Unintelligent Design
by Robert Langs, M.D.
One of the defining debates of this first decade of the twenty-first century is centered on the problem of accounting for the bio-diversity and complexity of the living organisms on our planet. The controversy pits Darwinian and neo-Darwinian evolutionists on one side and advocates of intelligent design (ID)—the crafting of organisms by a gifted creator—on the other. The supporters of ID argue that countless organ systems in living beings are so complicated in their configurations and so unimaginably detailed in their coordinated operations that they could not have been fashioned by evolutionary processes. Their chief target is natural selection, the passive process through which organisms with advantageous features survive better in response to newly arrived, endangering environmental challenges than do organisms with less favorable attributes.
Those individuals who are committed to ID point to the intricacies of such biological entities as the paramecium’s flagella, the human eye, and blood clotting mechanisms as indications that only a creator, and a divine creator at that, could have fashioned such integrated elegance and utility. It is their contention that statistical analyses indicate that despite the postulated millions of years during which evolutionists believe that organisms have evolved, the probability of outcomes of this kind are vanishing small. Whether they acknowledge it or not—politics brings out the deceiver in all but a few—ID proponents have a view of creation that posits that all existing organisms, and in some cases, their relatively recent progenitors, appeared on earth in a singular instant, as a kind of biological big bang that was fashioned by none other than God himself. A supremely gifted, if not perfect God whose creations were and are models of perfection, especially when it comes to humans who were at the pinnacle of his creative thrusts.
There are, of course, many biological and scientific counter-arguments to these extravagant claims. There are fossil records that trace the evolution of these disputed complex organ systems through enormous expanses of time. The design people counter this argument by pointing to the gaps in these historical records which are therefore, in their view, incomplete and open to question. In this never-ending circle of claims and counter-claims, evolutionary biologists then point to the many post-dictions and predictions that have been made on the basis of evolutionary theory and describe well defined experiments in nature in which adverse environmental changes were followed by adaptive organismic changes in ways that are in keeping with evolutionary thinking. They also turn to genetic studies that have supported many aspects of the theory of evolution by tracing the fate and effects of mutations in maternal mitochondrial DNA as passed from one generation to another. All this and more has nonetheless been challenged one way or another by the adherents to the design thesis.
The situation calls for fresh ways to try to put this debate to rest. It would be especially fortuitous if we could find an organ system whose design presents a challenge to both ID and evolution so we could see which theory fares best. And it would be telling if that organ system was part of the mind in that the human mind is the biological entity that created both of the theories at issue—evolution and intelligent design.
I propose, then, to offer a fresh look at the human mind, as distinct from, yet sponsored by, the human brain. And I will be focusing on the design of one of the mind’s specialized modules called the emotion-processing mind. This entity is an organized collection of mental faculties that have been designed by whatever and whomever to cope with emotionally-charged environmental challenges. The module’s primary task is to respond to and cope with traumatic events, large and small, singular and collective, such as natural disasters and physical and psychological harm from other livings beings—other humans and oneself in particular.
Evolutionists would see this mental module as product of natural selection which passively and automatically favored humans minds configured to function best under newly emerging conditions of stress and damage. During the estimated 150,000 to 250,000 years since homo sapiens sapiens acquired language capabilities—a relatively short span of evolutionary time—humans have had to deal with increasingly levels of emotional and physical challenges. These range from dramatic climate changes and the enhanced resources of large and microscopic predators to the threats posed by socialization, city living, and the destructive capabilities of technical advances. While it is far easier to visualize the evolution of a body part, like a leg, lung, or brain, evolutionary theory posits that the human mind and its modules also have been subject to natural selection. Much has been written, for example, about changes over large spans of time in the broad-based modular capabilities of the human mind, but until recently, the emotion-processing mind has not been recognized as such nor has its evolutionary trajectory been subjected to study.
