William Shuter

7 WILLIAM SHUTER

Sharing Our Humanity: The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

The Mass is the central act of Catholic worship. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997) describes it as the sum and summary of our faith (1327) and the source and summit of the Christian life (1324). It is also central to the sense of Catholic identity. A practicing Catholic is in effect a Mass-going Catholic. Why does the Mass mean so much to so many? Instructed Catholics who continue to understand the Mass as the Church has taught them to understand it can no doubt answer the question in terms that would satisfy a catechist, but their actual experience of Mass is more varied and more complex than any statement of formal doctrine recognizes. Children of various ages experience the Mass differently from each other and from adults, while adults themselves discern very different meanings in the impressive rite with which they have been familiar since childhood. When cradle Catholics (those raised as Catholics) attend Mass, however, they at some level of consciousness experience it as the same Mass they rst knew as children and are therefore reminded of the relation between their earlier and their later selves. Neither theology nor psychology alone can adequately explain this power of the Mass to engage the imagination of the child and to retain or even strengthen its hold on the mind of the adult. Since the Church claims to speak with authority of the divine nature, while psychology speaks from its observation and experience of our human nature, a dialogue on the meaning of the Mass should prove instructive, although the question will inevitably be construed somewhat differently by the participants on either side. For the purposes of a specically psychoanalytic reading, the question will take the form, What does the Mass mean at the more archaic as well as at the more recent levels of our mental life?
American Imago, Vol. 63, No. 1, 723. 2006 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass 1

The rst principal part of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word, is introduced by the Penitential Rite, a communal confession of sin concluding with the priests absolution. The second principal part, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, begins with the preparation and consecration of the gifts of bread and wine. The consecrated gifts are then offered to God the Father, as the priest recalls Christs death, resurrection, and ascension. Then follows the communion of the faithful, the last of the principal actions of the Mass. A detailed account of the Mass as a reenactment of the sacricial death and the resurrection of Christ has been given by Jung (1942). Jungs chief interest, however, lay in mythological motifs and parallels from the literature of alchemy. He wrote, moreover, before the reformation of the liturgy in the 1960s. Because he neglected the Penitential Rite and the Liturgy of the Word, and because of his entire theoretical framework, his account of the psychological sequence represented in the Mass differs substantially from that which I am presenting here. The Mass begins with a collective admission of guilt. In the Penitential Rite, those present acknowledge that they have sinned in thought, in word, and in what they have done as well as what they have failed to do, and they pray for forgiveness. Thus, the Mass begins by reminding worshipers of the reality of sin and of guilt. What is the origin of sin and guilt? According to the Catechism (1997), they are virtually coeval with the origin of the human race. The rst man and woman wished to be like God but not in accordance with God (398), and the guilt of their act of disobedience was transmitted by propagation to all mankind (404). Baptism remits the guilt of this original sin, but the inclination to sin (concupiscence) remains (405). Personal sins, those actually committed by an individual, are absolved in the sacrament of penance, but children are not admitted either to this sacrament or to the sacrament of the Eucharist until they reach the age of discretion, which is taken to be seven years. Psychoanalysis has much less to say about sin than about guilt, but about guilt it has a good deal to say. It is the capacity of the ego to observe, criticize, and accuse itself, activities exempli-

