The Self In Pilgrimage

'wisdom."
AL^T C. OUTLER

* THE

* SELF

* IN
PILGRIMAGE

by EARL A. LOOMIS, JR., M.D.

Forewords by:
REINHOLD NIEBUHR
KENNETH E. APPEL, M. D.

This book is an origin/ , .. ,. i to the
psychology of Jvi <*- 1 IMH- Psycho-
logically and spiritually modern man has be-
come a stranger to himself in a society full
of crippling pressures. Dr. Loomis, in this
exceptionally well-grounded book, urges that
it is only through love that man can over-
come his loneliness, his isolation from his
environment. And the way of love, he shows,
is the Way of Christ.

It is in and through the person of Christ
that man can hope to overcome his self-
centered individuality and find psychological
integration. Through giving himself up to
his fellows, the individual can grow and de-
velop as a part of the community. Dr.
Loomis shows the reader the true meaning
of losing the self in communion with God
and man whereby man can realize a trans-
figured individuality.

0960

MAi MAR m\ v;b

APR 2 4 1981

AUG 55 01984

MAY 23386
JAN08199C

75

137 L86s 61-07017

Loomis

The self in pilgrimage.

THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

Tk,

SELF

* In

PILGRIMAGE

Earl A. Loomis, Jr., M.D.

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
New York

THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

Copyright I960 by Earl A. Loomis, Jr.

Printed in the United States of America

All rights in this book are reserved. No part of the book may be used

or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and

reviews. For information address Harper & Brothers, 49 East 33rd

Street, New York 16, N. Y.

First Edition

Library of Congress catalog card number: 60-11781

To
My Father

CONTENTS

Forewords

by Reinhold Niebuhr ix

and Kennetii E. Appel x

Preface xv

I. The Self in Irons 1

II. The Self in History 1 1

HI. The Self in Development 34

IV. The Self in Communication 54

V. The Self in Community 67

VI. The Self in Hell 81

VII. The Self in Communion 94

Index 105

FOREWORDS

by REINHOLD NIEBUHR
and KENNETH E. APPEL

Professor Earl A. Loomis, Jr., who is the Director of the
Program in Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Sem-
inary in New York, has given us in this book a remarkably
fruitful analysis of the human self, which validates the co-
operation of theological and psychiatric studies. He has drawn
on religious and psychodynamic insights to give us a very telling
analysis of problems of human selfhood. He draws particularly
on the theological traditions of the Hebraic-Christian stream of
thought to emphasize both the unity of the self in body, mind,
and spirit, and the significance of individual selfhood as con-
trasted with the mystic desire and ambition to eliminate the ego.
In his analysis of self-discovery he has combined both religious
and psychiatric insights to plumb the depths of the labyrintbian
self with its good and evil possibilities and with its fear of coming
^to terms with both of these possibilities. In dealing with the
image of the self and the image of God in terms of the religious
doctrine that the self is made in the image of God and in terms
of psychiatric fact that the self usually makes an image of God
in terms of itself, he has again given us some very fruitful
insights.
He has shown that the Hebraic-Christian interpretation makes

ix

X FOREWORDS

for an emphasis not only upon individual selfhood but upon the
necessity of the self in community and the inevitability of the
self's involvement in history. In his chapters on the develop-
ment of the self from childhood to maturity he has particularly
validated this necessary co-operation between the psychiatric
and religious insights. He deals honestly with the sexuality of
the child, with the necessity of emancipating the self as a self
from the family, and with the dangers both of overpermissiveness
on the part of the parents and of a too rigorous paternalism which
prevents the child from establishing its independence.

He has dealt in a new way with the religious dimension of
selfhood, that is, with its transcendence over any particular
community or historical configuration, and his study properly
ends with the relation of the self to the religious community as
a community of grace. In all these studies he has drawn on
both significant psychiatric and theological elaborations of basic
problems of the self, of its individuality, of its need for com-
munity, and of its need of forgiveness. The volume will therefore
be of tremendous help to all pastors and counselors, and to the
whole Christian community.

R.N.

The Self in Pilgrimage does not provide easy solutions to the
problems of man and society in contemporary life, nor does it set
forth comfortable conclusions about the melioristic tendencies of
history. It is not a moralistic biography nor a case history with
commentary. Neither is it an allegory in the manner of Pilgrim's
Progress. It is not a homily. There is no special pleading for either
psychoanalysis or religion: it is not evangelistic, but scientific and
humanistic. It is not a detailed discourse on psychiatry, psycho-
analysis, or religion. Neither is it merely another uninspired review
of modern psychology. It is, instead, a work imbued with the
freshness of new observations and original encounters.

Dr. Loomis' book is a penetrating study of stratagems for the
healing of sickness and the maintenance of health, derived from the
combined insights of religion and psychology. It presents a high-
lighted precis of both these disciplines, from Socrates to Freud,

FOREWORDS XI

from Philo to Martin Buber, from St. Augustine to Hilaire Belloc
and Paul Tillich.

Human nature is illuminated by a realism that ranges from the
fumblings of the infant for pleasure to the cruelties of the Buchen-
walds in Nazi Germany, the potentialities for evil in South Africa
today, and the suicidal skirmishes between free and totalitarian
nations in the Cold War. Dr. Loomis shows that free men are not
nearly so free as they believe. Not infrequently, they are con-
trolled by their own demons unconsciously projected onto alien
societies, classes, and forces.

It would be difficult to imagine a briefer, clearer, more under-
standing presentation from the psychodynamic standpoint of "The
Self in Development" than is to be found in the chapter by that
name.

The section entitled "The Self in Communication" is a study of
the helping process. It also covers the development of a feeling of
identity, the achievement of a sense of reality, and the function of
therapy in providing the opportunity for self-fulfillment.

Modern psychodynamics and psychoanalysis illumine the com-
plexities underlying such established modes of behavior as the
beliefs, customs, ceremonials, and rituals of religion. Hell, for
example, acquires new significance and relevance in Dr. Loomis'
writing in the torment, isolation, separation, lack of communica-
tion, loss of identity, and absence of relationship that often charac-
terize human living today.

Socrates said that the unexamined life was not worth living. Dr.
Loomis indicates quite as emphatically that the uninvolved, non-
participating, uncommitted life is a hazard to the self and to
society. Through involvement, participation, sharing, burdening
oneself, through communication and community, come health and
effectiveness. Communion in this way attains new meaning. The
Dostoyevskian encounter with evil; the recognition of evil in one-
self as well as in others; the capacity for receiving help and for
giving it; the quest for new bridges of communication, assistance,
and forgiveness these are the nodal themes in Dr. Loomis' study,
important for all students of human behavior and for those in-
volved in the helping process, be it help for sick individuals or for
a sick society.

XU FOREWORDS

Dr. Loomis' sympathies are broad. He writes with a delicacy,
simplicity, kindliness, and humanity, and with such an avoidance of
dogmatism and technical jargon that, although he is himself a
Protestant, his work should appeal to liberals of all faiths, even to
those not formally religious.

He brings new perspectives, broadened backgrounds, and deeper
understanding of man and of his social and religious relationships
and directions. His thinking is interdisciplinary. He is equally
astute as a psychiatrist, as a psychoanalyst, and as a scholar in
religion. He brings together modern psychological and psycho-
analytic concepts and a basic concern for religious searchings and
truths. At a time when there is so much confusion of motivations,
so much that is destructive of old organizations and traditional
modes of thought, and so much that is threatening to human life
on this planet, it is heartening to read of suggestions for survival
and fulfillment based on sound psychological thinking, and
grounded in historical and religious understanding.

It is particularly fitting that this book should appear so soon after
the Joint Commission on Mental Illness and Health has discovered
through a national survey 1 that people in personal and emotional
stress turn first to the clergy (42 per cent) and only in lesser
degree to physicians, psychiatrists, and social agencies. This points
up the need for such a book as Dr. Loomis writes. It should be read
quite as much by psychiatrists as by the clergy and students of
theology. Social workers and intelligent laymen will find it stimulat-
ing and helpful. Many people struggling with the conflict between
religion and science, and disturbed by the not infrequent antireli-
gious atmosphere of psychoanalysis, will be greatly aided in their
thinking. The great institution in which Dr. Loomis works, Union
Theological Seminary, New York, is to be congratulated for offering
its facilities for the development of such important insights as Dr.
Loomis has achieved in his Pilgrimage.

Every psychiatrist should find his understanding and competence
enlarged by reading Dr. Loomis' discussion of the Greco-Roman
and Judaeo-Christian traditions, of the basic functions of religion
in society, and of the potential opportunities for religion in a

i G. Gurm, J. Veroff, and S. Feld, Americans View Their Mental Health
(New York: Basic Books, Inc., I960), p, 307,

FOREWORDS Xlli

country where one million of the citizens are church members. And
certainly the new and fuller perspective on the troubled, "evil"
aspects of human nature presented in this book will enable the
clergy (and other helpers of men) to become more understanding
and effective.

All this is not meant to imply that there are no matters of
controversy contained in this study. They can, however, be used for
the purposes of constructive criticism and discussion.

K.E.A.

PREFACE

This book grows out of lectures delivered as the 1958 Auburn
Lectures, part of a series given at Union Theological Seminary,
New York, since 1947.

The title of the original lecture series, "On Coming to Ourselves
in Christ," was suggested by my colleague, Charles R. Stinnette,
Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Program in
the Interrelations of Psychiatry and Religion. Originally we had
planned to deliver the 1958 Auburn Lectures as a joint project,
but this plan was later abandoned, and Dr. Stinnette published a
portion of the material he had planned as his contribution in his
recent book, Faith, Freedom and Selfhood?-

My own part which eventually became the lecture series has
been both condensed in style and expanded in content to make this
book. It consisted of five lectures, "The Self in History" (Chapter
II), "The Self in Development" (Chapter III), "The Self in Com-
munication" (Chapter IV), "The Self in Community" (Chapter
V), and "The Self in Communion" (Chapter VII). The present
chapters I and VI ("The Self in Irons" and "The Self in Hell")
are newly prepared especially for this volume.

It is not my purpose in this preface to summarize what is to
follow or even to state its purpose. That should be clear from the
text itself. Rather I should like to express gratitude to those who
have influenced and helped me, especially since this help has been
so widespread as to have influenced the entire book and does not
necessarily evidence itself in any specific reference.

Psychiatrically and psychoanalytically all of my teachers of
psychiatry deserve my thanks, especially Robert A. Clark, who

i Seabury Press, Greenwich, 1959.

XV

XVi PREFACE

first introduced me to a clinical study of psychiatry and religion,
and Kenneth E. Appel, of the Department of Psychiatry at the
University of Pennsylvania who epitomized a comprehensive
philosophy of psychiatry that is congenial to religion. To the
Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute, LeRoy M. A. Maeder, my
analyst, and Professor Margaret Mahler, who introduced me to the
concept of symbiosis (to which I hope I do not do violence in this
text), I also want to express appreciation. Chapters III and IV
benefited from suggestions and criticisms made by Lucile Meyer,
Associate Principal Investigator in Child Psychiatry Research at
St. Luke's Hospital, New York City. These same chapters bene-
fited from the opportunity I had of sharing in the teaching of the
course on Religion and Human Development with the late Pro-
fessor Lewis J. Sherrill, the memory of whose spirit and wisdom
will always lend inspiration and perspective to my approach to
religion and personality development.

I have for years drawn on the thought of Professor Reinhold
Niebuhr, especially as it appears in his Nature and Destiny of Man,
although this is not evident from specific references. With regard
to the use of Biblical materials Professor Cyril Blackman of New
College, London, and the University of London gave valuable sug-
gestions. My colleagues at Union Theological Seminary, Professor
Cyril Richardson and Professor James Muilenburg assisted me in
developing my thoughts as set forth in the historical section. Pro-
fessors Daniel Day Williams and Albert C Outler, as well as Dr.
Gotthard Booth read the entire text and made critical and creative
comments at many points. Many of their contributions I have in-
corporated with thanks; others I have rejected perhaps at my
peril. These words of appreciation need to be accompanied by my
acceptance of full responsibility for my work, including its errors.

In the rewriting of my tape-recorded lectures and the prepara-
tion of the new chapters I was assisted in a most valuable and
gracious manner by Mr. Leonard Gross. He also contributed im-
portant suggestions and helpful criticisms and assisted me in en-
hancing both clarity of design and craftsmanship in execution.

To the Rev. Robert Neale, the Tutor in our Program, special
thanks is due for the tedious and accurately performed task of
making the index. Three secretaries, Mary Jo Brown, Josephine

PREFACE XV11

Robertson Pearson, and Susannah Masten, made the dictation of
portions of the manuscript and its seemingly endless revising more
an adventure than a chore. My most intimate colleagues, Pro-
fessors Charles R. Stinnette and Jack Greenawalt, freed my time
from other duties to make study and writing possible.

Finally, no one writes a book without a debt to his family who
spares him the time and energy it claims. But I am grateful for
more than this, since my wife provided many insights through our
shared experiences, as have our children just through growing up
in our midst.

E.A.L.

Tne Sell in I

rons

When I was a thoroughly confused young man of twenty-
one I came upon a story as decisive for me as any I shall probably
ever read. It was a story of a fanner who saw a frightening
vision in his barnyard. As he entered, he found the cows peace-
fully chewing then: cuds, the hens clucking to their chicks, a
lizard sunning himself without fear. But suddenly there came
an incredible transformation. The cows turned into dinosaurs, the
chickens to vultures; the lizard became a python, the barnyard
a wild and threatening jungle.

The dismaying scene tarried a moment; then it dissolved. Once
again the farmer could see his placid cows, the hens and their
chicks, the lazy lizard. Ultimately, his terror ebbed. But never
again was he to look upon the inhabitants of his barnyard in the
way he had before. From that moment on, he was always to
wonder which was real, the domestic scene or the primitive
wildness.

And I was always to wonder which was the real me, the way
I had imagined myself to be or the way I was in depth.

At last, I could begin to know myself.

I thought I had known. I thought I had plumbed my depths.
But I was soon to discover that most of the real me had been
hiding from reality for years. I had busily engaged in being good
and avoiding evil and had not discovered the great wellsprings
of both good and evil within myself. I had believed "right," be-
haved "right," felt the "right" feelings, but the standards of
right were not truly mine.

All this suddenly began to change. I realized that if I were

2 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

something other than what I thought myself to be, then perhaps
I was composed of qualities I both saw and despised in others.
Could it be that I was selfish? Vindictive? Crude? Lustful?
Jealous? Tyrannical? Somehow these possibilities had always been
distant and theoretical. Now they were here and real.

In accepting the possibility of these evil inner threats, however,
I came to a discovery that was even more awesome and chal-
lenging. I realized that there might be aspects of my strengths
I had never known before. While all sorts of social and personal
forces are constantly combining to make one turn away from
good in oneself, now I suddenly found the strength to admit the
possibility that I cared for other people more genuinely than I had
given myself credit for. I further admitted that in all probability
I had both the intellectual and emotional capacity to help these
people about whom I cared. If these aspects of me were true,
then I was a better person than I had imagined myself to be.

Of my increased depth and worth I could not, of course, be
sure. But of another matter I could be very sure indeed. From
that moment on, I knew with utter certainty that if I were ever
to become the person I really was in fact, I would have to know
and accept both the good and bad in myself. Only by relating the
newly discovered virtue and evil in myself could I become
myself.

Getting to know myself became a tumultuous adventure. The
disquieting and dangerous alternatives led me to a total re-
examination of who I was, what I was for, what I must be and do.
Some of the decisions growing out of these experiences are still
to be vindicated. Some of them may never be. But life could
never be the same again.

The impetus to my self-discovery was that story of the man in
the barnyard, and I might never have come upon it except for
the advice of a professor wi^usi/hom I was studying at Princeton
Theological Seminary. I had been reading, with increasing frustra-
tion, the works of Feodor Dostoyevsky. I had complained to my
professor, and after many hours of conversation, he had told
me to read Dostoyevsky in the realization that he was writing
out of his own life his anguish, his power, his deep inner being,
If I could accept this possibility, my professor assured me, I

THE SELF IN IRONS 3

would then meet the author fully with my own being, and we
would resonate together.

To "resonate" with another human being is to know that
when you speak you are heard by him. The echoes that rever-
berate to you in his voice are rich with the sounds of your own
concern. Similarly, your own voice, echoing back to him, has
been affected by what you have heard him say and what you
felt that he believed.

My professor was quite right. When I approached Dos-
toyevsky with a willingness to receive the sounds of his inner
life, I heard them. So markedly did I resonate that it became
imperative for me to find others who had done so, too. It was
the expression of his resonance by the German theologian, Eduard
Thurneysen, that gave me what I now see as my particular
moment of truth. It was he who asserted that a man who has
seen himself in Dostoyevsky's mirror will, like the man in the
barnyard, never look the same to himself again. 1

In a sense, then, my self-discovery began by accident. Most
of us, however, are not so fortunate as to benefit from such
helpful accidents. Coming to acknowledge possibilities for both
good and evil in ourselves is so much of a threat that, lacking the
happy accident, too many of us proceed through life in blissful
unawareness of who we are. In fear of the unknown we deny our
possibility for evil, and commit it unawares. Avoiding responsi-
bility and decision through avoiding inner resources and powers,
we evade the challenge to be what we are or can be. We are
truly adrift, like a ship in irons.

A ship in irons is as powerless as a shackled human prisoner.
It has violated the laws of motion under sail, and has been
jailed for its failure. Like a human prisoner, a ship in irons has
lost direction, momentum, and control. It can sail neither to
port nor to starboard nor straight ahead. It can only stand still
or drift backwards.

A self in irons may in part reflect a culture in irons, for the
claims and commitments of a culture form a significant dimen-
sion of each self that participates in this culture. We in America

* Eduard Thurneysen, Dostoyevsky (4th ed.; Munich: Chr. Kaiser Ver-
lag, 1930).

4 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

have advanced far toward a commitment unlike any other in
modern times. Our commitment is to the "American dream"
success, adjustment, pleasure, satisfaction, and security, all of
which, supposedly, would assure us of a mature society.

Maturity is a useful but difficult word that can mean an end
point (the older we get the more mature we are), or a climax
(a point toward which we grow until we reach it and then from
which we fall away as we approach our second childhood and
"grow backwards"); or a concept of appropriate developmental
level for our age (living up to our full potentiality). Maturity
can mean the opposite of "childishness," which we deem a substi-
tute for age-appropriate behavior. The trouble with the word
maturity, however, is that in common usage it has come to mean
none of these, but rather a condition that is defined by the con-
formist's idea of perfectionism a combination of the previously
named "superficial" ingredients of the "happy society."

No single element of the conformist's happy society is nec-
essarily undesirable. But taken together as the be-all and end-all
of life, they can be disastrous. They cut us off from the real
possibilities of living, simply because they cut us off from the
quest for the unique qualities in ourselves that prove each of us
to be a creature of God. We force ourselves to deny even that
inner restlessness to which Augustine referred when he said,
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our heart is rest-
less until it finds its rest in Thee.'* 2

Why do we cut ourselves off from ourselves? Part of the
answer, to be sure, is that what impersonal society holds out as
good, looks very good indeed. Few of us would turn down a
Cadillac. None of us would grumble over a free trip to Bermuda.
We like a nice change of clothing, we want our families well
fed. We also want the esteem of our peers. To get it, we must
succeed on their terms.

- It is an important part of self-discovery to participate in the
life of our peers, to t share in their pleasures and joys, their
corporate aims and ideals. But when these goals are not organ-
ically linked to the infinitely more substantial pursuit of self-
discovery, they become shallow, empty, and blind. They are

2 Confessions, Book I, fart 1.

THE SELF IN IRONS 5

substitutes that lead us to much knowledge of things, but little
knowledge of others and no knowledge of self.

Yet who, when asked to choose, would willingly sacrifice the
opportunity to know himself? Who would throw away the hidden
treasures that, once mined, might make him a Mozart, an Ein-
stein, or a Schweitzer? Who would want the cures for cancer
or schizophrenia to perish in his brain, and thereby deprive him-
self of the joyous knowledge that in a world of eternal miseries,
he had made a difference?

The answer is disturbing. Most of us would be afraid to take
the needed steps to know ourselves. We refuse to plumb our
depths because we fear that in looking for something good we
shall also find something horrible: skeletons, hobgoblins, yes,
dinosaurs, vultures, and pythons. We fear the emergence of an
aspect that will be unacceptable to society, to our peers. We even
fear that the very search itself will be condemned, assuming that
in questing for the self we would be so selfishly preoccupied as
to be insensitive to the needs of others. We know all too well
that both religiously and socially such preoccupation is not
approved.

But mainly, and most paradoxically, the reason we refuse to
search for our inner being is that we fear we shall find something
good.

We f ear good? Americans fear good? This is not easy to
believe. It is a fundamental of our social creed that a free society
becomes great because its members work to the limits of their
intellectual and physical capacity. We give the best we have. When
these best efforts are combined, our theory holds, we arrive at
the "best" society. The American legend takes nourishment
from the log-splitter who became president, the copy boy who
became publisher, the attorney who waited on tables in college,
and the immigrant who made a million dollars.

The legends are true. But what percentage do their heroes
represent of all those who might have done the same thing and
didn't? Of those who had the same givens and the same gifts but
didn't try? In all probability the heroes are an infinitesimal per-
centage of the whole.

Why did the vast majority not try? Why did their goodness

6 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

remain hidden from them? It was hidden from them because it
wa^ hidden by them; they MdT their goodness from themselves.
Time after time doctors, in caring for unhappy and unfulfilled
people, discover that the patients were not deficient in potential,
but had concealed their potential from themselves. Instead of
working to full capacity, these people behaved as though they
were inferior, stupid, or unappealing. A child who fears he won't
be liked never finds out how likable he could be. A young girl
who believes she's so unattractive she'll never have a date actually
contributes, by worry, to the poor appearance that fulfills her
fears. The student who is excessively fearful about passing ex-
aminations inhibits his study to such an extent that he does fail.
A woman who fears she cannot love God ultimately flees from
even the thought of Him. These are the kinds of people who find
their way into psychiatrists' offices. They are sick. And it is
their own vitality, the source of their own inner forces, that
is used in the service of the sickness. Even though the sufferer
may blame his own forces, the latter are not sick in themselves.
They are present in the healthiest of us. All of us must wage
this same struggle to confront our own goodness. And all of us,
to some extent, fail.

Why? Why are we afraid to embrace our virtues? Why do we
mask them behind inaccurate estimates and unreasonable fears?
'Sometimes we may unconsciously reject our hidden powers be-
cause they are linked with impulses that are unacceptable either
to ourselves or to the society in which we set our lives\But the
more common answer is a much simpler one. BagcaBy, we resist
recognition of our assets because, once recognized^ they must
be used. """"'""" * **

For goodness makes claims. It must be expressed. It must be

^*~l^WWl* ., ,..< < _ t""*"*,*** !!, "*, ,, ,,, , fc fan i

used. Otherwise, it becomes evil in our hands. Badness is good-
ness dammed up, just as hell is heaven dammed up. The man
who knows he could help others but helps only himself will
ultimately not be able to live with himself. He will be his own
worst tormentor. The man who knows he could heal people but
is afraid to risk the sacrifice, responsibility, and hardship as
well as the humbling knowledge that sometimes he wiH not be

THE SELF IN IRONS 7

able to heal is ultimately victimized by his own unfiilfiUment.
The man who will not accept the risk of loving and receiving love
will live and die in emptiness.

Literature is full of stories of people who knew they had talent,
yet failed to use it. The untold stories are those of the millions
of individuals who unconsciously disguised their virtues lest
they be obliged to use them and lost the riches of true living
in the process. In this one sense, we human beings are akin to
the battery in a flashlight; unused, it corrodes. What we do not
use is wasted; what we do not share we cannot keep.

Talents must be invested. Jesus told the story of a man who,
departing on a long trip, left certain sums of money, then called
"talents," with his three servants. On his return he asked each
one what he had done with his money. The first two told their
master that they had invested the talents and earned a high
return. The third explained that out of fear he had buried his
talent in the ground. The master praised the first two servants
for their foresight and blamed the third for his sloth. Jesus left
us to draw our own conclusions from this story, and these are
mine: (There is a risk in knowing ourselves, just as there is a risk
in any investment. We may not like some of the things we find.
Or we may not succeed in realizing a return on our talents. But if
we permit our fears to be carried to their extreme, we become
paralyzed. Afraid to fall, we would never walk. Afraid to love,
we would never live. \

, These fears, as I sfiall try to show, are largely overestimated.
There are ways of coming to know oneself that do not require
lasting preoccupation with the self. There are ways of believing
in oneself without making oneself the center of the universe.
There are ways of accepting oneself without rejecting others. The
wildness we might find in our deep selves is not necessarily our
damnation. It may be necessary for our salvation. WhUe^many of
us might think we are happy and complete, few of us ever jichieve
the kind of fullness that is possible only with and after a thorough-
going exploration of our true selves. While a plant does not have to
understand what it is to be a plant in order to be one, a human being
can never be fully human unless he knows who and what he is. He

8 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

comes to this understanding by knowing himself not only as angel
but as animal. Some of his self-knowledge may not be satisfying, but
self-satisfaction is not necessarily the goal or the result of self-
searching. The self we ultimately come to know may be far less
adequate than the self we would like to imagine we Bit. While
we may have to sacrifice far more or far less than we dream, in
the process of coming to know and accept ourselves for what we
are, we often fear mqst the loss of illusions rather than the true
giving up of the self.

We need such knowledge of our possibilities, unadorned with
illusion, before we can ever really live. Certain values of society,
and all too frequently of religion, tend to stupefy and anesthetize
us. They teach us to avoid pain and sorrow, to deny anxiety.
And we gladly, happily embrace this deception. We abdicate our
true identity for a superimposed identity. But the superimposi-
tion doesn't take. The deception doesn't work. Pain and sorrow
and anxiety find us anyway and we, anemic and unprepared,
become ill and unhappy.; In failing to explore ourselves, we have
lost our armor against hardship.

