Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis
I
LECTURE BY DR. RUDOLF STEINER, DELIVERED AT THE
GOETHEANUM IN DORNACH, SWITZERLAND, NOVEMBER 10, 1917.
ONSIDERING
on this occasion the lectures which I am having to
give just now in Zürich,
[Anthroposophy and the Science of the Soul (Nov. 5),
Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science (Nov. 7),
Anthroposophy and Natural Science (Nov. 12),
Anthroposophy and Social Science (Nov. 14).]
I am freshly reminded that
one can hardly come into touch with the spiritual life of that
city in any broad sense at present without giving some
attention to what is now called analytical psychology,
or psychoanalysis. And various considerations connected
with this realization have decided me to introduce what I have
to say today with a short enumeration of certain points in
analytical psychology, in psychoanalysis. We shall link
it then with further remarks.
We
have often noted how important it is for the researcher in the
field of anthroposophical spiritual science, to connect his
considerations with what is offered by the moving forces of our
own age. It may be said that all sorts of people who feel drawn
to psychoanalysis today are earnestly searching for the
spiritual foundations of existence, for the inner
realities of the soul of man. And it may be called a curious
characteristic of our own time that so many of our
contemporaries are becoming aware of quite definite, and most
peculiar forces in the human soul. The psychoanalysts belong to
those who, simply through the impulses of the age, are forced
to hit upon certain phenomena of soul life.
It
is especially important also not to remain entirely oblivious
of this movement, because the phenomena of which it takes
cognizance are really present, and because in our own time they
intrude themselves for various reasons upon the attention of
human beings. Today they must become aware of such
phenomena.
On
the other hand it is a fact that the people who concern
themselves with these things today lack the means of knowledge
required for the discussion and, above all, for the
understanding of them. So that we may say: psychoanalysis is a
phenomenon of our time, which compels men to take account of
certain soul processes, and yet causes them to undertake their
consideration by inadequate methods of knowledge. This is
particularly important because this investigation, by
inadequate methods of knowledge, of a matter that quite
obviously exists and challenges our present human cognition
leads to a variety of serious errors, inimical to social life,
to the further development of knowledge, and to the influence
of this development of knowledge upon social life.
It
may be said that even less than half-truths are, under certain
circumstances, more harmful than complete errors. And what the
psychoanalysts bring to light today can be regarded only as an
assortment of quarter-truths.
Let
us consider a few excerpts from the research magazine of the
psychoanalysts. What is called psychoanalysis today had its
origin in a medical case observed by a Vienna interne, a Dr.
Breuer, in the eighteen-eighties. Dr. Breuer, with whom I was
acquainted, was a man of extraordinarily delicate spirituality
besides what he was as a physician. He was interested to
a high degree in all sorts of aesthetic, and general human
problems. With his intimate manner of handling disease, it was
natural that one case, which came under his observation
in the eighties, was particularly interesting to him.
He
had to treat a woman who seemed to be suffering from a severe
form of hysteria. Her hysterical symptoms consisted of an
occasional paralysis of one arm, dreamy conditions of various
kinds, reduction of consciousness, a deep degree of sleepiness,
and besides all this, forgetfulness of the usual language of
her every day life. She had always been able to speak German;
it was her native language, but under the influence of her
hysteria could no longer do so; she could speak and understand
only English.
Breuer noticed that when this woman was in her dreamy
condition she could be persuaded, by a more intimate
medical treatment, to speak of a certain scene, a very
trying past experience. Now I will make clear to you from the
description of the case given by the Breuer school, how the
woman in her half-conscious condition, sometimes artificially
induced, gave the impression that her hysteria was connected
with a severe illness of her father, through which he had
passed a long time before. Breuer could easily hypnotize a
patient, and when he had placed her under hypnosis and
encouraged her to speak of it, she told of an experience she
had had during her father's illness. She had helped with the
nursing, and always came back to this definite experience. I
will quote from the report:
[The following quotations are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's
Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über
die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie,
Zürich, 1917.]
“On one occasion she was watching at night in great
anxiety and tension, for the sick man had a high fever, and a
surgeon was expected from Vienna to perform an operation. Her
mother had left her for a time, and Anna (the patient) sat by
the sickbed, her right arm across the back of the chair. She
fell into a kind of waking dream, and saw, as if issuing
from the wall, a black snake approaching, to bite her father.
...”
Men
of the present day are always stricken by materialism, so we
find in the report at this point the following suggestion,
which is of no value whatever:
(“It is very probable that in the meadow behind the house
there were a few snakes which had frightened the girl
previously, and which now furnished material for the
hallucination.”)
