Psychoanalytic Hagiography: The Case of Ignatius of Loyola

Abstract

TRADITIONAL HAGIOGRAPHY is a form of biography that has its own special style, intents, and purposes. The biographer most often has a spiritual or theological frame of reference, and aims at edification or some doctrinal emphasis. Traditional hagiography, therefore, is more often than not embedded in a religious matrix that selects, focuses, and articulates the relevant elements in the biographical account of the saint and his works that are pertinent to that context and intentionality. The approach I will be describing here strikes a rather different emphasis. The psychoanalytic approach does not attempt to write the life of a saint, but rather the life of a man who happened to become a saint. The shift in emphasis brings with it modifications in methodology, approach, and emphases; it selects different data from the wealth of information about the saint's life and times, even from his spiritual works and teachings. The reason is that what is relevant to the understanding of the theological or spiritual meaning of the saint's life may not be meaningful to the psychological understanding of the human dimension of his spiritual torments and triumphs. The psychoanalytic hagiographer is less interested in the spiritual or religious aspects of the saint's accomplishments than he is in the fundamental human motivations, conflicts, developmental influences, goals, intentions, and purposes that determined the course of the saint's spiritual journey. When the psychoanalyst enters the world of history or biography, he enters an unfamiliar, foreign territory, in which all the usual and familiar landmarks that he has habitually used to guide his explorations are missing. While he is used to dealing with a living, talking, and responding subject, he now finds confronting him all the obscurities and opacities of the historical process. The immediacy of the psychoanalytic situation is replaced by the distant removal and the concealing veil of time. Instead of the vitality and spontaneity of a patient's associations, he is met with the residues of history: faceless facts, dates, names, monuments, and the infinitely obscure impenetrability of documents. One can only conclude that the project before us is fraught with pitfalls of many kinds.