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Despair, like dreaming, is not in itself insight. It becomes a path to insight only by way of an encounter, a cooperative interplay that is more art than science.

sight, pulls us off course and takes us where we did not (consciously) wish or intend to go. We cannot anticipate the unconscious… we only account for precisely that fraction of it that has become conscious. Looking backwards, we can speak of how something unconscious became conscious, as Freud did when he learned about himself from his dreams. And we can perhaps describe how it feels to pass from unconsciousness into consciousness. It is as though one must walk the Via Regia backwards. Does Christian psychology have a working theory of the unconscious that sits comfortably within or beside its theology? Does the working theory yield a margin of freedom to gain insights that are more experiential than doctrinal by methods that are more phenomenological than exegetical? I dare say that most Christian training programs lack such theory and method and that the lacuna implicitly shapes the boundaries of most pastoral and Christian counseling. Specifically, it produces an affinity for cognitive and positive psychology, both offering a wide berth for inserting doctrinal solutions to rationally crystallized problems. While anti-doctrinal beliefs may be cataloged and considered subconscious, this yields only a shallow concept of the unconscious. The Christian unconscious thereby becomes the pool of all doctrine (i.e., truths presumed to be knowable, known, and clearly expressed) that are misunderstood, disbelieved, not yet taken to heart, or not yet put into action. In its harsher version (which is not uncommon enough), the lies we still believe are presumed to be the chief (or even the exclusive) cause of suffering. “The [doctrinal] truth will set you free.” In most training programs in Christian counseling, doctrinal truths coexist with practical wisdom (e.g., dysfunctional beliefs) and scientific findings, but the rational basis of therapy remains intact. Bad ideas are replaced by better ideas, bad habits by better habits. The cognitive-behavioral rain, secular or Christian, falls mainly on the plain of ordinary consciousness. In either case, the implicit message can be, “When you quit believing the lie, the lie quits hurting.” Furthermore, if lies and truths can be made fully conscious simply by being articulated , then it is a short skip to supposing that suffering flows from conscious resistance to the truth. If affliction springs simply from refusal to “turn to the Lord” or “believe his Word,” then compassion evaporates in exasperation. Without a vigorous theory of the unconscious, we rouse the spirits of three ancient, famously ineffective counselors: Eliphaz, Bildad, & Zophar. Positive psychology cannot be the exclusive vehicle of a Christian approach to psychology without leading to this impasse. Truth must have qualities that are not grasped by pure reason. I submit, via imperii to the Christian unconscious, Kierkegaard’s theory of despair in The Sickness unto Death (1849). The book is subtitled A Christian Psychological Exposition for… Awakening . Fifty years before Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, Kierkegaard suggests that most of the time, Christians are asleep! The sickness unto death (despair) involves the failure to grasp that the self, though “given” in an eternal sense, is temporally experienced only rarely—only when “relating itself to itself [while it] rests transparently in the power that established it.” Since this “relating” is an act, it is invariably interrupted and must be repeated over and again. Thus, despair is not only the default condition of fallen humanity but the default condition of every Christian. The capacity for despair is, paradoxically, a divine gift, an “infinite advantage.” It makes faith possible. For Kierkegaard, this “relating” activity is the very definition of faith and is, therefore, “the formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out.” Self is more verb than noun, and there is mortal danger in taking the self for granted (i.e., objectively). Put differently, the Christian

self (and per Kierkegaard, “Spirit is the self”) falls asleep and lies unconscious except when God simultaneously sees polarities such as mind and body as undergirded. “The human self… in relating itself (e.g., mind) to itself (e.g., body) relates itself to another .” Put differently, the self is awakened by a vital connection with the Word made Flesh for us and in us . There is a phenomenological aspect to such awakenings that is so hard to describe that even Kierkegaard points to it in terms of its antithesis, despair. Despair, like dreaming, is not in itself insight. It becomes a path to insight only by way of an encounter, a cooperative interplay that is more art than science. For Freud, cooperation with the client involves nudging free associations followed by nudging interpretations, validated finally by freedom where freedom was absent. For Kierkegaard, the cooperation with the reader involves a via negativa that is even more complex. His entire opus must be viewed as dragging us away from seeing the self objectively. God sees us eternally and objectively out of one eye, but we become our eternal selves only momentarily—only when seeing ourselves concretely and subjectively. Seeing ourselves historically (in time) or objectively (e.g., in terms of virtue or character) is always a form of unconsciousness and despair. Seeing ourselves as nakedly contemporaneous with Christ, body and soul in this moment, is awakening. The patibulum (crossbar) of the cross comes from the Latin word for open, exposed, vulnerable, and accessible. Can we carry it? Turning from the via imperii back to the via regia , at the crux of the Holy Cross, we see that the Freudian royal road is transformed. Dreams are indeed guardians of sleep, but dreams are just one aspect of a grand disguising of everything unconscious; this includes not only the Freudian (psychosexual) unconscious but the Jungian unconscious, the broader relational (e.g., Adlerian, Family-Systems) unconscious, and the traumatic unconscious. The cross’s stipes (vertical beam) include everything the Word-made-Flesh remembers for us. But the personal awakenings occur in moments—precisely in instants when we subtract our abstracted train of cognitions, our conceptualized histories and projects, and come to our senses. This requires embracing sub-rational experiences (e.g., visceral sensation, associated images, and dreams) as significant encounters with self and Spirit. We meet the Christ who is in us. And in doing so, we move away from what we see and know (what we call objectivity). Instead, we follow Him—the indwelling Savior who tells us, “Your body is My temple; this is My body.” How could this be realized except by faithfully moving toward interoception (awareness of body and space) and imagination (the images that arise from such awareness)? As we do so, interoception and imagination slowly give rise to insight. As we learn to “present our bodies” to God, our minds are also gradually transformed. C

V. ELLSWORTH LEWIS, PH.D., studied philosophy at Wheaton College under Arthur Holmes ( All Truth is God’s Truth ), and was introduced to Soren Kierkegaard by professor of the philosophy of man course, C. Stephen Evans. He then studied clinical psychology at BYU, where he researched under Allen Bergin, and was supervised by an eclectic faculty including Michael Lambert and Gary Burlingame. Dr. Lewis completed his internship in the U.S. Army Medical Department, and has worked in children’s services, medical centers, prisons, and mental health court.

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