Abstract
This article draws on theologian Walter Brueggemann’s analysis of the prophetic tradition in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures to suggest implications for psychotherapists who wish to understand and intervene with patients in more hermeneutically grounded ways. It begins with a brief biographical contextualization of Walter Brueggemann’s work as an Old Testament scholar followed by an extrapolation of key themes in his work. These are (1) the ubiquity of empire, (2) the critical dismantling of empire through grief, and (3) the penetration of despair through the resuscitation of imagination that sees a future otherwise than empire. The article then moves to implications for a hermeneutically sensitive psychotherapy that makes use of the prophetic tradition to fashion a “prophetic sensibility.” Finally, the clinical practice of a prophetic sensibility is demonstrated through an examination of relevant case material.
Introduction
Let us begin with the central thesis from Walter Brueggemann’s (2018) influential book, The Prophetic Imagination: The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us. (p. 3)
This book (first published in 1978), which sets the tone for much of Brueggemann’s subsequent theological work, is both a study of the prophetic tradition (as embodied through Moses, Jeremiah, 2nd Isaiah, and Jesus) and a statement of the contemporary value of that tradition as a hermeneutical lens to assist the Church in the United States as it engages with the dominant culture, a culture that he sees as profoundly similar to the dominant cultures of empire to which the prophets addressed themselves. I aim to focus more narrowly on what this hermeneutical lens might imply for psychotherapists who are themselves connected with (or interested in) the Christian tradition, and who seek to understand what value the prophetic tradition might hold for their clinical work. In what follows, I provide a brief biographical contextualization of Walter Brueggemann’s work as an Old Testament scholar followed by an extrapolation of key themes in his work. These are (1) the ubiquity of empire, (2) the critical dismantling of empire through grief, and (3) the penetration of despair through the resuscitation of imagination that sees a future otherwise than empire. I then suggest implications for a hermeneutically sensitive psychotherapy that makes use of the prophetic tradition to fashion what I call a “prophetic sensibility.” Finally, I attempt to demonstrate how a prophetic sensibility could be put to work clinically by examining relevant case material.
Biography
Walter Brueggemann was born in 1933 in Tilden, Nebraska, and grew up in rural Missouri as the son of a German evangelical pastor. The denomination in which Brueggemann was raised, and in which his father pastored, merged with several other denominations in the middle part of the 20th century to form the United Church of Christ (UCC). It is worth noting that the UCC has historically favored social activist causes, progressive politics, and engagement with culture. One might say that thinking about the concrete realities of culture and transformation in the lived present is in the UCC water. Growing up in that tradition shaped him as a believer and set him on a path toward ministry as vocation. Today, Brueggemann is an Old Testament scholar of considerable renown, and an ordained minister in the UCC. As a theologian, he is known to offer fresh provocative readings of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, which he often puts into dialogue with contemporary psychological, sociological, and philosophical theory in generative ways. His corpus has great breadth, but he himself acknowledges that much of what he has written has been shaped by his engagement with the prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Brueggemann is closely aligned with Rhetorical Criticism, a methodological approach that shows how artifacts of communication (language, poetry, images, etc.) impact the possibilities for how the world is seen in a given cultural context. For our purposes, it is important to note that he sees language as functioning to construct and delimit human experience, imagination, and perception of social “reality.”
Synopsis of The Prophetic Imagination
Here, I will begin with a synopsis of The Prophetic Imagination to give readers a sense of the rhythm and repetition in Brueggemann’s analysis. I will follow up with an elaboration of integral themes in The Prophetic Imagination that point the way to useful implications for psychotherapists.
Brueggemann begins his analysis of the prophetic tradition with the story of Moses’ return to Pharoah’s court, having been sent by Yahweh to persuade Pharaoh to release the children of Israel from bondage. As God’s prophet, Moses is tasked with the critical dismantling of the Egyptian empire and with the articulation of a fresh consciousness and future that forms the basis of a new community. With signs, wonders, and the unleashing of plagues, Moses exposes the Egyptian gods as so much smoke and mirrors and simultaneously establishes the God of Israel as free, powerful, active, and very interested in these brick-making slaves. Not only does the prophet Moses dismantle the exceptionalism of the Egyptian empire (which was thought to have arrived and which was expected to go on forever), as he moves into the Exodus with God’s people in tow, an alternative community begins to form wherein a new politics of justice and compassion shapes law, power structure, and practice. 1 Justice will look very different in this new blessed community, and those who have been excluded from the benefits and comforts of empire will finally be seen, embraced, and treasured.
