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INTRODUCTION

MANY YEARS AGO, I CAME across a greeting card entitled “Ten Things to Make Besides Money.” Here is the list: Make merry. Make do. Make sense. Make amends. Make peace. Make waves. Make room. Make time. Make love. Make believe. I loved the innocent wisdom of that list so much, I held onto the card and pinned it to the bulletin board over my desk at work. All these years later, I would be hard-pressed to come up with a better list of things that make for a meaningful life.

To launch our endeavor, let’s start with one of the most compelling aspirations on the list: make peace. If you’re anything like me, you long for peace. Peace in the world, peace with your enemies, peace in your families, and peace within yourself. Peace is perhaps the most valuable thing in all of life, for, as I shall define it, peace is the basis of so much of what makes for a good and satisfying life, whether it be in high-level matters such as a moral worldview and a sound economy, or in the immediate longings of ordinary, daily life such as a happy love relationship, contentment with one’s work, physical health, self-respect, and even a good night’s sleep. While it is among the most precious qualities of life, peace—for a whole set of reasons—is one of the most difficult things to make and even harder to sustain.

In one way, “making peace” describes the process of working hard to reconcile our competing needs and desires. We all know about this kind of struggle. We read about it in the news; we struggle with it in the personal politics of the workplace; we watch it unfold at the dinner table and at family gatherings. We humans are just so darn competitive. We claw for power and resist compromise. We love to win and we hate to lose. If peace is about giving up something we value or feel we deserve, we want none of it. This is true whether we are speaking of the external world, like the Middle East, Wall Street, or Main Street, or—as I shall try to show in this book—when it comes to the internal world, the world of the heart and mind.

Peacemaking involves shifting from a competitive mode of relating to one of give-and-take. It is a process that involves finding that delicate balance between fighting for our needs and wants and making concessions out of fairness and respect for another. This is the vital process that we must all undertake to live in greater harmony with ourselves and with one another. Many books have been written about this kind of peacemaking, both from the perspective of our global community and for those engaged in the spiritual, psychological journey toward inner peace. We strive to balance competing motivations: love for self versus concern for the other; the comfort of sameness versus the appeal of risk and growth; the allure of success and power versus the satisfactions of camaraderie and peace of mind.

But the phrase making peace has a double meaning. It also speaks to the deeper work involving the relationship between ourselves and reality. This may sound like a funny way of describing it, but I think our relationship with reality is one of the hardest things to face in psychological life. It takes maturity to sort through the realities of complex ordinary life—the highs and lows, triumphs and disappointments, and everything in between—and conclude, “I’ve made peace with it.” In this way, making peace with one’s life has a direct link to something else on the list from that greeting card—we are trying to “make do” with a reality that is less than our ideal. We are lending strength to a state of mind that allows us to move forward and get on with our lives.

This approach is at odds with the stuff of the modern self-help movement in which we are encouraged to view ourselves as unlimited potential. This trend is seductive and powerful, offered in both subtle and overt ways in religion, modern psychology, and the New Age movements. We long to believe that we are limited only by the limitations we impose upon ourselves. We are offended at the mere suggestion that we live within boundaries that we cannot change. It is not the American way.

And yet, there are many lessons to be learned throughout the wisdom literature of the great problems that come when human aspirations are not kept in check with human limitations. One thinks of Icarus flying too close to the sun, Sisyphus trying to cheat death, Adam and Eve wishing to know as much as God, or the Israelites building a tower at Babel to reach the heavens. Envy, greed, and grandiosity get the best of us. The global economic turbulence of the last decade heralds this message. Should we listen, we will be reminded at every turn that we are mere mortals, subject to limitations. And one of the great lessons of life is that denying this truth leads to all sorts of trouble and accepting it shall set us free.

As a psychoanalyst, I see my patients struggling every day with this central task—to embrace and work with the life they have been given. I think that we human beings have a deep, natural resistance to this psychological task and that this resistance is a fundamental obstacle in our efforts to change and grow ourselves. It is extremely difficult to look at one’s life and say, “This is what I have to work with. This is my personality. This is my raw material. This is the life I’ve been given—the intellect, the body, the particular sensitivities, the strengths and weaknesses, the parents, the siblings, the children, the culture, the upbringing. This is my history—what I have been given and what I have done with it. I can wish for a different life, but I cannot have it. I must work with what I have.” As the saying goes, “We must bloom where we are planted.”