A failure to search for oneself is, in its crippling effects, little
better than suicide. It is also a denial of neighbor and of God.
We become and remain selves only in relationship; thus the re-
jection of our deep, true selves is a rejection of our neighbor.
We give him short change. And since one of the basic doctrines of
the Judaeo-Christian heritage is that we are made in God's image,
the denial of our identity seeing less than the full image of
ourselves is thus to see less than we can of God.

So long as the unrealistic ideals such as the "American Ideal"
of success go unchallenged, good minds will fall crippled and
unexplored at their feet. Only when we know ourselves can we
challenge these crippling myths, for only then can we come to
accept ourselves for what we are.

Where can man turn to escape this deception, this vicious
circle? To the light of reason advocated by the Greeks? Reason
does not illumine the whole man. To the path of obedience
followed by the Jews? Conformity cannot guarantee inner obe-
dience. To the light of faith imparted by Christianity? Faith can

THE SELF IN IRONS 9

still be clouded by self-deception. To the light of modern scien-
tific knowledge? Scientism can all too easily dazzle us into com-
placency, arrogance, and easy self-reliance.

None of these by itself is enough. But taken together ^^^gp,
pbedicgice, faith, and[ science they may be enough. For along
with the general knowledge that science has given us about man
has come a special method of understanding self and nature,
even in relation to God. It is a method that, linked with religion,
may lead us to know our own true and full selves. It is a method
arrived at through old faith and new experience. The old faith
is the Judaeo-Christian heritage that tells us optimistically about
man's potential to do and be good, in spite of its pessimistic re-
minder of his capacity to do and be bad, and even to turn the
good to evil, "the greatest treason." The new method is one that
dramatically demonstrates and illumines the old ideas while
challenging and testing their application.
( Whether we call this method psychoanalysis or psychodynamics
or depth psychology, we reflect our comprehension of a new ap-
proach to viewing human life, a perspective in depth. jThis method
has laid bare our deeper motives, revealed our latent hostility, and
proved how often we deceive ourselves and others, often when we
believe we are being our most virtuous selves. But it also dis-
closes our unmined resources for community with one another, for
discovery of powers to help and heal ourselves and others; it dis-
closes capacities for perceiving, feeling, and interacting at new
levels of effectiveness and love.

Psychoanalysis, by itself, cannot help man achieve a full
understanding of himself. It may, however, prove and prove
in our time to be the catalyst that releases the dormant power
in the classical and religious disciplines concerned with mankind.
This new science has already helped us to rediscover much that
was known in the ancient faiths, but too often petrified by con-
formity to frozen tradition. Psychoanalysis has laid bare the
concrete facts of what has been intuitively known all along, that
there is good and bad in man and that life is a continuing fight to
unblock good and conquer bac0As j^ax Scheler has said: "In
approximately ten centuries of history, this is the first in which

10 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

man finds himself completely and utterly 'problematical/ in which
he no longer knows what he is and simultaneously knows that
he does not have the answer." 3

For thousands of years, man has looked longingly for himself.
Time and again he has come close to discovery, and an occasional
seer or saint or scientist has broken throughout for most men
the search has all too often been in vain, because too often they
fled from their own contradictions. Instead of fleeing, we must
face and explore our contradictions in our quest for the self.

Self-knowledge is achieved through a long and difficult pil-
grimage. The journey has never been easy, and in some ways it
is harder today than ever. Yet today, perhaps more than ever
before, man needs to take seriously the pilgrimage toward dis-
covery of himself. His very survival may be determined by his
success.

Let not the need for success and the dangers of the journey
cause man to despair. There are charts and pilots to guide and
guard him on his pilgrimage.

3 Max Scheler, trans, from the German by Oscar A. Haac, Philosophical
Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958) p, 65. From Chapter IV, "Man
and History" (first published in the monthly, Die Neue Rundschau, Nov.
1926).

2
llie Sell in History

Who are we? Can we ever know? Or are we an abyss whose
depths we can never plumb? Is the ancient Greek maxim "Know
thyself!" an impossible command? Perhaps yes, perhaps no; in
either case, it is not new. A modern biologist, Edmund Sinnott,
would answer,\"Until man comes to kn$w himself, all other
knowledge that he gains is incomplete." 1 Man has recognized
this truth intuitively ever since thought began; thus the search
for the self may properly be considered the oldest treasure hunt
in history.

The effort has been constant and great, but in terms of the
riches available, the haul has been slight. Most of the treasure
still remains hidden. Have we any right to believe that we will
now mine these assets, when they have always eluded us before?
There are two popular answers to this question: there are those
who feel that the methods and insights of modern science will
unearth all solutions; others believe that no new knowledge can
resolve what history has indicated is irresolvable. Both positions
are unrealistic. New insights do give us a right to new optimism.
But history should teach us humility. A balance of hope and
humility is necessary to the search for the hidden self.

One of the most significant clues in determining how far
we have come in the search for the self is to be found in the
history of the way in which our ancestors have taken care of
each other, or haven't. We ask how they cared for children,

i Edmund W. Sinnott, Matter, Mind and Spirit (New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1957).

11

12 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

for the poor, for the sick, for prisoners in peace and in war.
And the answers say a great deal about their humanity and in-
humanity, their philosophy, their religion in short, about how
they saw man, and, most especially, themselves.

Comparing yourselves with your ancestors, try to imagine
yourself in the of a friend who had just given birth to

a child. You ask about her well-being. She tells you she's fine.
Thee you inquire about her new baby. "Oh," she says, "I took
him out last night and left him on a windy hill in the country.
We've decided we really can't afford another child." You, or
else, would be outraged. You would instantly call the
authorities or personally speed to the rescue of the child. Then
you would turn to your friend and her obvious problem of

illness.

Yet, in the ancient world, it was a common practice to dis*-

of unwanted children by exposing them to the elements and

The Greeks, the Romans, the East Indians, and

other ancient peoples practiced this form of infanticide with

relatively clear conscience. It was argued that either these infants

were not yet real human beings, or their souls would be better

off ia a more favorable reincarnation, which could be induced by

interrupting their present life. In no sense was the act viewed

the horror with which it would be attended today.
The point is not so obvious as it seems.
The concept of the self is interwoven with the history of all
mankind's acts, reflections, and feelings. It cuts across many
arteries of character. Following its progress is like trying to follow
a of cloverleaf superhighway tumoffs. One discovers that

by right he has really turned left, because here right

left in terms of the real direction he's after. In this same
right not always mean right; nor does left always

left as we search for the self. The Greeks, Romans, and
Indians who left their infants to the beasts were highly de-
voted to the care and nurture of the children they permitted to
survive. Thus, to conclude from their practice of infanticide that
the were unmitigatedly cruel and were therefore selves

of the lowest order would be unfair and inaccurate. The crudest

THE SELF IN HISTORY 13

practices by today's standards appear side by side with examples
of humaneness 2 that put modern man to shame.

It is not more difficult to collect examples of humaneness
among the ancient peoples than it is to ind instances of bar-
barism in modern man. What is difficult is to make sense out
of the inconsistencies. Just as we begin to believe that man has
learned something about caring for his fellow man we are shocked
by his radical departures from this understanding. Just as we
begin to hope that he has come to love his fellow man, we see
him applying new ingenuity in causing him suffering. The history
of the concept of the self, therefore, is no easy course to trace.
No single clue is entirely clear, entirely uncontradictory. \With
these reservations in mind, then, I would like to suggest that there
is one clue to the history of selfhood that, even allowing for
inconsistencies, is perhaps more revealing than othtrs./TMsjclue
is man's conception^^God. ^

Man's image of Go^and his image of himself are somehow
always linked together. Jf'In the history of human thought," notes
Professor Casserley, Special Chaplain to graduate students and
faculty of the University of Chicago, "the doctrine of God and
the doctrine of man rise and fall together. The more profound
our sense of the reality and meaning of divinity, the more vivid
our apprehension of the unique status and dignity of human
personality." 3 ^ Man's image of God is not, however, a simple

2 The pagans and their gods were capable of remarkable kindness to
strangers and enemies. For example, in Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses, lost and
alone, comes upon a strange island. There a young girl offers to lead him
to her king and queen. This is dangerous for Ulysses because the people
of this island are belligerent But the young girl, who represents Athena
the goddess of reason and balance, tells Ulysses exactly what to do to be
safe.

In the Iliad, Achilles, full of vengeance toward Hector, kills him in battle
and desecrates his corpse by dragging it over the ground, contrary to aU
moral lightness. But when Hector's father comes to Achilles and mourns
his loss, the two men weep together, and together arrange a funeral for
Hector. Cf. Walter F. Otto, Homeric Gods (New York: Pantheon Books*
1954), pp. 6-7,259-60.

3J. V. Langmead Casserley, The Christian in Philosophy (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951).

14 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

subject to investigate. We must, first of all, ask which of man's
Gods we are studying.

For every man there are at least three gods: God as He really
is; God as his group sees Him; and God as developed ^jtjiiix the
mind of the individual. About the first God, a psychiatrist can
say nothing as psychiatrist; theologians and philosophers them-
selves are divided in their opinions whether God can be known
as He actually is in Himself, 4 and the theories about just Who
or What He is are varied. About man's second God, much has
been said. Doctrines about this God have been believed and
promulgated by religious communities and scholars from ancient
times. It is man's third concept of God that inhibits or modifies
each person's acceptance of the God of his church. Whatever
God is in Himself, whatever He may be to each church, each
man's conception of God is to a significant extent Jthe, unwitting
work of man himself. The personality or impersonality man as-
cribes to God is almost always a reflection of the fullness or
emptiness of his own inner being.

For at some time in his life each individual begins to develop
his private picture of God.

This private God may be a reflection of a parent. He may
be what the parent is really like, or what the child wishes the
parent were like, or even what the child fears the parent is like.

This private God may be a reflection of the need of the child
or adult. If the need is for power, then God may assume a power-
ful countenance. If the need is for goodness, then God may be
perfect. If the need is for punishment, then God will be vindictive.

This private God may even be a reflection of the community.
If the community is seen by the child as hostile, his God may
reflect either the community's hostility or the child's compensa-
tory wish for protection.

As children grow up, they modify their childish notions of
God to conform more and more with the ideas of their religious

4 Daniel Day Williams, professor of theology at Union Theological Semi-
nary, correctly submits that properly and by definition a theologian has
implicit or explicit assumptions about the possibility of understanding God.
Philosophers may not. I think, however, that there are some theologians
who would not fit into this former category.

THE SELF IN HISTORY 15

community. But some remnants of the private God-image always
remain, coloring and modifying the adult faith.

There are, it need hardly be added, many people capable
of achieving a philosophical or theological vision of God. But
we all too rarely find the mature religious mind that is capable
of distinguishing between God Himself and the projection of
the images within the self onto GocL/For most of us these two
Gods are always confused and confounded. To a great extent our
ideas and feelings toward God continue to reflect our inner ex-
pectations and experiences and thus the historical visions of
God remain invaluable clues to the visions of the self.

Because man's image of God reflects his vision of himself,
the development of the image, it follows, is a reflection of the
development of the self. It is much more. It is a history of man's in-
cessant attempts to bury aspects of himself he has not dared to con-
front. It is also a proof that when man makes such attempts, he fails.
No fundamental aspect of human personality or its interaction with
God or man can ever be successfully suppressed. In demonstration
of this we have examples from the religious history of the Greeks,
the Jews, the Eastern faiths and, as we shall see, the Christian
Church, the currents on which we move today. These examples
constitute only fragments of the history of religion and man. In
no sense are they to be considered a comprehensive survey of
man's view of his own nature. Nevertheless, they represent signifi-
cant landmarks of man's attempt at self-disguise and its con-
sequences.

Most ancient Greeks were dominated by a popular, super-
stitious religion. A more - esoteric philosophical faith had a
smaller number of followers. The larger group pictured a world
of major and minor deities who inhabited Mount Olympus,
visiting their whims and fancies upon mortal man who dwelt on
the plains below. These gods could transform themselves into
men, and men into animals or plants. They could influence battles
by changing the weather or by confusing the minds of armies.
They could engage in treachery or trickery. They represented in
many ways orgiastic gods of the underworld, requiring and repre-
senting neither righteousness, obedience, reason, nor order. These

16 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

gods could sometimes be placated by sacrifice, but at other times
they ran roughshod over helpless man.

On the other hand, the small band of Greek philosophers had
thoughts of God that reached incomparably high degrees of virtue,
clarity, and order. In fact, these God-ideas became so rarified and
orderly perhaps as a reaction against the undisciplined and
scandalous popular deities that they tended to sound (at least to
us, today) sterile, impersonal, and abstract.

/The fusion of the superstitious, popular religion with the
philosophical ideas produced a contradiction in man's concept of
God. It also confused man's idea of himself. Instead of seeing
himself as one, he tended to the view that he consisted of two
separate and distinct parts, one a rambunctious body, the other a
rational soul. The rambunctious nature, having to do with man's
emotions, desires, and affections, was regarded as low and base.
Particularly low and base were the sexual functions because of
the insistent claims they could make on man and the ease with
which they could overcome his higher rational nature. The Greek
philosophers' tendency to devaluate and depreciate the body and
its functions was one origin of the ambiguous attitude toward sex
that appears today in much of Western religion; it remains one
of Christianity's most unfortunate borrowings from antiquity.

The pagans were correct in reporting that man had at least two
sides to himself; and polytheism, the belief in more than one
god, could accurately represent this fact. But just as polytheism
cannot bring the gods together, so the Greeks failed to bring man's
two sides together.

As a consequence of this philosophical dualism, the rejected side
ojtman emerged with an actually heightened intensity in the form
<bf,,orgiasti) religious cults, the most famous of which was the
Dionysian. Here the masses worshiped the god of wine through
abandon to his products, and the physical and emotional ecsta-
sies thus induced gave expression to that which man had sought
to hide.

An even greater extreme of splitting apart the self is seen in
some of the Eastern religions. They, too, accurately revealed
man's uncertainty of himself as a whole being. These religions
thought of God as the One into whom each individual must merge

THE SELF IN HISTORY 17

and thereby lose his unvalued personal identity. For some of the
more enlightened this merger represented not so much a loss of
the self as an expansion of the lightly regarded self into the divine
superself. For many, however, becoming part of God meant the
complete loss of selfhood. God, therefore, was seen as the enemy
of the individual self, for it was He in whom the self was to be
dissolved.

Pagan religions separated man's spirit from his body; for
many Indians, this cleavage was brought about by allowing the
body to perish out of unconcern, or manipulating it through
yogic exercises into a vessel having no claims of its own but totally
commanded by the soul and sacrificed to the soul's salvation. To
this day, much of East Indian culture finds it difficult to develop
enthusiasm for physical or public health and for certain types of
humanitarian concern that seem indispensable to Western man.

But the Indians could not abandon the body altogether; it was
too compelling in its claims. First of all, they demonstrated their
respect for the body through their emphasis on nonviolence to-
ward animals. Second, like the Greeks, they managed to find
in their pantheon of deities, representations of every human pas-
sion and vice. Krishna was a god who seduced hundreds of
maidens. Prajapati and Dhatri procreated millions of offspring.
Durge and Kali demanded bloody sacrifices. Shiva delighted in
the destruction of life. Ganeca was behind hosts of frightening
demons. Each of these gods represented deep and ubiquitous
drives in both man and nature, yet each was a different god. And
like the gods, the self remained fragmented.

Coming to the Hebrews, we find for the first time in a persisting
religion an unclouded statement that God is One. Although up to
the time of Second Isaiah even the Hebrews were monolatrists,
seeing God as King over lesser gods, since then their call, "Hear, O
Israel: the Lord our, Qod, the Lord is one," (Deuteronomy 6:4)
has resouficjed unambiguously^down the centuries.

To the extent that Old Testament religion was truly mono-

, thei&tic and God was One for the Hebrews, so the Hebrews were

one to themselves. Man's basic psychosomatic unity was real

to the Hebrew both in religion and in everyday life; he saw his

body and spirit as a unit not as separate parts hooked together.

18 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

One of the accounts of creation suggests that this unity had been
built into man from the outset. In Genesis 2:7 we find: ". . . the
Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
being."

One needs only to read the Psalms to feel the passion with
which he perceived the oneness of his body and spirit:

my eye is wasted from grief,

my soul and my body also.

For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing;
my strength fails because of my misery,

and my bones waste away. [Psalm 3 1 , RSV]

Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger,

nor chasten me in thy wrath!
For thy arrows have sunk into me,

and thy hand has come down on me.
There is no soundness in my flesh

because of thy indignation;
there is no health in my bones

because of my sin.
For my iniquities have gone over my head;

they weigh like a burden too heavy for me.
My wounds grow foul and fester

because of my foolishness,

1 am utterly bowed down and prostrate;

all the day I go about mourning.
For my loins are filled with burning,

and there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am utterly spent and crushed;

I groan because of the tumult of my heart.
Lord, all my longing is known to thee,

my sighing is not hidden from thee. [Psalm 38, RSV]

The organic intimacy of the creator God with man's body is
further illustrated in Psalm 139:

For thou didst form my inward parts,

thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb.

I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful.
Wonderful are thy works!

THE SELF IN HISTORY 19

Thou knowest me right well;

my frame was not hidden from thee,
when I was being made in secret,

intricately wrought in the depths of the earth.

For centuries man has viewed himself through the lenses sup-
plied by the Greeks. Through one lens the Greeks saw man
as physical and as part of nature. Through the other they and
others after them saw man as pure and nonphysical spirit.
Their image of man was therefore split just as though they
had been looking through two separate telescopes instead of one
pair of binoculars. Man's physical side remained related solely
to nature; his spiritual side solely to philosophy or God. What
the Hebrews perceived was that man is a unity; his physical and
spiritual natures are one. Instead of the mind being a repre-
sentation of abstract spirit, and the body a representation of
matter in general, each living being is indivisible. The body
is spiritual; and the spirit is concrete. This kind of thinking, so
alien to classical and medieval even modern thinking, can
now be rediscovered in the Old Testament as a great but long
lost heritage from the ancient Hebrews. 5

Perhaps no one knows or ever will know exactly how and
why and when the nomadic Semitic tribes came to perceive this
basic truth of man's nature. What we do know is that in early
biblical times we come upon a character such as Abraham to
whom God revealed Himself initially as the One who demanded
the sacrifice of Abraham's only son. But when Abraham's obedi-
ence was seen, God miraculously rescued the lad from the
sacrificial knife and supplied in his stead a ram. This God of the

5 Professor Johannes Pedersen of Copenhagen declares, "The Israelite
has no independent term for will as we understand the word. He does not
recognize the will as an independent feature or force of the soul. . . . The
soul is totality ... the will is the whole of the tendency of the soul." Cf .
Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture (London: Oxford University
Press, 1926), Vol. I, Parts 1-2, p. 103.

Professor James Muilenburg of Union Theological Seminary in New
York points out that for the Hebrew, the "living person is one and indi-
visible." (Personal communication.) In contrast with the tendency toward
generality and abstraction, thinking, to the Hebrew, was concrete, dramatic,
and holistic.

20 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

Hebrews could combine in Himself the contraries that other
faiths had to split into multiple deities.

The Hebrews maintained that God was Creator and Sustainer
of the universe and of the life of each man and that each man
was made in His image. Yet somehow even the Hebrews could
not always live by this image of God. In time they refused to
accept this image and they revolted against its claims. As reflected
in the Apocryphal writings, they developed demons to whom they
ascribed the unacceptable in themselves as well as their God. 6

The appearance of Christ, Christians believe, gave to men
a reminder both of who God is and who they are. If to be him-
self man must express God's image, then here, for the first time,
was God in the flesh. Suddenly man no longer had to guess
about God's image. He could see God's image. He could see

6 The Hebrew and Greek positions seem poles apart in theory. In prac-
tice, both of them tended to be modified by the existence of the other, and
most real persons combined both outlooks and attitudes. One intermediate
position that of the Hellenistic-Jewish philosophers served as a bridge
between the Greek and Hebrew positions as well as to the Christian philo-
sophical beginnings. The most noteworthy representative, Philo of Alex-
andria, a contemporary of Jesus, combined the Hebrew philosophic tradi-
tion with aspects of Platonic and Stoic philosophy. He saw the universe as
populated with spirits, but depreciated nature in favor of reason rather than
seeing nature itself as worthy of scientific inquiry, as would the Greeks. As
the late Gregory Zilboorg pointed out, **The existence of man as man was
thought to be due to an original moral fall and original sin." (Cf. Gregory
Zilboorg and George W. Henry, History of Medical Psychology [New
York: Norton, 1941], pp. 96-97). It was as if man had to deplore his own
creation an attitude implying that man's salvation depends on his ceasing
to be a created human being. It is as if there were something wrong with
being human.

In the atmosphere of "dying classicism** of Philo's time, man's body was
depreciated, his spirit was exalted, and his personality was ignored. Any
mental disorder was viewed as either spiritual or somatic. There was room
for neither psychology nor psychosomatic medicine. Man had lost sight of
himself as a holistic being and had lost sight of his God as being relevant
to his human or bodily existence. (Professor Albert C. Outler questions to
what extent it is altogether fair to single out Philo as the representative
whipping boy in the scourging of antiholism. He calls our attention to the
fact that not only Philo, a Hellenistic Jew [20 B.C. to A.D, 54] but also St.
Paul, a Christian convert from Judaism, could depreciate the "body" and
*Hesn and blood." [Compare ". . . flesh and blood cannot inherit the king-
dom of heaven ..." I Corinthians 15:50, RSV. And ". . . we know that
while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord ..."II
Corinthians 5:6, RSV.])

THE SELF IN HISTORY 21

what God did, know what He felt; understand what God wished
for man's true self to be. Christ was alive and human. He shared.
He gave. He loved. He wept. He became outraged at injustice.
He was impatient with stupidity, scathing toward hypocrisy.

His appearance to the Jews was both a fulfillment and a
scandal. For those to whom he came to mean the long expected
Messiah, he seemed to offer hope of deliverance of Jerusalem
and Israel from the Roman captivity. This was not Jesus' mission.
These expectations came to nought, and these Jews were disillu-
sioned and they resented both Jesus and their own gullibility.

Others saw his very tendency to imply a new interpretation of
the law and the prophets as blasphemous. Furthermore, the Jews
had been faithful in their avoidance of images or idols of their
God and they were suspicious of, indeed outraged at, any sug-
gestion of a visible manifestation of deity in a man. Incarnation
was a scandal too reminiscent of the pagan demigods which they
had successfully rejected.

But for the followers of Jesus, all this was evaluated as not
simply the behavior of another prophet who was especially good,
especially godly, and especially human. Rather, they saw Jesus
as a revelation, a disclosure, indeed the one full and genuine in-
carnation a coming in the flesh of the God of the Hebrews,
the God of the Old Testament. 7

Jesus was so remarkable that he was unendurable, and he had
to be crucified. His healings might be helpful and his teachings
thought-provoking, but this incarnational behavior had come "too
close to home." It was too reminiscent of the incarnational themes
of rival pagan mystery cults.

The mystery of this person was not cleared up in the thirty*

7 "The God of the Bible is not an ineffable One, a remote and lofty Ab-
solute, who is searched out by an abstruse philosophical method which in-
evitably falls short of Him, and is found only rarely in the bliss of mystical
absorption and ecstasy. The God of the Bible is the active creator-God
who reveals Himself in events in the history of Israel and the biography of
Jesus as Person, Purpose, and Will. The Bible speaks of Him in terms of
confident affirmation, telling of His Purpose, His Providence, His Justice,
His Wrath, and His Love. He has shown Himself to us in Jesus, so that
Svhoever has seen Jesus has seen the Father,* because Jesus is *me image of
the invisible God!' " J. V. Langmead Casserley, The Christian in Philosophy,
p. 38.

22 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

odd years he dwelt as a man on this earth in a remote province
of the Roman Empire. He was obviously a Jew, and so far as we
can tell, received no special training other than that of the ordi-
nary rabbi of his time. r Yet he was a man who "spoke with au-
thority," whom "the common people heard gladly.'* That he
healed the sick and performed miracles did not really distinguish
him from the earlier prophets or from rabbis before, during, and
after his time. That he preached judgment on the outwardly re-
ligious who were inwardly corrupt was directly in the line of the
greater prophets of Israel. That he preached obedience out of
love, and forgiveness out of grace rather than mechanical legalism
was further consistent with his prophetic predecessors.

It was also nothing new that a prophet's life should be in
jeopardy. This, too, was in the main line of Jewish tradition. The
painful truth is rarely welcomed with open arms.

Yet a few even before his death, and multitudes after it, came
to believe that Jesus was unique. He demanded explaining.

Was he just the best that humankind could produce, the finest
fruit of human evolution and development? Was he simply a
manifestation of Deity who took on himself temporarily an ap-
pearance of human form? Did he have one nature or two? Could
he really have sinned? And if not, could he therefore have truly
been tempted, even as man is tempted? Did he know who he was
from the beginning? Did he have to discover it, and if so, how?
Through foreknowledge? Special revelation from God? Or was it
by interaction with other persons?

These questions and many more occupied six centuries of
Christological conflict and debate. 8 Out of the dedicated and
difficult struggles of the first three of these centuries grew a mag-
nificent synthesis, the implications of which have only begun to
be realized.

The central theme of this synthesis is that of unity: the com-
bining into an organic union of what seemed to be otherwise
contradictory elements. In Christ one person was true man-

8 Professor Outlet reminds us that the Christological conflicts began with
the Gnostic struggle in the second century and raged on until the aftermath
of the; Iconoclastic controversy in the closing decades of the eighth century.
(Personal communication.)

THE SELF IN HISTORY 23

hood and true divinity. These elements came into dynamic tension
and relationship around the central figure who could combine
and relate in himself both time and eternity. He was a creature of
time, was born, grew up, and died, but he was and is also in and
of God, outside the constrictions of time and space.

