My Research Program:  An Overview

My research program is characterized by one overarching focus: the study of religion.  I have always found religion to be the most intriguing of human activities.  In fact, one of my most powerful memories of childhood recalls that which is fascinating about religious belief.  Witnessing two children fighting, I heard one child lob a threat at another, "if you don’t stop doing that, you’re going to hell when you die!"  Running back to my house, I encountered my dad and asked him to explain "hell" to me.  Describing some of its more colorful features while asserting that "I don’t actually believe in hell," my dad tried to define its meaning for me.  I was more than a little intrigued. I was hooked.  That humans had "come up" with an idea of the afterlife so filled with drama, horror, and apprehension I found wholly remarkable.  In the years which followed, I continued to find of compelling interest that aspect of human life which is focused on ultimate concern and ultimate destiny, life and death, hate and love:  the province of religion.

In college, I was introduced to two systems of thought which enabled me to seek answers to questions about religion in a manner which I found especially insightful:  philosophy (especially phenomenology and existentialism) and psychoanalytic theory.  I pursued these avenues of study in graduate school.  They have remained a primary focus for my scholarship for the past twenty years.

Although philosophy and psychoanalytic theory are distinct ways of exploring human existence, their appeal for me has a certain consistency. Both helpfully illuminate questions about religion on which I have focused most of my attention for the past decade.  I have considered what impact religion has on our gendered experience of the world, exploring religion as an instrument of social control as well as a vehicle of agency. As my book, Sacrificed Lives, details, I have considered, in particular, how religion is deeply implicated in cultural violence against women.  Drawing on the critical insights of my book, more recently, I have undertaken some new explorations, each of which will result in a book. 

First, I am working on a collection of essays in which I draw on the feminist criticism of René Girard I developed in Sacrificed Lives to illuminate some well known works from Western culture.  The texts I will include in the book are Antigone, works by Proust, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Frankenstein. 

In a second project, I am extending the general lines of my previous research to look more closely at ways in which the origin of human violence can be linked with the origin of the religious and creative imagination in children.  In Dwellers in Enchantment: Children and the Origins of Religious Belief, a book manuscript in progress, I attend to the emergence of religious belief in children, grounding my insights in psychoanalytic theory. This project extends the line of research about violence and religion on which my first book drew but applies this research to a different area of human life. Where I focused on adult violence in my book, in this new research project, I explore the birth of the imagination in children, seeking to trace the capacity for violence and nonviolence in the lives of children and to link the religious phenomenon of which I wrote in my first book with the emergence of creativity. This is a large project which will take several years to develop.

Sketches of each moment in my research program follow.

Kristeva and Girard:   Research on Women and Violence

The research project on which I focused during the 1990s, which culminated in the publication of my book, Sacrificed Lives, revolves around a series of questions. Why did medieval women mystics practice extreme asceticism at risk of death? Why did European witch hunting happen, and why were its victims tortured and executed? Why has the Christian West regularly found maternal figures profoundly disquieting and threatening? Locating mystics, witches, and mothers on a common continuum of violence, in my book I offer answers these questions as I advance a theory of sacrifice inspired by Julia Kristeva and René Girard. A theory of sacrifice best accounts for the pervasive blight of violence on Western culture, the human proclivity for bodily mutilation and abuse, and women's special vulnerability to violence.

Understanding sacrifice as an effort to counter societal unrest and disorder, I give special attention to two especially perplexing aspects of it. The logic of sacrifice suggests that those who practice it believe that effective action against social disorder mandates the death of the victim and precludes nonlethal, figurative sacrifices such as banishment or incarceration. But why must the victim die if the sacrificial gesture is to be truly efficacious? Moreover, what accounts for the ritualized gesture of sacrifice? The sacrificial victim is seldom speedily dispatched. Instead, as sacrificers probe and mutilate the victim's body, they linger over their work, forcing the victim to slowly give up its life.

With Kristeva, I locate answers to these questions when I trace the logic of sacrifice to the threshold of hominization when infants physically struggle to separate from the maternal body and acquire space in the world. Beset initially by mimetic conflict--"where does mommy end and I begin"—infants grow, eventually differentiating themselves from the "maternal continent" and claiming autonomy in a world of language. But they never rest easily there: mortality and loss shadow every expression of creativity and agency. During times of crisis, humans recall long-forgotten physical efforts, ritually reinvoking identity-differentiating acts that first won them a place in the world. Just as once they used their mouths and hands to fend off threats and delineate a space for being, so now do they seize hold of bodies, probing every surface and hollow in order to expel a death-bearing disorder that threatens to overcome them. Cutting, killing, eating, they attempt to capture the very powers of life itself. But, when success proves elusive, their ever more desperate probes become lethal, as infants' never could.

