"I haven't been pussyfooting around for the last five chapters. I've been writing psychoanalytic critique."-M. D. Faber, New Age Thinking

"With some minds, truth is, in effect, not so cruel a thing after all, seeing that, like a loaded pistol found by poor devils of savages, it raises more wonder than terror -its peculiar virtue being unguessed, unless, indeed, by indiscreet handling, it should happen to go off of itself."-Herman Melville, The Confidence Man

M. D. Faber has been a professor of English at the University of Victoria and taught at a variety of other universities in the United States and Canada. He has published and edited several books with a psychoanalytic approach to English literature and to culture, including The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare (1970) and Culture & Consciousness: The Social Meaning of Altered Awareness (1981).
One of his more wide-ranging works on psychoanalytic and social themes is Objectivity & Human Perception: Revisions & Crossroads in Psychoanalysis & Philosophy (1985). There, Faber expressed much sympathy for the New Age currents emerging in North America at the time. Siding with William James rather than Freud on the question of the spiritual counterculture, he challenged the conventional Calvinist and classical psychoanalytic views that the quest for "higher consciousness" is an escapist delusion.
I note this because the argument of his more recent New Age Thinking moves in quite the opposite direction. His current position is that the spiritualism of New Age is essentially an irresponsible invitation to regress to an infantile, fusional, omnipotent state of mind, in which self and other are poorly differentiated, if at all; whereas the earlier Faber thought it unfair to describe mysticism, or what some now call "self-spirituality", as an attempt to "regain the womb." According to the Faber of 1985, we should think of mystical practice as "a sophisticated concrete methodology designed to enable the individual to leave the womb.[through] detachment from the ego." The earlier book concludes with a triumphant endorsement of "those eastern disciplines which stress harmonious relations with the universe, as well as inner mastery, as opposed to technical control of the environment through the development of mechanical devices." This is a stock New Age argument, of course, and it makes a striking contrast with the "psychoanalytic critique" now under review.
For when it comes to any claim on behalf of altered consciousness in New Age Thinking, written a decade later, M. D. Faber is no longer "pussyfooting around"; he has metamorphosed into a tough realist who doesn't fall for sentimental fantasies about alternative realities and cosmic harmonies. There is no longer any question of bothering to validate or refute the New Age ideas. For him, these are so wildly implausible to begin with that the only legitimate intellectual concern is to establish the motive for holding them in the first place.
And the question of motive is a good one. Why would anyone bother with obvious nonsense like witchcraft, astral projection, or the spiritual "energy" of pyramids, magic stones, and crystals? Faber's answer is that people want to escape the responsibility of being separate individuals in the real world by retreating psychologically to childhood and infancy. They want to believe in magic-especially the hidden magic of their lost spiritual selves-because it helps to mitigate the sense of powerlessness, sorrow, and drudgery in their workaday lives.
But Faber's recourse to a form of reductionistic psychological explanation has serious limitations, which prevent his study of New Age from getting beyond a certain type of common-sense realism that has little to do with psychoanalysis. His version of psychoanalysis is a caricature of American academic developmental psychology from the 1950s and '60s. The range of ideas is limited almost exclusively to the concept of "separation" from the mother, and the development of realistic thinking. There is almost no reference to the nitty-gritty of instinctual life, no feel for the resourceful plasticity (or elasticity) of human fantasy, sexuality, aggression, or conflict. He seems to be unaware of the rich profusion of unconscious mental life as it is expressed in human cultures. Psychoanalysis for Faber is not a way of understanding and integrating the complex functions of the irrational and of fantasy; it is a way of setting up the category of "separateness" as having a privileged relationship to reality and reason. Even more questionable from a psychoanalytic point of view is his way of using developmental theory to obscure any constructive relationship between emotion and reason, or between fantasy and our sense of reality. He proceeds as if it were either possible or desirable to expunge the irrational from expression in human affairs-as if the unconscious could be "banished from the republic," like the poets in Plato.
Faber's argument is not wrong (so far as it goes), but it is incomplete. He seems to have patched up a collection of notes on infantile regression in New Age writings and strung them together into a book-length manuscript. The central idea about the wish to avoid adult responsibility has obviously not been pushed beyond the inspiration stage. Faber makes no attempt to define or differentiate New Age or to understand its place in social and cultural history. He simply plunges into his critique, applying his theory directly to "representative" texts with very little attention to background information or context. How is it that Robert Bly and Shirley MacLaine, or peyote mysticism and business management philosophy, are all related to the same bizarre cultural formation? This is never explored. In fact, the popular icons that fuel the New Age movement are barely mentioned.