Only after the synthesizers had successfully formulated a con-
ception of the personality of Jesus did man at last develop a Ml-
fiedged idea of the human person. Only after Christ came could
man awake from his earlier unawareness of himself as a person.
It was as though the second Adam (Christ) revealed to man the
meaning of being a son of the first. It was as though God had to
send Christ to show us who we were as well as who He was. Only
through learning who He was could we have begun to learn who
we are.

Who was He? Even the image of man in the Jesus of the Bible
and the Church is not the full human self as it must be known
by us. We know little or nothing of His personality development
as a child, a youth, or an adult. The aspects of his life that the
psychiatrist would so dearly love to understand are unknown. His
sexual and social development, his family life, his loves and hates,
his occupation and his recreation are hidden. We miss most of
the crucial aspects of what today we would demand in a well-
rounded picture of human nature and life.

Theologians have struggled with the problem of Christ's sexual-
ity. Some have turned to | ^ocryphal accosts of a romance.
Others have approached thfe-^ax^biK* I ^Msisting that if Christ's
maleness had been stressed, he would have been less than a per-
fect model for women. Some scholars have even reverted to the
old Greek rejection of sexuality, and suggested that Christ cEty
indeed represent a^i asexual idpal.

These explanation^ ar$, .eisfcapes. We cannot manufacture the
missing links; we can only conjecture. What is clear is that for the
Early Church it was not considered important to conserve or
teach details of Christ's human life, except those that had direct
bearing on salvation. The concerns of the Early Church so ig-
nored the human life oLOurist that in concrete terms he is por-
trayed as a n^bst attenu^^i^lersion of a concrete human being.
Therefore we sfidtflxf ~Se hesitant in representing this version to

24 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

our youth as ti|e epitom^^f perfect manhood. He may well have
been perfect. An<J*ffifs*is the faith of Christendom. But we do not
have the picture of all aspects of his life and to present such an
pmasculatgd image is to ask for emasculated copies in those for
whom the imitation of Christ is practiced.

So while at last man had an idea of God that did justice to God
as well as to his relation to God, his creaturehood, his sin, and
his salvation, this was not enough. The image of Jesus remained
a picture to be associated with divinity and not with man himself.
Instead of being able to appropriate Jesus' oneness, man was as-
sailed by a long series of theological contradictions. He was told
that he was the victim of original sin and therefore inevitably and
unavoidably sinful and that he was also the possessor of free
will. Man was told that God was both benevolent and wrathful;
that salvation was both a free gift and a reward for holy works.
True as these seemingly paradoxical statements may have been,
they were too much for man. 9 Even though he might have been
able to stretch his intellect to encompass the doctrines, even though
he might have confessed Ms faith with a loud voice, his under-
standing of both his God and himself was far afield from his daily
life. The truth had been discovered, but it had scarcely been
appropriated.

It is one thing to know about the truth; it is another to make
use of it. If man for once had the opportunity of discovering his
own unity through the model of Christ's, he did not take advantage
of the opportunity. He never really has.

Instead of confronting the future with all of himself, man has
waged a divided batde. He has simply refused to admit ff|e con-
tradictions in himself or allowed them to work to his own bene-
fit. He has constantly suppressed whatever side of hims^jf he

viewed with disfavor. But what happens when man permits one
aspppt of himself to dominate tfie olier? Iffie subdued ^tetaent

b&com^^^o^T; ultimately '\( 'erupts .' Tlus o f

tfie gfffi motifs^ history.' One recognizes tfie inescapable similari-

^,**-'***' /

9 IE a sense, this confusion was necessary for the survival of the Church.
It could not attack every evil of the world and of itself at once. That the
Church did survive suggests that some of the priorities were soundly selected.
For the task of integration was mammoth.

THE SELF IN HISTORY 25

ties between modern events and one of the greatest outpourings
of evil in history the age of witch-hunting.

This period, which extended from the late Middle Ages through
the Renaissance and Reformation and covered about five cen-
turies, is perhaps the most striking historical example that extreme
good and extreme evil can exist side by side. The age of witch-
hunting was a period of great theological and philosophical
thought, of great artistic and creative advance. It was the age of
Michelangelo, Dante, Vivaldi, Erasmus, Newton, Calvin, and
Luther. But it was also a period of one of the most fantastic
eruptions of the underworld in all of history.

The attempt to influence the powers of nature or the will of God
by human efforts is as old as religion itself. In a sense it is the
underside of religion, the unacceptable poor relation of the re-
spectable faiths. Black magic always is found hanging somewhere
around the fringes of white. In biblical literature, there is always
someone tagging after every prophet, beseeching him to use his
power for personal pleasure or gain.

Around^tiae^toest truths of high religion there is always the
fringe ^f quasi-religious, quasi-pagan, quasi-magical practices.
Some h^?eTeSt tolerated, even temporarily encouraged by the
churches in one interest or another. But something different hap-
pened in the great witch-hunts of the Middle Ages. It was as if
the kingdom of evil was tired of playing second best and now de-
manded primary allegiance. It was as if the whole world suddenly
took sides: there were those who would worship Satan and those
who would fight him and his worshipers. Ironically, as the excite-
ment of the great conflict grew, more and more attention was
paid to Satan, and he became more and more real to the medieval
world. In effect, his enemies gave him reality.

The witchcraft of the Middle Ages was believed^ not only
by the remnants of the "Old Religion," which had persisted under-
ground in western Europe despite the mass Christianizing of the
Franks and the Germanic tribes. It also became an article of faith
for the Church, so that theologians and philosophers as diverse
as Pope Innocent VIII, Luther, Calvin, John Wesley, John Knox,
and Francis Bacon considered the denial of the validity of witch-
craft an evil tantamount to rejection of the faith.

26 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

The nightmare era of witchcraft brought out the worst in man,
society, and religion. There have been other periods in which
witches were believed in but left alone; the popular imagination
did not dwell on them to the point of preoccupation. Rather,
witches existed at the level of superstition, convenient targets for
casual blame, benevolently tolerated, necessary evils. But with the
furor of the witch hunts, the power of suspicion became over-
whelming. Each man doubted his neighbor, and the contagion of
doubt seemed to infiltrate the entire Western world, festering into
deep abscesses that could only be healed by eruption. Witchcraft
became an unconscionably expensive luxury.

As the late English poet and lay theologian, Charles Williams,
put it, once the imagination was focused on the prisoner or sus-
pect, he gave

form and validity to the imagination. It was the pretty young woman
in the next house, the ascetic priest of the parish, the dignified wife of
the town-councillor, the idiot son of the poor couple in the hovel, the
old market-woman with the power of invective, the wandering pedlar,
the learned scholar, at whom men and women looked; whom . . .
they imagined doing this and the other talking to the tall black, run-
ning upstairs to a materializing lover, dancing, kissing, blaspheming.
They felt the sudden unexpected moments when anything or anyone
one's wife, one's friend, one's neighbour might be something else,
disguised and malicious.

... It needs but for a moment to contemplate another human be-
ing with that possibility in mind, in the street or in the train or the
house to understand what happened. Add the temptation, the fever,
the panic fear; add the longing so universal though so generally
denied nowadays for hate, for anger, for destruction. The moment
of doubt, of horror, of enjoyment of the thrill, resolved itself into belief
instead of into disbelief. . . . 10

Estimates vary as to how many persons went to the rack, the
gibbet, and the stake. It has been reckoned that hundreds of
thousands, perhaps millions met death through such madness.

One witch finder alone, Williams notes, boasted of some seven
hundred executions, and in one city, Berne, there were nine hun-
dred in ten years. Five thousand were burned in Alsace in one

w Charles Williams, Witchcraft (New York: Meridian Books, Inc.,
1959), pp. 168-69.

THE SELF IN HISTORY 27

twenty-year period. While execution was usually by burning, it
was often preceded by beheading, strangling, or mutilation.
"Pain," writes Williams, "brought the human spirit to its last point
of mortal existence; there, in its nakedness, it was asked and
answered the question. . . . But now the idea of the solemn
rarity of the agony was lost; the pain became popular, and mo-
notonous, and irrelevant." 11

Whatever the estimates, the literature available makes it per-
fectly clear that demonology was a major motif of the Western
world from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Every
manifestation of treason, heresy, licentiousness, original thought,
and even fresh piety, was suspected of being devil-inspired. So
auspicious was the movement that in 1484 the Pope accepted the
handbook of torture and inquisition propounded by the two Ger-
man Dominican monks, Sprenger and Kraemer, as the official text
of a devil-conscious era. One of^the most horrible books of all
time, it was called the Malleus Maleficamm,j)r f[e Witches' Ham-
mer. This book, which had implicit approval of Protestanfs""as"weil
as Catholics for centuries, is a nightmare of self-disclosure of the
human psyche of the Middle Ages and perhaps of all time. It is
marked by three major ideas: first, evil comes from the devil, and
man is his accomplice; second, women are the devil's principal
collaborators in the undermining of sanctity, virtue, and salvation;
and third, torture may be necessary and desirable to "assist" man
in telling the truth and to disclose the satanic origin of the unac-
ceptable in our neighbor.

The book became a mighty instrument. Suddenly almost any-
thing that human beings could do or imagine could be ascribed
by the populace to the Devil. And those who were alleged to be
possessed by him in turn could be condemned and annihilated.

Witchcraft was an attack on the body, on the wholeness of man.
It was also an attack upon the sexual functions of men and
women especially women. Alk^tili^against the alleged witches
and sorcerers are all too rich in sexual accusations for this to be
overlooked. Witches were especially blamed for what we today
would call impotence and sterility, and to a lesser degree for

W.,p. 178.

28 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

frigidity and abortion. What is most striking is the emphasis on
the woman's power to undermine man's potency.

In the trials of witches, the collective hate for women of many
millenniums suddenly reached a climax. It was taught on the one
hand that witches sought and enjoyed sexual congress with devils
or devil-created beings called incubL While theologically it was
not believed that such beings actually existed, for the popular
mind they were as real as the angels and devils themselves. These
incubi were blamed for talcing part in lewd sexual activities with
both the witches and certain innocent female victims. Other devil-
inspired creatures called succubi were supposed to steal into the
beds of men, rouse them sexually during their sleep and steal their
sperm, which later was used for immoral purposes.

In substance, every natural human emotion was now given a
demonic explanation. Not only were the demons and witches sup-
posed to stimulate and gratify sexually in immoral ways, they were
also alleged to interfere with "normal sexual satisfaction," in
disrupting marriages and tempting spouses to infidelity.

Catholic and Protestant theologians alike supported the witch
hunts. As Charles Williams points out, "The fires of Tyrol were
answered by the fires of Geneva," and "if our fathers erred, they
erred all together. Catholic and Reformed disputed about heaven;
they almost made a pact over Hell." 12

The authorities who used the Malleus to torture an era were
the same authorities who were elsewhere proclaiming God's love.
They were the Church. They were the Inquisition. They were
and are the historical proof that men recognized both good and
evil in themselves and in God. With this manifesto in their hands,
thousands of exorcists and inquisitors went forth to do battle
with the devil and Ms hosts, and with one another. 13 Now it be-
came not only legal but mandatory to expose, inform, torture,

12 ibid., p. 177.

is The Malleus itself is its own best critic, but the descriptions of the
behavior of the representatives of the Church and the State, the common
man and the aristocracy, the sane and the insane, is dramatically, and tragi-
cally set forth in accounts of this period, examples of which are included in
Zilboorg and Henry's History of Medical Psychology, Walter Bromberg's
Man above Humanity, Charles Williams' Witchcraft and Aldous Huxley's
The Devils of Loudun.

THE SELF IN HISTORY 29

and kill; over three centuries of victims were claimed (and we
may count among them the persecutors) before the devil retired
or more properly, before the mad world changed its demon-
ology.

A few voices spoke out against the blindness, the cruelty, and
the impiety of this assault upon mankind. Some church-operated
hospitals cared for the mentally ill. A Franciscan monk, Bartholo-
meus Anglicus, wrote a humane and sensitive document on the
care of the insane in 1275, even as about him raged the hysteria
of witchcraft. All during this period there existed a group of
monks, the Order of the Holy Trinity, made up of men willing
to give themselves as substitutes for slaves and galley prisoners.
Other orders were dedicated to the care of the sick, the poor, the
aged, the orphans.

Friedrich von Spee, a Jesuit (whose hair was prematurely
whitened by horrors he had seen committed upon the condemned)
protested that "some judges and Inquisitors made money out of
the trials."

A psychiatrist, Johannes Weyer, pointed out the presence of
mental illness in many of the accused and did much to encourage
a demand for exact proof that ultimately affected the entire legal
system of Europe. To do justice to them, it must be admitted that
on matters of witchcraft, the directors of the Inquisition were
the leaders of that demand.

The Church was not always blind to the dangers of a popular
witch hysteria. In fact, as early as the tenth century, Bishop
Regino of the Diocese of Prum collected a group of Rules on
Witchcraft which he attributed (probably incorrectly) to the Coun-
cil, or Synod of Ancyra. This collection was taken up by Gratian in
his Decretum about the year 1140 and found its place in thecont
pilation under the title, canon Episcopi. The statement there pointed
out that only God has power, and the witches only do in fantasy what
they claim miraculously to do in their bodies. Only the Creator
can make or transform things. And here the first chapter of the
Gospel of St. John is invoked: "All things were made by Him,
and without Him was not anything that was made."

"This was the great achievement of the 'quality of disbelief,' "
Charles Williams notes. "Unfortunately, the great vision of the

30 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

One Mover could not be adequately communicated to all the
men and women of Europe. The Church, three centuries after,
went back on its own law." 14

This "quality of disbelief" constitutes a necessary corrective
to all gullibility, superstition, and, in the best sense, heresy.
There is a sense in which doubt is a necessary safeguard to faith,
and it was the loss of this quality of doubt honest, inquiring
skepticism that contributed so greatly to the loosing of the
forces of destruction during the centuries of the witch trials.

The few merciful voices mentioned above risked torture, death,
and excommunication by gently raising the question, "Could the
alleged victims of the Devil be mentally ill?" or could their "con-
fessions," obtained under torture, be forced fantasies rather than
fact? But while these groups worked to overcome evils, wrong
was on the throne and power was in its hands.

How was it that through Christ man had finally come to the
opportunity to know himself, anci thQji kicked the opportunity
away with a viciousness that ^s-anathLema/ to Christian love?
How is it that man continues to do the same today? It would
take a strange being to perpetuate this delusion, and man is that
strange being. Worshiping a perfect God, he demands perfection
in himself as well as in his God. And the Devil is born. Man has
never been able to accept the pain of contradiction. He cannot
see that the barnyard animals and the wild animals are really the
same animals. What caused these Christians to create such black
Qjyapters in church history? ^^y^^^^^^^ri^^^^Humanness.
They shared with their ancestors the very same emotions and
hungers: lust and hate, fear and guilt, selfishness and domination,
pride and unconcern.

They feared God. His unattainable perfection judged their sin-
fulness. His omniscient vision left them no hiding place. His
omnipotence and wrath doomed them to eternal torment.

They feared their own beings. Their natural vitality seemed
like insatiable lust. Their self-transcendent vision seemed like
Promethean arrogance. Their perpetual task of binding contra-
dictions seemed an impossible assignment and so they fled.

They felt guilty. From the dawn of time, man has expected that

i* Op. cit., pp. 72-75.

THE SELF IN HISTORY 31

an eye would be required for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Like
all men before them, the people who induced and endured the
Inquisition felt guilty about their acts, their fantasies, and their
feelings. Their fantasies they blocked out Their feelings they
concealed, even from themselves. But their acts were public and
could not be hidden from God or man.

And so, feeling guilty, they had to have someone to blame.
They projected their guilt onto the Devil.

But even the Devil was not enough. They had to make devils
of each other.

Nowhere is the projection outward of the hell within so dra-
matically shown in a religious context as in the Inquisition, whose
attacks on heretics and lunatics seemed to be interchangeable.
Protestant continuity of the persecution of witches persisted al-
most unabated, making this common enemy, the witch, at least
one point of contact between the Roman and the Reformed. All
accounts point to a massive fear and hate reaction in the op-
pressor and to a curious complicity in the oppressed. They actu-
ally, like fanatical false martyrs, sought and provoked their own
persecution. It could almost be said that the more dire the threats
against, and the punishments for, witchcraft, the more it flour-
ished, the more deluded women and men gave themselves over
to its illusion, the more even former persecutors became them-
selves susceptible to its ravages. In contrast with a jolie a deux
or trois (a "contagious" insanity of two or three persons) it
became a madness of millions.

It is important that the world remember these outrages against
the human spirit, these Irayesties^on the divine will, these temp-
tations to mass ideology, ncJf "only as a lesson in history, but as
sobering insight on reality. For the delusions continue today.
Witchcraft of the Middle Ages is no worse than Nazi persecution
of the Jews or contemporary purges of men whose thinking does
not conform, or whose skin or faith is not acceptable. Buchen-
wald, Hiroshima, Budapest, Little Rock, and Johannesburg are
addenda to the Witches' Hammer.

What seems to have been assumed across the centuries is that
what we don't know won't hurt us, particularly when it has to do
with our own selves. Even the Church has fallen prey to man's

32 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

self-defeating tendency to push out of awareness that which dis-
pleases him. Banished to the underworld, his unacceptable im-
pulses and wishes and strivings rise again and again in ever-new
disguises. More often than not we imagine these subversives to
be foreigners, whereupon we can blame others for their intrusion.
Little do we guess that they are our own chickens coming home
to roost, our own exiled children returning as our enemies.

The excuse for the Middle Ages was their ignorance of psycho-
dynamics and the wide variety of manifestations of mental illness.
They did not have the "quality of disbelief" that our modern
generation possesses. We have a skepticism that saves us from
witches. But in our own time our very skepticism is reserved for
the superstitions of other persons and other times. Ironically, we
lack the quality of disbelief in relation to our own political,
ethical, and scientific positions. We can laugh at the witches of
others but we can't recognize our own.

If it is the nature of creaturehood to be in conflict, it is also
true that this conflict is something against which man continually
fights. Could he be asking to return to a source or condition he
no longer remembers, or asking to transcend the present and
take refuge in the beyond? As Gotthard Booth has pointed out,
with all the new methods we have developed for approaching the
self, we have also acquired new methods for disguising the self
behind the miracles of science, technology, and human engi-
neering. 15

Today we have two unprecedented if unusual allies we have
never had before to tear away the disguise. We have the science
of the mind. And we haye the power of the universe, which
threatens to bludgeon us(lf we will not hear the still small voice,
we may have to be deafened by the thunder of the splitting or
fusing atom^Fission and fusion in the electronic world are a sad
substitute for our own failure to master the problems of indi-
vidualism and relationshipLHjtl^

oftibie self has to teach T^^ W, are.

l^rve f oun( j t h e se if ? we are a i rea d in

18 Gotthard Booth, "Health from the Standpoint of the Physician," The
Church and Mental, Health, ed. by Paul B. Maves (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1953).

THE SELF IN HISTORY 33

the process of being left behind by the ongoing nature of life.

Man has never grasped this lesson. The result has been
tragedy. Will it ever end? Perhaps not. But if ever there were a
time when it might, it is our time. Ours could be the thrilling age
in which we discover what we have been doing and why, in
which we might at last come to know ourselves, the good, the
bad, and the different.

3s

Tne Sell in Development

\

>4

The self in history leads naturally to the history of the self.
Our search for the self will now shift its gaze from the history of
peoples and ideas to the history of the development of the indi-
vidual person. It is still a big question whether our search will
take us backward toward the past, forward toward the future, or
inward to our beings.

This knowledge has arrived through many sources in the last
hundred years the medical and social sciences, the experiences
of educators, the insights and observations of adults newly sensi-
tized to the behayior of children. Information is available from
experiment, observation, and theory formation, as well as from
the personal experiences of patients and of psychiatrists who
have first consented to be patients themselves the psycho-
analysts.

Knowledge of man can be classified and presented in numerous
W ays in the order of its discovery and formulation, in a develop-
mental scheme of the growth of a person from conception to
death, in a cross-sectional scheme that looks at all the interacting
forces at a given moment in life. The presentations can be given
in terms of a mechanical model, showing the machinelike mecha-
nisms and dynamisms of the human organism and personality.
The themes and relationships of a human life or group can also
be communicated in terms of history, drama, and myth, using
the classic models of ancient writers, poets, and seers. Inevitably^
we shall find ourselves slipping back and forth from one style of
presentation to the other. In so doing we shall be reflecting the
very ambiguity that is man. For man cannot be encompassed by

34

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 35

a single diagram. He eludes explanation in any universal sense.
He is always more than and other than the best of our explana-
tions. No matter how far our science and philosophy have led us,
there is a sense in which man transcends our fullest formulation
of his origin, nature, goal and destiny.

Any reduction of men to a few qualities, therefore, is an over-
simplification. But since such a reduction shows us the basic in-
gredients with which we are working, let us oversimplify by
reducing man to four essential qualities. We shall in turn combine
these four qualities into "paired opposites," each pair illustrating
a tension and a balance in which the human self participates,
through which the human self is defined and around which selves
enter into transactions with other selves. The dynamic complexity
of man will thus be diagrammed and condensed; later we shall
examine the meaning of the four poles. But first of all, what are
these four qualities we share?

First, ye are individual. Each of us is a separate and distinct
self. Each of us is unique, quantitatively and qualitatively dif-
ferent from each other. None of us can replace another.

Second, ^^^^^^n^^gd. Even though we are individual,
each of us depends for his existence and identity on that which
went before, pur ancestors and our parents; further, we depend
on our contemporaries to help discover and reveal our own
identities.

Third, we are in equilibrium. Each of us has a central or-
ganizing tendency that pulls together past, present, and future,
the inner and outer world, and maintains us in dynamic balance.
We are not just parts, but a unified, organic, psychosomatic
whole. Our unity is both a source of strength and of weakness.
If a part of us is threatened, our whole being is threatened. We
get sick with our whole being. We act and think and feel with
our whole being, and we sin with our whole being. If one side of us
doesn't know what the other is doing, this is not just a sign that
the one side is in trouble, but rather that our whole being is in
some kind of split condition.

Fourth, -we are in action. Even though we are in equilibrium,
we are also moving in some direction. Physiologically we are
somewhere along the path from conception to death, Psycholbg-

36 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

ically, we are moving between infancy and wisdom. Theologically,
we are some place between creation and redemption.

These four aspects of the self are paired, and in tension. Indi-
viduality is paired and in tension with interrelatedness. Equi-
librium is paired and in tension with action. The two pairs of
opposites are held together by the self, which they also serve to
define. The self, therefore, is to be found at the conjunction of
the paired opposites, at the point where contradictions come
together.

Where do the contradictions that make up the self begin? On
the day of conception, when sperm and egg each cease to be
sperm and egg, and join to become something else? On the day
when embryologic and fetal development have reached an end
point and birth occurs? When the child responds to a smile or
recognizes a familiar face? When he knows his own face in a
mirror and "mugs" back at himself? When he first walks, talks,
fights, rebels? Is it the day of sexual maturity? Of parenthood?
Religious conversion? Or death?

Of the contradictions the infant is born with, of the contradic-
tions he meets in his parents, of the contradictions that then grow
out of their relationship, two are probably most obviously there
from the beginning: the medical terms for them are symbiosis
and autism.

Symbiosis represents the initial merger of mother and child,
two beings interdependent in one body.

Autism is a state of extreme separation and isolation into
which the child is cast by the cutting of the umbilical cord and
out of which he must be wooed into relatedness at a new, psy-
chological level.

When an infant is born, he has just ended a nine-month period
of life in which he has done almost nothing for himself. He has
not taken a bite of food or drawn a breath of air. He has not
walked or crawled one inch through space. From conception until
birth the child has been a special kind of parasite upon the body
of the mother. His life physically has been fully dependent upon
hers. He is so much a part of his mother that her cup of coffee
makes his heart as well as hers beat faster. Her activity may

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 37

make him squirm. Research may disclose that even her pleasures
and heartaches affect the disposition of the unborn child.

After birth, the child is physically separated from mother. In
contrast with many lower animals, however, he is still almost
completely dependent on mother. His linkage continues, but in
a new mode. It is no longer a physiological union; it must now
be psychological instead. The physical needs must still be met;
although the child can breathe, this is about all he can do for
himself. He may even have to learn to suck. Every arrangement
will have to be made for him by an all-accepting, all-providing
environment that consists largely, still, of his mother. Thus there
is a sense in which this physical dependence of prenatal life does
not fully cease, because mother now takes over in a different way
and continues to anticipate the child's needs, feeding his hungers,
removing his stresses, and helping him to shift gears from the old
prenatal physical dependence into the new postnatal state of
psychological dependence.

Between the physical and psychological linkage is a period
through which each of us must pass, when we are no longer part
of mother and yet not able to relate to her. We are orphans be-
tween two worlds. If we stayed in this state, we would be like
the man in Steig's cartoon, curled up in the box, who says,
"People are no damn good." To avoid this we must be wooed
back into the human race by a mother who affirms to us moment
by moment the fact that the world is receptive and ready for our
companionship. If the wooing and our response to it are success-
ful, we move forward from the state of newborn isolation into a
state of "emotional" dependence out of which we must be born
a second time through a process of individuation. In other words,
there is a double process of being bqm,, first physically and then
psychologically, Restating all over again to become a separate self.

Months will have to pass before the child can in any way
separate himself from his psychological dependence. Gradually
he will come to control his eating. He will hold up his head, sit
up, crawl, stand, and walk. Having heretofore exclusively sub-
mitted, he will now begin to refuse as well.

With the first no, whether by word or act, comes the beginning

38 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

of separation. In the strictest sense, when your child says "no"
to you, this is the first time he says "yes" to himself. Independence
has begun.

