Everybody Prays

“Everybody prays.” This simple pronoun and verb pairing begins the 1982 book Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer, written by Jungian theologians Ann and Barry Ulanov. And it is true, everybody prays. They go on, “People pray whether or not they call it prayer. We pray every time we ask for help, understanding, or strength, in or out of religion. Then, who and what we are speak out of us whether we know it or not.”  Prayers, bellowing out of foxholes or otherwise, are magnificent and mundane, rough and raw, awful and awesome. And as such, they are at heart confessional. When we pray, we confess into awareness what our whole selves are saying—both what we readily acknowledge of ourselves and what we do not—and to whom we say it. Our prayers confess our innermost longings, our most ashamed secrets, and our hiding joys.

And these confessions implicate the whole person. They recruit the body, as demonstrated by neuroscientists like Andrew Newberg (a past guest of ours at The Center) and Zoran Josipovic. When we pray, increases in frontal lobe activity generate a focused sense of story and decreases in parietal lobe activity unstick the boundaries between self and surround to allow for transcendence. Neurons loosen more dopamine, and oxytocin flows more through the bloodstream, enlivening in our bodies a sense of rapturous bond. Freud called it the Oceanic Feeling.

Prayers recruit the mind too, as demonstrated by psychologists like Lee Kirkpatrick (also a past guest of ours at The Center), Justin Barrett, and the psychiatrist Ana-Maria Rizzuto. Our early object relations, coalescing our attempts at suffering slings and arrows, give shape to the categories of personhood into which we sort our experiences. Mommy and daddy, husband and wife, enemy and friend, God and Satan all receive our psychic projections even when we pray. And this is why the Ulanovs remind us that the prayers we utter today actually began a long time ago when our concepts of the good and bad other began taking shape. And when we pray for our enemies, we release “within us parts of ourselves that really are our own enemies, forces hostile to our conscious sense of who we are.” We confess to ourselves and to others, when we pray, the recesses of our minds.

And by weaving together body and mind, our prayers implicate that other life force—the breath, the spirit, the soul, the psyche. And here it becomes the singular focus of our field: Psychology. When considered, it seems ridiculous that psychology—the study of the soul—would avert its eyes from prayer. And yet we do. Perhaps because we nobly fear ethical violation, or we dismiss silly unscience, or we abhor histories of religious violence and abuse, we clinicians keep prayers safely outside the frame. But we mustn’t. For all the reasons considered and so many more, prayer is an enterprise so relevant to clinical intervention. We must ready ourselves to encounter it.