, 160;

Interpersonal World of the Human Infant, 74; language and communication, 73; [and]

Thus Spake Zarathustra. See Nietzsche, Friedrich Tillich, Paul, 29–35, 162, 190;

Mahler, 74, 75; [against] Mahler

Aquinas, 30–31; [against] Barth,

on “normal autism,” 69–70;

29; Calvin, 31; [against]

methodology, 69–70, 72;

Cartesian and Calvinist

neonatal relationship, 70, 72;

influences, 34; consciousness,

stages of early development, 71;

31; Courage to Be, The, 29;

theoretical originality, 75

culture, theology of, 29; [the]

Storytelling. See Narrative

demonic, 31; Descartes, 31;

Subject, subjectivity, 93; turn to

existentialism, 31; Freud, 34;

the, 9–14 Suffering, 2–4, 8, 11, 13–15, 17, 18–21, 27–28, 33, 36, 49, 77, 79,

234

Freudian unconscious, 34; intellect, 31; Luther and bondage of the will, 34; method

INDEX

of correlation, 29; Nietzsche, 33;

211, 213; Genesis 22, 211; Holy

psychoanalysis, 31; psychology,

Spirit, 206

29; Schleiermacher, 29, 33; Systematic Theology, 140; theology and psychology, 33; soteriology, 34; theology as therapeutic, 35 Time, 8, 29, 96, 99, 100–101, 110,

Uncle Remus, The Complete Tales of. See Br’er Rabbit Unconscious (psychological), 9–10, 12, 18, 32–34, 48, 58, 83, 122, 135, 211

115, 128, 145 Time for Bed, 86, 87–89, 94, 122

van der Kolk, Bessel, 126

Tracy, David, x, 3

Vietnam, 175

Transcendence, 206; after death,

Vulnerability, 164, 168, 171;

209; [as] horror–defeat, 207;

cultural catastrophe, 194; male,

radical, 205; [and] wholeness,

167

203. See also God Transition, 48, 129–30

Weil, Simone, 167

Transitional object, phenomena,

“What was I Scared of?”, 86, 90–93,

space. See Winnicott, D. W. Transubstantiation. See Adams, Eucharist Trauma, traumatic, 73, 78, 125–129,

121, 122 Where the Wild Things Are, 121, 133 Wholeness, 207, 209 Winnicott, D. W., 63–65, 115, 138,

140, 163, 174, 204; defined, 81,

145; breast– and bottle–feeding,

126; early childhood, 53; v.

80; frustration and

horror–participation, 126; [and]

development, 64; good–enough

picture books, 128; [and]

parenting, 63–64, 125; holding

silence, 127–28; [v.] social

environment, 51, 64, 119;

achievement in early childhood,

illusion, 61, (defined) 65, 84–85;

54

methodology, 65; rupture and

Trauma and Grace: Theology in a

development, 64; theological

Ruptured World. See Jones,

appropriation of, 84;

Serene

transitional object, 66;

Trinity, Trinitarian, 153, 163, 165,

transitional phenomena, 66,

182–83, 190–91, 203–4, 210n32,

(and symbolism) 67, 84, 123; transitional space, 65–67,

235

HORROR AND ITS AFTERMATH

(human need for) 66, (and the arts) 85, (and religion) 85, 113,

World War II, 175; Iwo Jima, 174–176

115, 123, 145 Wordsworth, William, 83 World War I, 173

236

Zwingli, Huldrych, 182