That is only an interpolated remark, to which you may attach
importance, or not — it does not matter. The point is
that the snake seemed to her to come out of the wall to bite
her father.
“She wanted to fight off the creature, but was as if
paralyzed; the right arm hanging over the back of the chair had
gone to sleep and became anaesthetized and paralyzed and, as
she looked at it, the fingers changed into little snakes tipped
with skulls.”
All
this was beside her father's sick bed.
“She probably tried to chase away the snake with the
lamed right hand, and so associated the anaesthesia and
lameness with the snake hallucination. When this had
disappeared she wished, in her fright, to pray, but every
language failed her. At last she remembered an English
nursery rhyme, and could continue to think and pray in this
language.”
The
whole illness originated from this experience. From it there
had remained the paralysis of one hand, reduction of
consciousness in varying degrees, and inability to
express herself in any language but English. Dr. Breuer then
noticed that the condition was ameliorated whenever he had her
tell this story, and he based his treatment upon this fact. By
means of hypnosis he drew from her little by little all the
details, and really succeeded in bringing about a marked
improvement in her condition. The patient got rid of the
matter, as it were, by uttering and communicating it to
another.
Breuer and his collaborator Freud, in Vienna, who were both
influenced, as was natural at this period, by the school of Charcot
[Jean Martin Charcot, French M.D. (1825-1893).]
in Paris, diagnosed this case as a psychic trauma, a psychic
wound, what is called in England a “nervous shock.”
The psychic shock was supposed to consist of this experience at
her father's bedside, and to have had an effect upon the soul
similar to that of a physical wound upon the body.
It
must be noted that from the beginning Breuer conceived the
whole affair as a soul illness, as a matter of the inner
life. He was convinced from the beginning that no anatomical or
physiological changes could have been shown, no causes, for
example, such as changes in the nerves leading from the arm to
the brain. He was convinced from the start that he was dealing
with a fact within the soul.
They were inclined in these early days to regard these cases as
induced by wounds of the soul, shocks, etc. Very soon, however,
because of Dr. Freud's active interest, theories took on a
different character. With Freud's further development of the
subject Dr. Breuer was never fully in accord. Freud felt that
the theory of soul wounds would not do, did not cover these
cases, and thus far Breuer agreed with him. I will remark in
parenthesis that Dr. Breuer was a very busy practicing
physician, thoroughly grounded in science, an excellent pupil
of Nothnagel
[Hermann Nothnagel, M.D. (1841-1905).]
and because of external circumstances alone never became a
professor. We may well believe that if Breuer, instead of
remaining one of the busiest physicians in Vienna, with little
time for scientific research, had obtained a professorship and
so been able to follow up this problem, it might have
assumed a very different form!
But
from then on Dr. Freud took especial interest in the matter. He
said to himself: the theory of trauma does not explain these
cases. We need to determine under what conditions such a soul
wound develops. For it might be said with justice that many
girls had sat beside a father's sickbed with equally deep
feelings, but without producing the same results. The
unscientific layman deals with such problems promptly by the
extraordinarily profound explanation that one is
predisposed to such symptoms while another is not. Although
very “profound,” this is the most absurd solution
that can be arrived at, is it not? For if you explain things
that occur on the basis of predisposition, you can easily
explain everything in the world. You need only say: the
predisposition for a certain thing exists.
Of
course serious thinkers did not concern themselves with such
ideas, but sought the real conditions. And Freud believed that
he had discovered them in cases like the following. You will
find innumerable similar cases in the literature of the
psychoanalysts today, and it may be admitted that an
immense amount of material has been collected in order to
decide this or that point within this field. I will describe
this one case, making it as comprehensible as possible.
Its absolute historical accuracy is not important to
us.
There was a woman with other guests at an evening party, a
gathering of friends to bid good-bye to the mistress of the
house, who had become nervous and was about to leave for a
health resort abroad. She was to leave on that evening, and
after the party had broken up, and the hostess departed, the
woman whose case we are describing was going with other supper
guests along the street when a cab came around the corner
behind them (not an automobile — a cab with horses),
driven at a great pace. In the smaller cities people returning
home at night often walk in the middle of the street instead of
on the sidewalk. (I do not know if you have noticed this). As
the cab rushed towards them the supper guests scattered to
right and left on to the sidewalks, with the exception of this
one woman whom we are considering. She ran along the
street in front of the horses, and all the driver's cursing and
swearing and the cracking of his whip could not deflect her.
