Psyche, Science, and Society

Angels and the intolerable loneliness of America

A new poll brings the startling news that an overwhelming majority, over 80%, of Americans believe in angels:

A bluebird in the garden, a spirit in a house, a kind man on the side of the road. Americans are big believers in angels, although not necessarily the ones with halos and wings.

An overwhelming majority, almost regardless of backgrounds and religious convictions, think angels are real, according to an AP-AOL News poll exploring attitudes about Santa Claus, angels and more.

Belief in angels, however people define them, is highest — almost universal — among white evangelical Christians, 97 percent of whom trust in their existence, the poll indicates. But even among people with no religious affiliation, well more than half said angels are for real.

Among the findings about angels and Santa:

• Protestants, women, Southerners, Midwesterners and Republicans were the most likely to believe in angels, although strong majorities in other groups also shared that faith. Belief in angels declined slightly with advanced education, from 87 percent of those with high school education or less to 73 percent of those with college degrees. Overall, 81 percent believed in angels.

• 86 percent believed in Santa as a child. And despite the multiethnic nature of the country, more than 60 percent of those with children at home consider Santa important in their holiday celebrations now.
• Nearly half, 47 percent, said Santa detracts from the religious significance of Christmas; over one-third, 36 percent, said he enhances the religious nature of the holiday.
• 91 percent of whites believed in Santa as a child; 72 percent of minorities did. One quarter of those now living in households with incomes under $25,000 did not believe in Santa.

The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted by telephone Dec. 12 to 14 by Ipsos, an international public opinion research company. The margin of sampling error for all adults was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

If it’s one thing to believe in angels, it’s something else to explain exactly what an angel is.

“A presence that you feel around you, is my opinion,” said Elizabeth Daves, 63, of Flemington, N.J. “I accept them — to come whenever they want to.” And she said they came, and have comforted her, since her mother-in-law died in their house.

Edward Pelz, 80, of Grabill, Ind., said he believes that angels are guiding him, even though it’s impossible to explain to anyone else.

“Have I ever seen one? Nope. We depict an angel as a person that’s white, has a robe on, has wings on back. I’m not sure that’s the way they look. So for me, I think sometimes there’s angels that aren’t that way.”

Pelz recounted a story about a man who showed up to change his tire when he had a flat in Ohio five years ago.

“I look at life — I say, well maybe I had an angel with me here today. It could have been just another man doing a good deed.”

Although Santa took knocks in the poll for diminishing the religious nature of the holiday, some grown-ups who considered him a benefit to the season cited the spirit of selfless giving that he represents.

“Now, if you are using Santa Claus to push a $100 robotic dinosaur, then that’s a problem,” said Ron Montgomery of Louisville, Ky. But the 64-year-old grandfather counts himself as a Santa believer to this day.

“It’s the whole atmosphere,” he said. “Santa Claus is the spirit. The trees, the church, the whole works. You actually see more of your neighbors.

“It’s a feeling. It’s not like a ghost. It’s an attitude.”

Pelz felt another spirit when he walked into his backyard on a winter’s day — that of the wife he lost over two years ago. He called her Mom.

“She loved bluebirds,” he said. “In the wintertime, we don’t have bluebirds. I was out in the back, thinking, ‘Mom I’d like to see you,’ and this little bluebird comes by.

“I don’t know, maybe that’s an angel. It was just something I wanted to see. Maybe I imagined it. Next thing you know, it flew off. What is an angel? Is an angel something that has a heartbeat like us? Or is it …?”

The thought trailed off.

The sense given here is that “angels” are a remedy for a profound loneliness, a sense of a benevolent presence that enhances life’s meaning and protects us. After all, we live in a society that, compared to most other industrialized countries, does not, either in ideology or practice, protect its citizens. The vaunted American individualism means that each of us faces our fate alone, with only potential support from our families. If we fall, there is little or no safety net to keep us from falling to the bottom.

