The belief that “we cannot fall out of this world” enables us to tolerate –
to find meaning in life – in light of the fact of our inevitable death.
00 The
language of illusion and wish is here supplemented with the notion of
creativity and memory. We may need to believe that our creative
capacities – such as in literature, in learning and in love – will matter
after our existence, a self after self, a symbolic form of life after death.
The terms of this debate between psychoanalysis and religion have
recently re-surfaced in Julia Kristeva’s book, This Incredible Need to Believe
(0000). Echoing Rolland, she begins with a disagreement with Freud.
Kristeva re-iterates the idea that belief is neither an illusion nor neurosis,
but a condition of surviving the fact of finite existence (and here we can
see her agreement with Rolland). As Kristeva (0000) writes: “Whether I
belong to a religion, whether I be agnostic or atheist, when I say ‘I
believe,’ I mean ‘I hold as true’….It is a matter of truth…that I hold for vital, absolute, indisputable, a truth that keeps me, makes me exist” (p.
0). Loosening the congealed relation between belief and religion,
Kristeva takes as her model of belief the figure of the adolescent. The
adolescent is a model of belief in her desperate search for a “jubilant
certainty of belonging to the world” that does not exist per say, but that is
needed to feel as if one exists (p. 00). For Kristeva, then, the adolescent
need to believe is a reprieve of the “oceanic feeling” – that feeling of
something larger than me – which the adolescent uses, at one level, in the
service of survival: to “not fall out of this world.” The adolescent, like the
believer, seeks belonging through the idealization of the erotic object:
whether this is a person, an idea or an idol (p. 00).