Reading the stories of mystics, witches, and mothers in light of this scenario, I explain how the pattern of violence described here historically has placed women at special risk. Exploiting sexual difference, those who kill have associated the ultimate source of threat with women's bodies, making them a primary currency in a sacrificial economy. So also has religion played a pivotal role among the many institutions and symbolic systems that have upheld the work of this economy. Notwithstanding its pervasiveness, sacrifice is not inevitable. In my conclusion, I attend to intimations of alternative economies which sustain hope that humans can come to terms with their life circumstances without resorting to deadly violence.

If you would like to learn more about my book, you may want to look at the Table of Contents or read Chapter One.  

Girard and Feminist Criticism

In work undertaken since the completion of my book, I have continued to explore the significance of Kristeva and Girard for issues in contemporary culture.  I plan for a book of essays in which I apply the theory I developed in Sacrificed Lives to several works of literature.  Chapters on Frankenstein, Antigone, and Passing are described below.  A chapter on Proust has not yet been begun. 

The only chapter of this proposed book which has already been published is "Mimetic Violence and Nella Larsen’s Passing: Toward a Critical Consciousness of Racism (Contagion, 5, Spring 1998, 74-98)," I draw on Girard’s theory to address the subject of white racism.

My essay takes as its focus Patricia Elliot’s claim that racism can successfully be combated by members of dominant groups only if they divest themselves of subjective investments in racism through forging a critical consciousness. Only as persons commit themselves to a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of white complicity in structures of domination in order to grapple with racism at multiple levels—including identity formation, maintenance, and transformation--can members of dominant groups actually tackle and begin to dismantle it. I argue that the Girardian notion of mimesis contributes to such an analysis. The dynamics of mimesis account well for agents of racism who, simultaneously recognizing and denying difference, act in ways that inhibit social and subjective transformation. I suggest that, were members of dominant groups to be more attentive to mimesis, they would more effectively address racism at the level of identify formation and maintenance.

Nella Larsen’s novella, Passing, is the focal point for my discussion of Girard’s notion of mimesis on behalf of enhancing critical consciousness among members of dominant groups. Passing offers a particularly telling context for interrogating racism. In the first place, themes in Passing summon the reader to sustained reflection on the construction of raced identity, illuminating the role of mimesis in that process. But mimetic currents not only cross through Passing, shaping its narrative, they also move beyond it, mutually implicating the text and its reader. As a consequence, white readers of Passing can self-reflexively engage these currents, noting how they shape their reading of the text. Their critical reflection can lead to the exposure of subjective investments in racism. As I consider themes of race and mimesis in the narrative and reading of Passing, new insights for grappling with racism emerge. Arising from a conversation about a work of literature, they have broadly suggestive possibilities for anti-racist initiatives among members of dominant groups.

I am in the midst of completing an article on Antigone.  In this article, I draw on Lacan’s readings of Antigone to set forth my own understanding of ways in which Antigone falls outside a sacrificial orbit, making problematic any characterization of her role as “self-sacrifice.”  My comments both establish points of commonality with Girard’s interpretation of Antigone and delineate important differences.  Looking closely at the text of Antigone, I elaborate on Lacan’s claims with testimony offered by feminist, psychoanalytic readings of Antigone.   Lacan does not place Antigone within the Oedipal drama but at "the limit" of that economy.  Attending to that limit, I point to the significance of a Lacanian reading of Antigone for scholars engaging in Girard-inspired reflection on mimetic violence, and I explain why Lacanian insights may be drawn on productively to augment their efforts.

The chapter on Frankenstein is the most well developed in the proposed book.  It takes its inspiration from Timothy Beal.  Beal, writing in Religion and its Monsters, observes that despite our best efforts to finish off monsters, they “keep coming back for more.”  Not only Dracula, but all monsters are undead.  Beal muses that perhaps monsters maintain their hold on us because “they still have something to say or show us about our world or ourselves.”[1]  Beal could not be more right.  In this presentation, I contend that the monstrous creature brought to life in the laboratory of Victor Frankenstein, whose story is told in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, maintains his compelling hold on our lives precisely because he has something important to say and show us about our world and ourselves. 

In exploring the ongoing significance of the creature for us, I draw on work of Julia Kristeva and René Girard.  Kristeva employs the tools of psychoanalysis to explore important features in the histories of families, sexualities, and bodies.  Girard deploys a mimetic theory that proves similarly insightful for an analysis of Frankenstein.  In this presentation, I demonstrate that Kristeva’s psychoanalytic insights and Girard’s mimetic theory illuminate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, enabling us to better understand how the undead who haunt its pages still speak to us, as they have for so many generations of readers.  

Kristeva authorizes a reading of Shelley oriented not toward Freud’s master thesis, the Oedipal drama, but toward his counter-thesis.  As described by Diane Jonte-Pace,[2] the counter-thesis was never formally thematized by Freud.  Instead, from Freud we gain only “a rough cartography of a terrain not well traveled.”[3]  This terrain features three images of the mother:  dead mothers, mothers as instructors in death, and uncanny (unheimlich) maternal bodies.  In her work, Kristeva attends closely to these images, offering us a sustained commentary on them.  Kristeva’s exposition of the counter-thesis illuminates the dynamics of Frankenstein because all three images of maternal death are featured in the text.