This radical intervention of Yahweh through the prophet Moses that both freed a little band of enslaved people and nourished an alternative consciousness lasted for roughly 250 years (Brueggemann, 2018, p. 7). But the lure of empire is strong, and soon the economics of affluence, politics of oppression, and triumphalist religion of the Egyptian empire were re-instantiated in the reign of King Solomon. Readers who are used to seeing Solomon’s reign as a bright spot in the history of Israel will want to hone in on Brueggemann’s against-the-grain reading as it helps illustrate how religion can be coopted into empire, a phenomenon that Brueggemann sees clearly as recapitulated in the contemporary church in the United States.
Enter stage left the prophet Jeremiah, who lived through and narrated the end of the Solomonic regime. Brueggemann believes empires characteristically breed numbness and suppress awareness of grief, anger, and pain. Jeremiah earns the moniker, “The Weeping Prophet” because he gives voice to the grief that has been suppressed. Grief over the inevitable exploitation on which empires run. Grief over the coming death of the empire, which amounts to the collapse of a world that was supposed to continue on forever. Even for the exploited and marginalized in the empire, the death of the empire is inarticulable and unfathomable without the lamentations of Jeremiah. As Brueggemann (2018) puts it, “We want nothing that secures us to die” (p. 47). He is clear on this point, that grief is a necessary precursor to the evocation of a hope for something new.
Where Jeremiah uses poetry of lament to make possible the awareness and experience of grief for the pre-exilic Solomonic regime that does not yet know it is dying, Brueggemann sees 2nd Isaiah at work in the midst of exiled Judah, where the numbness of empire has given way to deep despair in which no future or hope can be imagined. 2nd Isaiah makes a new future possible through words. He speaks through poetry of a God who is free, active, and still very interested in the people of God. 2nd Isaiah sings about the enthronement of this God and about new life that is both here and on the way. His poetry penetrates the despair of the exiles and makes possible the hope of something new and healing. The effect of his work is the freeing up of future-oriented imagination that had been squelched.
Brueggemann locates the fulfillment of the prophetic tradition in the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Again, we see a prophet emerge against the backdrop of the totalizing effect of empire wherein the imagining of a different economics, politics, and religion is suppressed with language and violence. Brueggemann states that Jesus’ critical dismantling of empire is defined by, “his decisive solidarity with marginal people and the accompanying vulnerability required by that solidarity” (p. 82). This solidarity serves as irrevocable noticing and validation of the pain wrought by empire, and the grief made possible in that solidarity opens space for both poetic and concrete embodied creation of a hopeful new consciousness and community. The image of Jesus turning over tables in the temple court is a helpful one here. Jesus as up-ender. Jesus upends the economics of empire through solidarity with the poor and through the poetry of the Beatitudes. He upends political oppression and marginalization by eating and communing with all the wrong people and by pulling back the curtain on the hypocrisy of the powerful. He upends the static religion of triumphal Rome and of legalistic Judaism in a myriad of ways, but most powerfully by witness to the radical freedom of God who can and will raise from the dead he whom empire has pushed onto a cross, and who can and will extend grace and forgiveness to the same murderers who did the pushing.
By now you are aware that Brueggemann is attuned both to the repetition of the old and to the irruption of the underived new. He believes we still exist in oscillation between empire and the newness most decisively brought to life in Jesus’ prophetic ministry. He believes our task in every nook and cranny of ministry is to discern the limiting power of empire, and to use the resources of the prophetic tradition to critically dismantle empire and energize hope. I turn now to an elaboration of the crucial themes of (1) Empire’s ubiquity, (2) the centrality of grief in critical dismantling, and (3) the penetration of despair through the resuscitation of imagination that sees a future otherwise than empire.
Ubiquity of empire in the prophetic tradition
The first important theme is that empire (what he elsewhere refers to as “royal consciousness” or “totalism”) as a social construction of “reality” is ubiquitous, from ancient Egypt through the contemporary moment. Brueggemann gives us a 3-part rubric by which we can know empire when we see it. (1) There is an “economics of affluence” where beneficiaries at the top and middle of society can afford not to notice pain, thanks to the numbing effects of constant repetitions of consumption and satiation. (2) There is a “politics of oppression” whereby voices on the margins are easily dismissed, and political machinery (institutions, laws, etc.) functions to maintain exploitative relationships between the beneficiaries of empire and the “brick-makers.” (3) There is a “religion of triumphalism” that reifies the current order by ordaining it as god’s will, and by proclaiming the already arrived pinnacle of history. In this religion, god is immanent, toothless, and completely in favor of the way things are. “Reality,” as perceived by those who live in the empire, seems like it is the only reality that could be. Brueggemann emphasizes the “numbness” wrought by living in a world that has “already arrived,” where satiation is achievable, and where grief is suppressed.