The movement from dependence to independence is more
radical in human than in any other form of life. In contrast with
many other animals, some of whom are ambulatory and can sur-
vive alone at birth, the human newborn is a helpless parasite that
would die within a few hours without an available, responsible
adult human being, preferably of the female sex. This gross help-
lessness and enforced dependence leaves its stamp upon us as
long as we live. The mark of that stamp is determined by how
well mothers care for their children, hearing their cries and
"listening with the third ear" for nonverbal indications of need.

Some mothers are more empathic, better able to sense and
feel how the child feels inside, than are other mothers. Some
mothers and fathers, too fear more readily and accurately
and answer more quickly and appropriately, some, of course, too
quickly and anxiously. Others are, through their own general
condition or through their special relations with a particular
child, especially inept, obtuse, or negativistic with the child. Still
other situations occur in which the child's peculiarities of constitu-
tion or a current illness preclude even a superwoman being an
effective mother.

It was fashionable a few decades ago to blame mother for
everything. Today, we are beginning to take into consideration
what mother is given to work with: the mother's own develop-
ment, her relation with her husband, her child's readiness to let
her be a mother and, most of all, the child's "givens" (Le., that
which is given) as an organism.

There are great variations in the "givens" of a child. Is he an
easy-crying baby, or does he find it hard to cry? Does he fall
asleep readily, or does he need prolonged rocking? Does he stay
asleep until he's awakened, or does he return to consciousness with
a bang? Some children are more active physically, and more
reactive to stimuli. Families vary in their tempo from "molasses-
in- January" to "jet-propelled." Scientific experiments have demon-
strated that some newborns require ten times as much noise to
make them jump as others. Even a child's skin, which is both

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 39

the boundary and the bridge between the inside and the outside,
may be thick or thin, and thus be variably affected by stimuli.

Mothers well know that their babies differ in the amount of
protection they need against noise, light, and other possible
irritants. Some children go into panic at the color yellow. Others
have ecstasy at the feeling of fur. Still others have a complete
change in their motor responses in connection with a certain
pitch or tempo.

These are only some of the ways in which babies are different
from one another even at birth. Some are like hi-fi sets with
short-wave and ultra-short-wave and middle-wave reception.
Others have only a single narrow band on which they can hear.
Most of us, of course, expect our infants to be in the middle
range, and we are alarmed if they hear either too much or too
little, if they have either an exceedingly thick skin or a too thin
one.

In addition to the many variations in receiving, there are also
many differences in sending. Erik Erikson of Stockbridge, Mas-
sachusetts, a psychoanalyst, speaks of infants who have a "sending
defect," or "low sending power." These babies are not irresist-
ible; in fact, they are easy to ignore. They are just the opposite of
babies about whom one says, "I just couldn't take my eyes off that
child." Despite adequate vocal cords and noise-making apparatus,
they fail to make themselves heard. For a time at least, someone
will have to help such a baby by speaking for him or by hearing
his unspoken or unvoiced message.

By and large, biological and psychological survival always de-
pends on someone's making up for the immaturity that every
infant has at birth. We don't expect the newborn to say, "I need
formula and not breast milk." We expect the doctor and the
mother together to figure out what the child needs.

It can almost be said that we expect the mother to figure out
the problem even more than we expect the doctor to do so. For
her observations are intense and intimate ones, but his are limited
and governed by what the mother tells him of her own.

Throughout, the doctor's role is a limited one. He examines
the child for signs of growth. He determines that limbs and organs
are functioning properly. He inoculates the child against future

40 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

illness, determines the presence of illness, and treats the child
when he is sick. All of these contributions are important. But
by themselves they are insufficient to produce or sustain life. For
the doctor sees the child infrequently, and though his manner
may be warm and his concern genuine, he sees the child, to some
degree at least, impersonally. To do his job well, the doctor needs
effective clues from the mother just as the child, in order to live,
needs something from the mother that the doctor cannot give
him. He needs her sustaining love and attention, her watchful
care, her patient limitation, and her stimulation of his total self
to growth and development.

What makes a mother sensitive to the needs of a child? Dr.
Sibylle Escalona, a research psychologist at Albert Einstein
College of Medicine, has called this "reading power," the ability
not only to comprehend the sounds and signs that suggest the
child's needs, but also to read between the lines for the unvoiced,
yet equally vital expressions of need. This ability to understand
the child is one that may be partly innate in the mother, as though
in creating a child, the mother comes to understand the unstated
obligation she has also created, and discovers her inbuilt ca-
pacity to meet this obligation. "Reading power" is also acquired
through the culture in which the mother lives. It is there for her
to learn; since childhood she has been exposed to the ready
power of her own mother and others. Furthermore, the culture
demands that she learn it.

Every social group expects certain things of mothers: to raise
healthy, normal, happy children; to protect them from harm until
they can protect themselves; to be tender and loving (although
a few encourage them to be cruel and teasing). Often these ex-
pectations of society enhance the mother-child relationship. Some-
times they are a hindrance. Consider, for example, the feeding of
a very new baby. If the mother were to follow her instincts, she
would feed the baby long before its wails threatened to destroy
them both. But at one time, our science-culture decreed that
babies should be fed on schedule every four hours. Superficially
this seems convenient, especially for the parent. But it is seldom
convenient for the child, who knows more about his need for

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 41

food than anyone, and whose digestive needs have not yet come
abreast of the parents' clocks and schedules.

Occasionally a mother's appreciation of her child's needs is
hindered by some emotional problem. She may resent the child
as a rival for her husband's affections. Or she may develop
claustrophobic feelings at being closeted with a helpless infant
But sometimes a mother is unable to read the child's needs be-
cause she simply doesn't know how.

If a mother is insensitive to her her own bodily sensations, she
may have difficulty in imagining how a baby feels. If she cannot
permit herself to recognize her true feelings, she will find it
difficult to teach her child about his. Many of our feelings our
tastes for food, the textures we enjoy and dislike, the sound
level and the temperature of air we find comfortable are
learned. Even our feelings of discomfort are developed by others.
A baby crying may only know after being told by his mother
that the vague discomfort he had experienced was the sensation
which hereafter he will interpret as being "too cold."

Mothers are the persons who interpret us to ourselves. In so
doing, they help us become the selves we are.

Most children cannot tell the mothers of these needs to be
interpreted to themselves. Parents must learn to read them. To
do so, they must be in tune with the child who is uniquely theirs.

"Being in tune" is either automatic or else it is terribly difficult.
It calls upon parents of very young children to bear immense
burdens like lighthouse keepers in their long vigils, like radar
operators who dare never take their eyes from the screen. Mothers
of very young infants are called upon to bind a good many ten-
sions and contradictions. While many of these contradictions grow
out of the variations in the child's equipment and reactivity from
birth, they also exist in large part as the consequence of the
mother's own past. She is herself a being of contradictions. How
well she has resolved her own contradictions may determine
how well she will be able to accept the child's contradictions and
help him to resolve them. However well prepared she is, the
contradictions the child presents to her will probably create still
more tensions and contradictions in her. The emotional state

42 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

of the mother and the interactions between mother and child
are thus of a circular type.

Needs of children do not remain at one level, however; just
as a parent begins to think that he has mastered the code for
one stage of development, a new one sets in, and the child or
nature changes the signals. Helplessness gives way to a desire
for independence a demand, raised again and again, that is
disastrous to gratify fully or at once. Most parents have judgment
enough not to allow a child unlimited freedom when he first
demands it. To do so is to terrorize the child, who finds himself
without supports, at the mercy of his drives and curiosity.

But to withhold freedom or unnecessarily delay independence
is to miss the opportunity of exploiting curiosity to the fullest.
Never again can it be fully recaptured.

One of the most zealous mothers I have ever known, the wife
of a musician, had a four-year-old son whose cries for help she
could not possibly have missed. She was with him all the time.
But this devoted mother was simply incapable of recognizing a
need that was just as significant to the child as rescue from ex-
ternal peril. That need was for some responsibility of his own.

At four, a child can reach things, dress himself, and make
decisions. He desires to express impatience and rage as well as
happiness and security. By overindulging and overprotecting this
child, by doing everything for him and allowing him to do nothing
for himself, this mother had failed to allow her child to grow in
one important way. His every wish gratified, he had failed to feel
the joy of achievement or the conviction of being what Gerald
Pearson, the Philadelphia child psychoanalyst, calls "a going con-
cern." As a result, the child, though given every advantage, is far
more immature than most children his age.

A second mother, the wife of a certified public accountant,
was extremely sensitive to her son's need to try the unknown.
She encouraged self-reliance in every way. As it developed, she
encouraged it too much. Whenever the child was sick, she failed
to realize that he was, in comparison with his normal state,
helpless. She found ways to involve his interest during his con-
valescence, but she didn't understand his craving for an unusual
amount of care and tenderness at this time. As a result, the boy

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 43

was unable to allow himself the retreat to immaturity and de-
pendence which is a necessary part of the healing process. He
could not allow himself to feel or express to Ms mother just how
frightened and hurt and unloved he felt. In one specific instance
the mother's inability to read her son's needs hurt even more.
The boy's father was injured in an accident while on a business
trip, and for several hours they did not know where he was.
Today, because the mother failed to perceive her son's fear of
losing his father, he has fears he shouldn't have at all. When
uncles visit his home, he fears that they are coming to replace
his father. When his mother leaves him to go shopping, he fears
that she will be injured or that something catastrophic will
happen to the house.

Allowing for the optimal regression and progression in the
development of a child sounds like an impossible task. It is
doubly so if one feels that his own freedom is threatened by the
child's claims for same.

Recall, if you will, Jesus' parable of the two sons and their
father. The father said, "Son, go work in my vineyard." The
first son said, "Father, I go," but went not. The second son said,
"Father, I go not," but he went. "Which," asked Jesus, "therefore did
the will of his father?" (Matthew 21: 28b~31a. RSV). Both were
addressed, both summoned, both commanded. One made the
obvious response of obedience without hint of resentment or
defiance and then didn't go. The other responded with a chal-
lenge, a retort, a refusal. But his was a gesture of individuality.
He said through it, "Father, I do not obey automatically, like a
thing. I am a person, a separate person. I own myself." Once
having established that, he chose to obey.

We're all familiar with the child who says, "I won't" when
you tell him to brush his teeth, and then proceeds to brush them
surreptitiously, as if to say, "Dad, that's your idea. When I
brush my teeth it's going to be my idea." But in this gesture of
defiance the child affirms both the father's reality as a person and
his reality as a separate self. He says, "You are a person, a person
to whom I can say no." And he also says, "I am a person, too,
because I can say no, because I have a mind of my own."

For the rest of his life the individual will find himself in the

44 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

midst of the battlefield between the two warring factions, de-
pendence and independence, which both claim and identify him.
Somehow he must resolve, balance, and use the tension between
them. When and if he succeeds, he has become a real self, a self
that can achieve reconciliation through the binding of contra-
dictions.

All our life we are faced with dramatic examples of the problem
of individuality and interrelatedness. All our life we face changes
that force us together or apart. These changes are fraught with
risk. Sometimes we react with false bravado and compensatory
fantasies. I may imagine how strong and powerful I am, that
I don't need anyone, that I'm omnipotent. Or my imaginations
may develop in the opposite direction and I may dwell upon
how evil and wicked and dangerous were the ones on whom
I depended and how lucky I am to have escaped their toils.

Sometimes, too, emancipation is only halfheartedly accom-
plished, as in the story of the little girl who kept walking past
a neighbor's front door pushing her baby carriage. The first time
around he said hello. The second time around, he said, "Oh,
you're back again?" The third time around the man's curiosity
was piqued. "What are you doing?" he asked.

"I'm running away," the little girl replied.

"But," said the man, "you just seem to be going around the
block, around and around and around."

"Yes, I know," the little girl answered, "I'm not allowed to
cross the street."

No matter how hal&eail^^
^*''^"^yf becomes incomplete, Iffiidiscovefed, or

WTiat breaks the bond of dependence and thereby enables
emancipation to occur? The answer is action. Each stage of
development demands new balancing of the conflicting forces;
as each new point or stage of balance is reached or mastered,
there is a new conflict, and the unvoiced but perpetual question
of development: "Do I stay here and enjoy the hard-won peace
of mind that has been so painfully acquired? Or do I more pain-
fully go on to the new?" "Do I take action?" "Or do I remain
'in irons. 5 "

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 45

The choice is not altogether the individual's. Nature has pro-
vided him with at least two forces that are forever pulling and
shoving forward namely, physiological growth and environ-
mental demands. The urgency of forward motion that is built
into all living things is what breaks the symbiotic, or dependent
bond. You've got to be four now, you can't be three any longer,
says the body, and the self must respond.

Maturation and development seem perpetually both at work,
maturation depending upon an inbuilt clock or timetable in
every body that links us to the human race through our genes, like
the cycle of a machine that goes through a sequence one step at
a time.

But development occurs in a context; it depends for each new
move on the stimuli and responses of our environment. Each
stage depends not only on what has gone before but also on what
man, and those around him, have made of the circumstances.
In other words, each of man's actions demonstrates its meaning
in terms of its effect on others, as well as on its source.

Sixty years ago the Western world was shocked by findings of
psychoanalytic pioneers that sexuality springs from the earliest
days of life. Jeers, snorts, and outraged rejection greeted Sigmund
Freud's report of his and his co-workers' observations. Today
we find no such argument. We know for sure that sex is integrally
linked to all four aspects of the self.

One's sex is part of individuality, but a part which one shares
with all members of one's own sex. One's sex is a key aspect
of all relationship, whether it be directly sexual or not.

One's sexuality forms a central focus of one's equilibrium,
contributing components of identity and energy to the control
system of the personality. Finally, one's sexuality constitutes one
of the ineluctable inbuilt timetable systems of action, driving
one on to new stages of development, new loves, aversions, and
identifications.

How does this all begin?

Knowing what we akeady do about the way in which man is
in directed action, the way in which he develops out of a long
history of his race and his own being, knowing that rarely do
even apparently new phenomena lack antecedents and precursors,

46 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

we should not find it difficult to look back to the first manifesta-
tions of sexuality in the child.

We do not, of course, expect to discover full-fledged adult
sexuality in the child. On the contrary, we are interested precisely
in the kind of sexuality that accompanies each stage of child-
hood development.

I The first aspect of infant sexuality we discover is that of
pleasure. We can trace the element of pleasure back as far as the
early sucking of the newborn. Within the first few days or weeks
of extra-uterine life, the baby begins to show us that he sucks
not only functionally, that is to get milk into his body; he also
sucks for fun. He shows what seems to be an innate tendency
or need to be gratified by lip and tongue and cheek movements
beyond those necessary for nutrition.

Non-nutritional sucking needs vary from child to child. Such
needs and their probable equivalents have been studied in
chickens (non-nutritional pecking) and in puppies (sucking) by
Dr. David Levy, an experimentalist in child psychiatry. The
studies suggest that while the amount of drive or need to suck
may vary from subject to subject, the amount of non-nutritional
movement clamoring for gratification will be greater in those
cases in which nutrition was not accompanied by gratification.
In other words, if the child doesn't get enough pleasure sucking
while eating, he'll go after other things such as his thumb in
between.

By no means all of the pleasure associated with eating is
simply the pleasure of sucking. But it is a crucial part, one that
lays an essential foundation for sexuality, the capacity to get
pleasure from sensitive zones of the body. As the child grows, this
pleasure sensitivity moves downward to his anus. He becomes
more aware of his bowel movements, getting pleasure from both
passing and retaining them, as the tissue of the anus becomes
more erogenous. Still later the genitals themselves will take on
the primacy of pleasure sensation.

But pleasure from one's own body is not all there is to sex.
There is also relationship.

One of the earliest discoveries a child makes is that when he
is uncomfortable, someone makes him comfortable. He may be

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 47

fed, cuddled, cleaned, reassured, spoken to, stimulated, or played
with. In any case, he knows it has taken another presence to help
him out. We have already talked about this in terms of the
mother-child relationship, that "basic psychosomatic unity" as
Dr. Therese Benedek, the psychoanalyst, has called it. These early
ordinary situations of intimacy are the forerunners of mutual
adult intimacy, and especially of the sharing of joys, a crucial
part of sexuality.

But sexuality is not limited to bodily pleasure or gratifying
relationships. Sexuality is also a matter of identity. It is part of
the answer to the eternal question, Who am I? Part of the answer
is always "a man 5 ' or "a woman" or "a boy" or "a girl." Identity
with our own sex and difference from the opposite sex are two
elementary discoveries in our growing self-awareness.

Parents, siblings, and animals are the models by which we
classify ourselves and others as males or females, as haves and
have-nots with regard to external genitalia. A whole world of
mythology grows up in the child's make-believe mind as he tries
to account for, justify, and reassure himself about the differences.
The need for meaning asserts itself, and explanations that are
not forthcoming from others are compensated for from within
the self. Frequently the personally conjured explanations are pre-
ferred to those which may be more accurate.

As the dominance in the zones of sensitivity shift, so do the
preferred modes of gratification or relationship. For example,
in the first year, the principal mode is incorporation, literally
in terms of food and symbolically in terms of words, sensations,
impressions, attitudes, and images. In the second year, expul-
sion is the predominant mode, be it the expulsion of body con-
tents or of words. The third modal phase is that of intrusion, and
this, too, has its literal sexual connotation and its more symbolic
social connotation.

It is, however, in the phase of genital (or as the analysts tend
to name it) phallic supremacy and of intrusive behavior that
interest, sensation, and retention tend to be focused on the sexual
parts. For those who do not possess a penis, it becomes an article
of envy, often accompanied by resentment of the mother for
having given her little girl short change. The child may quickly

48 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

adapt to her deprivation, saying she prefers to be as she is. For
a period she will look down on boys. Whether this is a genuine
shift in her orientation toward acceptance, pride, and assurance
in her femaleness, or whether it is a defense known as "sour
grapes," may make a considerable difference in her later identity
as a woman. The boy may be happy to be one of the "haves,"
particularly if maleness is prized in his family and community.
At the same time the very presence of the "have-nots" seems to
suggest to him a fear of losing the treasured emblem of maleness.

Not only is childhood sexuality developing around the organ
zone and relationship mode, it is also becoming oriented toward
an object of the relationship, someone toward whom the love or
desire is directed. Initially this object is the self, in its most
elementary form, a reflexive infantile organism.

But soon the opportunity occurs to turn this inner-directed
love at least partially outward, to a real human person in the
real world. This person is the mother or mothering one the one
closest, who feeds, tends, and comforts the child. Later, the
father who protects, plays with the child, and is loved by the
mothering person comes to be loved by the child.

Both mother and father can be loved by the infant long before
their sexual identity and differences are clear to him. When they
do become clear, the child tends to favor the parent of the other
sex. For the boy this comes naturally. For the girl, this shift
means giving up the mother as a loved "object" and taking her
as a model for identification. What she can't have she seeks
herself to become.

Externally, such early development of the sex and love life
proceeds in a fashion largely determined by the mores of the
family. But what happens internally when a boy or girl finds his
love partner in the parent of opposite sex? The process is thrill-
ing and exciting; it fulfills an innate readiness in both child and
parent. But it can also be frightening.

First of all, the child is overawed by the size of the partner.
Second, he becomes a rival of the parent of his own sex. Being
a rival means resenting and fearing resentment. Resentment
entails the combination of wishes to be rid of the irksome rival
and the parallel fear of being displaced oneself, But the resented

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 49

parent cannot be unequivocally hated, because tie or she has
been loved before. This puts the child in a quandary. He fears
both retaliative injury or the loss of love and desertion by the
beloved parent of his own sex. Ultimately this quandary compels
the child to renounce his first romantic love. He gives way to
his bigger rival.

This forced renunciation is termed the resolution of the Oedipus
complex. It is made possible by several psychological develop-
ments:

First, the selfish, sexual love for the parent of the opposite
sex is replaced by a sublimated (desexualized, but pleasant and
acceptable) emotion, the same that is felt for members of the
parent's sex in childhood and later in adulthood as a marital
partner. A boy reasons that while he can't have his mother as a
sweetheart, he can have her as a mother. Later he can marry
a girl like her. Meanwhile, he can enjoy friendship with other
females. The axis is thus shifted from sex to friendship, and from
present sex to future sex.

Second, the rival of the same sex who is ambivalently loved and
hated becomes the model for sexual identification; how the child
enjoys vicariously his former rival's access to the renounced part-
ner of the opposite sex. A boy reasons that since he can't have
his mother as his wife, he can be like his father who does, and
thus participate in the pleasure of the relationship.

Third, a new department of the personality, the superego, de-
velops as the child identifies himself with the parent of the same
sex. The superego can be looked upon as a kind of unconscious
conscience, a constellation of commands and prohibitions that
make their commands just as surely as does an external parent
or taskmaster. Its gradual development probably has its first
origins with the first experiences of limitation that the child un-
dergoes. Gradually, restraint from without is replaced by controls
from within almost automatic controls.

When the child first obeys in the absence of the parent when
he goes to the toilet by himself or stays on the sidewalk he
shows beginning signs that his superego is developing.

Prior to the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the child's
superego is weak, disorganized, and definitely not sex-linked.

50 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

Because it holds an inner threat, it becomes strongly organized
around one's sexuality as a boy or girl. Now the issue is not just
obedience, but one of being manly or womanly, of following a
pattern of a loved one whose life is becoming a part of one's own
inner life.

We will see how important it is through the next five or six
years of life, to puberty and adolescence, for the child to be like
those of his own sex. The other sex is condemned with a venge-
ance. Girls consider boys nasty; boys think girls silly. This is
the normal homosexual period of development.

Actually it is a largely desexualized period; the energies pre-
viously devoted to sexuality are now available for the growth
of the intellect in the crucial early years of school when we are
able to learn more rapidly than ever again. The energies are
also turned to socialization, with teachers, other adults, and otfyer
children, mostly of the same sex. Finally, energies are turned
to physical skills, to the sports, games, and tricks that mark us
as competitive and co-operative with our own sex.

Puberty, the emergence of adult sexual characteristics, intro-
duces the growing child to a tumultuous phase of adolescence. This
in-between period, in which one is neither child nor adult, and
at the same time is alternately both, is a time of troubles for most
normal children and their families. The body appearance as well
as the body image the picture one has of oneself is changing.
The appearance of one's sexual peers is also changing. Things
won't stay still! Parents are too understanding or not understand-
ing enough, too permissive or too controlling, too helpful or too
demanding of mature responsibility. Inner sexual urges are con-
trolled by inner prohibitions, outer conventions, and religious
taboos. It is at this puzzling time that three tasks confront the
adolescent.; He must learn to accept his body and its changing
function and needs. He must learn to accept adult responsibility.
Finally, he must achieve a work function and acquire a vocational
identity.

The timing could hardly be worse.

There are many styles that may be followed in the develop-
ment of the individual. In one sense we are all different; in another
we are all alike, possessing common needs, urges, drives: for

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 51

pleasure, for control, for meaning. If we deny our aggression and
pretend we are too good to desire control over others, we lie to
ourselves and develop a mask to others. If we deny our pleasure
needs and pretend we are not sexual creatures, we deceive our-
selves and distort our behavior toward others in turn. If we deny
our need for meaning in life and pretend we live only for pleasure
or power, we paralyze our minds for thinking in depth and cut
ourselves off from critical and creative contact with others in the
world of ideas.

In some ways adolescence is like the witchcraft period of
history. Energy and enthusiasms are unbounded, but directedness
is shaky, fanatical, contradictory, and evanescent. Rather than
being integrated, the good and evil of the self are isolated from
one another. The Devil is in the flesh, but he is either denied,
fought, or gratified. Our culture offers no other recourse. It
compels its adolescents to wait for gratification of their yearn-
ing; if they don't, the culture teaches them to feel guilty.

Alternations between dependence of an almost infantile type
with massive bids for unprepared-for autonomy go hand in hand.
The old struggle between individuality and relatedness is almost
as intense as the initial struggle between autism and symbiosis
in the newborn. Parents are hard put to be stable in the face of
such radical teenage vacillation.

Work is as crucial a part of the life of the adult as play is for
the child. Aside from its survival and utilitarian elements, it
fulfills needed psychic functions of handling energy, of asserting
and reinforcing personal identity, of reassuring one of personal
worth, of allowing nonharmful expression of aggression toward
material things and toward persons with whom one interacts.

Work can be denatured to drudgery or it can be overspiritual-
ized into a sacrament. Realistically it must always have in it two
elements: that of play and that of duty. Having them, it fulfills our
inner needs both for pleasure and for the feeling of self-approval
that comes from conforming to an inner demand or living up to
a high ideal.

It is the child's task at this time to begin formulating for
himself a type of work that will provide him with elements of
both play and duty. His task is not made simpler by our Calvin-

52 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

istic puritanical heritage, which makes so many of us dutiful but

joyless about our enterprise.

9 How the cultural contradictions contribute to personal disunity

is reflected both in man's work identity and in his approaches to

society.

We become suckers for the accepted lie; we are sheep who
follow and never question. We may accede to creeds and conduct,
but we are seldom knowers of the truth or believers in the way
of life.

How we get to be this way grows out of a series of givens
and gifts, out of our biological and social heredity and the way
in which it and our environment have interacted all along.

Some of these interactions are dramatic. Some are mechanical.
Both are necessary, one for ordered stability in our self ap-
praisal and self understanding, the other for imagination and
directedness. If the processes are reciprocal and mutual, then
tilings may develop smoothly. If they are in marked disharmony,
then we may have trouble. What is most "natural" is of course
the situation in which we're ready for something when the time
comes. In contrast a child may strain to fulfill the myth of an
older brother and fail miserably either because of innate un-
readiness or because the physiological timetable has him sched-
uled for another stop. The mutuality of the two trends, that of
maturation on the one hand and development on the other, the
indispensability of both if anything is to happen at all, makes
us cautious in underrating or overrating either. My genes insure
that I cannot be a lizard. There just isn't a chance in the world,
no matter what my environment. A bad environment insures that
even v the best genes will be wasted and fail to manifest or develop
the potential they would have in another milieu. As has been
said,, the very finest genes don't do very well in sulfuric acid.

