God in Mind: The Psychology of Religion

Part Four: Is "God" Our Unconscious?

French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, famously said, “The true formula of atheism is not 'God is dead' — the true formula of atheism is that God is unconscious.” What??? God is unconscious? What does this mean? Welcome to Part Four of my series, “God in Mind: The Psychology of Religion.”

To begin this journey, let’s take a walk in the park.

My favorite tree at a nearby running trail.

Imagine standing in a park, next to a tree. You can see the tree, smell it, touch it, hear the leaves rustling in the breeze, and there are all the thoughts and feelings you may have about the tree. Perhaps you frequent this park, and find this particular tree charming and comforting. Obviously, your experience, thoughts and feelings correspond directly with that tree. Right Everyone knows what a tree is and what makes it a tree, and this is what you were experiencing in that moment at the park. Case closed.

Well… not exactly.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant asserted that there are things that we perceive in the world, like a tree, and then there is the “thing-in-itself”, which is the objective reality of an object as it is, independent of representation and observation. At the park, your first-person experience of that tree is occurring through the doors of your perception, which do not correspond exactly to the actuality of what the tree is “in-itself”.

These doors of perception mediating your experience of the tree, include:

• the environmental conditions

• your knowledge of trees

• your sensory experience

• past experiences of that tree or all trees

• your emotional state at that moment

Change a few variables around and one’s experience or perception of the tree is different. For example, imagine how the tree would be perceived differently in these examples:

• a toddler verses a senior citizen

• an environmental scientist verses a logging truck driver

• a blind person versus someone who has sight

• at the park celebrating a birthday verses grieving the death of a child

The point is that our experience of anything, even a tree, is in large part a projection. That tree was something before you ever walked up to it, and how you experienced it doesn’t define or contain what it is. Our perceptions are not infallible. Watch a few David Blaine YouTube videos and you will see just how easily we can be deceived.

In every moment, we are experiencing the world not only through our five physical senses but through a lifetime of experience and conditioning. When two people interact it’s like two trucks facing each other. The interaction seems to be between the two front cabins, but the reality is that the interaction is impacted by everything you are pulling around in the trailer.

It becomes more complicated and subjective as we move from inanimate objects like trees, rocks and chairs to how we see, let’s say, people or God. One important insight from the psychology of religion is that your concept, understanding and experience of God is like this:

In other words, you are driving around two trailers full of conditioning, programming, indoctrination, culture, upbringing, and education when it comes to how you think of “God”.

By the way, there is a Jim Palmer Trucking Company and people often snap photos and send them to me:

To be more specific, we experience the world through our human psyche. We have been discussing this the last few weeks through the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The psyche is the totality of the human mind, including both conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, motivations and processes. The unconscious governs much of what we think and do, and this realization birthed the field of psychoanalysis.

Today’s article is covering some of the central concepts of French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan. If he had read my above illustration about the tree in the park he would likely respond like this:

“Uh oh!! I hate to break it to you, Jimmy. You think one’s perception is colored and subjectified by their sensory experience, station in life, mood, and personal history. It goes way deeper than that. The reality is that how you understand or experience anything is mediated, controlled and limited by the deepest structures of that part of you that is perceiving it.”

In other words, Lacan’s psychological insights call into question the assumption that our knowledge and experience of the world is infallible or even accurate. This can be problematic. For example, an over-inflated confidence in the mind can lead some people to claim that they know with absolute certainty who or what “God” is or isn’t. This can be highly problematic. Religions and denominations hold differing and irreconcilable versions of “God”, which often leads to violence and war.

One level of religious deconstruction involves examining the legitimacy of specific religious beliefs based on reason and critical thinking. A deeper level of deconstruction involves investigating the forces at play in all belief formation. The question isn’t “what do I believe?” but how I got there - not the content of your beliefs but the process (consciously and unconsciously) that gave birth to them.

Our knowledge and experience of life is mediated, facilitated, governed and limited by a dynamic process of conscious and unconscious components. Sigmund Freud referred to these as the “id”, “ego” and “superego”. Carl Jung’s work focused on what he called the “personal unconscious” and the “collective unconscious”. There’s a lot going on in that noggin at any given moment! The below image captures one aspect of this.

Maybe you’ve never considered this before, but why should we assume that a tree, rock, next-door neighbor or God is in fact the equivalent of all the machinations happening in our head? In fact, the more you understand what actually is going on in the trailer, the more you realize that there’s no way in hell that what we think or experience of anything can be an unerring and flawless interpretation of it. Or as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “There are no facts, only interpretations.”

This is part four of my series: “God in Mind: The Psychology of Religion”. The point of this series is NOT to question, undermine, debunk and dismiss all religious faith and experience. What I hope to achieve in this series includes:

• Introduce people to the field of the psychology of religion to aid their process in cultivating a meaningful and liberating non-religious spirituality.

• Point out ways that the insights from the psychology of religion can aid people in a faith transition, existential crisis, religious deconstruction process, or addressing the dynamics of Religious Trauma Syndrome.

• Demonstrate how to utilize the field of the psychology of religion to develop critical, nuanced, balanced, compassionate thinking about the phenomenon of religion.

So far, the series has unfolded in three parts:

• Part One: It’s All in Your Head (Or Is It?) → Series Introduction

• Part Two: Is Religion Illusion, Delusion or Prehension? → Work of Sigmund Freud

• Part Three: Does Religion Unlock or Shut Down Our Transcendence? → Work of Carl Jung

Today’s Part Four is titled, “Is ‘God’ Our Unconscious?”, and we are exploring a few Lacanian psychological insights into religion.

Who is Jacques Lacan?

Unless you have a background in psychology, you’ve probably never heard of Jacques Lacan. Most people know famous psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers… but not Lacan.

Jacques Lacan was a Parisian psychiatrist who was born in 1901 and who died from colon cancer in 1981. He gained an international reputation as an original interpreter of Sigmund Freud’s work. He visited the United State three times, twice in 1966 and once in 1975, where he lectured at a dozen American universities.

It is said that Lacan may be the best and least known psychoanalyst. He is perhaps the least known because he is hard to understand. Lacan’s written work and transcribed lectures are often difficult, if not impossible, for most people, including mental health professionals, to comprehend. His ideas are novel and complex and many seem obscure and enigmatic. Many innocent souls have gone missing in the quagmire of understanding Jacques Lacan, and cry out from niche journal articles and high-priced academic books that most folk will never read.