In contrast to these biological considerations, ID theorists would have it that the emotion-processing mind and the mind’s other modules were devised in an instant of creation. As such, the emotion-processing mind would be seen as one of those incredibly complex, ideally designed and optimally functioning entities that was crafted in one fell swoop to operate with utmost perfection. The ID belief in a consummately crafted human mind is a pivotal contention because the claim for its perfection is uniquely documented in Genesis (1:26-27) where, as part of the first creation story, it is written that after creating all manner of living beings:
“Then God said: ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…….
“ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” (Italics in the original.)
In this unusual passage, the bible—and for some, God, the creator—informs us that humans are the beneficiaries of God’s ultimate intelligent design. This implies that a perfect God created the perfect man and woman, who in their perfection were to have dominion over all of the other living creatures on earth. Thus, the human mind was forged by a profoundly wise creator in one fell swoop and is a prime example of the perfection of God’s most complex creations.
This belief presents us with an unexpected opportunity to test an aspect of the ID thesis. Oscar Wilde observed: “I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability”? Was Wilde on the mark with this wry comment which obliquely speaks against ID—and possibly evolution as well—or was he misreading the situation, at least in respect to the human mind?
Quite naturally, our first efforts to answer these questions are based on general impressions and they are anything but definitive. We are aware, for example, that our minds often fail us by misperceiving, misconceiving, and miscalculating, but we also recognize that the human mind has been able to forge some spectacular achievements. In the emotional realm, where the emotion-processing mind holds sway, the average person tends to have both evident successes in coping with emotionally-charged events like accidents and loss, but endures notable failures as well. On the impressionistic level of experience, then, one could argue pro or con regarding the idea that the human mind is a pinnacle of perfection. The debate between evolutionists and those who favor the ID thesis would continue on, unresolved and unabated.
Another broad approach to these issues involves comparisons between humans and other living entities. On the whole, both commentators on the bible and evolutionary biologists tend to point to the superior capabilities of the human mind as compared to the others species that have inhabited and presently inhabit the earth. A similar comparative conclusion can be made regarding the emotion-processing mind. While humans have many more types of danger situations to cope with than other living beings—i.e., significant threats to their ability to function and survive—they also have many more resources with which to deal with them. The very existence in humans of complex emotional resources, both physical and mental, is a reflection their highly advantageous adaptive repertoire. All in all, then, cross-species comparisons of mental resources speak for human superiority, but once more does little or nothing to resolve the ID-evolutionists debate.
There is, however, another way evaluating the features of the emotion-processing mind as they exist within each of us as humans. It turns out that a properly designed study of the details of the architecture and operations of this mental module provides information that has a distinctive bearing on the ID-evolution debate. The approach I shall use is founded on, but dramatically different from, Freud’s early ideas on how the emotion-related mind is structured. His picture of the mind was established on the basis of his contention that the most critical events in emotional life take place within the human mind itself. This inner-focused viewpoint stressed the role of conscious and unconscious intrapsychic needs, wishes, fantasies, and memories in both everyday life and neuroses. Among these needs, those that are incestuous and therefore the source of conflict, anxiety, and guilt, were thought to be chief among the most distressing aspects of emotional life. These anxiety-provoking needs are disguised in dreams, which therefore should be unraveled and interpreted accordingly. While many neo-Freudians have tended to disagree with Freud regarding the nature of the core human conflict—claiming, for example, that it lies with relationship issues or self-centered narcissistic needs—all of these later-day theories of psychoanalysis have maintained his inner-directed emphasis. In any case, the idea that, whatever the cause, the human mind often is in conflict has little to offer, pro or con, to the debate before us.
I turn now to an approach to the emotion-processing mind that does, however, have a bearing on this controversy. It is reality-centered rather than mind-centered. The basic idea, which is derived from evolutionary biology, is that the basic conflicts and issues in emotional life are evoked by external events rather than inner needs and wishes—i.e., that reality is far more emotionally affecting than fantasy. The key realization is that traumatic events and their many implications are the major causes of both emotional ills and human creativity. This shift in viewpoint proves to be one of those differences that makes a great deal of difference.