Critical dismantling and grief in the prophetic tradition
It is Brueggemann’s contention that readily available satiation and suppression of grief combine to produce numbness that greases the tracks on which empire roles interminably forward. He believes the central task of the prophet is not angry critique or agitation for social causes within empire. Rather, it is the dismantling of the imperial structure itself. He is adamant that this dismantling cannot proceed unless the prophet facilitates awareness of and engagement with grief. Grief is kryptonite to empire because it is the acknowledgment of pain, disappointment, unmet need and longing, passage of time that leads to death, and a host of other realities that are muted by the numbness of satiation and repression that empire trades in. Grief exposes the lack in empire that has been papered over. The central role of grieving (as opposed to outrage) determines the unique mode of intervention that the prophet uses. Only a song/poem can give adequate language to grief. It is important to see that as the experience of grief waxes, the old world of empire, which promises that nothing is lacking, is revealed to be a house of cards.
Energizing and the penetration of despair in the prophetic tradition
For Brueggemann, the penetration of numbness with grief is necessary but not sufficient as the prophet seeks to nourish a new consciousness and community. Because empire depends on a myth of static timelessness in which the community has arrived at its ultimate destination, there to dwell forever, futurity is anathema. When grief enables the realization that the empire is dying and/or dead, it is not registered as news that will have no practical impact. It means that the world of the imperial inhabitants has been annihilated. Whether these subjects were pharaohs or brick-makers, this was their world. The collapse of it leads to despair. A future cannot be imagined. In this context of despair, the prophet’s primary resource for stoking imagination is the poetry of doxology, which invokes the memory of God’s promises fulfilled in earlier generations, the suppressed-but-real freedom and action of God in the present, and the coming of a hopeful future. The words of these songs and poems serve to awaken and stretch imaginations that have been dulled by despair. That stretched imagination allows for the practice of new ways of being, even in the midst of the declining empire.
Clinical Implications
Having elaborated on these central themes, we turn next to what I see as implications for psychotherapists whose lives are shaped by the Christian tradition, and who want to understand how the prophetic tradition might impact their clinical work.
Ubiquity of empire in clinical theory
Brueggemann contends that we in the United States live and work in the midst of empire. 2 In The Prophetic Imagination, he aims not just to provide an analysis of a historical tradition, but also to urge the contemporary church to mobilize that tradition in an effort to see in our own time what the prophets saw in theirs, and to speak in ways that evoke an alternative consciousness and community marked by “the religion of God’s freedom and the politics of justice and compassion” (p. 115). My work as a psychotherapist differs from the work Brueggemann urges the church to do. Still, Brueggemann’s analysis of the imperial consciousness and the way that it shapes reality strikes me as a helpful lens for cultural criticism in general, even as it springs forth from a very particular tradition. One need not squint to look at the dominant cultural landscape in the United States and see economics of affluence, politics of oppression and marginalization, and a religion of static triumphalism. And Brueggemann contends that where this arrangement pre-dominates, it shapes certain kinds of “selves” with particular kinds of illnesses (isolation, emotional numbing, endless consumption, and despair). What would it mean for clinicians to take Brueggemann’s framework seriously, not to supplant our existing theories, techniques, and complex understandings of mental health, illness, and etiology, but as an additional hermeneutical lens for situating and contextualizing each subject and their pain?
