Psychoanalysis and Christian Formation: Becoming Fully Human

Analytic theoreticians have begun to identify the goal of psychoanalysis as vitalization or full human aliveness. This expands treatment beyond working through trauma, making the unconscious conscious, owning dissociated self and affect states or even the development of new object relations. While these remain important penultimate goals, the main telos of psychoanalysis is for patients to become fully alive, growing in their capacity to engage one’s full humanity. This article posits that while there is evidence within Christian formation of a similar telos, it remains largely buried beneath an anthropology of distrust of the body and humanity after the fall. Therefore, what I refer to as folk-Christianity primarily advances a subtraction–addition model of formation rather than an emergent model which contemporary psychoanalysis offers. Full aliveness or becoming fully human is an emergent property of the intersubjective therapeutic dyad. From an emergent model, psychology and Christian formation rest on the goodness of humanity and the capacity to enter fully into one’s human creatureliness as a form of honor and worship of a creator who became fully human and revels in humans fully alive. Psychoanalysis offers unique understanding and methodologies to assist religion in achieving this goal.