This second meaning of making peace is foundational to having success with the first. It means that we honor differences, work within the confines of the reality of our situation, and rely on the resources we have rather than nursing grievances or fantasizing about some ideal conditions that will never be. While this approach to life is enormously practical, it is also quite profound. In fact, these truths are at the heart of many spiritual philosophies—from both the East and the West. In particular, I like the Rule of St. Benedict, the guidebook of monastic life that emphasizes stability as the basis for continual conversion. Benedict emphasizes that it is only through commitment to one’s life as it is that we can grow and develop along the spiritual path. So, too, the Buddhists say that acceptance of the imperfections and impermanence of life is the starting point on the path to self-development and enlightenment—a journey that may take many lifetimes.

Throughout my professional life, I have been engaged in a personal journey of trying to make peace in and with myself. This has not always been easy, for I came to my work as a psychoanalyst along an unusual path. I grew up in a family that had deep religious roots in the mainline Protestant Christian church. For many years, Christian faith has been a guiding star for me, leading me with an ever-deepening desire to be a more thoughtful, balanced, and loving person. It has inspired me to follow a professional path of helping other people, with the twists and turns in the road leading me to training first as a clinical psychologist and then as a psychoanalyst. The religious roots of my path to psychoanalysis are unusual because many psychoanalysts are atheists and most hold the view that religion is something of a crutch for people who cannot face reality squarely.

I was fortunate, however, to grow up among what I call “thinking Christians.” Questions, doubts, searching, and deliberation were an essential part of the culture of my religious upbringing. I am grateful for it because I know that this is not the case for many people who are raised in traditional religious families. Even when my path took me in a more evangelical direction at Wheaton College and Fuller Theological Seminary, I was able to become connected with bright people of deep faith who practiced what David Dark calls “the sacredness of questioning everything.”1 This depiction may be surprising, as conservative Christian schools such as Wheaton and Fuller have the reputation of being narrow- and closed-minded. Sometimes that reputation is deserved, although it is not always the case. While faculty and students choose to be guided by a code of faith and conduct, there is still room to question, to search, and, above all, to think.

As I look back on my experiences, those settings were something like a modern monastery for me. Within the self-imposed boundaries of those commitments, there was a home base from which to explore. Many a classroom discussion or late-night coffee session found us challenging our faith at the frontiers. I have tried to keep that spirit alive as an adjunct professor at Fuller Seminary and in all my work in the years that have followed my work there.

With that said, I also must admit that I have experienced many frustrations with my Christian faith. It has not always been a source of peace, and has even been a source of disappointment, grief, and agitation. I continue to wrestle with its many imperfections and contradictions—both in its theology and in the ways in which the faith is practiced in organized, institutional religion. I have had to wrestle with the commonly held Christian beliefs that the Bible contains everything essential for life and the idea that Jesus is the only way to salvation. I think these are awfully narrow ways of viewing God and leave so much out of the equation. I believe there is a bigger life and a bigger God out there, and I have tried to have the wherewithal to look outside of my religious culture to see what other people are doing in their search for a meaningful life, even in their search for God. Along the way, I have had to make peace with the limitations of my personal faith, as well as the faith of my upbringing and my culture, seeking to cherish and build on the enduring truths while at the same time forgiving the limitations and failures.

I am grateful for the ways in which my work as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst has broadened my thinking, largely through in-depth exposure to people with a wide range of life experiences. For the first ten years of my career I worked at Patton State Hospital, where I conducted and supervised therapy with criminally insane patients—mentally ill men and women who had committed violent crimes such as rape and murder. During those days, I tried to walk a mile in the shoes of people whose paths were sometimes beyond my imagination—people from other races and cultures, poverty, violence, addiction, crime, severe mental illness, and a host of other contexts so far from my own.

Both then and now, as a psychoanalyst in private practice, I have intentionally put myself in situations that will burst my bubble. In particular, I often engage in conversations that challenge me to empathically understand people who operate with an entirely different value system from my own—people who have a different attitude toward honesty, fidelity, work, achievement, relationships, family, and the like. I have worked hard to become the kind of therapist who can set being judgmental aside (as much as one can) and be guided by real and genuine curiosity. How did this person get here? How does this way of thinking, believing, or behaving hold together in his or her mind? How does it work for him? What does it cost her? It is a privilege to be granted access to the life of another. I am given the unique opportunity to see another person’s life from the inside—an experience that grows me, widens my understanding of the human condition, and helps me question my own assumptions and commitments.