I argue that this hermeneutical lens would help us think about psychotherapy and psychopathology more holistically by augmenting the typical psychotherapeutic focus on individuals, observable symptoms, and the management of those symptoms with a framework for theorizing the relationship between dominant cultural imagination and individually experienced psychological illness or distress, a
Second, what is the contemporary shape of the politics of oppression and where are therapist and patient situated in that political imagination? Put differently, where does power reside in the “Imperial” United States, and how much or how little of it does a given person or group hold? 4 In Brueggemann’s analysis, the politics of oppression is akin to present day legislation that functions to keep imperial consciousness dominant, and to keep affluence and power in the hands of those who already possess it. But what is the place of politics in psychotherapy? Philip Cushman (1995) argues convincingly that in attempting to de-politicize psychotherapy, we tend to simply perpetuate the dominant political structure of the moment and reify contemporary constructions of self, health, pathology, and therapeutic technology. A prophetic sensibility requires attention to the political and how it constrains imagination and the experience of “reality.” Here I will list just a few prescient examples. Legislation that facilitates gerrymandering and voter suppression, political efforts to deny equal access to health care, legislatively protected wealth accumulation, the gender pay gap, discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered, and Queer people (LGBTQ+) people, inequitable laws that perpetuate mass incarceration of Black men, environmental de-regulation that maximizes profits and torpedoes the future, and pro-gun legislation that persists in an era of frequent mass shootings each represents an instance of the politics of oppression in empire. We and our patients live in the midst of the consciousness and reality that is constructed and held together by these politics. Knowing our positioning can be helpful as we try to understand the emotional lives and sense of agency (or lack thereof) that our patients present with. For example, it might help us to better understand the crucial differences in the “depression” of a low-income Gay Latino youth and the “depression” of an upper middle class heterosexual White male. Both kinds of suffering are to be taken seriously, but in Brueggemann’s framework, they would be understood as symbolizing different experiences. Each begs for the articulations of an alternative consciousness and reality.
Third, what is the static religion of triumphalism in the contemporary moment, and how are we and our patients impacted by it? Remember that for Brueggemann, this static religion is the theology (ideology) and ritual that legitimates an economics of affluence and politics of oppression by proclaiming that all is finally as it was meant to be, and it will (and should) stay that way forever. In our context, the curious blend of Christian Evangelicalism and nationalism that has been critiqued under the name of American exceptionalism is arguably one of the dominant forms of the static religion of triumphalism. It declares that the best life has arrived and there is no other future to look forward to. Again, we want to look at ourselves and each of our patients and wonder, If we’re taught in a multitude of ways that this is how “reality” ought to be, and that it will not and should not change, what might that evoke for this particular person, given their positioning vis a vis the economics of affluence and the politics of oppression?
Numbness? Despair? Smug superiority? Isolation? Is the religion of American exceptionalism good new to the poor? To the immigrant?
To summarize, Brueggemann argues that this is the context in which “self” and sense of “reality” are shaped. When we ignore the context to focus on the individual, we run the risk of perpetuating and tacitly legitimizing empire. Clinical theory and practice can function parallel to the static religion of triumphalism, or it can function to subvert that religion.
Critical dismantling and grief in clinical theory
Our second major Brueggemannian theme is the role of the prophet as critical dismantler and grief as the mechanism of that dismantling. The prophetic sensibility outlined above looks for contexts of denied or suppressed grief. Grief is often about loss, but empire is timeless and cannot be lost. Grief is often about the realization that things could or should have been different, but empire is exactly as it should be. Grief is antithetical to the numbness of satiation, but empire thrives on satiation. In other words, empire has no use for grief, and while it may be felt here or there, it is not thickly symbolized in the consciousness of empire. Presumably these contexts of grief will often have been suppressed or deprived of language, and the therapist working with a prophetic sensibility will need to find language to give substance to things that are felt but unsymbolized, calling to mind Bollas’ (1989) crucial developments in working with the “unthought known.” Incidentally, I often find that when patients and I do the work to contextualize (i.e., connect to concrete socio-historical realities) symptoms that have previously been individualized or biologized, deep grief appears around both the experience of having hurts taken seriously and the realization that “this symptom bears witness that this thing happened . . . but it might have been otherwise.” It has been my observation that the dominant culture in the United States often forms in individual subjects a powerful denial of grief, and when grieving is experienced, it often happens in privacy and aloneness. It is often disavowed as evidence of brokenness rather than as an understandable reaction to context. We see this in the all-too-common clinical presentation of substance abuse/dependence where substance use functions as an attempted solution to the problem of unacknowledged trauma and unsymbolized grief, but the patient (and those around them) is focused on the “character flaw” of substance abuse. 5
Energizing and the penetration of despair in clinical theory
Finally, we come to Brueggemann’s emphasis on the energizing aspect of the prophetic tradition. In this movement, the prophet penetrates despair with the poetic nourishment of the consciousness of a different “reality,” a new future where the politics of oppression is subverted by politics of justice and compassion, and where God is free to act, not constrained to legitimizing the imperial order. Where Brueggemann believes the task of the church is to reach deep into the language and history of the Christian tradition and proclaim the promises of God, I believe therapists working with a prophetic sensibility have the subtler task of opening space for other kinds of consciousness to compete with the imperial consciousness. I will flesh this out with an example below. For now, the first thing to note is that grief must proceed the energizing of an alternative consciousness. Where grief is suppressed or denied, unarticulated longing abounds. The second thing to note is that the therapist’s own formation is crucial in their ability to do this part of the work. A therapist who has never engaged in critical dismantling and who is not formed by experiences and communities where alternative consciousness is embodied (however imperfectly) will not have resources for the despair that Brueggemann describes, at least not resources that do not already fit into the consciousness of empire. When a single mother comes to my consulting room and tells me she is crumbling under stress, do I jump straight to a prescription of yoga, or do I begin to ask about her world, paying close attention to how the language and “realities” of empire create and constrain that world? I am not knocking yoga. My point is that a therapist’s imagination has a way of setting the limits of treatment, and ready-made prescriptions are often a way of telling the patient how a trick might help them fit back into the dominant consciousness and “get back to work.”
