From, George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1997) pp. 338-341.
"Mature defenses grow out of our brain's evolving capacity to master, assimilate, and feel grateful for life, living, and experience. Such gratitude encompasses the capacity for wonder. To see and comprehend the joy of a sunset or a symphony or to sustain a mature religious conviction is evidence that one's mind has experienced a hallucination or an illusion of sorts. Such wonder is in itself a transformation and a self-deception of the most sublime nature. But how does such wonder develop? How shall we understand such a paradoxical hope - the health-promoting, morale-restoring self-deception that transforms the lonely atheist in a foxhole into a true believer?"In general, in this book I have tried to stay away from mysticism and to play the role of psychoanalytical agnostic, but in this chapter God - the God of the reader's understanding - will be allowed a wider role. For the ego is a fascinating "organ," a remarkable synthesizer, and sometimes its achievements are nothing short of miraculous. In 1845 Wilhelm Griesenger, one of the first great psychiatrists, helped to move German psychology away from romantic and theological explanations of the mind toward a strictly empirical brain psychology. But in trying to be rational, Griesenger did not abandon the phenomena of synthetic mental activity. Thus, he wrote, 'How a material physical act in the nerve fibres or cells can be converted into an idea, an act of consciousness, is absolutely incomprehensible; indeed, we are utterly unable even to settle the question of the existence or nature of the media existing between them ... it is scientifically admissible to connect the faculties of the soul with the body in the same intimate relation as exists between function and organ ... to consider the soul primarily and preeminently as the sum of all cerebral states.' (1)
"Our capacities for creativity, for mature self-deception, and for religious wonder are all facilitated by situations that create a virtual reality, a way of supplementing and enhancing the love we have received. One such situation occurs in dreaming - both day and night dreaming - as we review the past and rehearse the future. We humans also seek out sacred places in which to find the holding environments we need. Our abilities to play and to integrate idea and affect also help to create the conditions that encourage creativity, maturity of defenses, and wonder. Not surprisingly, these four, dreaming, sacred places, play, and the linking of idea and affect, are also essential components of most psychotherapies and self-help groups. And all of them help to foster the spiritual and psychological growth that sometimes allows us to develop hope, faith, and gratitude even late in life.
"First, dreaming, by allowing us, in our minds, to manipulate past and future, gives us a way to master the passage of time. As egg-laying mammals like echidnas and platypuses evolved from their reptilian ancestors, they developed dramatically enlarged frontal lobes, but not the capacity to dream. Such expansion of the frontal lobes is thought to reflect an increased capacity to associate, to comprehend, and to reflect prior to action. As the non - egg-laying mammals evolved from their reptilian ancestors, they failed to develop similarly enlarged frontal lobes, but they developed a capacity for nocturnal dream states. While the purposes of nocturnal dreams are arguable, one purpose appears to be to allow the organism to reflect upon, associate to, and remember the past, because of the cataplexy (relative paralysis) of the dreaming state, being unable to act.
"Humans have evolved both the hypertrophied frontal lobes shared with more primitive mammals and the capacity to dream at night shared with dogs and cats. Humans also have the capacity to rehearse both past and future through daydreams while awake. Daydreaming and, by inference, night dreaming allow us to re-create the past and to rehearse the future. Thus, the evolution of both dreaming and the associational areas of the frontal lobes allows the organism to link past experience to future choice. Perhaps imagination and daydreaming are the same thing - but they are essential to the mastery of time, to the development of mature defenses, and to wondering whence we come and wither we are going. Dreaming and the frontal lobes permit us to imagine, and imagination is essential to religion, psychotherapy, and mature defenses. Without imagination and the capacity to transcend time present, mature defenses and faith would be impossible.
"Sacred place, too, allow us to imagine, to sustain paradox, and to wonder. In the painted caves of Altamira and Lascaux, or upon the artifact-surrounded, Oriental rug-draped couch of Sigmund Freud, or in an Aboriginal dance at a sacred site in Austrralia's Northern Territories - in such sacred places art, religion, ego, metaphor, play, and dreams intersect. The caveman's shrine, the analyst's office, the child's playhouse are places separated from and yet bound to reality. The same can be said of Stonehenge, the nave at Chartres, the studio of Picasso, and the stage of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. In sacred places, wonder reigns supreme. Transitional objects (symbols of early relationships) are everywhere. Sacraments and tragedy, rage and ecstasy can all be tolerated. Land can belong to two moral peoples at the same time; wine can become a savior's blood, and straw can be spun into gold. Perhaps a better term than sacred places would be playrooms or spiritual kindergartens for adults.
"The third link between creativity, mature self-deception, and wonder is play. Play allows self-deception and religious wonder to create order out of chaos and to seem to be true. As the psychoanalyst Anna Maria Rizzuto has demonstrated, when adults are asked to "play" and to draw their childhood family of origin and their image of God, the image they draw of God can be discerned in the images they draw of their families. (2) In the presence of psychological conflict, play can put into the world what was not there before. Play allows us to repeat and re-create conflictual relationships so that we can develop increasingly stable internalizations of those we love. Playful repetition offers mastery over past experiences of helplessness. Play, like religion and defenses, creates order. Indeed, play is order and 'brings to our lives a wonderful if limited perfection.' (3) In both play and in the evolution of mature defenses, the strength of a higher power may become ours. Play produces the very opposite of what we usually think of as illusion, for play is essential to the Piagetian concept of assimilation. But play has a beginning and an end; it is circumscribed and not to be confused with reality. Play, like religion and defenses, creates its own reality. To interrupt play creates disarray and anger. So it is with interrupting defenses and religious observance - a comforting virtual reality is destroyed and the spoilsport is resented.
"Sometimes, ritual allows the virtual reality of play to become reality. When through ritual or sacrement, we accept a transformed identity, the relationship between our old self and our new self is not adequately expressed by calling such a transformation just symbolic or just superstitious. Sometimes our new identity and the essential oneness of the old and the new identities go far deeper than the mere correspondence between a person and a symbolic image. It is a mystic unity. The one has become the other. In his magic dance, the Aboriginal dancer is a kangaroo; in the magic ceremonies of marriage and graduation, the girl becomes a matron and passes from medical student to physician.
"The fourth motif common to mature defenses and to many religious practices is the capacity to link the world of emotion and attachment with the world of reason and perception. Funerals, weddings, circumcisions, and christenings all bring passion and reason to mind simultaneously. An outspoken neuroscientist might venture that mature defenses, creativity, and religious wonder all come from the associational areas of the brain, especially from the frontal and temporal lobes. If the cerebral cortex allows us to make distinctions, to read, to count, and to discriminate, the "sticky" temporal lobes allow us to blend, to attach, to condense, and to remember people and feelings. It is not coincidental that smell, creativity, attachment, memory, and religious preoccupations all involve the temporal lobe. Both temporal lobe epilepsy and stimulation of the temporal lobes can produce hypergraphia, hypersexuality, hyperreligiousity - and sometimes the reexperience of smells and old songs. Damage the frontal lobe and we lose our judgment and our ability to distinguish "right" and "wrong." Damage the temporal lobes and our memory, and thus our ability to love, is destroyed. Remove the rest of the cortex and we cannot move, speak, or calulate, but we retain our affective attachments and our morality. Nevertheless, the affect-ridden temporal lobes and the logical, lexical parietal cortex are all part of the same brain; and it is their integration that produces mature defenses. As Piaget remind us, 'The two aspects, affective and cognitive, are at the same time inseparable and irreducible.' (4)"