I love my work immensely, but if you think being a psychoanalyst is a picnic compared to being a Christian, think again! Training in a psychoanalytic institute has been likened to being a member of a religious institution2—where it is Freud rather than Moses who brought the tablets down from the mountain. No deeply held belief system is immune from being turned into or misused as a fundamentalist creed. As a result, I have discovered that I must make peace with my psychological and psychoanalytic theories too—biased as they are, like religion, by the lens of the pioneers who themselves had limitations, blind spots, and agendas. But I shall be ever grateful for Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and those who developed their ideas about the life of the mind, the profound influence of unconscious forces, and the techniques that can bring about real, substantial transformation in the lives of those who seek it.

Taking it one step further, I have had to make peace with the limitations of the actual practice of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis—to face the reality that there is only so much that can be done to bring about change within myself and within my patients. I have had to face the disillusionment of my youthful fantasies that we are all created equal and are capable of becoming anything we wish to be. Experience shows that, together with the possibilities of real change, there are also real limitations. I present this sobering reality to my patients and students by suggesting that the kind of change one can expect in a successful, long-term analysis is like changing the course of a ship about ten degrees. While it is a modest, not radical, shift, it will take you in a completely different direction.

I think of myself as something of a hybrid in my professional peacemaking journey, trying to blend two systems of thought into a whole where the marriage of Christian faith and psychoanalysis works for me. However, as in any marriage, there are times when it is uncomfortable and challenging. I know that for some people, this mix is like oil and water. Like many of you, I mingle at the dinner party where these topics come up and, soon enough, the arguing and bad feelings begin. There is a way in which I wish to dodge the conversation, but it is something that I care about deeply and so I must push through my own resistances to grow, make a change, and find a new way.

By laying this foundation, I hope to offer a context for the ideas that are to come. Make no mistake—this is not a book about the integration of religion and psychoanalysis. It is a book about the basic principles of psychoanalysis that can be applied to anyone interested in living a more peaceful, fulfilling life. Since I come to psychoanalysis along the path of Christian spiritual practice, my approach may resonate in a particularly harmonious way with those from a similar background. But this is a book for any seeker, religious or not, who is willing to reflect upon his or her life with seriousness and to dig deeper into truths that transcend religion and, in some ways, even transcend psychoanalysis. I believe that the deepest truths have no culture, no religion, and no creed. Deep truths speak to all people and can be applied to all people—and these are the truths that I am going to share in a simple, accessible way.

In order to get to these deeper truths, I will have to strip them of their packaging. I will reduce them to their simplest components. I will try to avoid jargon. I hope to leave the ivory tower. I will have to stray from orthodoxy. I will have to question assumptions. I will play with ideas rather than rigidly uphold them. In an effort to reconcile and make something new, I must challenge what has been long established and perhaps even taken for granted. Unintentionally, I will offend. I will step on people’s toes. I will touch and examine a few sacred cows. It can’t be helped.

Some people relish that kind of revolutionary attitude, but that is not really my style. And so, I will make every attempt to share my ideas with humility and respect. My motives are to learn, to grow, and to share some lessons I have learned along the way. I want to be of help to the ordinary men and women engaged in the work of developing their own minds in a thoughtful, honest way. I wish to pass on wisdom I have learned from psychoanalysis filtered through my life experiences, and take a next step.

I must make one final note before setting out on this journey. In my effort to pass along the wisdom of psychoanalysis in an accessible way, I will keep theoretical terms and references to a minimum. But, in so doing, I run the risk of giving the impression that I discovered these ideas. I did not discover them. I am a messenger, a translator, and, hopefully, a diplomat. The psychoanalytic theories that I am drawing from have their roots in Sigmund Freud, as all psychoanalytic theories do. I am carrying forward a particular branch of the psychoanalytic tree, which is the work of Melanie Klein and of those who later went on to elaborate on her work.

Melanie Klein was a younger contemporary of Sigmund Freud who considered herself a developer of his ideas, particularly in their application to children. However, she was a pioneer in her own right and extended his theories in an insightful, sometimes radical way.3 She made waves. She practiced the sacred art of questioning everything, and developed a psychoanalytic model that I think is enormously useful, both in the practice of psychoanalysis and in everyday life. The thrust of her model of the mind is aptly described by the themes of making sense, making do, making amends, making love, and making room for one’s whole self. Few people will ever have the chance to be exposed to her wisdom—as the reach of psychoanalysis is so limited, mostly due to the immense investment of time and resources that is needed to learn about it, either as an analyst or as a patient. It is my hope that this book will bring her ideas to a much wider audience, for they are indeed ideas that can lead to that precious state she called “internal harmony,” and I call “making peace.”