Conclusion
To conclude, I want to examine some clinical material 6 that I hope illustrates how Brueggemann’s analysis of the prophetic tradition might be practically applied in psychotherapy.
“Sometimes . . . I just . . . want . . . to disappear,” Sharon gasped, tears moistening her cheeks. These declarations of grief and despair come regularly in our work. Sharon has been my patient for the better part of a decade now at a frequency of once or twice a week. We have built trust at a steady glacial pace. If we had not, I would not be allowed to see this moment of collapse. Sharon first came to see me at the request of another therapist who led a support group that Sharon “showed up to” in the loosest sense of that term. She hung on the periphery of the group, rejecting the bids for connection and commonsense advice that the other women in the group offered. When we met, she was very aware that she isolated herself, and she would eventually tell me about a lifetime of excruciatingly painful experiences that made keeping her interpersonal distance seem like a very good idea.
She was born on the West Coast in the ‘60s to a Black father who labored for low wages in a factory and a White mother who stayed home to raise Sharon and her brother and sister. Born the middle child, Sharon was the only one of her siblings who did not “pass” as White. Despite her mother’s fierce efforts to the contrary, Sharon was treated differently than her siblings when they were out in the community. She recalled being chased on her bike by a middle-aged White man who accused her of spitting on his truck. The scene came to a head as the man accosted her at the front door of her home where her father listened to the man rage about “what she did to my truck.” With deep humiliation and hurt, Sharon recounted how her father turned, hit her across the face, and growled at her to “Never do that again.” She wonders today if that was his strange way of protecting them from this White man’s rage.
She made good grades throughout childhood and was a standout athlete, but she never got over the feeling that people were watching her and that she was being held to a different standard. Sharon eventually joined the military and married her first husband, with whom she had her first three daughters. He was abusive and the marriage was short-lived. Sharon took full custody of her daughters and transferred overseas. On a given day, she could have been seen on post in fatigues (aptly named) with a baby on her back, a toddler in her arms, and another child clinging to her leg. After suffering a brutal sexual assault that was reported but never seriously investigated, Sharon was slowly squeezed out of the military. To her great credit, she had scrapped her way through a bachelor’s and master’s degree while working full-time in the military and raising her children. She was able to get a job in civil service on the West Coast and worked her way up through the ranks despite blatant sexist and racist harassment at every turn. She also started working with mental health professionals at a local VA hospital. When one of her therapists encouraged her to “give it a shot” with a man who had asked her on a date, she reluctantly agreed and developed a relationship with the father of her fourth daughter. He was violently abusive and squandered their money. It took Sharon a while, but she eventually found the courage to leave him. She continued on in her civil service job as long as she could, but eventually the toll of trauma, racial discrimination, sexism, financial struggle, and single parenting led to a major “nervous breakdown.” After extended leave and psychological treatment in various behavioral modalities, she attempted a return to work, but her ability to hold a fractured sense of self together had deteriorated and she was soon designated as fully disabled. She moved to Oklahoma with three of her daughters (two adults and one teen) and devoted her time to taking care of them.