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ed in what the Church calls the examination of conscience and that led Freud to postulate a superego. Although guilt has its precursor in the fear of retaliation, its full internalization and structuralization are not completed until around age six, very close to the Churchs age of discretion or reason. The superego is thus the latest of Freuds three mental agencies to be activated. Like conscience, with which it is frequently equated, the superego can be unforgiving, inexible, even cruel and sadistic in its treatment of the self. In actual practice, therefore, psychoanalysis as a mode of therapy attends less to realistic or normal guilt than to unconscious guilt and to such guilt-generated conditions as depression and obsessiveness, conditions that the Church has learned to recognize from centuries of experience in the confessional. Indeed, the denition of scrupulosity given by the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Cross 1997) reads like a diagnostic category. Those suffering from this condition are aficted with fears that there is sin where there is none (1475), and that they have neglected duties that do not exist. They accuse themselves of having consented to sinful imaginations and desires, of having made incomplete confessions and of being unworthy of the reception of the sacraments. Scrupulosity may also lead to the sins of obstinacy and despair, or conversely, to self-indulgence. Such pathological manifestations of the sense of guilt are particularly troubling to confessors and moral theologians. Whereas the Church teaches that forgiveness is always available to those who seek it, the despairing soul is convinced otherwise. Despair has therefore often been equated with the mysterious but unspecied sin that will not be forgiven mentioned in the gospels. The sin that cannot be forgiven is thus the presumption that one is unforgivable. Confronted with such pathological guilt, the confessor will attempt to moderate the sufferers implacable superego. Forgiveness of actual as distinguished from imagined sin, however, requires the sinner to be contrite for his sins. As the prerequisite for forgiveness, two forms of contrition are distinguished, imperfect and perfect. Imperfect contrition, which is sufcient for sacramental confession but which cannot of itself secure forgiveness, is motivated by fear of threatened punish-

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

ment and damnation. It corresponds to an immature state of the superego. The young child fears punishment and the loss of parental love before it learns to fear the disapproval of conscience. In Freuds words, this realistic anxiety is the precursor of the later moral anxiety (1933, 62). It is not fear but rather the love of God, whom sin offends, that serves as the motive of that perfect contrition that itself obtains forgiveness. The capacity of the superego to evoke love as well as fear indicates that it functions as something more than an agent of self-scrutiny and self-judgment. It is also the site of what Freud calls the ego ideal. Derived from our very early conception of our parents, to whom we attributed every conceivable perfection, it represents the idealized self to which we aspire and by which we measure our actual self. Our initial relation to it has the character of a narcissistic infatuation, but in time it normally alters its character, as it does, for example, when we nd ourselves in love. It is the beloved who is then endowed with all perfections by the lover, who sacrices his selflove for humble devotion to the one whose every wish is to be fullled with alacrity. To quote Freud again, the beloved serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own, and is loved on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego (1921, 11213). The ego ideal can also be observed at work, somewhat less obtrusively, in those groups whose individual members identify with each other in their common devotion to their leader or head. The members of such a group have placed the same person in place of their ego ideal and have consequently identied themselves with one another in their ego (Freud 1921, 116; italics in original). In the Catholic church, which Freud cites (along with the army) as a prime example, the tie which unites each individual with Christ is also the cause of the tie which unites them with one another (94). However, the Church expects still more of the individual Christian: He has also to identify himself with Christ and love all other Christians as Christ loved them. . . . Identication has to be added where object-choice has taken place, and object love where there is identication (134). In the order of the Mass, the introductory Penitential Rite is followed by the Liturgy of the Word, the rst of the two principal sections of the Mass. Passages from the Old and New

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Testaments (one of them always from the Gospels) are read, after which there ensues a homily based to a greater or lesser extent on the readings for the day. Explicit moral instruction is concentrated in this section of the Mass. The priests homily is hortatory in character, encouraging the practice of virtues commended in Scripture and exemplied above all in the gure of Christ. The queen of these virtues is always charity, which requires that Christians display to each other the same love that Christ displayed to them. The rst themes sounded in the Mass are thus ones of sin, guilt, and how one ought to live. The rst functions called uponself-observation, self-criticism, and the ego idealalso represent the three faculties of the superego, which, however, as has been noted, is the last of the psychic structures to be developed. In relation to the psychic functions exercised in the rst half of the Mass, those evoked in its latter half would therefore seem to mark a psychological regression. 2 The transition from the Penitential Rite and the Liturgy of the Word to the second half of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, is signaled by the physical movement of the priest from the lectern or pulpit to the altar and by a change in liturgical style. From this point, the meaning of the Mass is communicated at least as much preverbally as verbally. The simple but expressive and reverential gestures of the priest convey even to visiting strangers that he is about some work of great import, and though Catholics have in recent years been reminded by the Catechism (1997) that the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist form one single act of worship (1346), they continue to feel the Eucharist to be the most sacred part of the Mass. Whereas they stand or sit for most of the Mass, it is only during the consecration of bread and wine that they kneel. The moment at which the priest holds the just-consecrated host aloft for the contemplation and adoration of the faithful inspires a particular sense of awe, prompting some worshipers to lower their eyes in reverence.

