On Belief — Faith As Defense Mechanism & Applications to Multicultural Counseling
For the first three decades of my life, religious belief was central to my worldview. My deeply held religious beliefs also formed my ethical code. As a clergy member within a high-demand religious group, I also attempted to proliferate this worldview inside and outside the church.
In 2018, I experienced an existential crisis when I discovered that my intrinsic ethical values conflicted with the group’s. A sudden disappearance of the cognitive schemata that underpinned my worldview, belief system, and ethical framework led to symptoms of PTSD including depression, suicidality, intrusive ideation, and panic.
My situation was not unlike that of 16 th-century Swiss physician Paracelsus who’s spiritual crisis was described by Carl Jung in a lecture given in 1929:
“He loses all his comforting prejudices, his whole world falls apart, and he knows as yet nothing about a different order of things. He becomes impoverished, as unknowing as a small child, still entirely ignorant of a new world…and he must build a new world out of his own experience” (C. Jung, 1971)
My subsequent deconstruction led to a fascination with the cognitive, affective, and neurobiological correlates of belief, how they inform behavior, and how they contribute to wellness and conflict in the psyche.
Constructivist & Neuropsychoanalytic Theories of Belief
According to the constructivist theory of psychology, the developing human creates cognitive schemata that become short-hand for quick-fire behavioral decisions in everyday life (Karnaze, 2013). The founder of constructivist psychology, George Kelley, framed the human as a scientist that performs (all be they poorly designed) experiments upon their world, condensing their early experiences into cognitive schemata (Karnaze, 2013). These behavioral schemes become reinforced over time through interactions with the material and social world, such that the neural correlates of these cognitive structures are potentiated by intense emotion. To the extent the cognitive schemata that form beliefs are tied to biological need fulfillment in the form of bonding and attachment, group affiliation, and survival at the organismic level, they are reinforced over time as the neural correlates of these cognitive structures are potentiated by the neurochemical and neuroelectric activity arising from the subcortical areas of the brain (Solms, 2020).
From the neuropsychoanalytic perspective, beliefs appear as defense mechanisms that regulate the overwhelming affective sensations and neurochemical drives associated with biological and interpersonal functioning. To the extent that beliefs systems are not socially disruptive in higher strata of the social ecology, they can be conceptualized as healthy defense mechanisms. Belief systems can be further reduced to their constituent parts (supernatural beliefs, ethics, morals, values, etc.) that function at the individual level as either adaptive or maladaptive defense mechanisms. The importance of belief as defense mechanism cannot be underemphasized in the therapeutic process.
The Role of Belief in the Art of Counseling
In addition to the client’s belief system, the client-therapist interaction also involves the explicit and implicit belief system of the counselor. Clinical practitioners existing in multicultural settings are encouraged to examine closely their belief systems to consider how they could impact the therapeutic relationship.
At the first level of explicit cognition, the counselor must recognize that the belief system of their upbringing is not synonymous with that of the client. This is fairly obvious. Underpinning belief, however, is subconscious valence. Valence refers to the sense of approach and avoidance, connected at the organismic level to attraction and disgust (Schnall et al, 2008). Temporally, these pre-cognitive functions occur before cognitive interpretation of their significance in any interpersonal context (Haidt, 2003).
The multicultural counselor must understand how the valence of the client’s sensory system has informed the development of their belief system and, conversely, how their belief system disguises valence and cand can interrupt congruence in the therapy room. This goes beyond multicultural awareness, acknowledgment of cultural bias, or socio-politically charged debates over the superiority of certain belief systems over others. When a counselor experiences belief as a pre-cognitive, pre-affective, desire/disgust ambivalence (Freud, 2012), they can avoid much of the rapport-interrupting conflict that arises from the difference between their belief system and the client’s.
Counselors could follow the belief-transcending approach of the renowned ethnobiologist Terrence McKenna who famously stated:
“My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.”
McKenna’s experience with psychedelics and spiritual practices convinced him of the relativity of cognition (beliefs) to societal, cultural, and temporal contexts. Indeed, the ability to suspend one’s worldview and remain receptive to that of the other is the basis of many affective approaches to counseling including client-centered humanistic, post-modern, and neuroscience-based modalities. What McKenna failed to realize, however, is that the absence of belief systems and even structured cognition, which indeed appears to be an attainable state of consciousness (albeit only temporarily), represents what cultural psychologists refer to as an etic approach to belief. In the etic perspective, that could be considered a belief in itself, an aspirational value of transcendence over the divisive nature of belief is taken.