Thus we see that man's nature depends on a "given," his
organism and its environment. But his nature is also dependent
from moment to moment on the people about him and their
"gifts." Living is a function both of the genes that determine man's
potentialities and of his response to the gifts he continues to
receive.

The problems of developing our unique, separate, autistic side

THE SELF IN DEVELOPMENT 53

will be with us all our lives. Something inside will tug at us when
we take our first step, say our first word, first dress ourselves,
spend our first night with a friend, first talk back to our parents,
first undertake to decide our own destiny. Likewise, the problem
of symbiosis, of relatedness, merger, affiliation, will plague us;
it will block us from letting ourselves become deeply involved,
identified, or concerned with others. It will be so much easier to
merge, like the Indian does with God, 1 or simply to withdraw.
, To be separate and distinct, related and involved is a lifelong
struggle for balance. It is the basis of most major conflicts.
Sometimes the conflicts make us go forward. They can also make
us sick. The difference is in how we learn and are taught to use
them.

l While merging with God may seem to a Westerner an easy escape
from facing the challenges of differentiation into a separate self, the task
is not easily accomplished for the Indian.

4s
1 lie Sell in Communication

Emperor Frederick, who ruled the Holy Roman Empire
during the thirteenth century, was a curious man. Some of the
stories of his ranging quests for knowledge are told in Salimbene's
Chronicle. These experiments are known as "The Follies of the
Emperor." One is particularly notable.

Frederick wondered what language had been spoken in the
garden of Eden. Had it been Hebrew? Greek? Latin? How was
he to find out? The emperor reasoned that since Adam and Eve
had been left to their own devices, he need only recreate the cir-
cumstances in which they had begun to speak, and he would have
his answer. He determined to isolate infants from the moment
of their birth, so that they would never hear human speech
until they heard their own. To accomplish this, he arranged for
several children to be reared by wet nurses; the nurses he in-
structed to maintain absolute silence.

It is tremendously difficult for a woman to be silent with a
child. Nonetheless, the nurses succeeded. According to the ac-
count not one of them uttered a single word to any of the
children. In other words, the experimental conditions were a
success. But the children all died.

What was true for these children is true for all of us. We need
others in order to live, and without them we perish. We need
them in every level of relationship: in community, in com-
munion, and in pilgrimage. But before we can achieve any
needed relationship with others we must be able to communicate
with them. Failure in this primary relationship can be catastrophic
and we see this truth demonstrated over and over again in

54

THE SELF IN COMMUNICATION 55

contemporary society, with an unwitting cruelty matching Fred-
erick's.

We know that when children separated from their parents,
particularly from their mothers, from the fourth to the eighth
months of life, die, the cause of death is not usually conventional
disease but lack of relationship. We know from the work of
Margaret Ribble, Rene Spitz, and other child psychiatrists that
children reared in foundling hospitals, even under the most
hygienic conditions, have a higher mortality rate than other chil-
dren. They also develop a series of physical, intellectual, and
emotional disorders having direct relationship to their age at the
time of adoption to the length of time, in other words, that they
have been treated impersonally. We even know that older persons
deprived of the most basic form of communication with their
world, stimulation, lose their sense of reality and ultimately their
sense of themselves.

We don't ordinarily think about the thousands, indeed millions
of stimuli we receive each minute from the tightness of our
clothing, the uncomfortableness of our seat, the warmth of a
room or the monotonous sound of a voice, yet every one of these
serves to confirm that we are here and we are ourselves. Dr.
Donald Hebb, a psychologist in Montreal, and Dr. John Lilly, a
psychiatrist in Washington, have each managed to isolate volun-
teers from the real world of objective stimuli by using blinders,
earplugs, and other devices. The volunteers developed strange
ideas. They heard sounds that weren't there. They saw things
that weren't there. They lost their capacity to concentrate, and
became seriously muddled in their memory, time sense, and other
mental abilities.

Not only must we be assailed moment by moment by a con-
tinuing barrage of stimuli; there must also be a certain amount of
variety and change of pace in thk barrage. The teamster driving
his truck along a lonely road at three o'clock in the morning
may have plenty of stimuli impinging on his retina, his ear, and
the seat of his pants; but because the stimuli are the same ones
he has seen and felt and heard since the previous morning, he
begins to see red spiders on the windshield.

Our bodies and minds need to be kept awake and alive by

56 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

stimuli. Our sanity in a sense depends upon our being con-
tinuously and variably spoken to by those around us. Yet there
are forces within us that resist this essential ingredient to our
emotional diet. These forces isolate us from the very contact
with people that we need to become and remain ourselves. They
are the inner forces constantly with us and in conflict with each
other the pairs of opposites, individuality against relatedness
and equilibrium against action. Our troubles begin when any one
element of either pair overwhelms its opposite.

Overindividualistic communication is noncommunication: no
one else can understand our private language if we have for-
saken the human race.

Overrelated communication is barely communication. Unless
' we are separate selves we have little of value to offer others.

Overequilibrium makes us poor communicators, for we are
then so stable that we are not in need of either giving or re-
ceiving.

Overdirected action makes us poor communicators, since we
may be so goal-focused that we have difficulty finding and re-
lating to others with their own different goals, actions, and
directions. 1

While each of these tendencies, considered by itself, is a
problem, all of them, harmonized through communication, are
necessary to the discovery of the self. Without such reconcilia-
tion, we never learn who we are.

For we are defined by communication, which we may also call
reflection. We learn about ourselves by seeing our reflections in
others, by noting the feelings we arouse in them, just as we come
to know our own features by looking in a mirror.

When a young physician tells me about his work with a patient,
I hear not only the answers to my questions about the patient,

1 Professor Outler rightly questions to what extent our present knowledge
and methodology enable us to know or evaluate the degree to which a trait
or tendency is excessive or deficient. Implicit with all of these alternatives
is the assumption of some kind of a golden mean, central norm, or other
ideal balance. As a matter of fact, we need to think through the meaning
of such an ideal of balance and its implications for individuality as well as
to develop empirically both the methods for study and data from studies
about precisely what are the relative strengths of the tendencies in question.

THE SELF IN COMMUNICATION 57

but also some answers to my unvoiced questions about the kind
of doctor lie is. If he overreacts to a patient's anxiety, he sug-
gests that he is anxious himself. If he underreacts to a patient's
hostility, he may be revealing a fear of disclosing his own.
Similarly, when a mother talks to me about her child, she is
telling me about herself as well as the child. If she complains
that he can never let her out of his sight, she may be reflecting
her own inability to leave him alone. If she ignores his ex-
cessive messiness, she may be reflecting her own unsatisfied need
for this very form of gratification.

Communication requires two givens. One is a body that is
physiologically ready to receive and send messages. The other
is an environment in which there will be a response to these
messages. It is pretty hard to keep on sending messages from
a radio tower, day after day if one doesn't have a conviction
that someone, somewhere is listening. It is equally hard to keep
listening to the radio if one doesn't have the conviction that
someone, somewhere is going to be sending. The same is true
for the self in communication. For selfhood to occur and be
maintained, a person must be continuing in communication, and
the environment must be continuing to accept him as communi-
cator.

According to the Bible, God creates the reality of us as "he
calls us by name. According to scientific information about hu-
man development, the child learns who he is by being addressed;
he learns who the other is by addressing him and evoking re-
sponse. Thus communication comes to us on many levels on
the organic, the psychological, the social, and the spiritual. God's
word, mother's word; God's voice, mother's voice; my voice,
your voice all speak and "hear" us into life.

But communication need not always be in the form of the
direct, spoken word. It can also be indirect. Indeed, the many
forms of indirect communication are often more effective than
direct communication in getting across deep feelings in crucial
moments.

Mary Tully, associate professor of religious education at
Union Theological Seminary in New York City tells the story
of the little boy who went to lunch with his mother and sister

58 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

in a restaurant. After the sister and the mother had given their
orders, the waitress turned to the boy and asked, "Young man,
what will you have?" But before he could reply his sister said.
"I'll order for him." The waitress repeated her question to the
boy. But again his reply was stifled, this time by his mother, who
said, "I'll order for him."

The waitress, undaunted, repeated her question to the boy.
"Young man," she said firmly, "what will you have?"

"A hamburger," the boy said.

"And how would you like it? Rare, medium, or well done?"

"Well done."

"And what would you like on it mustard, pickles, onions,
relish, or catsup?"

"Mustard, pickles, onions, relish, catsup the whole works!"

The waitress repeated the order, "One hamburger, well done,
coming up with mustard, pickles, relish, onions, catsup the
whole works!" And then she walked off to fill the orders.

The boy turned and exclaimed in astonishment to his mother,
"Gee, mommy, she thinks I'm real!"

The waitress had communicated respect, sensitivity, and ac-
ceptance, without using one of these words.

Communication may be even more indirect, even less verbally
explicit. We are all aware of the reassurance that sometimes
comes from the mere presence of another person. We have all
experienced the signals of danger that are imparted by gesture
or involuntary physical movement. Indeed, there are hundreds
of ways in which we get across to another person whether we are
listening, hearing, or caring, all without the use of explicit words.
There is, for example, the story of the man who wanted to start
a jade collection. He was a very rich man, but he didn't want to
be cheated, so he determined to seek instruction in jade grading
from the most famous jade connoisseur in the world. Through a
friend he was introduced to an expert on jade, and learned that
the course consisted of twelve lessons and would cost a thousand
dollars. "That's all right," he said. "How do the lessons go?"

"You come here every week for one hour, and in twelve weeks
you will know how to evaluate jade," his teacher responded.

Each week the man went for his lesson, and each week his

THE SELF IN COMMUNICATION 59

teacher placed a different piece of jade in his hand and walked
from the room. That was all. At the end of the eleventh session,
the student was so angry he complained bitterly to the friend who
had arranged the lessons. "You led me astray. You let me think
this man was really an expert, and look what I've got for my
pains eleven hours of holding a stupid piece of jade in my
hand."

Together they went for the twelfth lesson. Again the jade
expert simply put a piece of jade in the hands of his pupil, and
walked out of the room.

"You see?" said the pupil to his friend. "Not only has he
wasted my time and money for the first eleven hours, but to add
insult to injury, in the last hour he gives me a fake piece of jade."
Communication had occurred.

Another example of nonverbal communication is that of the
mother who places a spoonful of food within the half-opened
mouth of the infant, and automatically and unwittingly opens her
own mouth in the process. The mother's communication is by
identification with the child who, at the same moment, is be-
ginning to experience identification with her. The same thing is
happening to each of us and continues to happen to us perhaps
every day, perhaps more often than we will ever know. As the
late George Herbert Mead, who was professor of social philoso-
phy at the University of Chicago pointed out, communication be-
comes both significant and meaningful when it succeeds in
arousing in the person to whom the communication is being
sent, or within the pair who are communicating, common feel-
ings, common experiences, common actions that are recognized
both as common and as being confirmed within the being of
the other. Here is evidence that when I address you, I address
myself. And when you listen to me, you are listening to yourself.
In other words, when I speak to you I feel that I am heard and
I feel that my speech becomes meaningful to you // and when
within you are elicited some of the actions that are contem-
poraneously being elicited within me.

This state of communicating is sometimes called resonance or
empathy. It is likened to a set of unstopped piano strings, which
will selectively reverberate or respond to a tone that is the same

60 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

as that for which any one of these strings is set. In other words,
one can sing to the piano, and it will sing back to him. In
human dialogue one elicits in the person the response at the very
moment that the communication has gone across. Reverberation,
is the necessary ingredient for all communication. It is especially
indispensable for nonverbal communication which, in turn, is
indispensable in the rearing of children, the creation of a thera-
peutic milieu for very sick people, and the achievement of an
effective relationship between a patient and his psychotherapist.

Despite the importance of a patient's verbalizations in the
recovery process, there are times when the verbal seems to block
, or replace real communication. Despite the necessity of speech
in the development of the personality from infancy onward, there
are elements of the nonverbal which seem to undergird and
transcend the verbal, and are essential for healthy development.
For example, it is little reassurance to a child who is really suffer-
ing to be told that "it doesn't hurt." If, however, a child's relation
to his mother is such that her words and voice transmit to him a
sense of security and love, then perhaps even real physical pain
is allayed.

For a number of years I have made a particular study of a
group of schizophrenic children. These children are characterized
by an early or innate disturbance in their capacity to relate, com-
municate, play, and learn. They may be nontalkers or delayed
talkers; they may talk for a time and then cease to speak, or they
may talk precociously and almost constantly. In this last variety,
speech is not used for social communication in any ordinary sense
but is usually made up of long speeches memorized in the past
and anachronistically regurgitated out of context. This phenome-
non, which is called "delayed echolalia," is only one of the autistic
symptoms seen in such children.

The concept of early infantile autism implies that the child
lives to himself. He may be accurate in his memory, dexterous
in his movements, and graceful in his gait, but he is without
appropriate feelings for others. It is sometimes said of these chil-
dren that they have invested their own psyche with the energy that
others invest in relationship with persons outside of themselves.

While the autistically schizophrenic child may be withdrawn,

THE SELF IN COMMUNICATION 61

negativistic, repetitive, resistant to change, or noncommunicative,
there are other manifestations of schizophrenic disorder in chil-
dren.

Almost the polar opposite of the autistic child is the one
known as the parasitically symbiotic. This child displays a
pathological prolongation, intensification, and distortion of the
normal mother-child symbiosis (which we described in Chapter
II). This relationship is necessary for survival in the human
species during the first six to twelve months of v life. Then it
should atrophy to permit the orderly development 'of independ-
ence. But for the symbiotic child, mother remains a part of his
ego as late as the eighth year. His normal emancipation and
development of separate identity never takes place.

The autistic child never becomes a part of his world. The
symbiotic child never leaves the oceanic oneness with the matrix
of origin. He refuses to become a separate self.

In these children, as in many adult schizophrenics, words do
not initiate cure. Neither their own words which may never be
verbalized, or at least never verbalized communicatively nor
those of the therapist seem to say very much at first. What helps
more than words, my colleagues and I have found in our treat-
ment of some forty schizophrenic childen in recent years, are
such nonverbal communicators as acceptance, limitation, and
spontaneity.

By acceptance I mean simply that the therapist saw both
bitter and sweet in the child and let the child know that he
saw both.

By limitation I mean that the therapist was not fully per-
missive. He did Hot permit his patient's or other children's
comfort and safety or, for that matter, his own to be impaired.
He called undesirable behavior to the attention of the child,
applied appropriate control techniques, and stopped the child
from going too far.

By spontaneity I mean that the therapist acted naturally, in
the context of the moment and out of the available fullness of his
own resources, including mirth, tenderness, stimulation, or anger.

For communication to occur something more than words is
called for. The most meaningful and indispensable contents of

62 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

communication are preverbally acquired. All too often words
become separated from the feelings to which they ought to refer.
In fact we rarely express concern about the most basic events
until long after we have forgotten their reality. How many recall
the taste of mother's milk, the feel of a wet diaper, or the
intra-uterine enveloping by fluid? Bits may be recovered in a
dream or fantasy, but by and large memories are lost. Indeed,
it may well be in parenthood that one first rediscovers that he
knows how a baby feels, but cannot tell how he knows
probably through having been a baby himself and having the
feelings recalled by the new member of the family.

Communication without words has been reported countless
times in religious experience. To what extent this is a spontaneous,
uncontrolled phenomenon, no one can be sure. I believe, however,
that there is relationship if not identity between nonverbal com-
munication and common grace, a quality or power that theology
sees as coming to man from God.

We have seen that communication can be not only direct but
often indirect; not only verbal, but also nonverbal through
accidental or deliberate gestures and signals, through empathy,
resonance, and the presence of a significant person. Going one
step further, we should also recognize that communication, which
is most often external, can occur within ourselves.

One may have dialogue alone. We have all had the experience
of lying awake in bed, planning the next day's activity. We have
all consoled ourselves by pleasant memories at times in which
we have felt cut off and abandoned. In such situations one has
dialogue with the memory of previous dialogues, with an absent
other, a person or being who is loved or hated. One can evoke
the reassuring relationships of the past, or the confident expecta-
tions of the future that we call trust.

A great many dialogues are carried on with the self as fantasy.
This kind of dialogue can be either dangerous or creative. It is
dangerous when it is entirely separated from reality, when it
so preoccupies one that it inhibits action. It is dangerous when
it is not under some degree of voluntary influence or when it
runs off in all directions. Then it becomes frightening to us,
signalling our disequilibrium or disease. But inner dialogue is

THE SELF IN COMMUNICATION 63

useful whenever it has relevance to the real world and is not re-
placing reality.

Indeed, the ability to maintain inner dialogue may well deter-
mine survival in those extreme situations in life that so infre-
quently occasion massive self-discovery. Each of us must feel
shame for the mankind that has produced a concentration camp
into which even one human being can be thrown. Yet out of these
terrible life stresses sometimes emerge insights into the nature
of life for which all we can do is gratefully thank the prisoner
returned from the dead. Both Bruno Bettelheim, a child
psychologist of Chicago, and Viktor Frankl, the Viennese founder
of the logotherapy school of psychotherapy, were imprisoned by
the Nazis during World War II. To survive the indignities heaped
upon him, Bettelheim steeled himself to observe them as clinically
as he would a scientific experiment. Observation and under-
standing became for him a means of survival. Frankl pre-
occupied himself with an internal scrutiny of his past values
and with recollections of his beloved wife, whose fate he did
not know. Many prisoners perished in the concentration camps,
many lost both their minds and their faith. But Bettelheim and
Frankl found a means of transcending their circumstances.

Inner dialogue may occur at moments of self-examination, of
spiritual ecstasy, or of intellectual illumination. The process is
essential to the working through of any problem. But whatever
its setting, internal dialogue is never really carried on alone.
For it takes as references all that has gone before in the life of
the individual engaged in self-communication. And his ex-
periences are inseparable from the world and its people who
surround him.

There is a great lesson here for all communication. It becomes
meaningful and effective only when carried on between people
who truly care what they hear from and say to others.

Not all communication should or can be at such depth. To
be at this level all the time would be wasteful, impossible, and
unendurable. It would be fantastically inefficient. For example,
when I dial the telephone to find what time it is, I'm interested
only in the numbers that are going to come back to me over
the phone. I'm not really interested in the woman or tape recorder

64 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

that utters them. This is communication in which the other is
an object, not a subject. Communication is often about things, but
real communication is always between persons.

Herein is the key to communicating, the first step in the dis-
covery and completion of the self: Hearing the other as subject
means hearing him as a person.

Too often, however, we find that persons communicating
with other persons regard them as things. If it is true, as we
have said, that we are defined by others, then here is where
many persons get lost in the search for themselves. In failing
to communicate with others, they fail to complete themselves.

To readers familiar with the works of the great Jewish
theologian, Martin Buber, this theme will not be unfamiliar. To
those not acquainted with Buber, his importance can quickly be
established through an opinion of many Protestant clergymen
that he has had more influence on Christianity than any Jew
since Paul. Buber wrote a book many years ago called I and
Thou. 2 J. H. Oldham, 3 the foremost spokesman for Protestant
unification, has said of it: "I question whether any book has been
published in the present century the message of which, if it were
understood, would have such far-reaching consequences for the
life of our time."

What Buber did in I and Thou was to establish the theological
validity of a psychological principle. Buber contended that self-
concern does not provide self-fulfillment. We become real, full
selves only when we relate to others, he declared, for it is only
through the reaction of others that our own existence is con-
firmed. Again, it is like seeing one's own image in a mirror; to
be fully real we must see our reflection in others. Thus, we are
interdependent in the quest of the self. We cannot really be un-
less our being is affirmed by others, and they will not affirm us
in a manner that makes us sure of our own existence unless we
affirm them in a manner that totally acknowledges them for

2 Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937; 2nd ed. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1958. Cf. also Buber, Between Man and Man (Boston: Beacon Press,
1955).

3 J. H. Oldham, Real Life Is Meeting (London, The Sheldon Press,
1942), p. 28.

THE SELF IN COMMUNICATION 65

themselves. If we use them, they are like doormen or ushers. But
if we accept them as they are, then we achieve a confirming
relationship that is acknowledged by the familiar address "thou."

To achieve such depth requires uninhibited ability to com-
municate.

Token communication has a definite maintenance value; it is
an absolute necessity in order to get downtown and back. We
must have communication that is automatic, stereotyped, repeti-
tive. We get out of someone's way and we expect him to get out
of our way. Such automatic gestures are requisite to survival.
If suddenly these techniques should drop out of sight, and if we
should expect to have intimate conversation on a person-to-person
level with people all the way downtown, we'd never get there.

On the other hand, these same maintenance communications
can be carried on as // we really knew and respected the other
person, as if we cared for him personally. There is a difference
between token communication of a cold type and token com-
munication of a warm type, and this difference is sometimes ex-
pressed in the word courtesy. A certain graciousness can permeate
even automatic gestures, a certain warmth can help us to treat the
other person as if we knew him well enough for him to be per-
sonally meaningful to us. The terrible discourtesy of thing or token
relationships minus the element of this grace is what frightens so
many people when they come to large cities or visit towns in which
their way of speaking is unfamiliar.

But even the consolation of courtesy wears thin so long as
communication remains on the "thing" level. At some point
every individual must achieve a relationship with a person as
person. I recall a young woman who worked as a food handler
in a cafeteria where a number of my associates and I once ate.
There are no pickles sour enough to make a person's face look
as grim as hers. Every individual anticipating his meal would be
confronted with this chilling visage, and doubtless gastric juices ran
cold. We decided to thaw her out. Every time we received our
food, we did so with warm and full graciousness. "My, that looks
good," we'd say. Or, "My, what a crowd you've had today."
And later on, "You must be tired." Or, "How was your vacation?"
We really worked at it. After about a year we were convinced we

66 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

were really getting somewhere, because every once in a while she
would smile, just a little fleeting smile, and then apologetically
cover it up with a scowl. Two years later she was "all fixed."
And then we learned. She'd been in psychotherapy the whole time.

Now nobody knows how much our little effort was responsible
for the success of her therapy. But it must have helped. At some
point the token relationships became genuine, and they became
genuine because we cared. What started out as an experiment
became a relationship of concern. She no longer was our guinea
pig; she was somebody we liked, and we liked her because we
had communicated with her. We all came to know each other
as persons.

We cannot live in a world that is made up of the dramatic
picture-language of feelings alone. We need a world that is con-
crete, accurate, and dependable. We cannot constantly maintain
the tension of intimacy and dramatic identification. A great many
of our relations to persons may and must occur in the objective
mode. We will, no matter what we do, think of some people as
"things." However, the basic, indispensable and ultimate in re-
lationships are those between two persons who see one another
as real in their own right, who have the capacity to feel the other's
feelings, see through the other's eyes, and hear through the other's
ears.

Such intimacy is too much for any of us to endure as a steady
diet. But all of us must have some of it, or die.

Tne Sell in Community

We have looked at the self in irons, at how man, complex and
loaded with conflicts, is all too often locked into a self-made
prison. We have spoken of the self in history, of how man viewed
his neighbor, his God, and himself across time. We have talked
of the self in development, of some of the ways in which each
of us personally comes to be. And we have looked at the self
in communication, at how each of us learns to hear and speak
to others.

But communication with a single "other" is not enough. Com-
munication draws its fuller meaning when we speak and are
spoken to by the community that we ,call our own. Community
implies a certain commonness, similarity, sharedness, participation,
belonging, and corporateness all of which make it possible for
us to become, survive, and thrive as selves. An old Jewish saying,
"Ein Mensch ist kein Mensch (One man is no man)," is as
true today as when it was first uttered.

Community involves the individual even before his birth. In
addition to providing protection for his mother during pregnancy
and childbirth, the community approves of her as a vessel for its
own perpetuation. The newborn is greeted not only by his own
parent, but by the larger family of siblings, ancestors, neighbor-
hood, culture and tradition all of which are made and per-
petuated by, and make and perpetuate, the community.

In Christian baptism or christening, as in parallel rites of
naming which occur in most if not all cultures, the new arrival
Is, recognized as a creature of promise (or threat) and receives
provisional acceptance. He or she is accepted on faith as a

67

68 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

future participant in the group usually on the basis of the
group's trust and expectations of the parents' desire and ability
to rear the child to be a good Missourian or Zulu or Presbyterian.
The child can say or do little about being cast into the special
community of his parents and their people. He depends upon
them to justify this fate through their reception of him and in-
terpretation to him of the world into which he is received.

From his parents he first learns of the protective (or non-
protective) character of his community, its culture, folkways,
traditions, language, history, ideology, rites, and worship. This
is an unasked-for indoctrination, but an inevitable one. And try
as a family may try to conceal, modify, or deny its community
in interpreting life to its child, a child will inevitably discover
the community or the substitute for it which the family wittingly
or unwittingly provides.

But the community of family and social inheritance has ac-
cepted the newborn (who soon becomes a child and an adoles-
cent) only provisionally. He is in and of the community but not
fully identified with it until he "comes of age"; until he is initiated
into the community's society he is still living on his parents' prom-
ises to the community and the community's promises to him. One
day he must choose and be chosen, commit himself and receive
commitment from the community that is his and whose he is.

These mutual choices and commitments of the young person
and his community (called variously initiation, rites du passage,
and confirmation) have gone on for centuries. They are the
processes by which the person's identity is given and received,
by which he confirms and is confirmed as who and what he is. In
this process he can say, "Yes, I am one of thee," and the group in
answer says responsively, "Yes, verily, thou art one of us and are
called by our name, and our God and people are your God and
your people."

But community, to be full community, is not simply a matter of
birth and identity confirming. It is also a matter of healing.