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

It becomes immediately clear that the solemn action the assembly has gathered to witnessand to participate in vicariouslyis an act of sacrice. The people pray, May the Lord accept the sacrice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his Church. What many Christians call the Lords Supper, Catholics call the Sacrice of the Mass, which they speak of as being offered, the offering being the consecrated bread they call the host, from the Latin hostia, meaning victim. Historically considered, the thought of a sacricial rite must seem and feel to us like an anachronism, a practice associated with a more primitive manner of life and mode of thought that we have long surpassed, something alien but not entirely unfamiliar. The more archaic motives of sacrice, propitiation, petition, and gratitude are also those of the Mass. (Eucharistia means giving of thanks.) The sacricial offerings of bread and wine, described by the priest as gifts of the earth, fruit of the vine, and work of human hands, also represent traditional offerings. Once consecrated, however, the bread and wine become for Catholics a living victim, and the sacrice of the Mass becomes the sacrice of the cross. In the words of the Catechism: The sacrice of Christ and the sacrice of the Eucharist are one single sacrice: The victim is one and the same: the same now offers through the ministry of priests, who then offered himself on the cross; only the manner of offering is different.1 (1997, 1367; italics in original) This understanding of the Mass as the reenactment of the sacricial death of Christ offers material for both theological and psychoanalytic reection. It is made unequivocally clear by the language of the Mass that the sacrice is offered to the Father, and equally clear that the sacricial victim is the Fathers only Son. Moreover, in the Eucharistic prayer the Father is asked to accept the sacrice as he accepted the sacrice of Abraham, our Father in faith, presumably an allusion to Abrahams willingness to sacrice his only son, Isaac, an analogy with Christs sacricial death that the Church endorses by reading the story of Abraham and Isaac during the celebration of the Easter Vigil.

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The sacricial character of Christs death was acknowledged very early in Christian thought and is taken for granted in numerous passages of the New Testament, but how that sacricial death is to be understood is an issue that has divided theologians and even churches. The Catholic church has in fact avoided any formal pronouncement on the matter, but in the absence of an authoritative formulation one view of Christs sacrice has been particularly widely and persistently held by Catholics, who suppose it to be the orthodox teaching of the Church. It is the theory of atonement through satisfaction proposed by St. Anselm. According to this theory, humanitys sin, because it was an offense against the innite God, was itself innite and therefore required an innite satisfaction, which could be offered only by an innite being, the Son of God in the person of Christ. The implication that the offended Father required the death of his Son in satisfaction has itself been found morally offensive by many, and it is deemphasized in recent theology. Karl Rahner (1975), for example, has criticized this theory as dependent on the particular categories of Germanic law and as failing to acknowledge that Gods mind is not moved by history and that reparation for sin has already been surpassed by forgiveness. Signicantly, there is no entry for atonement in the index to the present Catechism. Nevertheless, the theory continues to enjoy a persistent underground life in Catholic thinking.2 Its persistence, therefore, invites a psychoanalytic reading. Although the Church has consistently taught that Christ was completely obedient to the will of his Father and was therefore himself without sin, those attending Mass know they have not been sinless and remember that they were not in all things obedient to their fathers. Responding to the Mass unconsciously as well as consciously, they will be reminded of a more primitive sense of human justice: what is the crime for which the death of a son is the most tting atonement, if not an attempt by the son on the fathers life? In that region of the mind over which the catechist exercises little authority, the doctrine of the atonement continues to evoke disquieting fantasies of patricide and licide. For psychoanalysis, the paradigmatic father-son relationship is, of course, that of Laius and Oedipus. We remember the story of Oedipus as the story of a sons aggression against