What New Age is has to be divined from Faber's examples. These are drawn from the peculiar sub-genre of the vast pop-psych literature that extols the virtues of magic stones and crystals, shamanism, channelling, Goddess Worship (Witchcraft or Wiccan), and various folk healing practices. Each is discussed in a separate chapter or subsection, and there is no doubt that Faber has put together a fascinating collection of cultural curiosities. The most interesting part of the book comes near the end, in a long chapter made up of transcripts of his interviews with New Age healers. These are worth reading in full, and may be consulted as soon as the reader has gotten the gist of Faber's critique. Since the central argument is not so much developed as re-applied in sequence to different texts, the book may be read in virtually any order. The second chapter, on psychoanalytic theory, should be read with caution by those who are not familiar with the background literature. It is superficial, and conflates authors like Daniel Stern and Margaret Mahler whose views on "symbiosis" in infancy are explicitly opposed.
The actual substance of Faber's critique is fairly straightforward common sense, and will work reasonably well at first for many readers, because it has a certain prima facie plausibility. Reasoning from a very widely believed, but partial, model of psychological development that equates maturity with separation and independence, he argues that the appeal of New Age philosophy is to offer a way of avoiding awareness of the inevitable physical and emotional separation from the mother. As he puts it in one passage: "New Age thinking has been designed to restore the past in a fantastic, wish-fulfilling, idealized form that reunites the practitioner with the symbiotic object and with the omnipotence and narcissism which accompany the before-separation interplay." It is certainly not difficult to accept the general point that New Age writers do explicitly offer a fantasy escape from isolation and pain into a magical, fusional world, and that this does bear some resemblance to a child's reassuring emotional dependency on a powerful protector.
But that is where the effectiveness of Faber's psychoanalytic reading ends. Like the gun in Melville's parable of the truth, quoted at the head of this review, psychoanalysis is wondrously shiny and metallic, but in Faber's hands it has "gone off by itself" and just hit something that happened to be in the way. In this case, the victim is really not New Age thinking as such-that would be too precise a target-but all of religion, and perhaps even all of human imagination. The bang kicks up a storm of excitement, and once the principle behind the trigger mechanism has been grasped, there ensues the inevitable flurry of shots fired into the air.
One hardly needs psychoanalysis to arrive at the conclusion that New Age thinking is a form of unrealistic wish-fulfilment. But Faber pushes his quasi-psychoanalytic version of this observation to the limit, reinventing all the most embarrassing category mistakes and circular reductionisms that plagued the first, inexperienced attempts to apply psychoanalysis to culture. His use of psychoanalytic language is so concrete as to make it intellectually almost unrecognizable. The effect is to turn the crude Mahlerian metaphor of symbiosis (the unconscious fantasy of merging or identifying with a powerful object who is experienced as an ideal form of the self) into a literal assertion about the New Age state of mind. It is as if New Age philosophy literally caused an actual developmental regression to an infantile state of consciousness in which there is no ability to distinguish the object from the self.
Psychoanalysis has an admirable capacity to defuse the usual tension and panic we have about what is going on inside us by showing how certain psychological processes, particularly fantasies related to intense passions like need and envy, work as complex, continuing metaphors. The effect of this kind of understanding is to reduce the pressure toward desperate action and to increase the capacity to contain and even enjoy the sometimes turbulent and shocking flow within. Faber's almost permanent stance of scandalized outrage over New Age seems designed to have precisely the opposite effect. Presumably he argues this way in order to make his critique seem more interesting and consequential. In his introduction, for example, he warns sonorously that regression to the "pre-separation" stage of infantile development is "inimical to our culture's intellectual and psychological well-being." This is a dire warning indeed, since "as the next millennium nears, New Age thinking sweeps vigorously through Western culture." Faber clearly wants to be our Jeremiah, but there is a hint that his publicists may have ambitions for him as a Redeemer: the dustjacket announces, in what sounds like a send-up of spiritualist hype, "New Age Thinking has the power to alter the course-and perhaps the destiny-of the New Age movement."