She ran until she came to a bridge where she tried to throw
herself into the water in order to avoid being run over. She
was rescued by passersby, and returned to her party, being thus
preserved from a serious accident.
This performance was of course connected with the woman's
general condition. It is due, undoubtedly, to hysteria if a
person runs along the middle of the street in front of horses,
and the cause of such an action had to be discovered. Freud, in
this and similar cases, examined the previous life back to
childhood. If, even at an early age, something happened that
was not assimilated by the soul, it could create a
tendency which might be released later by any sort of
shock.
And
in fact such an experience was found in the childhood of the
woman in question. She was taken driving as a child, and the
horses became frightened and ran away. The coachman could not
control them, and when they reached the river bank he sprang
off, ordering the child to jump too, which it did, just before
the horses plunged into the river. Thus the shocking incident
was there, and a certain association of horse with horse. At
the moment when she realized her danger from the horses she
lost control of herself, and ran frantically in front of them
instead of turning aside — all this as an after-effect of
the childhood experience. You see that the psychoanalysts
have a scientific method, according to present-day scientific
ideas. But are there not many who have some such experience in
childhood without such a reaction, even with the
association of horse with horse? To this single circumstance
something must be added to produce a
“predisposition” to run in front of horses, instead
of avoiding them.
Freud continued his search, and actually found an
interesting connection in this case. The woman was
engaged to be married, but was in love with two men at the same
time. One was the man to whom she was engaged, and she was sure
that she loved him best; but she was not quite clear about
that, only halfway so; she loved the other also, this other
being the husband of her best friend, whose farewell supper had
taken place that evening. The hostess, who was somewhat
nervous, took her departure, and this woman left with the other
guests, ran in front of the horses, was rescued, and brought
back quite naturally into the house she had just left. Further
inquiry elicited the fact that in the past there had existed a
significant association between the lady and this other man,
the husband of her best friend. The love affair had already
taken on “certain dimensions,” let us say, which
accounted for the nervousness of her friend, as you may easily
imagine. The physician brought her to this point in the story,
but had difficulty in persuading her to continue. She
admitted at last that when she came to herself in her
friend's house, and was again normal, the husband declared his
love to her. Quite a “remarkable case,” as you
see!
Dr.
Freud went after similar cases, and his researches
convinced him that the hysterical symptoms, which had
been attributed to a psychic “trauma” or
wound, were due instead to love, conscious or unconscious. His
examination of life experiences showed that circumstances might
greatly differ, indeed in the most characteristic cases, that
these love stories might never have risen into the
consciousness of the patient at any time.
So
Freud completed what he called his neurosis theory or
sexual theory. He considered that sexuality entered into
all such cases. But such things are extraordinarily deceptive.
To begin with, there is everywhere at the present time an
inclination to call sex to your aid, for the solution of any
human problem. Therefore we need not wonder that a doctor
who found it to be a factor in a certain number of cases of
hysteria set up such a theory.
But
on the other hand, since analytical psychology is carrying on a
research with inadequate tools, this is the point at which the
greatest danger begins. The matter is dangerous first, because
this longing for knowledge is so extremely tempting, tempting
because of present circumstances, and because it may always be
proved that the sex connection is more or less present. Yet the
psychoanalyst Jung, who wrote
Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse
(see the above quotations that are translations of passages from
C. G. Jung's
Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über
die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie,
Zürich, 1917.), Professor Jung of Zürich does not
share the opinion that Freud's sexual “neurosis theory”
covers these cases. He has instead another theory.
Jung noted that Freud has his opponents. Among them is a
certain Adler. This Adler takes a quite different
viewpoint. Just as Freud tested large numbers of cases, and
settled upon sex as the original cause (you can read it all in
Jung's book), so Adler approached the problem from another
side, and decided that this side is more important than the one
that Freud has placed in the foreground.
Adler — I will only generalize — found that there
was another urge that played quite as important a role in the
human being as the sexual impulse emphasized by Freud. This was
the desire for power, power over one's environment, the desire
for power in general. The “will to power” is even
regarded by Nietzsche as a philosophical principle, and
as many cases may be found to support the power-impulse theory
as Freud found for his sexual theory.
One
need only begin “analyzing” hysterical women to
find that such cases are not at all rare. Assume for example
that a woman is hysterical and has spasms — heart spasms
are a favorite in such cases — as well as all sorts of
other conditions. The home is stirred up, the whole
environment, everything possible is done, doctors are summoned,
the patient greatly pitied. In short, she exercises a
tyrannical power over her environment. A reasonable person
knows that in such a case there is really nothing the matter,
even though such patients are aware of their condition and
suffered from it. They are in reality perfectly healthy —
but ill when they wish to be. You may diagnose them as well and
ill at the same time. They do of course fall down when they
faint in a heart spasm, but they fall as a rule on the rug, not
on the bare floor! These things may be observed.