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

his father, but in fact the story begins with the aggression of a father towards his son. Having learned from an oracle that he would be slain by his son, Laius thrust a spike through the feet of the infant Oedipus and abandoned him to die, presumably projecting his own patricidal impulses onto his son. A number of psychoanalysts have therefore adopted the idea of a Laius complex, formulated by George Devereux (1953), to describe the complement to the more familiar Oedipus complex. In his survey of child sacrice in history and myth, Martin Bergmann (1992) has considered not only the story of Laius and Oedipus but also Abrahams aborted sacrice of his son Isaac and the consummated sacrice of Christ on the cross. He argues that it is because of the Oedipus complex that the sacrice of Isaac and the sacrice of Christ appear as frightening events in the unconscious of every child, and that the sacrice of children was a collective trauma with which Western religions are still struggling (8). Most fathers doubtless love their sons, thinking of them as another self through whom they themselves expect to survive, but fathers are also vulnerable to the power of a darker unconscious logic: if the birth of a son signals the fathers mortality, the death of a son may be a pathway to the fathers survival. For Bergmann, the Laius complex is not, like the Oedipus complex, a developmental phase, but rather an obstacle, potential in all men and actual in some, to the enjoyment of fatherhood (1992, 313). And though sons are indeed predisposed to love their fathers (in the complete Oedipus complex the son also loves his father and is jealous of his mother), they also fear mutilation at their fathers hands whether or not they have actually been threatened with it. Under the pressure of this fear, the son renounces his incestuous desires for his mother and achieves identication with his father. Thus, in the Penitential Rite and the Liturgy of the Word, the Mass activates the functions of the superego by reenacting Christs sacricial death, which in turn recalls the oedipal rivalry from which the consolidated superego originally arose.3

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While the Mass may be described as a sacricial ritual, no one would be tempted to describe it as a ritual sacrice. No knife is wielded and no blood actually shed. The ritual character so predominates over the sacricial that a visitor unfamiliar with its language and with the Christian tradition would probably not recognize what he was witnessing as a sacrice although he would certainly be aware it was a ritual of great signicance to those participating in it. The sacrice of the Mass, in other words, is not so much actually performed as ritually reenacted. But the reenactment or, to borrow the term of the Catechism, the re-presentation of an event inevitably suggests an analogy with a theatrical performance. As the presider at the Eucharistic celebration invested with the power to pronounce the words of consecration, This is my body, the priest is said to function in persona Christi, that is, in the role of Christ, persona originally designating the mask worn by actors. At the time of the Reformation, foes of the theater were also often foes of the Catholic church and its sacramental institutions, and for the same reason.4 According to the early seventeenth-century Protestant controversialist Samuel Harsnett, Catholicism was mimic superstition. Harsnett is quoted by Stephen Greenblatt (1988) in his inuential analysis of the changing relationship between religion and theater in the early modern period. According to Greenblatt, Harsnett sought to drive the Catholic church into the theater, just as during the Reformation Catholic clerical garmentsthe copes and albs and amices and stoles that were the glories of medieval textile craftswere sold to the players (112). Greenblatt summarizes the new relation between the theater and the church: The ofcial church dismantles and cedes to the players the powerful mechanisms of an unwanted and dangerous charisma; in return the players conrm the charge that those mechanisms are theatrical and hence illusory (120). But the theatricality of the Mass has also had its defenders. In T. S. Eliots A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry (1928), one of the interlocutors (presumably Eliot himself) announces, I say that the consummation of the drama, the perfect and ideal drama, is to be found in the ceremony of the Mass, and he