Faber is too much of a rationalist to descend completely to the level of Jerry Falwell or Catherine McKinnon, but at times he does sound like a holy terror. Imagine all those innocent North Americans regressing to a state of "pre-separation", in which their ego boundaries dissolve and their sense of reality crumbles! Of course, this apocalyptic image of cultural perdition presupposes that we will first manage to tear ourselves away from our television sets, our drugs and alcohol, and our personal choice of carnal relations, long enough to get hooked on the New Age line. If regressive behaviour and a taste for the implausible are real threats to "the culture's intellectual and psychological well-being", as Faber maintains, then Western culture was doomed long before Castaneda made his first million and Ram Das said, "Be here now."
As I have said, Faber's theory of the New Age is formulated so broadly that it could be applied without much effort to almost any religion or mystical doctrine. The reason for this is that the motive he ascribes to New Age religion is so non-specific that it can safely be assumed as a factor in almost any attempt to make sense of life's difficulties, or to imagine a better way of life. Every religion has something to say about the resolution of conflict and the recuperation of loss, but what this tells us in particular about New Age is not clear, for as Faber himself states, "The wish for fusion, re-union, the past, the desire to refind the before-separation-world, the belief in a `lost paradise', and the longing to regain it are ancient wishes, longings, and beliefs predating our own civilization by thousands of years."
The basic insight into religion as a compensatory defensive system derives, of course, from Freud, especially in his Future of an Illusion, and his famous discussion of the "oceanic feeling" in the first chapter of Civilization & Its Discontents. (Faber does not refer to these texts.) Freud's intuition was that the roots of religious feeling lie in children's ordinary ways of coping with feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. Children normally cling to their parents through a long period during which they gradually learn to separate themselves out as personalities and to take responsibility for themselves. It is important to remember, however, that in itself this understanding of the emotional function of religion as a derivative of childhood dependency needs does not justify the assumption, which Faber seems to make about New Age people, that religious belief is a sign of immaturity or a failure to take responsibility for oneself.
There is no basis for a critique of religion here, whether psychoanalytic or otherwise, because there is no part of traditional or modern culture-including science itself-that cannot plausibly be shown to have both a derivative and defensive function in relation to the general human condition of animal imperfection, vulnerability, neediness, and unappeasable desire. Even in our highly individualistic North Atlantic societies, the ideal social norm is not absolute autonomy, but only relative separation and independence, which the Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn called "mature dependence". No textbook formula makes the religious man with supposedly childish beliefs less mature than the research scientist with a sophisticated pragmatist theory of knowledge. The former may take a thoughtful and responsible position within the community, and be a genuine support to others in need, including the members of his own family, while the latter may work out his compensatory needs in sadomasochistic sex with a hired sex worker. The "infantile" and "symbiotic" content of New Age thought is indicative of precisely zero on the scales of regression and development in the human emotional spectrum.
Psychological "separation" is in fact a very paradoxical process, because it requires the successful interiorization of a "symbiotic" fantasy to succeed. Ties of emotional dependency are slow to loosen, and nobody gives them up voluntarily without some reassurance that the emotional care and protection that mother and father provided can be supplied by other means. Successful "separation" from dependency objects relies partly on the trick of "internalizing" them in a relatively benign form. With luck, the child gradually transforms parental regulation into self-regulation. But even when this is accomplished at the child's own pace, and with the co-operation of the parents, it can be a wrenching process and it always involves a measure of self-deception. The "mature ego" of the individual who has "separated" from the symbiotic mother is in fact a kind of surrogate version of that imaginary mother, ministering to the needs and concerns of the self and the internal world. So, in a sense, the belief that we have an "identity" or a "self" is partly a semantic effect of emotional development. It includes a largely unconscious organization of identifications, in which continuing relational experiences are averaged out by memory and turned into self-perceptions. From this point of view, to be a "separate" person is essentially to partake in the paradoxical illusion, again largely unconscious, that one can or does contain and control one's own protecting and nurturing environment.
