Author Yair Caspi had a religious experience once, what psychologist Abraham Maslow would term a “peak experience.” It’s content? We can only find true freedom by making ourselves slaves to god.

Caspi then built that experience into a psychological method that relies heavily on Jewish god-talk. A secular Jew, Caspi find traditional psychology to be a false religion.

Because the basis of Caspi’s concept is that all of us — secular, Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox — worship idols of some sort, the student must identify his idol and what he sacrifices to this false god.

A test: What difficulties or suffering am I required to endure here? What is my complaint to God? Revelation: What new and surprising insight have I received? How did I know God in this exercise? Vision: What is a true vision that should guide me? What is a false vision? What is my mitzva? What am I obligated to do, what am I commanded to do out of all this? And what will my reward be? What is my prayer to God? That’s the format. That’s the language.
And that’s the method of work.

Tillich defines idolatry as the lifting up to ultimate concern something which only deserves limited concern, and in that respect I can agree that the removal of idols is a positive thing. But the Augustinian truism–that we are only truly free when we are slaves to god–gives me pause.

The notion that we should become slaves to god goes back in Christian sources to Saul/Paul, whose solution to the place of humanity in the cosmos was to divide the soul irreparably against itself. As Philocrites notes, I have no problem using god-talk for greater human understanding. But the god-talk must not be fundamentally harmful from the start.

There has been a movement to use philosophy as a substitute for and/or complement to traditional counseling. This movement and Caspi stand in judgment of traditional psychology (and especially Freudian branches) for endless counseling that never seems to cure. It is thought that Jewish god-talk or good old-fashioned philosophy will do a better job of solving what proponents understand to be an ontological or existential problem.

Fair enough, as long as you’re not talking about cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal therapies, which do work for most affective disorders. (And they don’t focus on a cheap forgiveness, which seems to be Caspi’s main complain against psychology.) Pharmaceuticals work too. Yet there still seems to be a “Prozac backlash” in some quarters. My hunch is that they just don’t understand disability.

The desire for a disembodied existence is the root of the desire to be a slave to god. What could cause this? A displacement of personal responsibility for your life.

But perhaps that’s too harsh a judgement. And perhaps my latent existentialism is showing through. To be more precise, they desire a personal apocalypse, a total resolution of the messiness of life in one moment of ultimate crisis. Throwing your will upon god–that is, slavery to god–is acting in anticipation of that apocalyptic moment, hoping that this time it will really happen. Only a total act of god can save, they reason.

There are other models, though. The New Testament also talks of being “joint heirs with Christ” and “partners with god.” And Taoism teaches that there will always be a little yin in your yang, so the trick is learning that that’s how creativity happens. Or to quote a childhood memory, “You put your chocolate in my peanut butter. You put your peanut butter in my chocolate.”