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

insists that the only dramatic satisfaction that I nd now is in a High Mass well performed (35). One might suppose that Catholics attending Mass resemble the members of a theater audience who willingly succumb to the illusion that what they know to be a carefully rehearsed simulation or imitation is a real action taking place in their presence, and that the leading gures in the action whom they recognize by their voice and appearance as renowned performers are in reality Desdemona or King Lear. But the analogy fails. The Mass is not a passion play. Catholics are not permitted to make any essential distinction between the Mass and what it re-presents. According to the Catechism (1997), The sacrice of Christ and the sacrice of the Eucharist are one single sacrice (1367). The consecrated bread and wine are really the body and blood of Christ, not merely the symbols under which they are venerated. How this is possible is a mystery that Catholics can accept only on faith: praestet des supplementum sensuum defectui (faith lends assistance where the senses fail). Every adult Catholic, however, was once a child whose sense of reality was more exible and for whom, therefore, the Eucharist presented less of a mystery. This more exible reality was of particular interest to Winnicott (1953), who described the infant as inhabiting an area of experience intermediate between inner and external realms. In later life, he added, this space of illusion is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientic work (97). The infants rst transitional object, a piece of blanket or sheet, is thus a precursor of symbolic experience in the adult, although, as Winnicott adds, the distinction between a symbol and what it symbolizes is drawn differently at different times by different persons. His example is the Eucharist: For instance, if we consider the wafer of the Blessed Sacrament, which is symbolic of the Body of Christ, I think I am right in saying that for the Roman Catholic community it is the body, and for the Protestant community it is a substitute, a reminder, and is essentially not, in fact, actually the body itself. Yet in both cases it is a symbol (92; italics in original).5 The young daughter of a woman I know informed her mother that when she made her First Communion she would

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not drink from the cup because, as she explained, I dont like the taste of blood. Speaking of the infantile element in the mind that overemphasizes psychical in comparison with material reality, Freud (1919) gives as an example those occasions on which a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes (244). Such infantile thinking is normally surmounted with the passage of time, but it can be reactivated under certain circumstances. I have been told by several adult converts to Catholicism that when they received communion for the rst time the host felt warm to the tongue. Unable to resolve rationally the contradiction between the evidence of their senses and the conviction of their faith, some adult Catholics may regress to modes of thinking that have for the most part been surmounted. Thus, though the Mass resembles a dramatic performance and a symbolic representation, the resemblance is imperfect. The Mass resists the very analogies it invites. Regarded less as drama and symbolism than purely as ritual, the Mass might be said to resemble the neurotic ceremonies studied by Freud. A xed invariant structure of observances and prohibitions, a neurotic ceremony may not be interrupted and must be repeated. The resemblance was certainly more apparent in the period before the liturgical reforms of the 1960s, when the rubrics or ceremonial directives were extraordinarily detailed and precise, forbidding any improvisation or spontaneity. The physical movements of the priest were rigidly prescribed. Ceremonial bows of the head were distinguished from medium or deeper bows of the body. The priests thumb and index nger were to be held together once they had touched the consecrated host. If a priest was unable to nish Mass because of illness, another priest was called to nish it. In seminary, stories were told of a priest who haunted the church in which he once failed to nish celebrating Mass. In Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices (1907), Freud associates neurotic ceremonies with religious rituals largely because they perform the same psychological function: they serve the anxious mind against some instinctual impulse that has been repressed but that found expression in childhood. Freud does, however, acknowledge an apparent distinction: the rituals of religion, unlike the ceremonies of neurotics, are

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

public and communal, not private; and unlike the apparently senseless ceremonies of neurotics, they are full of signicance and symbolic meaning (119). But neurotic ceremonies are themselves not without meaning for Freud, though the meaning is one of which the participants are probably unconscious. Nevertheless, Freud still seems to be thinking of the contrast between a private and a socially shared religion when he suggests that the impulses repressed in the case of religious rituals are not solely sexual but are also hostile, socially harmful (127) instincts, the very impulses a religious community seeks to inhibit and counteract in its members. If a neurotic ceremony resembles a private religion, a religious ritual obsessionally performed may be said to resemble a neurotic ceremony. I have been told of a priest who, in the years before the liturgy was reformed, suffered from such acute anxiety lest he pronounce the words of consecration with insufcient care and reverence that he could speak the sacred words only in a grotesque stutter. Of course, not all priests were so obsessive, and many welcomed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, but the very fact that the Church thought reform necessary conrms Freuds observation (1907) that obsessional actions represent a displacement from something important to something trivial: It cannot be denied that in the religious eld as well there is a similar tendency to a displacement of values, and in the same direction, so that the petty ceremonials of religious practices gradually become the essential thing and push aside the underlying thoughts. That is why religions are subject to reforms which work retroactively and aim at re-establishment of the original balance of values. (126) When we regard the Mass as an elaborated religious ritual and we reect on the origin of the obsessional neuroses that such rituals resemble, we are reminded of an earlier period of mental life at which we might have become xated and to which as adults it is therefore still possible for us to regress.