The conviction that one is an independent centre of initiative and responsibility is difficult to achieve and, for the reasons I outlined earlier, it usually does not run very deep. Usually, it is the culture that supplies the initiative, takes the responsibility, and provides the vital illusion of coherence and containment. If one belongs to a group with a strong cultural "identity", one's sense of being a person will depend in large part on membership in the group. But some types of society-usually big, pluralistic, abstract, urban societies like our own-do not play this containing role very convincingly. Modern culture lacks the symbolic depth to sustain effectively the illusion of personal belonging. Social critics think this "loss of community" is a great moral failing, and many look to the state for guidance and support. The problem is that the state makes a cold and humiliating parent compared to a traditional culture or religion. One doesn't really feel contained by the "social safety net"-at best, one feels tolerated, if not punished and excluded. In fact, modern Western societies have tended to repudiate the consolations of collective identity. There really is no way that bureaucrats and accountants can take responsibility for the illusion of personhood anyway, and so this tremendous symbolic burden has been shoved right back in the individual's face.
But not many individuals, even in our culture of individualism, have the wherewithal to sustain, without difficulty, the challenge of personal autonomy that the erosion of traditional cultural forms demands from each one of us. This is not just a matter of individual fortitude or failing. The illusion of a separate identity, as opposed to the illusion of a group identity, presupposes a secularized social infrastructure of education and customary refinement, upon whose successful internalization the credibility of the individual's claim to personal responsibility depends. In practice, this means that the individual must get a grip on his or her own mental life, which is not easy. There are fewer socially sanctioned opportunities to project one's problems and conflicts, and to receive with dignity the symbolic solution of the group in return.
This is why psychoanalysis and its sibling psychotherapies have become so important in our culture. But this also means that the crucial feature distinguishing modern secular societies from traditional societies is not the decline of illusion, as Freud thought, but the way in which the culture distributes the illusions that sustain various notions of identity. For example, the modernist idea that each one of us is influenced by primitive unconscious mental processes can be seen as a rational displacement of symbolic processes and responsibilities that were formerly lived out at the level of the tribe or the religious community. Because the status of the individual as a social form has to a considerable degree been cut loose from connection to any special, prescribed cultural content, no particular act of belonging or private adherence can serve any longer to define the whole character of any one person. We are all becoming increasingly composite in our form of social existence; and the problem of cultural definition and self-regulation is becoming more and more a matter of individuals negotiating themselves through layers of historically sedimented symbolic networks, which have been expertly preserved like so many dead languages that nobody remembers for sure how to speak.
So it should be no special surprise to find a very strong sense of personal responsibility, of independence, and of respect for rationality, coupled with all sorts of characterological idiosyncrasies and peculiar beliefs, including New Age hocus-pocus. The important factor here is not one's special emotional and ideological preferences, but the degree to which the surrounding culture permits one to hold onto these preferences, to combine them freely, and to cultivate them in one's own way, without having to conform too closely to the group norm. When placed in its socio-historical context, then, we can see that the spiritual New Age is just one of a vast range of oddball choices we are all making all the time, in the absence of any substantive cultural guideline capable of carrying the weight of universal truth. To claim, therefore, that the popularity of New Age concepts threatens to implicate us in some sort of infantile cultural catastrophe is rather like saying that the Coca-Cola company is stirring up mass oral regression by marketing Fruitopia. It tells us very little about New Age in particular, and even less about why it has been such an important cultural movement in the last twenty-five years.
Faber does not address the specific character of New Age because he does not recognize that New Age works basically as a type of commodity, and not primarily as a religion or a belief system, or even as a form of community. New Age has emerged as part of a much broader trend of secularization and commercialization of traditional culture (and of the ritual symbolic core of traditional culture, namely religion itself). In its heyday, which seems to have passed, New Age was a "do-it yourself" version of the new full-service supermarket religions that increasingly dominate the spiritual landscape in North America. If you haven't got time to immerse yourself in the arcane, the new transcendental corporations can offer you spiritual affiliation in the form of a commercial package of product lines replete with options, frills, and upgrades.
The point here is not that New Age is a vulgar, commercial impostor but that it is a good example of what religions begin to look like as they become increasingly difficult for large numbers of people to take altogether seriously. At the dawn of the modern scientific era, Tertullian's rule of faith-"I believe because it is absurd"-took on a new meaning, which is Pascal's wager. Religion is no longer an enveloping way of life, but a rational decision to bet against the odds. New Age is a compendium of everything that is most absurd and unlikely in the great eclectic grab-bag of the world's lost cultures. Its emergence is not a threat to rationality, but a sign of the extent to which rationality has already undermined the traditional cultural basis of life and left people with a bewildering choice of alternative "styles". Often, precisely what has become the most doubtful and far-fetched attracts the greatest interest and suggests, at least on the surface, through its faint echoes of archaic mystery, the highest potential yield of meaning.
Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, psychoanalysis, from an epistemological point of view, is not fundamentally a system of interpretation, and even less a system of moral judgement. It is a method of investigation or, more precisely, a technique for creating a context in which unexpected and unwanted meanings can emerge and be held in consciousness long enough, without too much panic, for some further understanding to develop. The crude public description of this process has been that psychoanalysis "interprets the unconscious meaning" of things; but what this really refers to in practice, if it means anything at all, is that psychoanalysts have learned how to wait for unconscious meanings to emerge; and if they are really skilful, they have also learned how to make it easier for people to interpret these meanings for themselves, as only they can do anyway. So what Faber does with New Age is actually unpsychoanalytic in spirit: he imposes a system of interpretation and he bases it only on what is already clear on the surface of New Age thinking: its obvious irrationality, which he judges and condemns. There is no provision of context, and no attempt to let potential meanings emerge, as a skilful literary critic might achieve by playing around with the virtual relationships in a poem or novel.
New Age philosophy openly disagrees with the idea that the individual should think of himself as "separate", and so Faber concludes from this that New Age tries to "deny" psychological separateness. But this denial is not an unconscious one. What is unconsciously denied in the New Age philosophy is aggression-aggression as it appears in all its human guises: violence, hatred, envy, jealousy, revenge, greed, lust, competition, and disagreement, with their ambiguous ties to the concept of evil-and the even more ambiguous association of the concept of evil with the concept of illness. This massive tangle of issues is passed over in New Age philosophy with barely a word, and Faber doesn't give it any mention either. Patient attention to what the New Age writers are not saying reveals that what the New Age literature appeals to unconsciously is not the denial of separation but the denial of the irrational and always potentially destructive side of the human soul.
The denial of the reality of aggression has been a feature of mainstream American culture for over a century now, and it is a primary social defence to be found in secular consumer societies everywhere. It seems to have worked its way into American thought through the extraordinarily influential kookiness of Mary Baker Eddy and the faith healers, and continued with the rise of popular media culture in the early twentieth century, with Pollyanna, Prohibition, and The Power of Positive Thinking. Freud summed it up in his succinct characterization of the Christian Science doctrine: "God is good, illness is evil. Illness contradicts the nature of God. Therefore, since God exists, illness does not exist. There is no illness." (This is from the introduction to Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study.)
New Age represents only a fraction of this massive formation of defensive optimism. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, especially in America, the modern Enlightenment has tried to reverse its own liberation of thought and expression with a new cultural ethos of niceness and convenience-the administrative rationalization and standardization of social life. There is always some new Walden II on the horizon, with a brand new design for the environment that promises to eradicate the accident of evil. The administrative response usually involves some abrogation of the hard-won distinction between thinking and doing upon which the Enlightenment hope of expressive freedom was originally based. The result is a generalized preoccupation with the problem of how to eradicate the unpredictable and the offensive from social life. We are not supposed to be disturbed by outward signs of psychic reality. This is a way of thinking perfectly suited to any form of broadcasting for profit, and lives on buoyantly in the appropriate smiles and frowns of friendly politicians and celebrities.
Like much of the ambient mass culture, New Age philosophy is essentially a soul-cleaning operation. But it is much less insidious and controlling than the routinization of the expression of personality now at work in corporations, public institutions, and education. Faber thinks that the danger of New Age thinking is the spread of irrationality, but the worse risk is that it helps to disguise the official standardization of social life with a bit of surface lunacy. In the final analysis, the recycled bits of bygone mystery that make up the menu of New Age spirituality are just a distraction. Underlying the apparent incoherence is a more fundamental commitment to laundering the psyche. Hostile to emotional and instinctual reality, which are usually contrary to social peace, and dreaming of life as a pleasant and manageable convenience, in which there is no illness, pain, or violence, because there are no bad thoughts or upsetting images, New Age expresses an ever more common superego impulse toward happy conformity. 

Charles Levin is a practising member of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society, and also teaches in the Graduate Program in Communications, McGill University. His most recent publication is Jean Baudrillard: A Study in Cultural Metaphysics (Prentice Hall).