Now
this subconscious lust for power leads very easily to
hysterical conditions. Adler investigated the cases at his
disposal from this particular standpoint, and found everywhere
when hysterical symptoms appeared that somehow the lust for
power had been aroused and driven into unhealthy extremes. Jung
said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot say that Freud is
wrong; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler
is wrong; what he observed is also there. So it is probably
sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”
That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and
sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special
theory. This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it
abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the
action of our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness
of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there
are two types of people. In one type feeling is more
developed, in the other thinking.
Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a
great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could
make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the
fact that men are divided into thinking men and feeling men is
sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it
must not regard anything as a layman would, and simply say: in
our environment there are two types of people, feeling people
and intellectuals — it must add something to that.
Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into
things sends out his own force into objectivity; the other
draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers.
The first is called the extroverted type, the other the
introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the
second the intellectual one. This is a learned division, is it
not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point
— that is not to be denied!
Then Jung goes on to say; In the case of the extraverted type
(that of the man who lives preferably in his feelings), there
exist very frequently in the subconscious mind intellectual
concepts, and he finds himself in a collision between what is
in his consciousness and the intellectual concepts that
float about subconsciously within him. And from this
collision all sorts of conditions may arise, conditions mainly
characteristic of the feeling type.
In
the case of those who occupy themselves more with the mind, the
men of reason, the feelings remain down below, swarm in the
subconscious, and come into collision with the conscious life.
The conscious life cannot understand what is surging up. It is
the force of the subconscious feelings, and because man is
never complete, but belongs to one of these two types,
circumstances may arise that cause the subconscious mind
to revolt against the conscious, and may frequently lead to
hysterical conditions.
Now
we must say that Jung's theory is simply a paraphrase of the
trivial idea of the feeling and the reasoning man, and adds
nothing to the facts. But from all this you needs must realize
that men of the present are at least beginning to notice all
sorts of psychic peculiarities, and so concern themselves that
they ask what goes on within a man who shows such symptoms. And
they are at least so far along that they say to themselves:
These are not due to physiological or anatomical changes. They
have already outgrown bare materialism, in that they speak of
psychic phenomena. So this is certainly one way in which people
try to emerge from materialism, and to reach some knowledge of
the soul.
It
is, however, very peculiar, when you look at the subject more
closely, to see into what strange paths people are led by the
general inadequacy of their means of cognition. But I must
emphatically point out that men do not realize into what they
are being driven, and neither do their supporters, readers, and
contemporaries. Thus, rightly regarded, the matter has actually
a very dangerous side, because so much is not taken into
consideration. In the subconscious mind itself there is a
commotion, it is the theories which agitate in the
subconscious. It is really strange. People set up a theory in
regard to the subconscious, but their own subconsciousness is
agitated by it. Jung pursues the matter as a physician, and it
is important that psychological questions should be handled
from that standpoint, therapeutically, and that many
should be striving to carry over the matter into pedagogy. We
are no longer confronted by a limited theory, but by the effort
to make it into a cultural fact.
It
is interesting to see how someone like Jung, who handles this
matter as a physician, and has observed, treated, and
apparently even cured all sorts of cases, is driven
further and further. He says to himself: when such abnormal
psychological symptoms are found, a search must be made in
order to discover any incidents of childhood which may have
made such an impression on the human soul life as to
produce after-effects. That is something especially sought for
in this field: after-effects of something that happened in
childhood. I have cited an example which plays quite a role in
the literature of psychoanalysis: the association of horse and
horse.
Later, however, Jung came upon the fact that in many of the
cases of genuine illness it cannot be proved, even if
you go back to his earliest childhood, that the patient as an
individual is suffering from any such after-effects. If you
take into consideration everything with which he has come
in contact, you find the conflict within the individual, but no
explanation of it. So Jung was led to distinguish two
subconsciousnesses: first the individual
subconsciousness, concealed within the human being. If in her
childhood the young woman jumped out of a carriage and received
a shock, the incident has long since vanished from her
consciousness, but works subconsciously. If you consider this
subconscious element (made up of innumerable details), you get
the personal or individual subconsciousness. This is the first
of Jung's differentiations.