By the time we met, she was a paradox. On one hand, she financially provided and served as safety net for half a dozen people. She met the monetary needs of her adult daughters and functioned as a part-time mother for her grandchildren. “I feel like I’m at the center of a web, and I’m being pulled in every direction,” she said. On the other hand, she described herself as weak and incapable of doing anything right . . . a shadow of her former self. Some of her daughters played into her poor self-image by blaming her for each disappointment they encountered in life. The thing that kept her afloat in the beginning of our work was her recently discovered passion for creating art, her participation in senior Olympics, and some burgeoning relationships with a group of women she met through her new artistic interest.
The ubiquity of empire in practice
In the midst of empire, Sharon is not a beneficiary. In an economics of affluence, she was born into humble beginnings. She worked hard throughout her life, but multiple glass ceilings made sure she never broke into the rarefied air of perpetual numbness and satiation. Moments of numbness (playing the casino, compulsive shopping, seeking comfort in junk food) punctuate the norm of despair. In the politics of oppression, she has drawn the short straw. She is a poor Black single woman. Her coordinates in this political imagination leave her with borderline paranoid delusions that she is always being watched and found lacking. 7 The static triumphalist religion of empire does not proclaim good news to people like Sharon. When I see the energy behind making this empire “Great Again,” I wonder, when was America ever great for people like Sharon? The static religion of American triumphalism declares this national experiment to be a success. When movements like feminism or critical race theory suggest that it might not be a democratically shared success, the economics, politics, and religion of empire are mobilized to suppress the protest, groaning, and grief embodied in such movements. The message is, “Yeah, that was bad, but we’re past that and everybody has an equal playing field now . . . just find your bootstraps.” From a prophetic sensibility, these are the coordinates in which Sharon’s suffering takes shape. Her depression and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) do not manifest in a vacuum.
Critical dismantling and grief in practice
Everything is my fault. I just can’t do anything right.
Can you tell me what’s stirring that up in you?
She [daughter] raged at me again. Told me I’m weak and that I embarrass her. Couldn’t have been more than hour after I paid her rent for this month. She’s right though . . . I just mess everything up. What happened to me . . . I didn’t want it to happen to them, and I protected them too much, and now everything is my fault.
You didn’t want your daughters to be abused, assaulted, mistreated, so you protected them fiercely . . . maybe a little too fiercely, you think, even though you’re apparently “weak.” So, everything is your fault, is that right?
Yeah, that’s it.
I always wonder how those accusations of total blame and weakness resonate so strongly with you when they seem so unlike the Sharon I know. I don’t think those arrows hit home because they’re objectively true. I think they just happen to hit a target that’s already in you . . . Something that’s been there for a long time. Can we wonder about that? About when and where it was absolutely critical to your survival that you should start to feel like the shit that happens to you is your fault, and that if you’d just figure out what to do differently, life would be a lot easier? I think that’s something that was imposed on you.
I always feel like I’m back in that same moment. With the front-desk lady giving me that stink-eye, like I’m a piece of trash . . . And then, he’s always up there watching [gestures toward the corner where the walls meet the ceiling], so I just have to keep taking care of everybody else’s needs, and meanwhile I’m getting sicker.
Sharon has a touchstone memory that she returns to again and again. Her youngest daughter often had somatic complaints in the mornings and consequently Sharon often dropped her off late to school, where the receptionist treated Sharon with disdain. The memory of those encounters served as a stand-in for a host of life experiences in which Sharon was made to feel inadequate, in which her “failure” was foregrounded without any acknowledgment of how hard she was swimming against the tide. The man in the corner of the room is a constant presence for her and could very well be the god of the religion of static triumphalism. We have established that he watches her to see if she is doing the right thing. She is envious of others who get to do “the wrong thing” and prosper despite it. The movement in the transcript above is repeated in our work quite often. A part of Sharon is a devout believer in the static religion of triumphalism in this sense; she is primed to believe that the system is fine as it is, and that her suffering is all her fault. I would not want to suggest that she plays no part in her own pain. To do so would crush any nascent sense of agency. But I often find myself trying to articulate a larger picture for her. To look at the very real hurts that have been inflicted on her by individuals and by systems, and especially to look at the insidious ways in which she has been made to believe that she alone is the author of all this pain. The thing we have found to be most vitalizing to her is a combination of grief (over what she has survived) and anger (over how she is blamed for what she has survived) that is facilitated by slowly moving from the particularity of a present interaction to a critical engagement with the cultural imagination that gives shape to her sense of self and to her suffering. It is not my technical knowledge or skill as a psychotherapist that accounts for the longevity or helpfulness of our work. She has had ample exposure to skilled therapists with cutting-edge workbooks and techniques. What I bring on my better days is a stubborn belief that culture shapes us and that suffering can often be contextualized as an understandable reaction to the surround. 8 As time has gone by, we have also been able to talk more about my coordinates in empire and to use that as a jumping off point for voicing grief and anger about the inequity of Sharon and I’s experiences. With a wry smile, she will point out how a painful situation would have gone differently, “for someone who looks like You.”