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A change in the character of the actions of the priest becomes apparent as he introduces the nal part of the Mass. Even the alien visitor who was able to overlook the sacricial character of the priests earlier actions will recognize without difculty that he is now engaged in the preparation of a meal. The consecrated bread and wine are to be given as food to those in attendance. What was offered to the Father they will now consume themselves. A sense of anticipation is felt even by small children who want some too. Whereas the meaning of the Mass has thus far been communicated above all by word or symbolic gesture, the principal medium of communication now becomes the bodys mouth not as the instrument of speech but as the organ of ingestion. Continuing what I have called a psychologically regressive movement, the last part of the Mass communicates its meaning at the level of oral experience. Since we have been oral beings as long as we have been anything else, the oral stage is the earliest period of mental life studied by Freud.6 For approximately the rst eighteen months, the infants experience of pleasure and frustration as well as his means of expressing them are connected largely with the oral zone, and his later capacity for desire and satisfaction bear the impress of his earliest experiences. Freud (1905) wrote: There are thus good reasons why a child sucking at his mothers breast has become the prototype of every relation of love. The nding of an object is in fact a rending of it (222). Differentiation, as of activity from passivity, is difcult at this stage. Thus, people readily speak of infants as either feeding or being fed, as adult Catholics speak indifferently of taking or receiving communion. Disentangling what in an adult we would call love from what we would call aggression is also very difcult in infancy. As Freud (1921) observes, at the oral stage the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such (105). By foreshadowing, Freud (1905) with justication speaks of the oral stage as cannibalistic (198). With this proleptic use of the word, Freud (1921) alludes to the belief shared by societies in which cannibalism was practiced

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass

that it is possible to acquire the qualities of another person by eating parts of his body. The cannibal, he notes, has a devouring affection for his enemies and only devours people of whom he is fond (105). A highly sublimated form of such assimilation is represented by the psychological process of identication, but the early prototype of both cannibalism and identication remains the infants wish to incorporate the object of its desire. The analogy with the Eucharist was obvious to Freud as to others: Catholics hope to become more like Christ by consuming his body and blood.7 Catholics are not cannibals, but they began life at a stage of mental life for which we have no more apt name than cannibalistic; and until relatively recently it was felt that precautions needed to be taken against the tendency to regress to that state. In my youth, children preparing to receive communion for the rst time were forbidden to use their teeth. Writing in 1946, Marjorie Brierley accurately noted that a Catholic must go to Mass fasting and must swallow the consecrated wafer whole. Every precaution is thus taken to preserve the idealized object from cannibalistic destruction. . . . The spiritual renewal and worshipful refreshment, which is the gift of sacramental grace to the true believer, appears as a sublimated version of infantile sucking fulllment, in the form of loving, uninjuring incorporation of the idealized object. (70) In his Winnicottian account of the Eucharist, however, Brooke Hopkins (1989) emphasizes what Brierley excludes: Every time the believer takes the sacrament, he must acknowledge his own destructiveness (in eating the wafer, the symbol of the body, or the body itself) and his own faith that the love-object survives and continues to love (257). 5 Catholics at Mass do not eat alone either actually or symbolically. In more than one sense, they experience the meal with which the Mass concludes as an act of communion. The meal