But
the second is the superpersonal subconsciousness. He
says: There are things affecting the soul life which are
neither in the personality nor in the matter of the outside
world, and which must be assumed therefore as present in a soul
world.
The
aim of psychoanalysis is to bring such soul contents into
consciousness. That is supposed to be the healing method: to
bring everything into consciousness. Thus the physician must
undertake to extract from the patient, not only what he has
experienced individually from his birth on, but also something
that was not in the outside world and is of a soul nature. This
has driven the psychoanalysts to say that a man experiences,
not only what he goes through after his physical birth, but
also all sorts of things that preceded his birth — and
that all this creates disorder within him. A man who is born
today experiences thus subconsciously the Oedipus Saga. He not
only learns it in school; he experiences it. He
experiences the Greek gods, the whole past of mankind. The evil
of this consists in the fact that he experiences it
subconsciously. The psychoanalyst must therefore say —
and he does go so far — that the Greek child also
experienced this but, since he was told about it, he
experienced it consciously. Man experiences it today, but
it only stirs within him — in the thoughts of the
extraverted man, in the subconscious feelings of the
introverted type. It growls like demons.
Now
consider the necessity that confronts the psychoanalyst if he
is true to his theory. He would have to take these things
seriously and say simply that when a man grows up and may
be made ill by his relation to that which stirs within him
— a relation of which he knows nothing — that this
connection must become conscious, and it must be
explained to him that there is a spiritual world inhabited by
different gods. For the psychoanalyst goes so far as to say
that the human soul has a connection with the gods, but it is a
cause of illness in that the soul knows nothing of it.
The
psychoanalyst seeks all sorts of expedients, sometimes quite
grotesque. Let us assume that a patient comes and displays this
or that hysterical symptom, because he is afraid of a demon
— let us say — a fire demon. Men of earlier periods
believed in fire demons, had visions of them, knew about them.
Present-day people still have connections with them (the
psychoanalyst admits that), but these connections are not
conscious; no one explains that there are fire demons, so they
become a cause of illness.
Jung however goes so far as to assert that the gods, to whom
man is unconsciously related, become angry and revenge
themselves, this revenge showing itself as hysteria. Very
well, it amounts then to this: such a present-day man who is
mistreated by a demon in his subconscious mind, does not know
that there are demons, and cannot achieve any conscious
relation with them because — that is superstition! What
does the poor modern man do then, if he becomes ill from this
cause? He projects it outwardly, that is to say he looks
up some friend whom he had liked quite well, and says: This is
the one who is persecuting and abusing me! He feels this
to be true, which means that he has a demon which torments him,
and so projects it into another man.
Often psychoanalysts, in treating such a case, deflect this
projection upon themselves. Thus it often happens that
patients, in a good or evil sense, make the doctor into a god
or a devil.
So
you see the physician of the present day is forced to say to
himself: Men are tormented by spirits, and because they are
taught nothing about them, cannot take possession of them in
consciousness, they become therefore tormenting spirits
among themselves, project their demons outwardly,
persuade one another of all sorts of demoniacal nonsense, etc.
And how disastrous this is assumed to be by the psychoanalysts
is shown by the following case which Jung describes. He says:
“Certain of my colleagues claim that the soul energies
that spring from such torment, must be deflected into another
channel.” Let us turn back then to one of the elementary
cases of psychoanalysis. A patient comes, whose illness was
caused, according to her psychoanalytical confession, by her
having been in love, many years before, with a man whom she did
not get. This had remained with her. Of course she might be
annoyed by a demon, but in most cases observed by the doctors
it turns out that something has happened in the individual
subconsciousness, which they classify separately from the
super-personal subconscious. The doctors try to divert this
immature fantasy or to transform it. If a love-thirsty soul can
be persuaded to make use of her accumulated affections in
humanitarian services, perhaps as head of a charitable
institution, it may turn out well. But Jung himself says:
“It is not always possible thus to divert this energy.
Energies so implanted in the soul have often a certain definite
potential which cannot be directed.” Very well, I
have no objection to this expression, but wish only to point
out that it is a translation of what the layman often
discusses, and the way in which he often expresses himself. But
Jung describes a case which is interesting, and a good example
of the fact that these potentials cannot always be
directed.
An
American, a typical man of today, a self-made man, the
efficient head of a business that he had built up, having
devoted himself to his work and achieved a great success,
thought then: I shall soon be forty-five, and have done my bit!