The early Christian community experienced and communicated
a special kind of healing special because it was complete:
physical, moral, spiritual, and psychological. In Christian com-
munity the individual is seen as a whole being. The community

THE SELF IN COMMUNITY 69

suffers together with him whether he suffers in an aspect we call
mind, or an aspect we call body, or an aspect we call spirit
Whatever their genesis, the wounds of the individual are those of
the community, and healing that is a forgiving kind, an accepting-
in-spite-of, goes on.

The message of the Early Church was not that man could be
so awfully good, but that he could be so loved in spite of Ms
failure to be good, and that the more he could allow himself to be
loved, the more his possibilities for good could be enhanced.

"The good news" that the fellowship of Christians (called the
Koinonid) preached to their flock was that God was with them,
that he had been all along despite man's attempt to deny Ms
dependence on God, to distance himself, or to erect religious
barriers between himself and his God. And this news was drama-
tized by God's coming in Christ, and Christ's fellowship with men
as they were; the love that was stronger than hate or fear or guilt;
the openness that was more powerful than man's need to encap-
sulate himself, the welcome to the outcast, the slave, and the
pagan. These all bespoke a new dimension in community, one
that was supposed to break down barriers and admit the stranger
even while it transformed him and was itself transformed in the
process.

How well the Early Church succeeded in erecting this kind of
Koinonia is recorded in the pages of the New Testament and the
writings of the Early Fathers. How quickly and easily it failed
in certain aspects is a reminder again and again of man's tendency
to spurn both the givens and the gifts of the good life that God
has offered.

Able to raise women to a new estate of equality, to accept
slaves as spiritual equals, to speak to Samaritans and pagans, to
love enemies and strangers, the Christians were still intolerant
of heretics and even mild deviants. Zealous to preserve the truth,
they lost again and again the unity and the concord that was the
injunction of both the Lord who prayed that the flock might
be one even as he was one with the Father, and of the Apostles
Paul and John, who saw the Church as one Body whose members*
sonship was seen in their love of one another.

Yet somehow the Church moved in the right direction. Despite

70 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

a tendency toward perfectionism that sometimes forgot what man
was, the Church could usually take into account human nature in
a realistic way. Despite the periodic attempts to discredit and
philosophize away the body, to negate the intensity of man's
negative feelings and encourage him to conceal them, there was
recurrent realism and honesty. St. Paul expressed it in his aware-
ness of the internal warfare, the contradictory principles within
man. Where sin abounded, said St. Paul, "grace did much more
abound."

Out of honest recognition of the contradictions came great
power for life, great new surprises. The presence in the Church
of a knowledge of the depth of evil, of anger, of lust, of pride,
made it possible to accept man as given, in spite of the unaccept-
able in him.

This openness to surprise is one of the most characteristic
marks of a truly healing community. The moment we stereotype
a healing process we stop it, or at least interfere with its fullest
expresson. If the ministry and the Church become so preoccupied
with discipline and theory that they become obscurantist, moral-
istic, or mechanical, the caring is lost; if they become pre-
occupied with the caring at the expense of discipline, they become
ecstatic, sentimental, or lawless.

But amidst this tension between discipline and caring, which
make for disciplined caring, is the element of surprise. For
Christians, this is very often seen as Grace.

The very thing that makes us human is this capacity for the
unexpected. What shows that we have slipped a little in our
humanness is when we are bowled over by the unexpected, or
when we no longer startle ourselves by what we say.

Openness to surprise is one way of talking about flexibility in a
community. It means that the community is not static, not fixed,
not unchangeable, not "as it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be, world without end." If a community is fixed and
final and unchanging, it is not a Hving community. It is an
archaic cross section viewed at a point of time as if for all time.

How, then, can we achieve the mean? How can we live at the
interfaces between the constant and dependable, which we must
have as a baseline for life, and the surprising, the flexible, the

THE SELF IN COMMUNITY 71

adaptive, and the emerging, which we need to make life live?

I would like to suggest that we can do it through dramatic acts
of participation and identification with the community, whether
these are acts of drama, reading, reciting, or taking bread together.
These are the acts by which we symbolize and concretize what
our theology teaches abstractly and our everyday life deals with
existentially. They are meetings in which we bring together the
pieces and particles and make them one, where we relate the
general to the very particular, to the concrete here-and-now. We
call these acts of meeting "worship."

A famous Roman Catholic lay theologian, Hilaire Belloc, has
likened the mass (and I would liken all of worship) to play. It
is in play that an individual is forever making it possible for
himself to live at the interfaces between fantasy and reality, be-
tween past and present, between self and other, because in play
one can try a role for fun and not for keeps. He can reverse
or turn the tables, not only on the other but on himself, can en-
gage in "reality testing" without enduring the burden of reality
itself. He can find out what it is like to be on the inside -from the
inside and yet never commit himself unless he wishes. So in
worship the whole community can be itself, and yet act in a kind
of corporate play at the same time and in the process speak
beyond itself to a larger concept.

Often we forget this larger concept, as in the story of a father
praying in a house of worship beside his son. The little boy is
praying softly, the father loudly. The father nudges him and
says, "Talk louder." The little boy replies, "I'm not talking to
you."

In worship we are not talking just to each other. We are talk-
ing through each other to God. To put it as Martin Buber does,
the shortest line to God is the longest line we can draw around
our neighbor. To put it as Jesus did, "How can a man love God
whom he has not seen if he does not love his brother whom lie
has seen?"

It is not enough just to love; we must also be able to recognize
the difference between loving and pretending to love, between
true nonhostility and covered-up hostility.

In our community there is a form of kindness to others that

72 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

we think of as an act of love, but that is frequently a crucial act
of hate. It occurs when, out of an exaggerated sense of noninvolve-
ment, we let another person come to a slow boil; and then wonder
with raised eyebrows why he is so upset. In other words we
"eliminate" his hostilities by avoiding them. The hostilities, of
course, do not go away. They persist, they grow, until ultimately
we must deal with them in a far more intensified version.

The method by which communities handle hostility vary greatly.
In some, a high value is placed on its use in competition, in war, in
hunting, and in work. In others, hostility is concealed, denied, and
turned indirectly on the self or various scapegoats. Few commu-
nities seem to be altogether devoid of hostility; few are able to
put it to good use. One that does come close is the Senoi tribe, an
isolated Malayan people described by Kilton Stewart, anthropolo-
gist and psychologist. The Senoi illustrate two important dimen-
sions of community, those of openness and of meaning. They have
managed through a number of methods, circumstances, or acci-
dents, to remain relatively unaffected by the turmoil of the world.
In their valleys and mountain fastnesses they have escaped involve-
ment in major conflict; their people do not seem to need to war
upon each other. They have a very low degree of crime by their
own definitions of crime, and an equally low incidence of mental
illness. Perhaps by our definitions and standards their entire cul-
ture would be seen as mentally ill. On the other hand, in contrast
with America where the majority of all hospital beds are used for
the care of the mentally ill, the Senoi are not troubled with emo-
tional and mental deviation as a community problem. 1

The Senoi family is exceedingly close. Father and mother both
take a keen interest not only in what the child does but also in
what he thinks, fantasies, and dreams. The Senoi believe above
all in the mastery of reality through coming to terms with the
dream.

A Senoi child may tell his parent one morning, "I don't have
any bananas today because Johnny stole them in my dream." And
Daddy might suggest, "Well, you go and tell Johnny that you
didn't like that, and that he'd better make it right today, or at
best in tonight's dream." And so the boy would go complain to

i Kilton Stewart, "Dream Theory in Malaya," Complex, 1951, pp. 3-15.

THE SELF IN COMMUNITY 73

Johnny, who would accept the dream as part of the real world.
"I didn't realize this had happened," he might say, "but if it
happened, I'll make it right." They may fight, of course, but the
dream in any event is taken seriously. The dream is a community
party line to which everyone is connected and responds.

While such a dream schemes denies an individual privacy, at
the same time it creates the possibility for making peace before
war begins. By American standards the community becomes a
little bit crazy by confusing fantasy with reality; yet there is
another sense in which the community has no problem any longer
about the difference.

A Senoi culture will work as long as the dreams of each member
of the culture are acceptable to the others or can be interacted
upon. When a foreign note or foreign body is intruded, either
from outside or from some kind of spontaneous emergence from
within, this can make trouble. Even then the dream process works
on it.

The Senoi does more than use the dream individually and
socially. He links together the individual and the social use.
For example, a child is directed to dream, he is directed to accept
his dream, his dream evolves and he engages in dream thinking.
Stewart likens this to the biblical "as a man thinketh in his heart,
so is he." 2

Not only do the Senoi people handle their interpersonal
problems through the mastery of the dream, they also deal with
sociological issues such as that of the contact of alien cultures.
While in such instances there is usually intense conflict and
anxiety for both of the cultures involved in the encounter, the
Senoi people have a means of overcoming this difficulty through
the dream.

An example grows out of what happened when a Senoi group
was faced with the contact of the Muslim Malayans and the
issue arose as to whether they were to wear the sarong and to
prohibit the eating of pork. The head shaman had a dream in
which a peaceful solution to the conflict emerged. It was a healing
dream and it suggested a healing dance the Chim Chim dance.

Dramatization through dance was relaxing physically and

2 Personal Communication.

74 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

socially. In this dramatization were elucidated the problems and
their solutions. The dance reduced the differences between the
two cultures and provided for an outcome which rivaled that of the
highest solutions of individual psychology and modern sociology.
It also prevented anxiety, guilt, schism, and perhaps even blood-
shed.

The solution did not come by accident. It emerged out of the
background of centuries of trusting the dream and directing the
dream. This illustration indicates how the Senoi both directs
his dreams, trusts his dreams, and shares his dreams. He uses
them to share his life's problems in a way that approaches the
highest type of social thinking that the world has evolved.

No young Senoi is initiated into the group until he is able not
only to control his own dream characters, but also able to receive
from them. His dream characters must give him a song with words
and music, a dance and a design which he draws on a piece of
wood. These must have both an original character and a high
standard, and he continues to try to dream and receive from his
dream characters, until the dream characters are not only under
his control, but also have given him a socially acceptable con-
tribution.

Stewart sees the Senoi culture as approaching the Christian
church directly, "in their basic concept that if a man will tell his
dreams, will co-operate with his fellows when he can, and when
lie cannot, oppose them with good will, he will be able to conquer
all the forces in the spirit world." Stewart likens this to Jesus'
teaching that "the kingdom of heaven is within you." Christian
doctrine teaches that when we have in us the mind of Christ, we
have overcome the forces of evil, "the principalities and powers"
"the spiritual rulers in high places." Hence, Christians be-
come "more than conquerors." 3

Dramatic and dream communication are not always successful
and they depend for their success upon a sharing culture or at
least a mutual openness to sharing on the part of both sides.

There is the story of the trapper welcomed by an Indian tribe
at the banks of the Mississippi. As they smoked together, the trap-

8 Personal Communication.

THE SELF IN COMMUNITY 75

per dreamed off into a haze and was put to bed. In the morning
the Indian chief asked him, "What did you dream?"

"I dreamed you gave me the peace pipe."

"Well, White Brother, we have a custom in our tribe that
whatever you dream, you shall have; so if you dreamed it, you
shall have it."

The next night they again smoked the pipe of peace, and the
following morning, the Indian said, "White Brother, I had a
dream last night. I dreamed you gave me your gun."

The White Brother scratched his head and decided it was the
better part of valor to say, "All right, if you dreamed it, Red
Brother, you shall have it."

And so it went. The next morning the white man got the squaw.
The morning after that the Indian got the liquor. Finally, one
morning, the white man said, "Red Brother, I dreamed last night
that all the land from this river, as far as one can go to the great
blue waters, you gave to me."

The Indian scratched his head and said, "White Brother, if
you dreamed it, you shall have it, but I'm not going to dream with
you any more."

But against the possibility of such troubles caused by the intru-
sion of foreign bodies is the virtue that the earliest inklings of
community trouble are bared at once. Each little concern is dealt
with as it arises.

Another unusual type of mystic community is Hasidism, an
eighteenth-century central European movement. The word Hasid-
ism, meaning "pious ones," actually goes back to the first cen-
tury B.C. as a tradition within Judaism. The tradition more or
less died out from the time of Christ until it reappeared among
the Jewish people of the ghettos of middle Europe.

Three separate forces had ripened the Jews for new intellectual
ferment. One was a recent and painful history of false alarms re-
garding the coming of the Messiah. A second was the external
force of the Enlightenment itself, from whose scientific and intel-
lectual discoveries came demands that faith be informed by reason,
and that tradition be overthrown in favor of new light from the
non- Jewish area. Finally, there was a kind of cabalistic quasi-

76 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

magic, quasi-religious influence upon the Jewish community
that sought to convince Jews that they could arrive at some special
knowledge of how to influence the world in their favor.

In the midst of this ferment, about 1720, there came to prom-
inence a young and relatively nonintellectual rabbi, the Baal Shem
Tov, the Master of the Good Name. The very thing that at first
terrified people about him ultimately drew them to him. He was
alive. He did not believe in tradition, unless it was a living tradi-
tion. He disregarded his own lessons in order to play with children
and take them to and from school. His personality set the com-
munity on fire, and a group formed around him, its members
developing ultimately into the spiritual leaders, educators, adjudi-
cators and cultural leaders of the community. These leaders dared
to propound, and their communities to demonstrate, that instead
of the afterlife, they should hallow the commonplace, the here
and now.

It was a community of spontaneity in which there was a great
deal of singing and dancing and even drinking together. Religious
services were hilarious and, at times, ecstatic. It was a community
in which not only did man feel under God's law and indeed under
His demand and judgment; it was also a community which felt
God should and could be called to account, and in which the rabbi
felt quite comfortable in talking back to God in the name of his
congregation asserting the claim on God that the community
made.

It was a community in which gradual decay proved its undoing;
gradually the Zaddikim ceased to be saint-rabbis and became
magic-rabbis and obscurantists. But even in the present-day re-
mains of the Hasidic type of faith, there is a remnant and a relic
of something of the joy and the spontaneity that these people had
together, so that they could laugh in their faith and revel in their
stories, which we know as the Hasidic tales.

One of these will give a sense of the community they charac-
terized, uniting the fragmented into the larger whole, making the
lonely feel he belonged to a center that was unshakable. Before
the Baal Shem died, he commissioned one of his rabbis to wander
for an indefinite period of time in search of truth. He was to be

THE SELF IN COMMUNITY 77

without regular income and dependent on each day's gifts. The
rabbi protested to no avail. Off he went finally, wandering from
town to town until he came to the outskirts of a city in which he
had heard there was a very wealthy Jew. In this city the Jews
were in a distinct minority, but the rich Jew was respected by
Jews and non-Jews alike. Many times he gave large dinners to
which the whole Jewish population came eagerly because the
host always had an interesting visitor who spoke.

When the wandering rabbi arrived at the rich man's house, he
was made very comfortable. "We'll have a big party tonight," the
rich man said. "You will be the guest of honor. You'll tell us some
story about the Baal Shem."

The prominent man promised the rabbi all kinds of gifts and
presents for his speech. But when the time came to speak the
rabbi could not open his mouth. The guests were cynical but
the host, however, said, "Friend, I understand that it's hard to
talk tonight. Try tomorrow."

So he tried the next day. And again he could not speak a word.
The third night came and went, and he could not speak. And so,
sadly he left. But even though he had not told a single story, his
host provided him with a beautiful carriage and let him be
driven away to the next city. Just a few hundred yards outside
the gates he suddenly came alive. He returned to the host and
said, "I can tell you what has happened."

So the rabbi began. "When the Baal Shem was alive, once in
the middle of the night we took a very hurried journey. We came
to a city and rapped on a door. It was just before daybreak and
we would not be admitted. A woman said the Jews were being
persecuted and they dared not let us in. We forced our way in, and
found that the people of the house had hidden themselves every-
where. On this particular day there was to be a public celebration
and a sermon by the Cardinal, in the Square which the house
faced. It had been said that any Jew found on the street would
be killed.

As daybreak came we opened and looked out througji the
cracks in the barred and shuttered windows and saw the high
pulpit that had been set up for the Cardinal. Hours later the prel-

78 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

ate mounted the pulpit and prepared to speak. Suddenly the Baal
Shem commanded me, Moses, you go to the Cardinal and tell
him to come here. Tell him the Baal Shem is here.

So I brazenly approached the Cardinal and said, Come, the
Baal Shem is calling you.

I know he's there, the Cardinal said. You teE him 111 come
after my sermon.

When I reported this to the Baal Shem, he said, Go back and
tell him to come now.

I did, and lo and behold, the Cardinal excused himself from
the thousands in the Square, and followed me into this heavily
barred and shuttered house. There he and the Baal Shem were
cloistered for a matter of two or three hours. Finally the two of
them came out.

Look, the host broke in, I'll tell you the rest of the story.
I know who you are. I recognized you when you came. Did you
recognize me?

And Moses said, I do now. You were the Cardinal.

Yes. I was a former Jew who had risen high in the Catholic
Church. When the Baal Shem called for me I know why. I gave
up my persecution of the Jews, disappeared, and built a new life
for myself. Now that you've come, I take this as a sign that I have
been forgiven. The Baal Shem told me that when a man comes
as his messenger some day, I will know that I have been forgiven
and I can tell that messenger that his job has been completed, too,
and that he can now go to the promised land and be free from his
wanderings.

A third community with a meaning for us today is that of the
Early Church, immediately following the death and resurrection of
Christ.

This community was fired with the vision of a world that had
been deteriorating, that was corrupt, rotten, on the verge of ul-
timate judgment. From this world each of the Church's members
was rescued into a glorious joy of deliverance, of freedom, and
of servitude to One who was so great and loving and worthy that
it was an honor to be His slave. At the very moment one became
a slave, one became a king. It was a community in which there
was a concept of an overarching wholeness, a notion of a body

THE SELF IN COMMUNITY 79

in which no part was higher or lower or better or worse than
another, but in which all parts were integral and meaningful to
one another and to the whole.

And there was a feeling of belonging in a very focused sense
to the revival of something very old, the culmination of some-
thing very ancient, namely, God's dealings with His people.

But now was added something altogether new, even though
very ancient, something so inspiring that it was inflammatory;
it shook those who were involved in it, and it could not but
shake those who were outside it. They were shaken either to
acceptance or to persecution. The nature of the legal, political,
and religious situation of the time was such that the temper was
not one to compromise. Whether it existed above or below the
ground it drew its strength from a common center, Christ, a
person whom they saw even when he was physically absent, a
person whose life they felt dwelt in them, and a portion of whose
body they felt they were. In such a situation there could not but
be an oscillation between notions of perfection in everyday life
that were believed to prepare one for an instantaneous transla-
tion into eternity, and counsels of a more practical, everyday,
humdrum type that seemed to the Christians to be counsels of
compromise and corruption. This oscillation led, of course, to
the problem of who was in the "in-group" and who was in the
"out-group" regarding redemption, and what the possibilities
were for the person who'd fallen from the intimacy of the inner
Christ.

The struggles between Christian and Jew, between those who
had known the Lord in his earthly life and those who had not,
between those for whom the vision was a transmutation of some-
thing pagan, and for those for whom the vision was a gradual
change or evolution, were as real as the struggle between the
redeemed and unredeemed. The amazing thing was that this
community was able to survive, to strengthen itself inwardly by
a series of ideas that were corporate and came to be the key words
of the community's creed. There was baptism and the Eucharist;
there was a special attitude toward the family as related some-
how integrally to God's family. There arose a two-way process
of defining a member. The word in the Scriptures is "confess."

80 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

But confession is not a private act. It is public. Confessing with
the mouth the Lord Jesus is an act whereby one, in a sense,
took Christ upon himself and invested himself in the body that
was Christ's, It is an act of confirmation in a sense whereby the
individual is confirmed by the community who said to him, "Yes,
indeed, you are Christ's and we accept you," and he at the same
moment, said, "I take Christ, I choose Christ, I invest my life or
my death in Chirst."

The two-wayness of this act of confirmation is the key to true
community, as against imposed community which is the pulling
together of persons according to a principle that does not resonate
with their own commitments. Confirmation goes on between both
the community and the person confirmed. In the community of
the Hasidim the Hasid confirms the Hasidim, the Hasidim con-
firms the Hasid there's a two-wayness. Again in the little Senoi
family, the father hears the dream and accepts it, and the child
tells it without fear. In every community, the possibility of con-
firmation makes possible and opens the way to the possibility of
community.

Community, then, depends upon confirmation by which one
accepts an identity, and at the moment of accepting the identity,
identifies the group which one accepts. You are now a Boy Scout,
you are now a Christian, you are now a son the community
gives a name and in turn says, "You are valued and recognized."

To be confirmed then, is to be accepted as valued by a com-
munity that accepts and values, and a community that you accept
and value. It's a two-way process and it's a process without
which you are left alone, unrelated, and a nonentity even to
yourself.

6s

Tke Sell in Hell

A patient of mine once dreamed that he was approaching a
drawbridge in his automobile when the two arms parted and
the bridge opened. After a ship had passed, the arms began to
descend and my patient drove his car onto the one nearest
him. Much to his surprise, his section did not come down to
meet its partner, but rather swung forty-five degrees out to sea.
My patient drove off the bridge into the bay.

While this dream had several meanings for him, one of them
is particularly important for everyone. The failure of the separated
parts to reunite represented an unwillingness to bring together
two warring factions in himself. He refused to function as a
bridge.

Each of us is a bridge. We linlc past and present, inner and
outer, the corporate and the individual, time and eternity, infinite
and finite, organic and inorganic, and good and evil in and around
ourselves. When we fail as a bridge we are split, and when we
are split we are in hell.

Hell is the separation of that which belongs together. It is
a state of torment, of unnaturally forcing, twisting, or distorting
parts that are meant to fit. It turns a drawbridge into a chasm.

When the bridge is in place, communication occurs between
the separate dimensions of the self: individuality, relatedness,
equilibrium, and motion. When the bridge is up or twisted out of
fit, communication is severed or distorted. The messages the in-
dividual sends and receives sometimes seem to be terribly wrong.

Who among us has not endured the awful conviction that at
some moment he was not himself, that he was the victim of a

81

82 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

tendency over which he had no control, crying out in anguish
even as did St. Paul, "The things that I would I do not, and the
things that I would not, these I do?" When man is in such a state,
he yearns for some explanation of this mystery /Man has always
been tempted to project the rejected elements of himself onto
others, to blame them for his own ^misdeeds, or to see the mis-
deeds as existing only in these others! In our society today, we are
constantly witnessing attempts to ^attribute to another the un-
acceptable in oneself. For Hitler and the Nazis, Jews were the
Satan-equivalent; for Communism, all non-Communists and re-
visionists. Conflicts, temptation, and inexplicable behavior are
frequently ascribed to the Devil. An inexplicably persistent
thought today is still called an obsession, a term that derived
directly from ancient notions of demon possession.

But the truth is that hells exist not only outside the self, but
also within. The self is in hell essentially because there is hell in
the self. The isolated parts of the split-up self, seeking to go their
own way, war on one another, and from time to time take over
one another's function, leading to surprising impulsive outbursts.
When this occurs, man frequently becomes a slave to some
unbridged part.

This form of slavery we call neurosis.

Neurosis is a situation in which substitute expression of the
deep, inner, alienated side of the self comes into expression in
disguise. Then the dark side of the self may be experienced in
symptoms, fears, obsessions, alteration of bodily functions, and
weird experiences of unreality. These bizarre and otherwise un-
accountable manifestations do reveal an aspect of the deep self,
but they do it through a distorting lens. These disguised exiles,
entering without a passport, are never acknowledged or recog-
nized for what they really are, nor are they successfully repatri-
ated and integrated.

Neurosis, like hell, is as old as man. Who does not remember
the Old Testament story of Samson and Delilah? Samson was a
judge of Israel, but his fame stemmed from the greatness of his
strength. His feats of power in peace and war were fabulous. The
secret of his strength was said to be in his hair. That is, the Spirit

THE SELF IN HELL 83

of the Lord strengthened him as long as he observed the rule of
the Nazarites, which included allowing his hair to grow.

But Samson, who liked to play cruel jokes on others, had col-
lected many enemies. His strength and cunning and sense of
Jiumor had given them a strong desire for vengeance. Samson
knew this. More than once he had been deceived by a woman
first his wife, who out of fear for herself and her father gave away
the answer to his riddle, and then left him for a friend; second,
by a harlot who was supposed to detain him while his enemies
waylaid him; third, and most familiar to us, by Delilah. Three
times, the account relates, Samson tested her with the alleged
secret of his strength; each time she attempted to unman him.
Nonetheless, her pleadings led him finally to give away his
secret. The outcome is well known. Delilah helped shave Samson's
head while he slept, then turned him over to his enemies who
blinded and imprisoned him. All that was left for Samson was the
final revenge of pulling down the pillars of the Temple on him-
self and on the whole host, killing more in his death than he had
in his life.

In some respects, all of us are Samsons. Time and again we
are deceived; time and again we participate in our own undoing.
Each time, on the slimmest of excuses, we go back for more
and play into the hands of our enemies. Samson not only allowed
himself to be victimized, he created and provoked Ms enemies
by acts of gratuitous hostility,

Let us now recognize what Samson could not that most of
our enemies are within us. When our desires are not integrated,
their satisfaction cannot be achieved. Samson hungered for love.
What is more natural than that? But with all his manliness he
could not accept the idea that part of him wished to be loved as
if he were a helpless child. By arranging to be shorn of his manly
strength, he actually brought his unconscious wish to fulfillment
but with what tragic consequences!

Like Samson, we are all vulnerable to our inner hungers. And
like him, too, we conceal these hungers even from ourselves. We
seek substitute solutions, which we use as makeshift bridges.

These bridges exist in all of us. Few of us, admittedly, are

84 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

aware that they do; were it not for the few for whom their exist-
ence makes life a nightmare, we might never know what they
are like.

