Truth-telling, comedy, psychotherapy, faith...

I was watching 'Make 'Em Laugh' on the ABC last night, the episode about wise guys. Truth-telling as the basis of comedy was brought up particularly with respect to Larry David's character in 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' and Joan Rivers' stand-up. It was remarked that truth-telling comedy is as funny as it is because it says things that we all think but haven't owned up to. It tells the untellable about human nature - none of us is as good as we let on. Jung says something similar to this in relation to the shadow*. And indeed, telling the truth about how far from perfect our deepest motivations (and many of our words and actions) can be is an integral part of psychotherapy: it is the path to wellness. Perhaps this is why I've felt that psychotherapy has been so threatening to the kind of faith I had when I began it. It's not just threatening to black-and-white, fundamentalist faith: no matter how much Christians may want to emphasise forgiveness over goodness, the 'g' word pops up everywhere, even in the most liberal congregations. At times the pressure to be less than 100% honest about goodness is merely transferred from a discussion of traditional virtues and vices to issues surrounding political correctness, the environment, sometimes even psychological maturity versus immaturity. A friend who enjoys reading Bernard Salt's writing on psychodemographics paraphrased him in this way: 'In the past, if you didn't believe in God, that was considered shocking. Nowadays, if you were to say that you didn't believe in recycling, that would be considered shocking in almost the same way'.

My spiritual anxiety really makes itself known when issues of morality and goodness crop up. Again, I think this is because I feel that people in authority (in a spiritual or church context) are asking me to believe something, or say something about myself, that my intuition, trained by lots of years of psychotherapy, knows to be untrue. My motives are not pure! In fact, sometimes, they're atrocious! And from now on, I resolve to picture my God as the Great Psychotherapist in the Sky: someone who tells the truth, even when it's ugly; who wants to hear the truth, even when it's ugly... and hopefully has a sense of humour about it too.

For future discussion: are God's motives always pure? What is a pure motive, anyway? I don't know if one exists...

*I want to mention how liberating the concept of the shadow is, the idea that everything 'impure' that we suppress in ourselves is there within us anyway, just in a hidden compartment! We contain all goodness and all badness and everything in between. This concept is suprememly effective in countering what I've begun to call my 'spiritual anxiety'. Thank God for Jung...