In regard to the design of the emotion-processing mind, Freud’s most singular insight—and it was as much on the mark as it was off base—was that this mental module is comprised of two basic systems. The contents of one system, the conscious system, are actually or potentially present, directly and undisguised, in awareness, while the contents of the other system, the unconscious system, exist outside of awareness and reach consciousness solely in disguised forms. Looking at dreams in light of his inner-mental bias, Freud proposed a series of consistent features for each of these system. Thus, the conscious system was said to be in touch with reality; controlled; single-meaning in its contents, which are directly conveyed without disguise; capable of delay and restraint in respect to its needs and wishes; rational and logical; and quite mature in nature. In contrast, he characterized the unconscious system as being out of touch with reality; uncontrolled; having contents and images with multiple meanings that reach awareness in disguise; intent on discharging or expressing its needs and wishes regardless of reality considerations; irrational and illogical; and quite primitive in nature. The details of Freud’s proposed design of the mind, in which its more primitive parts operate outside of awareness and its more mature parts do so consciously, would appear to be a relatively ideal arrangement but as such, it could be the result of either ID or evolution.
The view of the emotion-processing mind as a basically adaptive instrument designed to cope with the outer world and its traumas leads to a picture of the mind that turns Freud’s picture on its ears. On the basis of how the emotion-processing mind responds to emotionally-charged events, the conscious system (mind) has been found to be crude and clumsy; often totally out of touch with reality; bent on getting its needs satisfied no matter what the reality; inclined towards knowledge reduction and therefore rather dense if not utterly stupid when it comes to emotion-related understanding, choices, and actions; and extremely defensive and inclined towards the extensive use of denial, obliteration, and misperception. On the other hand, the deep unconscious system (mind), is highly perceptive; exquisitely in touch with reality and with the true nature of traumatic events; capable of postponing the satisfaction of its needs and wishes; relatively open and non-defensive when it comes to the most disturbing implications of emotionally-charged events; and emotionally wise and adaptively sagacious beyond anything that we can muster consciously. What’s more, the two systems do not act cooperatively but do so relatively independently of each other and they tend to take diametrically opposite views of emotionally important incidents—with the conscious mind generally in error and the unconscious mind on the mark.
It comes down to this: As humans, we are at a loss consciously when it comes to knowing what we are dealing with emotionally, how we are coping with it, and what the best coping strategy is at the moment. On the other hand, when we have no conscious idea of what we are being confronted with emotionally, we are intensely aware of what the problem is and we know exactly what we should do about it. The main problem with this unconscious wisdom is that it is not directly available to us, but is encoded in our dreams and stories. We therefore need to decode these dreams in light of the traumatic incidents that have evoked them—a process called trigger decoding—in order to get in touch with this, our own inner wisdom. But it so happens that the conscious mind is loathe to carry out this process—what the human mind cannot bear in awareness, the conscious mind wants to keep that way. The loss of knowledge, wisdom, and the chance to live in peace, personally and collectively, is enormous.
These discoveries clearly indicate that the human mind, and the emotion-processing mind in particular, is far from ideal. The claim for a divine creator who fashioned a complex and elegantly efficient human mind is not substantiated. In fact, the emotion-processing mind appears to be poorly designed, fashioned for failure far more than success, and defective in critical ways. That said, we can see that the design of the emotion-processing mind also poses a problem for evolution and natural selection: What could have driven nature to select for such an inefficient and ignorant conscious mind? That is, what possible survival value can lie in a conscious mind fashioned for denial and ignorance? These design features surely have caused humankind no end of grief. Why so?
Marla is a single, twenty-five year old woman who had been living with Ted for three years and had just ended her relationship with him because he backed away from marrying her. She meets Mark on a blind date and is immediately attracted to him. The night of their first date she dreams of Al, a man she dated briefly in college until he quit school to take over his family’s business. In the dream, she and Al are having a drink at a bar and he accidentally spills his drink onto her dress. She remembers Al as a charming man who was a little careless at times and she connects him to Mark who also seems charming to her.