Energizing and the penetration of despair in practice
[Tearfully] I just lie to myself when I’m talking to you.
How is that?
Because I start to feel strong, and . . . I start to feel like I like myself, and like I want to live. But then . . . I go back to them, and I’m just a big problem. And they’re right.
I can see it feels very different, but I’m not so sure we’re just dealing with dishonesty here. When you spend an hour with me, you start to feel stronger, right?
Yes
And when you hang out with Letha and Kim and your other friends, you’ve got your differences, but you feel good, right? You feel appreciated, and you’ve got a spark. And when you’re crafting and creating and competing, you feel good?
Yeah
So, I think what’s happening is that different ideas about who you “really are” get fed to you by these different people. It strikes me that the people who have nothing to gain from being in a relationship with you other than being around someone they like and admire . . . they treat you with respect and appreciation. And the people who depend on you to finance their way of life . . . they leave you feeling like that’s all you’re good for.
Yeah, and it makes me wanna tell them to leave me alone and let me live my life.
I don’t blame you! In fact, I think that you might just have to do that again and again to save your own life. You’ve been mistreated, used, and blamed since you were a little girl. Now, you’ve got a little safe haven you’ve built with your art, your athletics, and your friends. Maybe it’s time to flip the bird to the man in the corner and start loving that little girl.
I need that . . .
In reality, Sharon is being watched, and she is being found lacking. The tragedy is that she has internalized all of this as the truth about who she is. Who could blame her? To do otherwise requires critical understanding of the imperial structure that needs her to be productive and needs her to feel like she is falling short. Those kinds of words and feelings and criticisms are suppressed by the dominant culture. We work, she and I, at sketching a world where she is not always at fault, where it might be okay to treat herself with compassion and concern for her own well-being. We agree that work of grief and imagination keeps her alive, but we also agree that the lure of the old way is strong, so we oscillate back and forth. What choice do we have but to keep working at it?
I have introduced the reader to Brueggemann’s analysis of empire and the prophetic tradition, focusing on the key themes of (1) the ubiquity of empire, (2) the critical dismantling of empire through grief, and (3) the penetration of despair through the resuscitation of imagination that sees a future otherwise than empire. I suggested the implications of these themes for the development of a prophetic sensibility in the work of psychotherapy. Finally, I put these ideas to work in a clinical example, showing how clinical work can be enriched by locating the imperial coordinates of therapist and patient, critically dismantling imperial “reality” through grief, and penetrating despair through the articulation of an alternative consciousness and way of being.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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1.
A prime example of the new shape of law is found in the Ten Commandments which focus on covenant with God and covenant with neighbor in opposition to the Egyptian focus on production. The pyramid-shaped power structure of Egypt is flattened out in a new community that initially sidesteps the lure of having a king. The strange practices of this new community include the year of jubilee, prohibitions around indebtedness and interest, and provision for the poor and marginalized.
2.
In a retrospective reflection at the end of the 40th anniversary edition of TPI, Brueggemann (2018) notes a preference for the term “totalism” instead of “empire” because it lacks the historical trappings of the latter term.
3.
This is a promise that we all know to be empty because we have known the fantasy that this or that new thing would complete us, and we have known the reality that we soon become used to the thing once we have acquired it, and we have to seek out a new object of desire. Anticipation is stimulating. Acquisition is hell.
4.
The concept of intersectionality, which originated in Black Feminism, is useful for thinking through this.
5.
Special thanks to Joseph Couch, PhD, for giving me the language of “solution” as an empathic way to think and articulate the compulsion to repeat (J. Couch, personal communication, January 1, 2016).
6.
This clinical material emerged in my own practice and is used with permission. Details have been changed to sufficiently obscure the identity of the patient.
7.
Keep in mind reader, “Just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you” (McWilliams, 1994).
8.
This part of my identity is beholden to my own formation in little pockets of the Christian tradition that have tried to exist as alternative communities, and to my falling down the hole of philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and critical theory as a graduate student.