The Question Reframed: From Belief Versus Unbelief to Porous Versus Buffered Self

Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, published in 2007 and running to nearly nine hundred pages, opens by refusing the standard framing of the secularization debate. The familiar question — whether religion has declined under the pressure of modern science, capitalism, or rationalization — Taylor treats as misposed. Belief and unbelief are not the relevant variables. The relevant variable is the condition of selfhood that makes a particular configuration of belief or unbelief possible. Taylor’s contention, developed across three long parts of the book, is that the West has undergone a long historical transformation from one condition of selfhood to another. The pre-modern self of medieval European Christendom — and, Taylor argues, of most pre-modern human cultures — was porous: open to the action of spirits, demons, the divine, the powers of nature, the influence of the dead, and to states of consciousness that the buffered subject would later interpret as merely subjective. The modern self of the post-Enlightenment North Atlantic — Taylor’s primary case — is buffered: sealed against external metaphysical agency, organized around an interior subjectivity whose contents are its own, related to an external world by epistemic and instrumental rather than participatory bonds. The secular age is the historical condition in which the buffered self has become the default option for educated Western subjects. The reframing reorients the entire investigation. The question is no longer “does God exist” or “is religion declining?” The question is: by what historical process did the buffered self become the default, what was lost in the transition, and what conditions does the contemporary self find itself in as a result?

The Long Historical Arc: From Naïve Belief to the Immanent Frame

The book’s first long part reconstructs the historical arc by which the porous self of European Christendom gave way to the buffered self of modernity. Taylor refuses the standard secular-progressive narrative according to which scientific reason simply displaced religious belief. The actual history is more interesting and more contingent. The medieval Christian world did not require belief in God in the way the contemporary religious subject requires belief; belief was “naïve” in the sense that unbelief was barely a conceptual option for most people. The Reformation, Taylor argues following Marcel Gauchet, played a role no Reformer intended: by abolishing the porous-sacramental-ritual mediation of the divine and centring religion on the believing subject’s direct relation to God, the Reformation prepared the conceptual conditions for the buffered self. The seventeenth-century natural philosophy, the Enlightenment’s providential deism, the nineteenth-century immanent humanism, and the twentieth-century existential atheism are then successive elaborations of the immanent frame within which contemporary religious and non-religious life takes place. The arc is non-monotonic — Taylor is careful to register the religious renewals, the Romantic countermovements, the twentieth-century existential and phenomenological retrievals — but the cumulative direction is the establishment of the buffered self as the unmarked default. By the end of part one, Taylor has supplied a philosophical-historical account of the secular age as a condition rather than as the absence of a prior condition.

Cross-Pressures, Fullness, and the Phenomenology of the Contemporary Subject

The book’s most clinically suggestive material is in its phenomenological middle chapters on what Taylor names the cross-pressures of contemporary Western experience. The buffered self is not, in Taylor’s account, a stable achievement. The buffered self lives within an immanent frame — a way of organizing experience that does not require reference to anything outside immanent natural causation — but the immanent frame is, for many contemporary subjects, contested from within. Moments of fullness arrive: the experience of beauty in nature or art, the experience of love, the experience of meaning, the experience of a “something more” that the buffered subject does not have ready conceptual resources to interpret. The contemporary subject experiences these as cross-pressures: the immanent frame insists on naturalistic interpretation, the moment of fullness pulls toward transcendence, and the subject is left with a structural ambivalence that neither secular humanism nor traditional theism satisfies. Taylor’s phenomenological vocabulary for this condition — cross-pressures, fullness, the immanent frame, the buffered self’s interior that knows itself to be such — supplies depth psychology with conceptual resources that the field has not previously possessed. Patients in contemporary North Atlantic societies arrive in the consulting room having lived inside the immanent frame, having had moments of fullness whose interpretation is unsettled, and having no secure cultural resources for integrating the moments of fullness with the working ontology of the immanent frame. The clinical task with such patients is not to convert the buffered self to belief or to confirm the buffered self in unbelief; the clinical task is to support the patient’s capacity to live the cross-pressures without enforcing premature resolution in either direction.

Implications for Depth-Clinical Practice with Religious and Spiritual Content

The book’s implications for depth-psychological practice are not Taylor’s primary concern, but they are substantial. The Jungian tradition, with its long-standing engagement of religious and spiritual material — Jung’s Answer to Job, his Eranos lectures on alchemy and Eastern religion, the explicit use of the imago Dei in Whitmont’s and Edinger’s expositions of the Self — has often appeared, to clinicians of more secular formation, to require a confessional commitment that the buffered self of contemporary clinical training does not have. Taylor’s account suggests a different reading. The Jungian engagement with religious material is not the importation of confessional content into clinical practice; it is the recognition that the buffered self is a culturally specific configuration whose hegemony in contemporary North Atlantic clinical training is not the unproblematic baseline. The depth-clinical practitioner who works with patients’ religious-spiritual material — dreams of God, encounters with the numinous, the recurring archetypal figures of saint or messiah or imago Dei — is not committing to a confessional position. The practitioner is recognising that the patient lives in the cross-pressures Taylor describes, and that the clinical work cannot adopt either the confessional frame or the secular-reductive frame without distorting what the patient is bringing.

For any reader of depth psychology trying to think about the religious and spiritual material patients bring, A Secular Age is the philosophical-historical companion the field has needed. To read it is to inherit a vocabulary — porous self, buffered self, fullness, cross-pressures, the immanent frame — by which the cultural-historical situation of the contemporary clinical encounter can be described, and to recognise that depth-clinical work in the contemporary North Atlantic must reckon with the secular age as the cultural condition within which it takes place. After Taylor, the analyst hearing the patient’s religious dream meets the dream within a phenomenology of the secular age that no clinical literature, working alone, could have supplied.