Marla gives little thought to her dream. She falls in love and gets heavily involved with Mark only to discover months later that he’s a cheater and liar, that he’s married and has two children and that he’s inclined to be physically violent when he feels he’s been provoked. The night she finally frees herself from Mark she dreams again of Al: They are together in a car that he’s driving and the car slowly skids into a telephone pole. She awakens with a start.
This time the image of Al prompts Marla to recall a long forgotten memory, namely, that a year after he left college she read in a newspaper that he had destroyed his family’s business and had attempted suicide after being indicted for assaulting his wife. With a shudder, Marla recalls Al’s violent temper and a time when they were at a bar and he barely held back from beating her because she had forgotten to purchase tickets for a movie they wanted to see. With a start, Al’s suicide attempt prompts her to remember that a month before she met Mark, her father, who had an inoperable cancer of the bowel, had died by virtue of her family’s secret arrangements for his assisted suicide.
This bare-bones story tells you almost everything you need to know about the unintelligent design of the emotion-processing mind. I know from my work as a psychoanalyst that it is a prototypical narrative because in one form or another, I hear versions of this frustrating tale every day of my working life. Recognizing the implications of incidents of this kind is what led me, with much struggle, to abandon the basic inner-mental premise of Freud’s psychoanalysis and its many variants, and to propose in its place that traumatic realities are what damage our lives no matter how we happen to recall, think about, and fantasize about them. The emotion-processing mind is, as I said, designed first and foremost to process and cope with these traumatic realities, and only secondarily, with what we imagine in response to them and our inner needs.
Once stated, this may seem obvious, given that adapting to environmental challenges is the primary function of every living being that has occupied our earth. But the persistent belief that human life is otherwise organized is itself a clue to the fact that the emotion-processing mind is anything but intelligently crafted. As soon as you begin to recognize the events that trigger our emotion-related decisions and actions, you discover that our dreams and fantasies are keyed into dealing with these realities. And you discover too that we try to cope with our traumas in two very different ways: Consciously, as reflected in the manifest contents or the surface of a dream and deep unconsciously, as reflected in the encoded meanings of these same dream images.
Look at Marla. She meets Mark on a blind date and consciously falls in love with him only to discover, to her conscious surprise, that he’s a cheat and wife-beater. After her first date with Mark, she dreams of Al but thinks only of how attractive Al was in the past, thereby affirming her attraction to Mark. Without the least idea that she has done so, she has obliterated or denied herself conscious access to her other recollections of Al, memories that would have warned her that danger lay ahead. It’s only after she’s been traumatized by Mark that she recalls the terrible incidents with, and facts about, Al and the awful experience she had had with the death of her father.
Not very intelligent: A mind designed to consciously obliterate crucial facts and truths that could spare us an inordinate amount of emotional pain. A conscious mind that appears to be adaptively deranged and geared to unwittingly punish us and make us suffer far more than helping us to gain satisfaction and happiness.
It’s important to notice that Marla’s dream and her associations to the dream—her dream-associational network—conveys a view of Mark that is very different from her conscious, enamoured picture. The encoded dream imagery reflects Marla’s deep unconscious realization that Mark is a dangerous man who will harm her in some terrible way. The dream network also indicates by means of the allusion to Al’s suicide attempt that Marla’s deep unconscious mind understands that her attraction to Mark is not only self-punishing, but also related in some way to the unconscious guilt that she was feeling in regard to the family-assisted death of her father.
What the conscious mind denies and obliterates, the deep unconscious mind knows full well. The conscious mind seems to be designed to work against our best interests, while the deep unconscious mind favors the turn to highly suitable adaptive solutions to our emotional concerns. But another fateful problem is that, again by design, we have no way of using this profound deep unconscious wisdom because it reaches our conscious minds in disguise—disguises that we’d rather not undo because they always are linked to emotionally painful behaviors and events that we are afraid to face head on.