Important to my analysis of the uncanny within Frankenstein are Girard’s reflections in Violence and the Sacred on the monstrous double.  Not only do Victor and the creature, confronting each other in a window/mirror, attest to doubling.  Mary Shelley and Margaret Saville, who receives the letters around which the outer frame of the text is constructed, may be doubles.  Shelley and Walton, Shelley and Victor, Walton and Victor, Victor and the creature, the creature and Safie, Safie and Shelley attest to a doubling of selves that makes of the text a house of mirrors.[4]  In the end, even we, the readers, become caught up in the mimetic currents of the text.  To the extent that we identify with the creature, we too feel monstrous, becoming its mimetic doubles.  Caught in that doubling, we experience the uncanny (unheimlich) directly.  We learn that just as for the creature earth has not been, could never be a home, we too will never truly be at home.

The significance of Kristeva and Girard for my analysis of Frankenstein is highlighted by the theme of immortality, through which my explorations of images of maternal death and monstrous doubles are joined.  Freud’s term for immortality, “Unsterblichkeit,” or “undeath,” is telling.  In Freud’s concept of undeath, we discover a theory of the afterlife that “recapitulates and reverses our deadly encounters with the maternal body.”[5]  Dead mothers who give instructions to us about death introduce us also to the uncanny dynamics of undeath, which is visible in most pronounced form in repeated episodes of monstrous doubling within the text.  As a consequence, Girard and Kristeva illuminate Frankenstein, enabling the reader to see in it a traveler’s guide to the terrain of the undead.

Kristeva and Girard’s insights enable us better to understand Victor Frankenstein’s creature as a being who, haunting the psychic and social terrain of the undead, attests to some of our most deep-seated desires and fantasies.  We are uncomfortable with death; we are more uncomfortable with undeath.  Nevertheless, our lasting fascination with Frankenstein’s creature—a most memorable example of the undead--educates us in important ways to our human anxiety about mortality and to ways in which humans have tried in the past and continue to try today to come to terms with this anxiety. 

Dwellers in Enchantment:  On the Origins of Religious Belief

I have initiated also a study from a psychoanalytic perspective on the emergence of religious belief in children. Defining "religious belief" as "meaning-making oriented toward ultimacy," I  set out to trace its origins to very early childhood, locating the impulse for ultimacy in the child's transitional object (a favorite toy or blanket from which the child is inseparable). Following the child as she/he develops and matures, I  observe that the impulse for ultimacy is linked with the emergence of a mythic imagination. Choosing to study fairy tales as instances of this mythic imagination at work, I offer a positive assessment of their role in children's lives. Although others have charted a similar course in their research on the origins of religion, my project breaks new ground in several respects: I  attend systematically to the role of gender in the child's quest for ultimacy; I  address the pervasiveness of violence in work undertaken by the mythic imagination as well as its social impact; and I  establish a framework for examining the emergence of religious belief in a cross-cultural context.

My project draws on psychoanalytic theory to revise and augment psychoanalytic literature that addresses the emergence of religious belief in children. Linking revisionist Freudian psychoanalytic theories and object-relations theories influenced by the British school of psychoanalysis, I set forth a reading of religion that sheds new light on the social context of emergent religious belief. This reading makes space for religious belief along a broad continuum of life experience and uncovers a vibrant matrix of meaning-making in play, fantasy, and creativity out of which the human orientation toward religious belief emerges. Central to this process are symbols, which attest to the human capacity to create meaningful space oriented toward community. Symbol-making follows infant play with transitional objects that are first exercises in world-forming and relationship-making activities. In turn, fairy tales extend into the world of language work that the transitional object previously has performed. "Enchantment" (Bettelheim) describes the process by which children who engage fairy tales are able to "compose an ultimate environment and orient themselves toward the being or beings that constitute their character." Within this environment are patterns of meaning that, augmented and transformed by adults within communities of faith, are typically associated with religious belief and ritual practice.

The portrait of the origins of religious belief in children that I offer here is not uniquely my own. However, my efforts do break new ground in three ways. First, the mark of gender in processes described here has not been traced yet by other scholars. I initiate an analysis oriented toward gender in my project. Second, within the transitional space of early childhood, the pervasiveness of violence in human creative work and image-making has not been analyzed adequately. Building on research conducted for my first book, which set forth a psychoanalytic theory of the origins of violence, I address this lacuna. Finally, research in this area has drawn almost exclusively on imaginative traditions in American and European culture. My project establishes a broader framework for study by including a cross-cultural context of exploration. By augmenting extant theory on the emergence of religious belief in children in these three ways, my research contributes to ongoing research in the field of religion on the essence, origins, function, and significance of religious belief in society. On a broader level, it promises to contribute to knowledge about children’s creativity and their experiences with meaning-making in contexts oriented toward ultimacy (i.e. emergent religiosity) in the fields of education, psychology, and counseling.

Please click here to see a complete prospectus. 

© Martha J. Reineke.     Please send correspondence to martha.reineke@uni.edu