Sick men hold the doomsday nuclear button

GEOFF SIFRIN

US President Donald Trump, wanting to appear smarter than everyone, throws tantrums when anyone disagrees; North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, in total control of his people and military, wants to appear more macho than everyone – a gang leader daring others to take him on.

North Korea is “begging for war” says US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.

Freud, a neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, was born to Jewish parents in Austria. He fled to London in 1938, aged 82, to escape the Nazis. His secular Jewish identity influenced his intellectual and moral outlook, and psychoanalysis’s rationalist values.

Can religion and rationality reconcile? Last week, an eminent Orthodox rabbinical delegation representing 90 per cent of the Orthodox Jewish world, met with the Pope, presenting the document “Between Jerusalem and Rome”, calling on Catholics and other faith communities “to assure the future of religious freedom, to foster the moral principles of our faiths, particularly the sanctity of life and the significance of the traditional family”, and to strengthen the “moral and religious conscience”.

It marked the five-decade anniversary of the radical 1965 Vatican statement Nostra Aetate, devised by Pope Paul VI, to guide Catholics in relations with non-Christian communities, heralding a sea change in attitudes towards Jews and denouncing anti-Semitism and treatment of Jews as the people who had rejected the Messiah.

Pope Francis said Nostra Aetate “represented the Magna Carta of the Church’s dialogue with the Jewish world”. Despite irreconcilable theological differences, the Church and Jews were trying rationally to construct a better world together, “blessed with peace, social justice and security”.

Freud had a “rationalist” approach to morality, evoking scepticism among religious leaders about psychoanalysis. But the thread of psychoanalysis runs through many places. Pope Francis admitted recently to a French sociologist and author of an upcoming book, that he regularly consulted a female Jewish psychoanalyst in the 1970s in his native Argentina when he was 42 and working as a Jesuit official.

“She helped me a lot,” the Italian newspaper La Stampa quoted him as saying.

He said people with straitjacket points of view bother him, even singling out “rigid priests… It’s a form of fundamentalism… Whenever I run into a rigid person, especially if young, I tell myself that he’s sick… in reality, they are persons looking for security.”

Although the Catholic Church used to mistrust psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy, it has softened on the subject. Vatican guidelines applied today in seminaries training future priests, appreciate psychologists’ help in assessing candidates’ suitability.

Coincidentally, tensions between faith and rationality are superbly portrayed in a play currently running in Johannesburg directed by Alan Swerdlow, entitled “Freud’s Last Session”.

It portrays an imagined fierce conversation between an old, sick Freud approaching death from mouth cancer, and CS Lewis, a much younger Oxford professor of literary scholarship and firm believer in Christianity and G-d.

In the argument between these two great intellectuals, Freud claims morality itself is something brainwashed into people by their parents.

When his cancer becomes too much to bear, he will commit suicide. Lewis protests that only G-d gives life and only He can take it away.

Whatever one thinks of Freud and Lewis, rationality and faith, one thing is certain: Some of the leaders the world has mistakenly put into the most powerful positions on earth, could do with serious interventions, whether rational or faith-based. Untold millions of people could die if these men’s pathologies are given free rein.

Read Geoff Sifrin’s regular columns on his blog sifrintakingissue.wordpress.com