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is shared with fellow Catholics and with those in communion with the Catholic church. Receiving the Eucharist, one is said to communicate, and a practicing Catholic is known as a communicant. As a shared meal, the Eucharist is thus performative of the community it symbolizes. The Eucharistic Prayer is offered in communion with the saints for the Church, the whole world, for the dead as well as for the living. But experiencing the Massas most Catholics doat the more archaic as well as at the more recent levels of the self, they are also reminded, unconsciously if not consciously, of another sense in which they are in communion. The priest prays that we may share in his divinity who deigned to share in our humanity, and behind the divine mysteries Catholics are invited to celebrate at Mass lies a very human mystery. Highly sublimated in form and intention, the ritual words and actions of the Mass evoke and recapitulate in a suggestively inverted sequence the early stages of mental life through which it is the destiny of every human being to pass. To be sure, no other order would be possible logically or theologically: the sacricial gifts must be offered before they are consumed, and repentance must precede the worthy celebration of the Eucharist. But psychologically the Mass moves from what comes later to what comes earlier, from outcome to origin. In this sense, the Mass may be said to illustrate Freuds observation (1937) that portions of our earlier organization always persist alongside of the more recent one, and even in normal development the transformation is never complete and residues of earlier libidinal xations may still be retained in the nal conguration. . . . What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence (229). It is through its sensed but not always acknowledged power to evoke the early origins of our shared humanity that the Mass gains much of the hold it exercises and maintains over the diverse body of the Catholic faithful. Department of English Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti, MI 48197

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The Psychological Power of the Catholic Mass Notes

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

The quotation is taken from an encyclical issued at the Council of Trent in 1502. Rahner (1976) notes that the theory of satisfaction appears on the periphery of ofcial church statements, but the extraordinary magisterium of the church did not take a position on it in any detailed way (288). I do not mean to minimize the existence of preoedipal aggression, but I do not discuss it here because it is not explicitly thematized in the theology of Christs sacricial death. The history of the antitheatrical prejudice has been traced back to Plato by Jonas Barish (1981), who notes that the ercer foes of the theater were also antiliturgical (76). The transitional character of religious experience has been elaborated by W. W. Meissner (1984) and by Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1979). Meissner highlights the faith dimension, the God-representation, the use of symbols, and the experience of prayer. Rizzuto focuses on the God-representations of twenty patients whom she studied in depth. Both writers agree that, as transitional phenomena, Godrepresentations undergo development according to ascertainable laws. Bowlbys attention to the infants attachment behavior leads him to question the designation of the earliest phase as oral. Nevertheless, Bowlby (1958) at one time characterized his own theory as combining the theory of primary object sucking with the theory of primary object clinging. Both psychological and theological interpretations illustrate the alliterative German saying, Der Mensch ist was er isst (You are what you eat). Freud (191213) traced the Eucharist to the totem meal, which commemorated the killing of the father of the primal horde and the devouring of his body. In a tribute to Totem and Taboo, Thomas Mann (1929) noted the paradox of the Christian Eucharist: who can fail to see in Christianity with its invocation and revival of older religious rites of civilized antiquity, its belief in souls, in the communal feast of the blood and esh of a divine sacrice, a modied reversion to earlier atrocities, an atavism, in which literally the lowest has become the highest (69). Theodore Reik (1957) argued that the original crime recorded in Genesis was an attempt to become like God by eating him. In Reiks interpretation of Christs sacricial death, the story of the tree that grew in Eden has its sequel in the tree of the cross erected on Calvary, and the price paid for the sacrilegious devouring of the Father-god was the consumption of his Son in the Eucharist.

References
Barish, Jonas A. 1981. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bergmann, Martin S. 1992. In the Shadow of Moloch: The Sacrice of Children and Its Impact on Western Religions. New York: Columbia University Press. Bowlby, John. 1958. The Nature of the Childs Tie to His Mother. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39:35071. Brierley, Marjorie. 1946. Notes on Psycho-Analysis and Integrative Living. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 28:57105. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1997. New York: Doubleday. Cross, F. L. ed. 1997. Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Devereux, George. 1953. Why Oedipus Killed Laius. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34:13441. Eliot, T. S. 1928. A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry. In Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1964, pp. 3145. Freud, Sigmund. 1905. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. S.E., 7:125243.

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