Now I will give myself a rest. So he decided to retire, bought
himself an estate with autos and tennis courts, and everything
else that belonged to it, intending to live in the country, and
simply to draw his dividends from the business. But when he had
been for a time on his estate he ceased to play tennis or to
drive his car, or to go to the theater. He took no pleasure in
the gardens that were laid out, but sat in his room alone, and
brooded. It hurt him there, and there, everything
hurt him. Actually his head hurt, then his chest, and then his
legs. He could not endure himself, ceased from laughter, was
tired, strung up, had continual headache — it was
horrible. There was no illness that a doctor could diagnose! It
is often that way with men of the present, is it not? They are
perfectly healthy, and yet ill. The doctor said: "This
trouble is psychic. You have adapted yourself to business
conditions, and your energies will not readily take another
course. Go back to business. That is the only suggestion that I
can make.” The man in question grasped this, but found
that he was no longer any good at business! He was just as ill
there as at home.
From this Jung rightly concludes that you cannot easily deflect
energy from one potential to another, nor even turn it back
again when you have failed. This man came to him for treatment.
(You know many people come to Switzerland bringing such
illnesses and non-illnesses!) But he could not help this
American. The trouble had taken too strong a hold; it should
have been handled earlier.
You
see from this that the therapy of deflection has also its
difficulties, and Jung himself offers this example.
Important facts are met everywhere which — I now may say
— will be successfully dealt with only by spiritual
science or Anthroposophy, in accordance with exact knowledge.
But there they are, and people notice them. The questions are
there. It will be discovered that the human being is
complicated, and not the simple creature presented to us by the
science of the 19th century. The psychoanalyst is confronted by
a remarkable fact which is quite inexplicable by the science of
today. In Anthroposophy, together with the information given in
my lectures, you will easily find an explanation, but I can
come back to the point in case you do not find it. It may
happen, for example, that someone becomes hysterically blind,
that is, his blindness is an hysterical symptom. This is
possible. There are hysterically blind people, who could see,
yet do not — who are psychically blind. Now such people
are sometimes partially cured — partially; they
begin to see again, but do not see everything. Sometimes such
an hysterically blind man recovers sufficient sight to see
people, all but their heads! Such a half-cured person goes
along the streets, and sees everyone without a head. That
really occurs, and there are even stranger symptoms.
All
this may be dealt with by spiritual science —
anthroposophically oriented spiritual science — and in a
lecture that I gave here last year you may find an explanation
of the inability to see the heads of people.
[Lecture given at Dörnach, August 5, 1916.]
But the present psychoanalyst is
faced by all these phenomena. And so much confronts him that he
says to himself: It may be quite disastrous for a man to be
connected with the superpersonal unconscious; but for God's
sake (the psychoanalyst does not say ‘for God's sake,’ but
perhaps ‘for science's sake’) do not let us take the spiritual
world seriously! It does not enter their minds to consider the
spiritual world seriously. Thus something very peculiar
happens. Very few notice what strange phenomena appear under
the influence of these things. I will call to your attention
something in Jung's book
Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse,
[see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's
Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über
die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie,
Zürich, 1917.] recently published, which
will show you where the psychoanalyst lands today. I shall have
to read you a passage.
“According to this example” (these are examples
showing that a man has within him, not only the contents of his
present personal life, but far-back connections with all sorts
of demonic, divine, or spiritual forces, etc.) —
“According to this example of the genesis of new ideas
from the store of the primeval pictures” — (here he
does not call them ‘gods’ but ‘primeval pictures’)
— “we will take up the further description of the
transference processes. We saw that the libido, in those
apparently preposterous and curious fantasies, had seized
upon its new object, namely the contents of the absolute
unconscious.” (The absolute unconscious is the
superpersonal unconscious, not the personal.) “As I
have already said, the uncomprehended projection of the
primeval pictures upon the physician involves a danger for the
further treatment that must not be under-estimated.” (The
patient transfers his demons to the doctor. That is
one danger.) “The pictures contain not only the
best and greatest of all that mankind has thought and felt, but
also every infamous and devilish deed of which men have been
capable.”
Just think! Jung has come so far as to perceive that a man has
subconsciously within him all the most fiendish crimes, as well
as the most beautiful of all that mankind has been able to
think and feel. These people cannot be persuaded to speak of
Lucifer and Ahriman,
[Compare Rudolf Steiner,
The Luciferic and Ahrimanic Influences in their Relation to Man,
1918, reprinted in Anthroposophie, Vol. 17, Book 2, p. 159.]
but they agree upon the preceding statement, which I shall read to you
once more:
“The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of
all that mankind has thought and felt, but also every
infamous and devilish deed of which men have been
capable. If the patient cannot distinguish the
personality of the physician from these projections, then every
possibility of mutual understanding is lost, and the
human relationship becomes hopeless. If, however, the patient
avoids this Charybdis he falls into the Scylla of the
introjection of these pictures, that is to say that he
attributes their qualities not to the physician but to
himself.” (Then he himself is the devil.)