One must remember that belief, while often framed as religious or related to faith, operates in a similar fashion in the realm of the political, social, and hot button social issues, in that the aforementioned are also based on valence at the precognitive level. McKenna’s aspirational value of non-belief contrasts modern emic sociological approaches that encourage not philosophical transcendence, but radical acceptance of cultural, sexual, and gender differences and the responsibility of the counselor to broach these early with the client. Proponents of the latter would assert that an attempt to attain non-belief could cloud a counselor to their implicit biases.
Regardless of the individual counselor’s skill at actively separating faith-based belief schemata from affect and valence in consciousness in real-time therapeutic practice, the counselor is still likely to operate under an assumptive belief in the value of the academic, scientific, and professional infrastructures of the counseling field. In sum, a certain amount of belief is asked of the counselor — the aspirational belief in the efficacy of psychotherapy. This requires a belief in the epistemological claims of the scientific method for delivering psychotherapeutic modalities that work. The counselor must suspend their disbelief in the psychotherapeutic process even when faced with evidence supporting such a disbelief is drawn from direct experience with a challenging client.
How Academic Trends Impact Approaches to Belief in Clinical Counseling
As mentioned above, modern social discourse raises to the level of belief the intractable difference between cultural, racial, and societal perspectives. What began as an attempt to highlight a blind spot in the Western secularist ideal of etic multiculturalism and its byproduct of cultural assimilation, has evolved into a belief system in and of itself — a belief in the difference between beliefs as the philosophical ideal. Included in these trends is a criticism of the epistemological claims of the scientific method (Rorty, 2009).
Awareness of the cognitive nature of belief calls for more affect-based modes of psychotherapy. Emotional experience (if not the language of communication itself) is universal, based on the activity of neural structures with their electrical and neurochemical roots in the subcortical (and therefore pre-cognitive) areas of the brain (Solms, 2020). This requires that the field of counseling turn its attention to the brain and an analysis not only of the cognitive causes of the so-called psychological disorders but also the emotional roots of cognitive schemata, belief included. A brain-based approach will allow counselors to frame belief from a universal materialist perspective that can be leveraged, in the etic tradition, regardless of the narrative and dialectical nature of belief systems in the room and emerging criticism of the clinical evidence base. In short, affect-based forms of therapy bypass belief.
This is not to say that outside of the therapeutic chamber, both client and counselor will not continue to use belief systems as developmentally appropriate defense mechanisms against existential fears and in the service of their interpersonal functioning. However, neuropsychodynamic approaches can be used as a framework for understanding how belief systems serve as networks of defense mechanisms (Shore, 2018). This approach highlights the affective/cognitive/linguistic interplay of the belief-making and re-making process, and how this serves the client in establishing affective homeostasis in the brain, and interpersonal health.
Focusing on belief creation and deconstruction as a plastic neurobiological process that correlates with both adaptive and maladaptive defense mechanisms, rather than framing belief from the emic perspective as static cognitive schemata assumed static as does current sociological theory could lead to positive for the counseling discipline and the larger social ecology.
References:
Freud, S. (2012). Totem and taboo. Routledge., 53–55
Gilmour, G. S., Nielsen, G., Teodoro, T., Yogarajah, M., Coebergh, J. A., Dilley, M. D., … & Edwards, M. J. (2020). Management of functional neurological disorder. Journal of Neurology, 267, 2164–2172.
Haidt, J. (2003). The moral emotions. Handbook of affective sciences, 11(2003), 852–870.
Hoffman, L., & Obradovic, S. (2023). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness., 122–125
Jung, C. G. (1971). The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Routledge and Kegan P., 10
Karnaze, M. M. (2013). A constructivist approach to defining human emotion: From George Kelly to Rue Cromwell. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 26(3), 194–201.
Rorty, R. (2009). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton university press.
Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G. L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and social psychology bulletin, 34(8), 1096–1109.
Originally published at https://thomaswmoore.substack.com.