Of course, this applies only to the majority of us. The wealthy have elaborate safety nets. CEOs are guaranteed tens of millions of dollars in “severance packages” if and when they fail. Their pay goes up regardless of performance. And the George W. Bush’s have wealthy families and their pals to bail them out when they fail. Perhaps they believe in angels because they’ve experienced undeserved beneficence.

As for the rest of us, Santa or angels are the only creatures potentially available to save us when disaster strikes: job loss, death of spouse, or loss of a loved one in Iraq (a fate virtually never experienced by the wealthy and powerful). We know that society will leave us to our fate. It’s either Santa or angels or disaster.

1 comment December 27th, 2006

Maybe Freud did have an affair with his sister-in-law

For decades it was rumored that Sigmund Freud had had an affair with his wife’s sister Minna Bernays. Carl Jung claimed so, but others denied it. Now a German sociologist has found a new tantalizing bit of evidence:

But a German sociologist now says he has found evidence that on Aug. 13, 1898, during a two-week vacation in the Swiss Alps, Freud, then 42, and Miss Bernays, then 33, put up at the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja, and registered as a married couple, a finding that may cause historians to re-evaluate their understanding of Freud’s own psychology.

A yellowing page of the leather-bound ledger shows that they occupied Room 11. Freud signed the book, in his distinctive Germanic scrawl, “Dr Sigm Freud u frau,” abbreviated German for “Dr. Sigmund Freud and wife….”

Freud’s wife, Martha, knew about his trip with Miss Bernays, if not its nature. The same day Freud signed the hotel ledger, he sent his wife a postcard rhapsodizing about the glaciers, mountains and lakes the pair had seen. In the card, published in Freud’s collected correspondence, he described their lodgings as “humble,” although the hotel appears to have been the second-fanciest in town.

The evidence is persuasive enough for Peter Gay, the Freud biographer and longtime skeptic on what he called “the Minna matter,” to say that he is now inclined to revise his work accordingly.

“It makes it very possible that they slept together,” he said. “It doesn’t make him or psychoanalysis more or less correct.”

Does it matter? Psychoanalysts and Freud scholars will continue the debate. A certain faction appears to believe that psychoanalysis rises or falls with the moral reputation of its founder. If Freud was “flawed,” then so must be his creation.

Another opinion can be seen in an email I received this morning from my fellow psychoanalyst Michael Roloff:

So Freud did have an affair with Minna! Good for him!

In any case, the hagiography of Freud has been slowly dying as even psychoanalysts have gradually started to accept that all of us are human, even we analysts.

As for me, I find it interesting, just as Freud is a more interesting person the more we realize that he was a person. The fate of psychoanalysis doesn’t rest on Freud’s reputations but rather on the combination of the insights it provides into human nature, the guidance it provides for therapists, and the empirical evidence regarding its central tenets.

Add comment December 27th, 2006

Iran to run out of oil soon?

Reuters reports that a Johns Hopkins researcher has published an analysis which states that Iran may experience a shortfall in oil to export within eight years. Of course, I have no idea if this analysis is correct, but, of course, it does shed new light on Iran’s determination to develop nuclear power:

Iran’s claim to need nuclear power may be genuine, given that it could run out of oil to export as soon as eight years from now, according to an analysis published on Tuesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

The study’s author, Roger Stern, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, said investment in Iranian oil production had been inadequate to offset oil field declines and the explosive growth in domestic demand.

“I’m not saying that Iran will have no oil in eight years,” Stern said in a telephone interview. “I’m saying that they will be using all of it for themselves.”

The analysis, published in the latest issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said the Iranian government could become “politically vulnerable” from declining exports.

Oil exports account for about 70 percent of Iranian government revenue, said Stern, of the university’s department of geography and environmental engineering.

He projected that in five years, Iranian oil exports may be less than half their present level, and could drop to zero by 2015.

“It therefore seems possible that Iran’s claim to need nuclear power might be genuine, an indicator of distress from anticipated export revenue shortfalls,” he wrote. “If so, the Iranian regime may be more vulnerable than is presently understood.”

Add comment December 27th, 2006