“This danger is equally serious. In projection he
staggers between an extravagant and morbid adulation and a
hateful contempt for his physician. In introjection he
falls into a ridiculous self-deification, or a moral
self-laceration. The mistake that he makes each time is in
attributing to himself the contents of the absolute
unconscious. So he makes himself into a god or a devil. Here
lies the psychological reason why men have always needed
demons, and were never able to live without gods — except
a few particularly clever Western specimens of yesterday and
the day before, supermen whose god being dead, have made gods
of themselves, rationalistic pocket size gods with thick skulls
and cold hearts.”
Thus you see, the psychoanalyst is driven to say: The human
soul is so made that it needs gods, that gods are necessary to
it, for it becomes ill without them. Therefore it has always
had them. Men need gods. The psychoanalyst ridicules men,
saying that when they lack other gods they make gods of
themselves, but “rationalistic pocket size gods
with thick skulls and cold hearts. The idea of God” (he
says further), “is simply a necessary psychological
function of an irrational nature. ...”
To
describe the necessity of the God-concept in these terms
is as far as one can go by the methods of natural science! Man
must have a God; he needs him. The psychoanalyst knows that.
But let us read to the end of the sentence:
“The idea of God is simply a necessary psychological
function of an irrational nature, which has nothing to do with
the question of the actual existence of God.”
When you read the complete sentence you run upon the great
dilemma of the present day. The psychoanalyst proves to you
that man becomes ill and useless without his God, but says that
this need has nothing to do with the existence or non-existence
of God. And he continues:
“For this latter question” (namely, of the
existence of God,) “belongs to the most stupid questions
that can be framed. Man knows well enough that he cannot
conceive a God, much less imagine that he really exists, or
that there can be any occurrence not conditioned by natural
causes.”
Now
I beg of you, here you find — here you are standing at
the point where you may catch at things. The things are there,
knocking upon the doors of knowledge. Seekers are also
there. They admit an absolute necessity, but when that
necessity is stated as a serious question they consider it one
of the stupidest that can be suggested.
You
see, you have there one of the points in the cultural life of
today from which you may note exactly what is always avoided. I
can assure you that, in their examination and knowledge of the
soul, these psychoanalysts are far ahead of what is offered in
current psychiatry by the universities. They are not only far
beyond ordinary university psychiatry and psychology, but in a
certain sense they are right to look down upon this dreadful
so-called science. But one may catch them in any such passage,
showing as it does what mankind is actually facing in the
attitude of contemporary science.
Many do not recognize this. They do not realize the force of
belief in authority. There has never been such faith in
authority, nor has it ever reigned so absolutely as in the
subconscious mind today. One asks again and again: Just
what do you do as physicians when you handle hysterical cases?
You seek something in the subconscious mind that is not
solved within consciousness. Yes, but you find repeatedly just
such a subconscious content in the case of the theorists. If
you lift it into full consciousness it turns out to be exactly
what has been murmuring in the subconsciousness of the modern
doctors and their patients. And all our literature is so
saturated with it that you are in daily and hourly danger of
imbibing it. And since it is only through spiritual
science that men may become aware of these things, many
take them up unknowingly, draw them into their
subconsciousness, where they remain.
This psychoanalysis has at least pointed out that the reality
of the soul is to be accepted as such. They do that. But the
devil is everywhere at their heels; I mean that they are
neither able nor willing to approach spiritual reality.
Therefore you find in all sorts of places the most incredible
statements. But present humanity has not the degree of
attention necessary to perceive them. We should naturally
expect any reader of Jung's book to fall off his chair under
the table at certain sentences, but men of the present do not
do that; so only think how much of it must lie in the
subconsciousness of modern humanity. Yet for this very
reason, because these psychoanalysts see how much there is in
the subconscious — and they do see it — they look
upon many things differently from other people. In his Preface
Jung says something, for example, part of which is not bad.