When it comes to the flawed design of the emotion-processing mind, ID thinkers have no way of understanding why the supposed crowning achievement of a divine creator is a crowning failure for both the designer and their theory of creation. However, had they read their bible more carefully, they might have anticipated this design failure because these flaws in the emotion-processing mind are revealed in Genesis. As for evolutionists, once they have recognized the existence of this problem, they would be in a position to attempt to scientifically explain its basis. As implied by Popper’s well known dictum that a viable theory must be falsifiable, we should be able to learn more from one of evolution’s greatest failures than from its many successes.
As for how the bible can shed light on this situation, problems with God’s design of the human mind can be gleaned from the opening stories of creation and from his first interactions with living beings—Adam, Eve, and the serpent. In creating Eden, God places two special trees at its center: The tree of eternal life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. He then forbids Adam to eat from the second tree, warning him that he will die if he does so. Soon after, Eve is born from Adam’s rib and the serpent comes to Eve, challenging God’s promise of death. Eve sees that the tree is desired to be wise and eats the forbidden fruit and she gives some to Adam who also eats it. They then realize that they are naked and try to hide from God who, on discovering their transgression, punishes the three offenders. He then expels Adam and Eve from the garden and blocks their way to the tree of eternal life.
From this summary, we can deduce that the bible does not portray God as an ideal or intelligent designer, a perfect creator. This is the case because he fashioned humans with minds that lacked the capacity for knowledge of good and evil, that is, for what we may think of as divine, moral, and emotionally-relevant adaptive wisdom. Even as God says that he will fashion male and female in his image, he does so without providing them with certain key mental faculties. In this light, we can see that, for reasons unspecified in the bible, Eve was seeking to complete God’s work and to give herself and humankind a more effective, moral and adaptively wise mind.
Taking a closer look at this accomplishment, we see that the result of eating the forbidden fruit is that Adam and Eve realize that they are naked and cover themselves. This insight, which is the sole consequence of their act, has been variously interpreted. Some see it as a reflection of their attaining separate identities in that they seem to have been united as one after Eve’s birth. Others, treating the nudity in a concrete manner, see it as a reflection of the couple’s dawning awareness of their sexuality—a doubtful suggestion seeing that they are married and soon to have children without signs of conflict. The third and most compelling meaning of their nakedness—and by implication of their acquiring divine knowledge—is that it is a reflection of the newly attained knowledge that they are vulnerable to, and unprotected against, the prospect of death and the anxieties it evokes.
This last conjecture finds considerable support in the story itself. God warns that death will be the consequence of eating the forbidden fruit, while the serpent contradicts him. Both prove to be right in that the couple do not die, but evidently become aware of death and of their personal mortality. In addition, on learning what they have done, God not only expels them from paradise, but also bars them from gaining access to the tree of eternal life. Heretofore, Adam and Eve have showed no interest in this tree, but God evidently knows that, having eaten the forbidden fruit and having acquired death-related divine knowledge, they will seek immortality—an attribute that he alone can possess.
It appears then that for humans, divine knowledge entails the explicit awareness of death and arouses a need for immortality that cannot be satisfied. It is no coincidence then that the very next story in the bible is about the death of Abel who is murdered by his brother, Cain, and that many stories of violence and death soon follow. Indeed, to this very day violence and death are the central issues of life on earth. As the bible shows, the problem for us as human is not simply that we die, but that we experience various forms of death anxiety that influence our most critical decisions and behaviors each day of our knowing lives.
There are three forms of death anxiety and we react differently to each of them. There is existential death anxiety which is caused by the explicit awareness of our mortality; we cope with this anxiety by invoking various kinds of denial in both thought and action. There also is predatory death anxiety which is caused by threats to our lives and mental stability from natural disasters and other living beings, especially other humans; we cope with these threats by mobilizing our psychological and physical resources. And finally, there is predator death anxiety which is caused by the harm we perpetrate against others; we respond to these anxieties by feeling guilty, often unconsciously, and unwittingly punishing ourselves accordingly.