Here I am going to describe a few of these bridges created by
man. While I will be illustrating with sick people patients of
mine or those of my colleagues the principles illustrated apply
even to those persons who are nominally healthy. Advanced
symptoms exist in many of us to a less well-developed degree.

One of the most common of the substitutes for valid, unifying
solutions is alcohol.

John Jones is successful at work, or so he believes. He brings
home his check each month, receives periodic advancements, and
is respected as a good worker and a "regular fellow." But it has
been years since he dared to express an original idea, to object
to an obvious absurdity in company practice, or to reconsider his
vocation. Long ago he buried both his ideals and his dreams in
compromise with what he felt to be the inevitable. Jones feels
more "at home" while working than when he is with his family.
His business demands are predictable, his responses are well
learned and safe, and there are no growing and changing children
to remind him of what he was and what he could have been.
Jones's superiors are convinced that he is a well-adjusted junior
executive. He is admired by his subordinates. There is just one
problem he hasn't licked, and that is how to bridge the chasm
from office to home at night. He is unaware that he uses alcohol
. as his makeshift bridge.

Jones commutes home each evening in a semistupor, just in
time to give his children a bleary goodnight kiss, and to tolerate
his wife during an hour or two of televiewing. Then he falls
asleep.

It is not enough to say that Jones uses alcohol as a substitute
for his mother's milk, of which he did not receive enough as an
infant. It is not enough to say that the companionship he finds at
bars is a substitute for friendships for which he never acknowl-
edged the need as a child. Nor is it enough to say that he is so
frightened by an overtrained, overstrict conscience that he uses
alcohol to numb it. All this is true, but there is more.

THE SELF IN HELL 85

At each decisive moment in the last twenty years, Jones has
been selling short his freedom to choose between the difficult
and the easy. At each new moment, because of past surrenders,
he has less power of choice than before. In each new year, some-
one, usually his wife, has unspokenly filled the breech left by his
diminishing courage. Jones's unconscious guilt over his failure to
use his full self becomes worse and worse and alcohol, five to
ten shots daily becomes the only means of concealment.

Alcohol and other drugs may temporarily give us the means
to exhibit an aspect of ourselves that we otherwise hide. But is
such a disclosure valid when it occurs under a partial anesthesia?
While interesting and indeed valuable depths of the self may be
revealed, what is important is how they are apprehended and
worked into the conscious self that decides and wills and acts. If
these depths are not so apprehended, the split in the self is only
momentarily overcome. Rather than a victory, it is a truce oc-
curing in a stupor.

Another common neurotic bridge is the replacement of real by
imaginary fears.

Bill Benson fears bridges. Even though he works in a city with
many of them he ingeniously manages to avoid them without
revealing his irrational concern to his employer or customers. He
is regarded by everyone as a normal, well-adjusted, successful
man. Only his wife knows of his symptoms and she is pledged to
secrecy. She doesn't know, however, what these fears really mean,
although they involve her in ways she can dimly guess.

Bill Benson's father deserted his mother when he was three.
In a sense, the foundations were removed from the bridge be-
tween his parents that he believed himself to be. Like most young
children whose parents divorce, Bill blamed himself for the col-
lapse of the bridge.

In his mind Bill remained a bridge, one that was now without
parental foundation. Even so, he had now to extend it further; he
had to be father as well as son to his family. Outwardly he made
the grade. He was a loyal son to his mother, a loyal father to Ms
younger brother. But inwardly his own identity as man and male
was precarious, because he felt himself to be a coward. He did

86 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

not know that his fear of bridges was a symbolic concern carried
over from his own apparent collapse as a bridge between his
parents.

Bill's shame affected both his sexual and religious life.

He became so concerned about each that the other suffered.
Today he is unable to attend confession because he feels too
embarrassed to admit his childish substitutes for marital sex
relations. Yet he compulsively pursues that which makes him
guilty. God for him is both the sadistic tyrant who threatens him
with doom and at the same time an easily deceived policeman
who winks at what is obvious. His wife blames herself for their
sexual problems, and their children feel guilty for "making Daddy
and Mother nervous." Bill could be different, but for years he has
run away from the recognition of his false bridges and thus from
his eventual liberation.

Examples of these ersatz bridges include other instances that
modern psychiatry also calls neurosis. Escape into health or the
denial of pains and troubles to avoid facing them is as neurotic
a bridge as alcoholism. So is the deification of normality or con-
formity.

Roger Randall goes to dancing classes Tuesdays and Thursdays
to acquire balance and poise. He attends success and personality
school on Wednesdays to learn to adjust and succeed at work. He
is worried that his wife, Mabel, is not well integrated because she
has ideas and ways that are different from those of his co-workers*
wives. Mabel resents the feeling that she has to conform but sees
that Roger is devoutly committed to finding his place in society
and filling it, and she supposes that sooner or later she'll have
to give in.

The pursuit of adjustment, the superficial conformity to defini-
tions of normality, the evasion of the depths by focus on the
obvious, all lead to a life that merely touches the surface of
full experience. People live roles, not lives. The deviant and the
distinctive are attacked, and we become so busy being normal that
we lose the richness and depth that our inner struggle for self-
knowledge could yield. That illness may be a signal of truth, that
superficial health may be an illusion masking sickness in our

THE SELF IN HELL 87

depths, is forgotten. As Socrates declared, the unexamined life
is not worth living.

Pseudo-health is no better when it is gained through religion.
Many hearken today to voices that promise health and happiness,
peace and pleasure, success and adjustment as the reward for
right thinking and doing. Such escapes bypass self-confrontation;
they leave little self to sense a neighbor's anguish or depth, or to
see God in His fullness of wrath and suffering forgiveness. Nor is
religious practice that offers escape from the self through frenzied
activity, pedantic preoccupation with details, or passive with-
drawal from the world any better.

Other escapes may be corporate rather than individual. It may
be easier, for example, to face uncertainty, shame, doubt, or
guilt if others share them. There is always a danger in corporate
confession, corporate reassurance, and corporate affirmation.
Another's guilt makes ours less poignant, another's shame makes
ours less painful, another's doubts make our less reprehensible.
But only as we come to know our own doubt, shame, and guilt,
only as we see that in some sense ours is different and personal, is
it meaningful to talk about its relation to that of others. Other-
wise we and they are talking about surface experiences.

But of all the devious methods we use to escape the obliga-
tion of bridging our parts, none, perhaps, is quite so ironic as
when we refuse to recognize the greatness in ourselves. We pervert
every good gift and call it evil. God gives us sex and we call it
lust. He gives us aggression and we call it hate. He gives us
curiosity and we call it arrogance. Seeing the good as evil makes
us use it as evil and ultimately deprives us of its use.

Jane Smith is a would-be artist. Her work seems unoriginal.
Her creativity exists, but it appears in her dreams and fantasies,
largely in a frightening form. She cannot give creative birth for
she fears that what is inside her is evil and the way she relates
to it, it is evil. She constantly bemoans her fate but never takes
steps to change. She behaves as if she prefers things as they are
to the way they might be.

A glance at Jane's history reveals many clues to her fear of
recognizing and using her talents,, At five, she had begun to

88 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

show talent for dancing; her mother, a professional dancer, en-
couraged her. As she improved, her teacher began to make ex-
travagant prophecies about her future. To the normal jealousy
every five-year-old feels toward her mother was thus added the
rivalry of a prematurely promised dancing career. As is normal
for five-year-olds, Jane assumed that her mother felt counter-
rivalry and that her success would destroy her mother. In the
midst of such fantasies, Jane's mother was killed in an automobile
accident. Jane's dancing ceased; her talent was paralyzed.

Years later, Jane discovered a talent for art. But her stepmother
was an artist, too. Rather than risk a second death for which she
would blame herself, Jane allowed her talent to languish. All
this was unknown to Jane while it happened. She learned of her
unconscious rejection of her talents only after she had gone to a
therapist. Jane's dilemma illustrates one of the most painful
heritages of childhood the deep inner belief that whatever we
have, we have wrested from someone else. To a certain extent,
received. The mother's breast, the father's encouragement, the
this is true. There is nothing we ever have that we have not
teacher's knowledge, the friend's acceptance all are given.
Somewhere along the line, most of us forget that all true re-
ceiving is actually a form of sharing. The giver receives in the
giving. The moment this is lost sight of, receiving becomes
grasping, and grasping a form of exploitation of the giver. To
excel, therefore, becomes tantamount to destruction of those who
have given us the most. It implies that we have depleted them in
order to increase ourselves. Imagine then what this unconscious
fear does to the child who is on the verge of surpassing his beloved
parent. The conflict is further intensified if the parent urges the
child on to success to do, in other words, the very thing that
will make the child feel guilty. Not only does the child feel sorry
about hurting the cherished parent; his guilt is also an expression
of the expectation of punishment. Every young child believes
that wishes are omnipotent; he also believes in retribution; what
he does will be done to him; therefore, the penalty for his success
at some later date will be his well-deserved failure and downfall.
Much later, as an adult, he connects achievement with competi-
tion and competition with destruction of a rival. Fearing retalia-

THE SELF IN HELL 89

tion or censure, he avoids competition and thus cuts himself off
from achievement.

No better evidence of this unconscious attitude exists than in
the manner Americans react to compliments. Instead of admitting
honestly their pride in achievement, they belittle and deny it as
if it were something to be ashamed of.

Here is a paradox! Here an irony! So complex is man that he
fears the very success his inner strivings demand. Surely such
deviousness he cannot help but view as a curse.

What is the source of this "curse"? What is Its connection with
the roots of evil? What, indeed, is the source of evil? Does it
come from God? The Devil? One's neighbor? Oneself? Is evil
inevitable, inescapable? Or is it an accident, and preventable?

God only knows. We do not. All we do know is that evil
is everywhere around us. It is fruitless to ask where ultimately
it comes from as a prerequisite to its proximate elimination.
People who do are really asking, "How do you get around it?"

The problem is to deal with evil. How do we do that?

Fkst of all, we recognize that evil exists but as a perversion
of the good. This does not mean denying that this perversion
is radically destructive; that we suffer inwardly and cause others
to suffer. It does mean that we are willing to take what we have
called evil and use it in the service of good.

Second, we must reopen our receptivity to pain. To be truly
alive is to be able to feel pain, both one's own and one's neigh-
bors. Living is not the numbness of easy salvation, through think-
ing good thoughts or busying oneself in good works and important
causes. As long as we live there will be suffering. But how do we
use it? Do we deny its presence? Do we blame it on others?
Do we relish and enjoy it, indeed perversely bring it upon our-
selves? Or have we the wisdom and patience to avoid unnecessary
suffering and to accept and use the inevitable suffering that may
be our lot? The latter course is that of the wise man and the
saint, the humble person who neither seeks out nor flinches from,
pain.

Suffering even the most apparently meaningless can be used.
A stirring document of its creative use is offered by Viktor
Frankl, whom we considered earlier in connection with his book

)0 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

Death Camp to Existentialism. 1 Frankl tells how some
inmates of his concentration camp gave up and welcomed death;
tiow others expressed their bitterness in sadistic cruelty to their
fellow prisoners; how still others found ways of learning from
their pain something of the meaning of their own life, and the
challenges life still held for them even in their apparently God-
forsaken condition.

A third means of dealing with evil is to recognize our part in
it, to realize that the demons are inside us. Most people do this
by increasing their feelings of guilt. But calling ourselves guilty
sinners, pleading guilty to every sin, serves as a substitute for
a real examination of our lives. By preoccupation with guilt
feelings we actually avoid discovering the aspects of ourselves
that can and must be changed if our behavior is to be just and
loving. The picayune cataloguing of individual vices may replace
the awakening of radical concern for our total out-of-jointness
with God, nature, neighbor, and self.

The too-easy confession of sins leads one to an impasse. Only
that person who believes he is basically good can take responsi-
bility for the evil in himself. To say one is a complete mess is to
say one could have done no better, and that basically God made
us bad. This attitude is reminiscent of the apology of the mouse
berated by a lion for being small: "I'm sorry, I've been sick!"

The fourth and final decision we must make in an effort to
deal with evil is to relate ourselves to others in a personal way,
as persons not things. Failure to do this means withdrawal from
the world and abdication to the imaginary foe.

Except for his mother no one ever sees Carl Carlton. Since
he quit his job five years ago he's stayed at home; he has closed
the door to any future. Her meager pension and his tiny savings
support them. She has become worried about what will happen
to him after she is dead, but he refuses to think of this possibility,
apparently preferring to go on in the daze of isolated withdrawal.
Once he allowed the minister in the house. That was two years
ago. Now there is doubt whether he will leave except by police
escort.

i Trans. llse Lasch (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959).

THE SELF IN HELL 91

One can hardly say that he chooses or prefers his present
condition. He is beyond choosing, for there was a time when,
after a certain decision had caused him pain by revealing aspects
of himself that he did not wish to confront, that he chose, in
effect, not to choose.

Restoring Carl Carlton to the condition of free choice is the
difficult task of a psychiatric team. Before he can feel pain
creatively again, he may have to feel anger destructively, lust
recklessly, despair wrackingly. The path he must now retrace is
one that each of us must traverse. However arduous and danger-
ous, it is inescapable. We must partake of our world.

But extreme immersion in the world can be just as bad as ex-
treme withdrawal. Mary Levitt had been so close to her group
that she rarely could be distinguished from it. She put group
loyalty before family, job, religion, or her own needs. In fact, the
group had become all these for her, and was indistinguishable from
them. When the group was branded criminal and subversive she
was horrified and unbelieving, later tried suicide; her world had
collapsed and she saw herself as having shared in its destruction.

Such immersion comes through exaggeration of the need to be
a part. This symbiotic need is one we all feel; it is the residual
of the normal child's dependence and the normal adult's need for
affiliation. When the craving to belong overbalances the need to
differentiate from the mass, the individual never becomes a self
in his own right. As a child, Mary appeared to be an ugly
duckling; her mother told her repeatedly that no man could love
her because she was a freak. When a group appeared that would
accept her, she was overwhelmed. She was also undiscriminating.
One who is so hungry for the merest human affection can hardly
be expected to behave as a connoisseur. Now, a recovering
patient in a mental hospital, she has acquired esteem as a separate
self.

Extremes are rarely gratifying as lifelong patterns. Passivity
violates man's need for directed action and frenetic activity his
need for centered equilibrium. Passivity and compliance do not
constitute real participation and affirmation. Challenge and con-
frontation do not constitute independence and choice.

Yet even ordered doing has its dangers. Marvin Barker does

92 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

everything energetically and well. He is forever finding new
places to invest his many talents. He knows the world as his
workshop and his arena of action. But receptiveness and open-
ness to others and the inwardness of his quiet inner self are un-
known to him. In his dreams, however, Barker sees visions of the
broad, peaceful lands of reflection. He feels the cool winds of
unforced being, of unhurried contemplation. This side of him
deserves to be heard, but he is forever running from it. Here,
again, is a fear of confrontation. Instead of withdrawal, Barker
substitutes preoccupation.

Unlike the Senoi who accept their dreams as part of life, most
of us isolate ourselves from messages which come through this
medium. We are thereby cut off from the correctives that could
help us to balance our lopsided lives, the correctives of the un-
heard inner voice. Failing to become whole, we seek adjustment
But adjustment occurs around a faulty salvation; in his search
for himself man becomes less than himself. None of his efforts
leads him up and out of a hell of destruction, or even into a hell
of purification.

Most of these pseudo-hells can be transcended or escaped by
seeing them for what they are. But that is not easy because
they all mask the deeper reality, the greater crime or schism,
the separation of the self from its deep inner rootage, from
God Himself. Just as the pseudo-heavens can keep us from the
King of Heaven, so the pseudo-hell can prevent our escape from
the real hell.

These maneuvers away from reality have simply led us into
greater and greater compression of our potential being, a com-
pression which is at last approaching the point of explosion. For
we live in an age that is starving, depressed, suicidal. True, we
have prosperity here and there, and Americans like to imagine
that others are either as well off as they, or on the road to
economic and hygienic salvation. True, leisure and enjoyment of
life have in some parts of our world reached a high peak for
large masses, and an American workingman can enjoy his own
car and television, and send his sons to college. True, we are on
the verge of new discoveries that may conquer disease and
prolong life, that may clarify the relevance of religion, make

THE SELF IN HELL 93

neurotic life less inevitable. But our health is a hazard if it
distracts us from the doom with which we toy.

Never before have a few men owned the means of destroying
the whole world. Never before have we seemed as blind to the
real danger we possess and constitute for one another. Never be-
fore have we been as far from seeing any real and lasting solution
to the problem of power, for we are suddenly possessed of power
far beyond our judgment and wisdom and compassion. We were
shocked when our own nation used it at Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
but the shock did not last; rather, it seems to have benumbed us
to the power that is increasing even more rapidly. Most of us are
afraid to face this fact, sensing that the very knowledge itself
would be destructive and unendurable. As Charles Williams has
so well said, "It is habitual for us 'to prefer' to be miserable
rather than to give, and to believe we could give our miseries up."

So, in a sense, hell has come to fruition. May we be wise enough
to see what we must that this hell is of our own making, that
it springs from the hell within ourselves. We must learn to live
with it or perish.

7m

Tke Sell in Communion

In one sense this book would end more realistically if we
left the self in hell, where most of us surely are. Yet realism
blind to the possibility of redemption is as unworthy as medicine
blind to the possibilities of healing. As a psychiatrist I have been
a participant in the process of healing, sometimes with gratification
and sometimes with disappointment. Occasionally I have for-
gotten that it was not I who healed alone, but something within
the patient and between us as well.

Only the physician who believes in a potential power for heal-
ing that exists within his patient can treat his patient. Whether he
calls this power the vis medicatrix naturae (healing power of
nature) or the vis medicatrix del (healing power of God), the
worthy physician has faith that the patient is fighting alongside
him for health and against sickness. In a sense the physician can
be only the assistant to this power, saying with Ambroise Pare,
the "Father of French Surgery," "I dressed his wounds and
God healed him," or with Sigmund Freud, the father of psycho-
analysis, that we are the midwives participating in the birth of the
healthy self.

But while it would be most unphysicianly for me to make none
but gloomy conclusions, it would be just as unphysicianly for me
to fail to give gloom its due. I am convinced that it is only in the
perpetual recognition of the possibility of illness that health can
be achieved even fleetingly, that illness can be prevented even
partially.

I have already suggested that we die of loneliness and loveless-
ness when we make ourselves the center of our lives and do not

94

THE SELF IN COMMUNION 95

live in participative community. I have suggested that we can only
validate ourselves by giving them to others. It is the community
that helps us confirm who and what we are; without it we have
little identity.

But community as we ordinarily think of it is not enough.
There is a condition of participation that goes beyond the com-
munity. Not only does it validate; it heals. This condition is called
communion, and it is the answer to hell.

Communion means the relating of the parts, all the parts
good dnd evil, corporate and individual, divine and human. It is
the curing of the split condition that we have come to know
as hell. Historically, communion occurs in at least three senses:
the communion of the saints, the communion of the Lord's
Supper, and the communion that transcends symbols. Each points
to the other.

The communion of the saints is a Christian term that his
implications for those who come together as a part of the Redemp-
tive Community that the Church seeks to be and never quite be-
comes, and, in a union across time and space, of those who have
either died or are yet to be born. This communion is a fellow-
ship that cuts across race and creed and external affiliation in a
reality we remember (or too often forget) on All Saints' Day and
at funerals, and otherwise largely ignore.

The uniting principle of both aspects of this communion of
saints is the belief that Christ showed man what he is, namely,
one who can become himself only through bearing the burdens of
others and allowing them to bear his burdens. Charles Williams,
who exemplified this theme in life, always insisted not only that
we must bear one another's burden but that no man can bear
his own burden alone. This is one meaning of the Cross.

Communion in the Lord's Supper goes back to the Jewish
Passover feast as the commemoration by the Hebrews of their
liberation from slavery at the hands of the Egyptians. Many be-
lieved that it was the Passover meal with his disciples that was
Jesus' last supper, and this very feast has been accepted by the
Church as its commemoration of liberation.

The Lord's Supper has many meanings. Psychologically, there
is communion among the participants, one with the other. Theo-

96 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

logically, there is communion between each participant and the
Founder of the Feast. A symbol of the transaction is the food, as
basic and organic a symbol of ultimate nurture and of receptive
thanksgiving as possible. And yet to this simple meaning is added
the more personal one of the incorporation of the Host of the
feast or making Christ part of the self and the self part of
Christ. The words of the commemoration, "This is my body,"
symbolically represent the continuity of his people with Christ,
one which both nourishes and judges, because to be in continuity
with Christ is to be condemned to the humilating glory of making
real the bridge between nature and man, between things and
persons.

Being a bridge constitutes man's glory and his torment. The
glory is that he can commune. The torment is that when he does
not commune, he and his world are divided, and that when he
does, he and his world are judged because it is just at the mo-
ment when man most keenly feels that he is and must be a bridge
and a burden-bearer that he most keenly recognizes his failure. It
is at the moment of recognition of his greatest possibility that man
accepts the most radical judgment of himself. Little wonder that
he then embraces any number of methods of avoiding the recogni-
tion that he is a bridge.

Religion is by and large the most popular defense against the
unbearable judgments and joys that follow from such recognition.
And what a strange religion it becomes through man's distor-
tions. Man will become preoccupied with doing rather than being,
with avoiding sins rather than with accepting his sinfulness, with
pursuing sanctity without his neighbor or with coercing his neigh-
bor into an unwilling common pursuit. He will even destroy the
source of the communion by fighting over its theological meaning
or its external form, destroying its fellowship by making it ex-
clusive rather than inclusive. He may concentrate on right belief,
which deteriorates into doctrinal assent, or on salvation by agree-
ment. He may even pursue moral perfectionism as a graceless
legalism, forgetting the "drunken miracle" (as Charles Williams
terms the wine-producing for the festivity of the Cana feast)
which was perhaps best rediscovered in semimodern times in the
slightly intoxicated ecstasies of the Hasadic faithful. Since then
austerity and pomp have too often replaced joy and spontaneity,

THE SELF IN COMMUNION 97

and conformity and exclusivism have replaced the fellowship that
could even include Judas.

Where distortions persist, the basic need of man remains
unfulfilled. While both hell and heaven are within, the self can-
not find them alone. There can be no salvation outside the Church
(in its deepest meaning), not because the Church alone has the
Word, but because a redemptive community is part of all redemp-
tion. Bearing another's burdens, casting one's burdens upon the
Lord, taking up the Cross, dying to live and living to die, all these
do not go on in isolation they grow out of relationship to God
and self through the fellowship of the redemptive community.

But the community is not always redemptive; and even when it
may seem to be redemptive, it may tend to become a god in itself,
leading to new idolatries. Every good tends to deteriorate into an
evil when it is absolutized; or into an idol when it is deified. The
highest that God has given us tends to become demonic when
it is confused with God Himself.

St. Augustine reportedly once said, "This also is thou; neither
is this thou." This saying is a double corrective. Whenever men
fail to see the good in anything in creation, even that which
appears to be evil, the first half "This also is Thou" stands
in judgment. Whenever men make an idol of anything, even the
highest and best, the second half "Neither is this Thou" calls
it into question and dethrones it.

"This also is Thou," must always be balanced with "Neither
is this thou," whether we call this the Protestant Principle 1 or
Oriental wisdom. Or, putting it in the words of Nicolas Berdyaev,
the Russian Orthodox theologian, "There is a church in the exis-
tential sense, which is community and fellowship, and there are
churches which are objectifizations and social institutions. When
the church, as objectifization and a social institution is regarded
as holy and impeccable, then the creation of an idol and the
slavery of man begins. . . . Man possesses the capacity for turn-
ing love for God and for the highest ideas, into the most terrible
slavery." 2

1 Cf. Paul Tillich's The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1948), pp. 161 ff.

2 Nicolas Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1944), p. 294 ff.

98 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

The third meaning of communion constitutes a category that
many would call nontheological and nonreligious, if not anti-
theological and antireligious. It is the communion that unites in
unspoken mutual recognition those who can speak and listen to
one another at the intersection of the secular and spiritual worlds.
These men are bridges of self to others' selves, whether or not
they know it, because in their being they fulfill an openness to all
possibilities; because communication happens in and through their
openness, and because they have not interrupted their participa-
tion in exchange because of preoccupation with its coinage.

Such men are religious without knowing it. They can be in
communion without distraction of the external signs of religion
or philosophy, creed or liturgy. They may not even be aware of
their functioning as bridges of communion. Those who have made
absolutes of the externals may judge these silent communicants,
but they cannot dislodge them from their contact with one another
and reality. On the other hand, the silent communicant is in no
position to judge the man for whom the externals are important
because, interfused with spirit and power and love, they serve as
means of communication and grace.

Karl Heim, the German philosopher-theologian, has described
all individuals as bridges between two world spaces.

We stand in two spaces at once, spaces with contracting structures.

The one space is the space into which we have been born, together
with all other beings. In this space we live and think and explore in
accordance with the generally accepted methods of natural science to-
gether with all the others. We can communicate with all other human
beings in a way which ensures mutual comprehension and general
agreement. The second space is that which is disclosed to us only by
a "second birth," as it were by a "second sight." With regard to this
second space we can communicate only with those who have under-
gone the same experience as ourselves. 3

Yet once this openness in both directions have been affirmed,
the person so experiencing and affirming becomes a means of
Grace. Such persons are in Grace; their lives communicate a

* Karl Heim, Christian Faith and Natural Science (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1953), p. 248.

THE SELF IN COMMUNION 99

gracious openness that does not insist on payment in advance.
They are open to receive as well as to give, to be healed as well
as to heal, to be forgiven as well as to forgive.