“The psychological processes which accompany the
present war, above all the incredible depravity of public
opinion, the mutual calumnies, the undreamed of fury of
destruction, the flood of lies, and men's inability to halt the
bloody demon, are all adapted to set before the eyes of
thinking humanity the problem of the restlessly slumbering,
chaotic realm of the subconscious. This war has shown
pitilessly to the cultured man that he is still a barbarian,
and at the same time what an iron rod of correction
awaits him should it again occur to him to hold his neighbor
responsible for his own bad character. The psychology of the
single individual corresponds to the psychology of the
nations.”
And
now comes a sentence which makes you wonder what to do with
it.
“What the nations do is done by each individual, and so
long as the individual does it the nation will do it too. Only
a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a
change in the psychology of the nation.”
These sentences, placed side by side, show how destructively
this thinking works. I ask you if it is sensible to say:
“What the nations do is done by each individual?”
It would be equally reasonable to ask: Could an individual do
it without nations doing it too? It is nonsense, is it not, to
say things like that. The unfortunate thing is that even
prominent thinkers are impressed by it. And this sort of
thinking is not only to become therapy, but take the lead in
pedagogy. This again is founded upon the justifiable longing to
introduce into pedagogy a new soul and spiritual element.
Are conclusions to be accepted which were reached by
entirely inadequate methods of cognition? These are
nowadays the important questions.
We
shall return to the matter from the standpoint of
anthroposophical orientation, and throw light upon it from a
broader horizon. Then we shall see that one must set about it
in a much bigger way, in order to succeed with these things at
all. But they must be handled concretely. The problems which as
yet have been investigated only by the old, inadequate methods,
must be placed in the light of anthroposophical knowledge.
Take, for example, the problem of Nietzsche. Today I will only
suggest it; tomorrow we shall consider such problems more
thoroughly. We know already from former lectures:
[Lectures given at Dörnach, October 14, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28;
November 2, 3, 4, 1917.]
from 1841 to 1879 battle of spirits above; from
1879 on, the fallen spirits in the human realm. In future such
and similar things must of necessity play a role whenever
a human life is studied. For Nietzsche was born in 1844. For
three years before he descended to earth his soul was in the
spiritual realm in the midst of the spirit battle. During his
boyhood Schopenhauer was still living, but died in 1860, and
only after his death did Nietzsche devote himself to the study
of Schopenhauer's writings. The soul of Schopenhauer
cooperated from above in the spiritual world. That was
the real relationship. Nietzsche was reading
Schopenhauer, and while he was absorbing his writings
Schopenhauer was working upon his thoughts.
But
how was Schopenhauer situated in the spiritual realm? From 1860
through the years when Nietzsche was reading his books,
Schopenhauer was in the midst of the spiritual battle that was
still being fought out on that plane. Therefore Schopenhauer's
inspiration of Nietzsche was colored by what he himself
gathered from the battle of spirits in which he was involved.
In 1879 these spirits were cast down from heaven upon the
earth. Up to 1879 Nietzsche's spiritual development had
followed very curious paths. They will be explained in the
future as due to the influence of Schopenhauer and of Wagner.
In my book
Friedrich Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time,
you may find many supporting details. Wagner had up
to that time no particular influence except that he was active
on earth. For Wagner was born in 1813; the battle of spirits
only began in 1841. But Wagner died in 1883, and Nietzsche's
spiritual development took its peculiar direction when Wagner's
influence began. Wagner entered the spiritual world in 1883,
when the battle of spirits was over, and the defeated spirits
had been cast to earth. Nietzsche was in the midst of things
when the spirits began to roam around here on earth. Wagner's
post mortem influence upon Nietzsche had an entirely different
object from that of Schopenhauer.
Here begin the super-personal but definite influences, not
those abstract demonic ones, of which the psychoanalyst speaks.
Humanity must resolve to enter this concrete spiritual
world, in order to comprehend things which are obvious if only
the facts are tested. In the future Nietzsche's biography will
state that he was stimulated by that Richard Wagner who was
born in 1813, and took part up to 1879 everything that led to
the brilliant being whom I described in my book; that he had
the influence of Schopenhauer from his sixteenth year,
but that Schopenhauer was involved in the spiritual battle that
was fought upon the super-physical plane before 1879; that he
was exposed to Wagner's influence after Wagner had died
and entered the spiritual world, while Nietzsche was still here
below, where the spirits of darkness were ruling.
Jung considers this a fact: that Nietzsche found a demon, and
projected it without upon Wagner. Oh well — projections,
potentials, introverted or extraverted human types
— all words for abstractions, but nothing about
realities! These things are truly important. This is not
agitation for an anthroposophical world-conception for which we
are prejudiced. On the contrary, everything
outside of anthroposophy shows how necessary this
conception is for present-day humanity!
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