Eve and Adam sinned against God, but they did not act in an evil manner—they did not harm either themselves or others. There is however a link between the acquisition of knowledge about death and evil thoughts and actions because death anxiety is the basic motive behind evil acts, which typically are invoked in order to deny our vulnerabilities, especially our ultimate defenselessness against dying.
All in all, coping with death and its attendant anxieties is the fundamental adaptive task for all humans and death-related events, issues, and conflicts are the root source of human foibles and emotional dysfunctions—and human creativity as well.
How then do we put all of this together in order to understand the present-day design of the emotion-processing mind? Let’s first look at the religious view of the mind as reflected in the idea of ID and in the bible. In essence, it appears that God designed the human mind so it lacked awareness of death and operated without a sense of morality. In addition, he warned Adam to keep it that way and made it a sin to do otherwise. Why so?
The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden indicates that one reason for God’s injunction against eating from the tree of knowledge is that humans can dwell in paradise only on the basis of divine ignorance, that is, without an awareness of death. As described by writers like Sam Harris (Norton, 2004) in “The End of Faith,” this requisite prevails to the present day in that believing in God is a way of finding spirituality and inner peace through what is best characterized as blind faith. In our terms, religious beliefs are a way of denying the inevitability of personal death and it reaches its ultimate form in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Given that some means of denying death is essential for emotional peace, this adaptation-related appraisal is not meant to demean religious beliefs or to engage in discussions of their truth value. The important point for the moment is the need to note that throughout the history of civilization, religious convictions have been responsible for countless acts of violence and harm. This realization suggests that this type of effort to cope with life’s death-related adversities leaves much to be desired.
In crafting the human mind, God evidently did not know how to provide humans with the capacity to deal with death-related issues—the core problem in our lives. Given that God created humans in his image, we are entitled to conjecture that God himself may well have suffered from unresolved forms of death anxiety. Much as is true of humans, God makes use of denial and mindlessness to combat these anxieties and these defenses seem to be as inadequate for God as they are for humans. There is much in the bible that is in keeping with this proposition. To cite an incomplete sampling from Genesis: God both condemns and protects Cain for having murdered his brother; God destroys humankind with a flood but then vows to never again try to solve the problem of human evil in that way; and he commands Abraham to kill his son, Isaac, but rescinds the command at the eleventh hour. Handling death and violence does indeed appear to be an unresolved problem for God.
The story of Babel, which follows the flood, is of special note in this regard. Having in their possession a single, united language, humans attempt to seize godlike enlightenment and powers for themselves. In his evident anxiety about becoming unnecessary and extinct—essentially, that he would die—God confuses their languages so that humans can no longer understand each other and he scatters them over the earth. Here, God seems to have experienced predatory death anxieties and defended himself against annihilation by humans by using his superhuman prowess to defeat this attempt at murder. But the story also may be seen as a disguised or symbolic version of the creation of the unconscious mind—the encoded human language that no conscious mind can immediately fathom. The first dream described in the bible soon follows: King Abimelech’s dream of God warning him that he has taken a married woman, Abraham’s wife, Sarah, into bed with him and that he is about to commit the sin of adultery which is punishable by death. In this light, we can suspect that encoded narratives are the present-day vehicle for the human expression of divine knowledge and wisdom, and that decoding dreams so as to access this knowledge, always entails a disturbing brush with death.