Forgiveness means that both must be forgiven because to
forgive is an affront which the forgiven must endure and in turn
forgive. Only in Grace, a dimension that can tolerate the absurd
and the comical, the blessed and the whimsical, can this happen.
Grace is a gift, but as Aldous Huxley has said, too often men
pursue the gift when they have not accepted that which has
already been given. 4 The given is our own self and the selves of
others, the mystery and glory and torment of our own being, and
the mystery and wonder and inscrutable awfulness of others.
Says Huxley:

That the infinite must include the finite and must therefore be
totally present at every point of space, every instant of time, seems
sufficiently evident. To avoid this obvious conclusion and to escape its
practical consequences, the older and more rigorous Christian thinkers
expended all their ingenuity, the severer Christian moralists all their
persuasions and coercions.

This is a fallen world, proclaimed the thinkers, and nature, human
and subhuman, is radically corrupt. Therefore, said the moralists, na-
ture must be fought on every front suppressed within, ignored and
depreciated without.

But it is only through the datum of nature that we can hope to re-
ceive the donum of Grace. It is only by accepting the given, as it is
given, that we may qualify for the Gift. It is only through the facts that
we can come to the primordial Fact. 5

Grace can be commanded no more than love. Each happens;
there are conditions which may foster or hinder their happening,
but we do not and cannot conjure up or manipulate their ap-
pearance. True healing cannot be magical; one cannot manipulate
another magically even if this manipulation be dignified by the
name of science or religion. What we can do is to open ourselves
to participation in the life of communities and their communions,
by whatever name; and to remember that openness is a condition
that is required of one's own being as well as another's. Or as

* The Devils of Loudun, pp. 285 ff.

100 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

Gabriel Marcel, the French Catholic existentialist might have
put it, "the need for Being is the need to participate, as con-
trasted with fitting into a routine." 6

But this participation means risking the radical danger of losing
the self, and what may be more frightening, of finding the self.
The self we find may not be the kind of self we thought we
wanted to be. It will surely not be the kind of self that was
closed to the possibilities of evil, nor the kind of self that could
imagine it was whole because it had exiled the internal rebels.
Neither will the community of such selves be able to imagine
that it is whole simply because it has banished its visionaries to
mental hospitals or monasteries and its nonconformists to prisons.

In both individual and collective forms, this kind of open self
will perpetually risk destruction; it will live at the edge of an
abyss; the abyss will be frightening, but the self will have learned
to live with the fear because it will have known the depth of the
abyss, and will have discovered that part of the rejected self
returns as a blessing rather than a curse.

How much any one of us can risk this kind of openness is
problematic. To propose that it is an easy possibility is to give
false hope. But to deny that it is a possibility is to deny all hope.

The varieties of pseudo-hell and pseudo-transcendence all lead
to some violation of the basic qualities of the whole self related-
ness, individuality, equilibrium, and action. Escape into mob
psychology, for example, violates individuality, escape into iso-
lated meditation violates relatedness, escape into inactivity violates
directedness, escape into frenetic activism violates centeredness.
Yet each man will express each of his dimensions in a personal
way. The ways may seem contradictory, but the man in pilgrimage
prays for grace to recognize his brethren in pilgrimage and to
respect the way each of them must travel to achieve full selfhood.

Grace does not mean live-and-let-live indifference. Interaction
is part of relatedness; it may be or seem to be negative interaction.

To realize that our fellowship can sometimes be uncomfortable
is, of course, to face our anger and hurt as our own. Recognizing
that even passive resistance constitutes an attack and acknowledg-

6 Paraphrase from David Roberts, Existentialism and Religious Belief
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 283.

THE SELF IN COMMUNION 101

ing that from time to time we do and must attack one another
is part of accepting and being the whole self, not rejecting the
dark, nether underside. It means sharing in the responsibility for
the individual and the collective wrongs we all commit and suffer.
The threat of imminent nuclear destruction of ourselves, our
genes, and our descendants, the "crime against the future," is
so close as to be terrifying and paralyzing. We have neither the
assurance of technological defense and prevention nor the promise
of moral transcendence that would be the more radical and
lasting solution. It is humbling to understand that not only we
are on the brink of annihilation but also all we have built, begun,
bequeathed, and even dreamed. Yet we seem to move on, almost
as though we were not next door to doom. Is this denial a
mechanism of defense, a flight from fear, an innate inability to
contemplate the hour of mankind's death? Or is it the reflection
of a hope within, a hope that witnesses to the innate organic
assurance that life is good, that life is of God, and that He will
not allow His creation to perish again as it did at the time of the
Flood?

Perhaps there is a man in our world so placed that his courage
will transcend faintheartedness; his clarity of thought, muddled
thinking. Perhaps in him may come to focus the hopes and prayers
and would-be achievements of the wishing billions. Perhaps he
is not one specific man, but rather Everyman, facing the ultimate
test of his existence his willingness to become a saving in-
carnational bridge.

Jewish mythology describes the exile of the Shekinah, or the
glory of God from the creation. May this not be analogous to the
exiles of the forbidden side of man's self and the creation of an
artificial split in his nature? Not only man is split by this division
and exile, but God, as well; the ultimate restoration of the exiles
is also the restoration of God to His wholeness and to His glory.
Perhaps as we come to accept the hitherto unacceptable in our
world, we will come to accept even in our God the negative
that until now we have invested in the Devil, whom we ourselves
have empowered as our enemy and God's enemy, and whose
exile we have enforced at the cost of depleting ourselves and our
God. We have accepted the symbol of final defeat of a part of

102 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

God's universe as foreordained and irreversible. We have built
hedges around the holy, and in so doing have destroyed not only
the holy but also that which it must hallow. We have accepted
the demonic verdict of ultimate separation instead of accepting
the ultimate reality of reunion.

To be sure, we have wanted reunion and sometimes have even
pretended that it had already come to be. But reunion does not
come about through denying difference and separation. Reunion
occurs, not by projecting demons onto the enemy, but by recogniz-
ing our own part in the suicide of the race. The price of the angels
is the demons, and we may find it as hard to accept the former
as the latter. Receiving the unearned gift of Grace may be more
difficult than remaining brave in the face of injustice. Grace from
our enemies may be more unwelcome than their assaults.

The forgiver is an offense, a scandal, a Christ; one who must
realize that to forgive is to offer the grandest insult, that it in-
volves working through the hostility of the forgiven toward the
forgiver. Yet this is the only route to reconciliation. This is
the shedding of blood, the risking of the forgiver's life, without
which there is no forgiveness. Forgiveness of our enemies is the
only solution to global paranoia, the projection of doubt and sus-
picion and Ul motives upon one another, a mechanism that is at
once a sign of our own poor self-perception and our own too
excellent perception of others. This is what Jesus meant in his
saying about the mote and the beam. He pointed out the in-
congruity in attacking our neighbor's blindness, the sliver (mote)
in his eye all the while having a log (beam) in our own eye.
The mote is there, but we see it precisely because of the beam.

But before we can forgive others we must accept forgiveness.
And we must forgive ourselves. This means that we really see
and bewail the beam, that we really take steps to remove it, that
then and only then can we stop, feeling guilty and start being
helpful.

Albert Schweitzer has called us to relinquish our nuclear power
and to submit to tyranny rather than to use it as a threat, even a
defensive threat, the risk of which may be total and final destruc-
tion of the human race. His alternative is not an easy one. The
tyranny we would face might prove to be more terrible for our-

THE SELF IN COMMUNION 103

selves and our descendants than any tyranny that the world has
known. Yet Christianity was certainly healthier and more Chris-
tian as a persecuted minority religion. Judaism has certainly dis-
played its spiritual strengths more dramatically under dispersion
and persecution than in moments of conquest.

How can we ever find the healing for ourselves and our enemies
that comes only through self-surrender as long as we are deluded
into believing that we are already or are about to be conquerors?
This self delusion undermines us both as warriors and as healers,
as conquerors and as conquered, and is rapidly becoming the
prelude to annihilation.

Some form of redemption is necessary as the only alternative
to suicide. What steps are we taking, then, to prepare for the
inevitable partial surrender to our enemies so that they may
partially surrender to us? How can we accept the evil in ourselves
as a prelude to accepting it in others?

It is our refusal to face our guilt, our contentment with the
confession of lesser crimes, that has blocked our way to reconcilia-
tion. We have created our Armageddon, we have poured out our
own vials of wrath. We have placed ourselves in a position where
only God can save us; at the same time we have carefully
disposed of the God who could. We are like children testing the
limits of their parents' patience and endurance, seeing whether
the parent will intervene, perhaps as a sign that the parent is
really there, that the child really matters, and that the parent is
powerful enough to extricate the child from his own dilemmas.

This is risky flirtation with destiny, with death, and with the
Almighty.

Yet a Church that is afraid to speak peace to power, a State
that cannot listen to psychiatry or religion, a psychiatry and a
religion both of which can diagnose and neither of which is ready
to risk entering the pesthouse, cannot rescue a perishing world.
Our pride in not having failed because of not having tried is one
deterrent to the needed action. Our fear of failure is another.
Our belief, born of this fear, that the destiny of man is safer in
the hands of statecraft, even paranoid statecraft, of military power,
even frightened military power, is a third.

But if we know anything about human beings and their inter-

104 THE SELF IN PILGRIMAGE

actions and this has been the business of religion and medicine
for millenniums and of psychiatry for centuries we know that
fear and hate destroy and that love and forgiveness heal. If we
believe in them at all we must entrust ourselves to them altogether
for they are unconditional in their demands. Even as hate and
guilt and fear destroy the mind and the brain's effectiveness, so
love and faith and hope enhance them. Even as isolation and ten-
sion destroy relationship, so interaction and earnest engagement
build it up. These are simple truths built into the stuff of our lives
and veiled to us only by the blindness to which we willfully cling.
God did build love into the warp and woof of the universe it
did not creep in unawares. But the discovery of the given, the
datum, the real truth that we all have received more love than
we knew this is the burden of forgiveness which means accept-
ing, which means taking.

Reunion of enemies can only come about through mutual for-
giveness, and its cost is staggering. We have all been terribly
wounded by others' attempts to restore relationship. But the mean-
ing of pilgrimage is a life that feels the offenses, in their fullest
degree, yet continues with others in communion.

This questing communion may receive its symbols from history
and the Scriptures, or may live without symbols, fearing to make
of them idols. The miracle is that to some extent each type of
communicant will see that the way of the other is the necessary
corrective to its own, just as every moment in which we imagine
we see God in another person, event, or part of ourselves, we
must be corrected by the reminder, "Neither is this Thou"; when
we imagine that something unfamiliar, unknown, or unwelcome
is not God or of God, we must be corrected by the reminder,
"This also is Thou." Whether our way is an affirmation of images,
with symbols right and left that cast a glorious spectrum over a
drab and desolate world, or whether we reject every idol, at-
tractive as it may be, demanding that our God be ineffably pure
and transcendent, we will be both right and wrong. But we will
be in communion, and to be in communion is to be in pilgrimage.

INDEX

Abraham, 19

Acceptance, meaning of, 61; see
also Empathy; Forgiveness; Grace;
Hostility; Love; Peace; Resonate;
Sex; Spontaneity; Stimulus

Adolescence, 50-53; as a "witchcraft
period," 51; see also Psychological
Development; Self

Alcoholism, 84-85; see also Psychia-
try; Neurosis

America, 3; "Ideal" of, 8; social
creed of, 5

Anglicus, Bartholomeus, 29

Anxiety, 8; see also Evil; Fear;
Good and Evil; Hell; Pain; Sin

Apocryphal writings; see Scripture

Augustine, 4, 97

Autism, 52-53, 60 f.; meaning of,
36; see also Psychological Devel-
opment; Self

Baal Shem Tov, 76-78

Baptism, 67-68, 79

Belloc, Hilaire, 71

Benedek, Theresa, 47

Berdyaev, Nicolas, 97

Bettelheim, Bruno, 63

Between Man and Man, 64 n.

Bible: see Scripture

Birth, double aspect of, 37; see also
Psychological Development; Self

Body, ix; Greek view of, 16; and
spirit, 17f.; see also Psychoso-
matic; Self

Booth, Gotthard, 32
Bromberg, Walter, 28 n.
Buber, Martin, 64, 71

Canon Episcopi, 29

Casserley, J. V. Langmead, 13, 21 n.

Childhood, 42 ff.; see also Psycho-
logical Development; Self

Christ, 20 f., 30, 95-96; as second
Adam, 23; and community, fel-
lowship with, 69; and idea of per-
sonality, 23; perfection of, 23-24;
mind of, 74; sexuality of, 23;
work of, 96; as forgiver, 102; see
also Jesus

Christian Faith and Natural Science,
98 n.

Christian in Philosophy, The, 13 n.,
21 n.

Christianity, 8, 103; Christian, 95,
99; Christians, 20, 74; see also
Communion of saints; Church;
Koinonia; Protestant; Roman
Catholic

Christology, 221; see also Christ;
Jesus

Chronicle, Salimbene's, 54

Church, 28, 31, 78-80, 95-97, 103-
104; early church, 23, 24, 68-70;
see also Christianity; Communion
of saints; Koinonia; Protestant;
Roman Catholic

Church and Mental Health, The,
32 n.

105

106

INDEX

Communication, 54-66; as reflection,
56-57; effectiveness of, 59; inter-
nal, 62-63; indirect, 58; require-
ments of, 57; token, 63-65; see
also Self

Communion of saints, 95; see also
Christianity; Church, Koinonia;
Protestant; Roman Catholic

Community, x, 9, 54, 67-80; and
dramatic acts, 71; and early
church, 78-80; and confession,
79-80; and forgiveness, 76-78;
and Hasidism, 75-78; and con-
firmation, 80; and healing, 69;
and flexibility, 70; and identity,
68; and Senoi, 72-74; as indoctri-
nation, 68; as redemptive, 97;
dimensions of, 72; rites du pas-
sage, 68; see also Self; Society

Confession, 79-80; as confirmation,
87,90

Confessions, 4 n.

Conformity, 4; see also Self; Culture

Creaturehood, and conflict, 32; see
also Self; God

Culture, in irons, 3 f.; see also
America; Dionysian cult; Greeks;
Indian; Middle Ages; Roman;
Senoi

Demonology, 20 n., 27 f., 102; as

inside man, 90
Demons; see Demonology
Depth Psychology; see Psychiatry
Devil, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31, 51, 82,

101-102

Devils of Loudun, The, 28 n., 99 n.
Diocese of Prum, 29
Dionysian cult, 16
Disbelief, quality of, 29-30, 32
Dostoyevsky, 2-3

Ego, ix; see also Psychological de-
velopment; Self

Empathy, 38f. 59; as "reading
power," 40 f.; see also Accept-
ance; Forgiveness; Grace; Hostil-
ity; Love; Peace; Resonate; Sex;
Spontaneity; Stimulus

Erikson, Erik, 39

Escalona, Sihylle, 40

Eucharist, 71, 79, 95-96; and Pass-
over, 95

Evil, 89 f,, 100, 103; and the Church,
24; as inside man, 90; kingdom
of, 25; recognition of, 89; recep-
tivity to, 89; see also Anxiety;
Fear; Good and Evil; Hell; Pain;
Sin

Existentialism and Religious Belief,
lOOn.

Faith, 8-9; and doubt, 29-30

Fantasy, 62-63

Fear, 5f., 69, 87-89, 100-101, 104;
of good, 5-7; of God, 30; of loss
of illusions, 8; of self, 30; of fail-
ure, 103; see also Anxiety; Evil;
Good and Evil; Hell; Pain; Sin

Forgiveness, x, 99, 104; and Christ,
102; see also Acceptance; Em-
pathy; Grace; Hostility; Love;
Peace; Resonate; Sex; Sponta-
neity; Stimulus

Frankl, Viktor, 63, 89-90

Frederick, Emperor II, 54

Freud, Sigmund, 45, 94

From Death Camp to Existential-
ism, 90

God, and devil, 101-102; and evil,
89; and community, 14; and loss
of self, 17; and human need, 14;
and parent, 14; and redemption,
103-104; as creator, 4, 18, 20,
21 n., 29, 57, 101; as the One,
16-17; as superself, 17; and poly-
theism, 16-17; His grace, 62;
His healing, 94; His love, 28; His
wholeness, 101; His will, 25; His
perfection, 30; image of, ix, 8-9,
131, 20 f., 24, 79, 86, 87, 97,
104; of Hebrews, 21; of Old
Testament, 21; of Bible, 21 n.;
man's denial of, 8; man's distance
from, 69-92; man's fear of, 30;
man's inability to love, 6; see also
Greek; Indian

Good and Evil. 1-3, 9, 25, 28, 33,
87, 97; nature of, 6; see aho

INDEX

107

Good and Evil (cont.}

Anxiety; Evil; Fear; Hell; Pain;

Sin
Grace, x, 70, 98 f., 100 f., 102; and

non-verbal communication, 62; as

surprise, 70; see also Acceptance;

Empathy; Forgiveness; Hostility;

Peace; Resonate; Sex; Spontaneity;

Stimulus; Love
Gratian, 29
Greeks, 12; philosophy of, 8, 11, 16,

19, 20 n.; religion of, 15-16
Guilt, 30-31, 69, 85 f., 103, 104; see

also Psychiatry

Hasidism, 75-78, 80, 96

Healing, 6-7, 68-69, 99, 103, 104;
as openness to surprise, 70

Hebb, Donald, 55

Hebraic-Christian tradition, ix, 8, 9;
see also Hasidism; Hebrews; Is-
rael; Messiah; Jews

Hebrews, 17 f., 20 n.; see also Hasi-
dism; Hebraic-Christian tradition;
Israel; Jews; Messiah

Heim, Karl, 98

Hell, 81-94, 95; definition of, 81-
82; pseudo-hells, 92-93; answer
to, 94-104; see also Anxiety; Evil;
Fear; Good and Evil; Pain; Sin

Henry, George W., 20 n.

History of Medical Psychology,
20 n., 28 n.

Homeric Gods, 13 n.

Hostility, 9, 69, 71 f., 104

Humaneness, 12-13

Huxley, Aldous, 28 n., 99

I and Thou, 64

Iliad, 13 n.

Incubi, 28

Indian, East, 12, 17; religion of, 17,

53
Infancy, 36 f.; tempo of, 38-39; see

also Psychological development;

Self

Infanticide, 11
Inquisition, 28, 31
Israel: Its Life and Culture, 19 n.
Israel, prophets of, 22; see also

Hebraic-Christian tradition; He-
brews; Jews; Messiah

Jesus, 20 n., 211, 71, 74, 102; and
God, 22 f.; parable of the talents,
7; parable of the vineyard, 43;
see also Christ; Christology

Jews, 75-78, 95, 101, 103; obediance
of, 8; saying of, 67; see also
Hasidism; Hebraic-Christian tra-
dition; Hebrews; Israel; Messiah

Koinonia, 69; see also Christianity;

Communion of saints; Church;

Protestant; Roman Catholic
Kraemer, 27

Levy, David, 46
Lilly, John, 55
Limitations, meaning of, 61
Lord's Supper; see Eucharist
Love, 7, 9, 30, 69, 71-72, 83, 97,
99, 104; see also Acceptance; Em-
pathy; Forgiveness; Grace; Hostil-
ity; Peace; Resonate; Sex; Sponta-
neity; Stimulus

Magic, 25

Malleus Maleficarum, 27, 28, 31

Man above Humanity, 28 n.

Mass; see Eucharist

Matter, Mind and Spirit, 1 1 n.

Maturity, concepts of, 4; see also
Psychological development; Self

Mead, George Herbert, 59

Messiah, 21, 75

Middle Ages, 25 f.

Mothering, 37 f.; see also Psycho-
logical development; Self

Muilenburg, James, 19 n.

Nature, powers of, 25

Neurosis, definition of, 82; see also

Psychiatry
New Testament; see Scripture

Odyssey, 13 n.

Oedipus Complex, 48; see also Psy-
chological development; Self
Oldham, J. H., 64

108

Old Testament; see Scripture
Order of the Holy Trinity, 29
Otto, Walter R, 13 n.
Outlet, Albert C, 20 n., 56 n.

Pain, 27, 30; receptivity to, 89-90;
see also Anxiety; Evil; Fear;
Good and Evil; Hell; Sin

Pare, Ambroise, 94

Paul, St., 20 n., 70, 82

Peace, 102-104; see also Acceptance;
Empathy; Forgiveness; Grace;
Hostility; Resonate; Sex; Sponta-
neity; Stimulus; Love

Pearson, Gerald, 42

Pedersen, Johannes, 19 n.

Philo of Alexandria, 20 n.

Philosophical Perspectives, 10 n.

Philosophy, 35; and God, 14; dual-
ism, 16; free will, 24; Platonic,
20 n.; Stoic, 20 n.

Pilgrimage, 10, 54, 100, 104; see
also Psychological development;
Self

Play, 51; and worship, 71; see also
Work

Protestant, 27, 28, 31; Protestant
principle, 97; see also Christi-
anity; Communion of Saints;
Church; Koinonia; Roman Cath-
olic

Protestant Era, The, 97 n.

Psychiatry (psychoanalysis, psycho-
dynamics, psychology, depth psy-
chology), ix, x, 14, 20 n., 29, 32,
45; limits of, 9; method of, 9; see
also Alcoholism; Guilt; Neurosis;
Psychosomatic; Schizophrenia

Psychoanalysis; see Psychiatry

Psychodynamics; see Psychiatry

Psychological development, 13, 15,
34 f.; see also Adolescence; Au-
tism; Birth; Childhood; Ego; In-
fancy; Maturity; Mothering, Oedi-
pus Complex; Puberty; Superego;
Symbiosis; Pilgrimage; Self

Psychology, see Psychiatry

Psychosomatic, 17, 20 n., 35; see
also Psychiatry; Body

INDEX

Puberty, 50; see also Psychological
Development; Self

Real Life Is Meeting, 64 n.

Regino, Bishop, 29

Resonate, definition of, 3; see also
Acceptance; Empathy; Forgive-
ness; Grace; Hostility; Peace; Sex;
Spontaneity; Stimulus; Love

Ribble, Margaret, 55

Roberts, David, 100 n.

Roman, 11,22

Roman Catholic, 27, 28, 31; see
also Christianity; Communion of
saints; Church; Koinonia; Protes-
tant

Rules on Witchcraft, 29

Sacraments; see Baptism; Confes-
sion; Eucharist; Worship

Salimbene, 54

Salvation, 7, 24, 94-104; as gift and
reward, 24

Samson, 82-83

Satan; see Devil

Scheler, Max, 9-10

Schizophrenia, 5; see also Psychiatry

Science, 11, 34 f.; scientism, 9

Scripture, 104; Apocryphal writings,
20; Bible, 21 n., 57; / Car. 51:30,
20; // Cor. 5:6, 20; DeuL 6:4, 17;
Gen. 2:7, 18; John, ch. I, 29;
Matt. 21:28b-31a, 43; New Testa-
ment, 69; Old Testament, 17, 19,
82-83; Ps. 31, 18; Ps. 38, 18; Ps.
139, 18-19; // Isa. t 17

Self, and history, 111, 33; as
bridge, 81, 83 f.; as split, 82, 101;
beginning of, 35; dependence-in-
dependence movement, 38f., 51;
fulfillment of, 64-66; in commun-
ion, 54, 94-104; in irons, 3 f.; in
relationship, 8, 55 f.; loss of, 17;
nature of, 351; role of action,
441; self-deception, 9, 24; self-
discovery, 4 f., 56; self-knowledge,
71, 10, 111; separation of, 38;
qualities of, 34-35; see also
Body; Communication; Commu-
nity; Conformity; Creaturehood;

INDEX

Self, and History (cent.)
Psychological development; Hell;
Love

Senoi, 72-74, 80

Sex, and adolescence, 50; and as-
pects of the self, 45 f.; and Jesus,
23; and identity, 47; and relation-
ship, 47-48; and pleasure, 46; and
witchcraft, 27-28; Greek attitude
toward, 16; in the child, x, 45 f.;
in the neurotic, 87; zones, 47-48;
see also Acceptance; Empathy;
Forgiveness; Grace; Hostility;
Love; Peace; Resonate; Sponta-
neity; Stimulus

Sin, 24, 70, 96; original sin, 24; see
also Anxiety; Evil; Fear; Good
and Evil; Hell; Pain

Sinnott, Edmund, 1 1

Slavery and Freedom, 97 n.

Society, conformist's, 4; imper-
sonal, 4

Spitz, Rene, 55

Spontaneity, meaning of, 61; see
also Acceptance; Empathy; For-
giveness; Grace; Hostility; Love;
Peace; Resonate; Sex; Stimulus

Sprenger, 27

Stewart, Kilton, 72, 73, 74

Stimulus, 38f., 45, 54 f.; depriva-
tion of, 54 f.; see also Acceptance;
Empathy; Forgiveness; Grace;

109

Hostility; Love; Peace; Resonate;
Sex; Spontaneity

Succubi, 28

Suicide, 8

Superego, definition of, 49-50; see
also Psychological development;
Self

Symbiosis, 53, 61, 91; meaning of,
36; see also Psychological devel-
opment; Self

Thurneysen, Eduard, 3
Tillich, Paul, 97 n.
Truth, appropriation of, 24
Tully, Mary, 57-58

Von Spee, Friedrich, 29

Weyer, Johannes, 29

Williams, Charles, 26, 27, 28, 29-

30, 93, 96
Witchcraft, 24 f.; see also Demon-

ology; Devil

Witchcraft, 26 n., 27 n., 28 n.
Witches; see Witchcraft
Witches Hammer; see Malleus

Maleficarum

Witch-hunting; see Witchcraft
Work, 51; see also Play
Worship, 71

Zilboorg, Gregory, 20 n., 28 n.

A. LOOMIS, JR.

Dr. Loomls is a -Professor of Psychiatry
and Religion at Union Theological Seminary
in New York and Director of the Program
in the Interrelations of Psychiatry and Re-
ligion. In addition to his medical training,
he bss studied at Princeton Theological
Seminary. He is also Chief of the Child
Psychiatry Division at St. Luke's Hospital in
New York City.

Kla. 9868A

130399