Turning now to the science of biology, natural selection does not fare much better in regard to the evolved design of the emotion-processing mind. these respects. There are many paradoxes that need to be to explained. Why does this mental module have a two-system configuration? Why is the conscious mind so inordinately devoted to denial and defensiveness so as to render us oblivious to some of the most crucial inputs we experience in our lives? Why is the conscious mind also prone to adopting compromised moral positions and why is it so adaptively unwise and so exceedingly self-punitive? We also need to explain why the deep unconscious system is so eminently wise, open to the most terrible implications and meanings of our own behaviors and those of others, and so puritanically moral and adaptively effective. Overall, we need to understand why natural selection has been so seemingly ineffective when it came to choosing for the survival value of emotion-processing minds.
The answer to these puzzling questions appears to lie with our unique conscious awareness of death and our experiences with the three forms of death anxiety. About 150,000 years ago, humans acquired the use of language. With language we were able to mentally process both positive and negative events when away from the scene of an incident. We also developed a faculty for abstracting ideas and meanings from events and were able to elaborate on them concretely and symbolically so as to become innovative and creative in ways unknown in prior species. In addition, language brought us a sense of our individuality and personal identities, as well as the ability to consciously anticipate many of the consequences of our behaviors. We became able to foretell the future and with this came the explicit recognition that certain acts do or can lead to harm or death and that death itself is inevitable for all humans.
Death and death anxiety became the selection factors that shaped the evolved design of the emotion-processing mind. This was and is an unusual state of affairs because here-to-for selection factors were entirely environmental and external to living beings. But in this case, the conscious awareness of threats to human life became a discombobulating force that threatened to derail human functioning and coping skills, and thus became a serious threat to personal and collective survival. Given the hopelessness of attempts to cope with the inevitability of death—i.e., to live forever—it appears that individuals who effectively denied the dangers posed by the certainty of personal of death survived better than those who lacked these capabilities. In addition, people who were more resourceful at self-defense and those who had sufficient guilt to motivate them to avoid unduly harming others in ways that would lead to reprisals probably survived better than those who lacked such attributes.
Most of these coping strategies are, however, extremely costly in that they promote violence against others and a kind of conscious ignorance that renders us vulnerable to unrecognized sources of harm. The situation is not unlike the natural selection for immunity to malaria in people living in tropical climates. The trade off there lies with the link between the genes that convey this immunity and those that cause sickle cell anemia. Similarly, denial of death helps us to avoid mental breakdowns, but it is linked to serious limitations in our conscious knowledge-base and usable adaptive resources.
Neither God nor natural selection ‘knew’ or ‘knows’ how to deal effectively with death and the anxieties that it evokes. This failure is compounded by the propensity of the conscious mind to deny—i.e., fail to recognize—that it is in a state of denial. In addition, the conscious mind unwittingly opposes the acquisition of divine knowledge because it is death-related and anxiety-provoking. And because this knowledge is encoded in our dreams and storied tales, the conscious mind also does everything it can to avoid properly decoding the imagery and themes contained in these narratives. It greatly prefers to turn to cliches that are of little adaptive value rather than risk the anxiety-provoking acquisition of divine wisdom, which, although enormously adaptive, is often unbearable to behold. Nowhere are these preferences more evident yet critical than in the psychoanalytic and dynamic psychotherapeutic situations where this kind of curative pursuit should hold sway. Instead, both patients and their therapists seek and thrive on patently obvious, mundane, cliched seeming insights and interpretations that are light years away from the divine realm of deep unconscious experience and wisdom.
Who then might lead us from divine ignorance to consciously available divine wisdom? The guides for such pursuits have always been our shamans, seers, and holy men and women. Whatever their successes and failures, it seems clear that we need to develop a benign, healing form of rational spirituality if we are to find true and lasting peace, individually and collectively (see again, Harris, ibid). It follows from this that one group of new spiritual leaders should be constituted as properly informed psychoanalysts and that one of our spiritual sanctuaries should be the psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic settings. This is, of course, an unexpected advisory and one that Freud would surely think of as mad, but it is well informed. The therapeutic setting is, at present, the only place where individuals—i.e., patients—are naturally inclined to encode the secrets connected with their traumas and anxieties, and other individuals—i.e., therapists—can be trained to trigger decode their meanings. Rare is the person who can do this on their own so this appears to be the best means of gaining divine wisdom and of finding ways to resolve our death-related issues in a truly safe and adaptive manner.
The psychoanalytic pursuit of divine knowledge would not detract from the healing process, but would enhance it. Presently, psychoanalysts are soulless because they trade in mundane knowledge. They do not decode their patients’ narratives in light of the evocative traumatic-related triggers that evoke these storied themes. Nor do they deal with the profound, unconsciously experienced archetypal meanings of their patients’ death-related experiences, past and present, much of it activated by their therapists’ interventions within the therapy situation. As such, they do not enter the awesome realm of deep unconscious experience and divine wisdom.
Despite themselves, psychoanalysts presently are aligned with God rather than the serpent. They implicitly believe and convey to their patients the idea that gaining divine knowledge will lead to unbearable death-related anxieties and punishments in some real yet symbolic manner for both themselves and their clients. This position suits most patients who, at bottom, shy away from being Eve-like, that is, from engaging in the pursuit of divine knowledge and wisdom. There are, in fact, very few Eve-patients and even fewer serpent-therapists in this world today. Eve-patients communicate encoded narratives and accept their trigger decoded interpretations as offered by serpent-therapists who believe that all concerned will survive and even flourish in the wake of such insights.
By and large, then, by evolved design, we humans are neither Eves nor serpents, but loyal subjects of God in his edict that humans can live and survive best in the midst of divine ignorance. Eves and serpents therefore live in defiance of nature and act against their own natural inclinations.
I know much of this full well because, for reasons I’ve yet to fully fathom, I am a serpent-therapist. I have offered many dozens of patients the opportunity to play Eve to my implicit reassurances that they will survive the quest for divine knowledge as linked to their personal death-related traumas. Few patients accept this challenge, but those who do so and endure show an intuitive bravery that is rare among humans. But only Eve-patients and serpent-therapists can discover the deepest and most critical ramifications and meanings of death and its pervasive visible and invisible influence on our lives.
In this connection, my experience with present-day Eves indicates that the biblical Eve’s motive for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which goes unremarked in the bible, must have been derived from a personal death-related trauma. A review of the biblical tale suggests that the most likely form it took was a spontaneous abortion. As countless writers and philosophers have told us, death alone drives the human quest for the absolute truths of life—and death.
To illustrate, I turn to a recent interlude in Haruki Murakami’s novel, "The Wind-up Bird Chronicle". His character, May Kasahara, a sixteen year old Eve-like character, is speaking to the narrator of the story, Toru Okada, who is sitting at the bottom of a dry well unable to leave because May has taken away his exit ladder:
“I mean.... this is what I think.... but... people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they’re going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they should bother, they’d probably just figure, ‘Oh, well, I’ve got plenty of time for that. I’ll think about it later.’ But we can’t wait till later. We’ve got to think about it right this second. I might get run over by a truck tomorrow afternoon. And you, Mr. Wind-up Bird: you might starve to death. One morning three days from now, you could be dead in the bottom of a well. See? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That’s what I think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things.” (New York: Vintage International, 1998, pages 258-9)
As a psychoanalyst, however much a renegade, I dutifully end this article with a quote from Freud, who was a great denier of death and who offered psychoanalysts a car load of ways to deny the importance of death and death anxiety in human life. To cite a few of his most notable efforts along these lines, he generated the thesis that incest and sex rather than violence and death are the root causes of neuroses; proposed that death is not represented in the unconscious; argued that sexual fantasies outweigh grim realities; claimed that rather than fear death, we have a instinctual wish to die; and proposed that, despite the presence in the story of one attempt at murder, one actual murder, two suicides, and one act of self-blinding the Oedipus myth is mainly about the male child’s incestuous wishes for his mother. That said, these are his unheeded words spoken in the context of the first world war:
“If you want to preserve peace, arm for war. If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.” (Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915)
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