THE THIRD REVOLUTION A STUDY OF PSYCHIATRY AND RELIGION

103180

The Third Revolution

A STUDY OF PSYCHIATRY AND RELIGION

by Karl Stern

HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1954, BY KARL STERN

AH rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book
or portions thereof in any form.

first edition

Thanks are due to The Newman Press for permission to quote from
An Anthokgy of Mysticism, edited by Paul de Jaegher, S.J.; to
Technology Press and John Wiley & Sons for permission to quote
from Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 54-11326
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MY WIFE

Some of the ideas presented here are enlargements on ob-
servations which the author has published in essays here
and there. Occasionally sentences and paragraphs are re-
peated from these earlier essays, without special acknowl-
edgment. In this study, various trends in the history of
psychiatry are outlined in their fundamental features but
not more than is necessary for the presentation of the argu-
ment. Anyone who wants to obtain a fuller view of the
subject has to consult technical books. Many cases had to
be described in episodic form; interpretations given here
are frequently based on a greater amount of material than
is actually presented. Wherever case histories are men-
tioned they are taken from actual experience but, in accord
with common usage in medical books, external details are
Changed in such a way that the identity of the patient is
completely unrecognizable.

As happens so often with studies of this kind, many ideas
have developed out of collaboration and discussion with
friends, especially Dr. Victorin Voyer. Particular acknowl-
edgments go to Rev. Father Frangois M. Drouin, O.P.,
Fr. Richard Mignault, O.P., and Fr. Henri Gratton, O.M.I.,
for the critical appraisal of this study. I also wish to thank
Miss Cecilia McGuire for her patient help in the prepara-
tion of the manuscript.

K.S.

CONTENTS

I THE CONTROVERSY 3

An old vocabulary and a new controversy The Comtean
revolution-The scope of science "Optimism of the tech-
nique" Danger of a purely negative attitude.

II THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 15

Degrees of psychological disturbance The function of
empathy A case of "abnormal grief" Trained and "naive"
understanding The story of the old immigrant Objective
reality and the world of the unconscious Extending the
frontiers of empathy.

III THE MECHANICS OF MAN 40
Classical methods of description and classification (no-
sology) : their historical significance and limitations Phe-
nomenology "Diseases of the mind are diseases of the
brain" Centers and connections The crowbar accident-
Pavlov Behaviorism Electrophysiology Cybernetics
Socrates and Professor Bykov.

IV THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 68

Method and philosophy The magic of numbers Science
and values The "behavior quanta" The "communication
model" Group dynamics A blueprint for "piecemeal so-
cial engineering" How methods in themselves innocent
can become morally corrosive.

X CONTENTS

V THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 90

Freud's early studies on hysteria The unconsciousThe
universe of our mind mysterious but not unfathomable
The theory of libido An embryology of the psyche Re-
lation of primary thought processes to later forms of
thinking-The Ego and "fields" of the unconscious-
Transference Sublimation.

VI THE THIRD REVOLUTION 115

The basic concepts of psychoanalysis are philosophically
neutral Freud's views on religion The theory of "noth-
ing but"-A hypothesis concerning the origin of the
Judaeo-Christian religion Overextension of the psycho-
logical method ("psychologism," Husserl) The inverted
Renaissance Things of the natural order (economic, bio-
logical, psychological) elevated to a state of primacy
The third revolution Phases of a spiritual landslide.

VII SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 149

After the "contra" the "pro" The nature of empathic
knowledge Its relationship to other "non-scientific" forms
of insight (knowledge by connaturality of Saint Thomas,
poetic knowledge, Einfuhlung, Bergsonian intuition, "ex-
plaining" versus "understanding") Psychoanalytic insight
is primarily empathic insight The terminology derived
from the natural sciences Psycho-physical unity Symbol
and Reality Unfolding form and design: the entelechy of
Aristotle a transcendental principle In and out of Plato's
"cave" Empathic insight and charity.

VIE GUILT AND ANXIETY 178

Sickness and culpability The subjective experience of
guilt A biological theory of anxiety The tiger inside the
lady A phobia of sharing meals A phobia of heights

CONTENTS XI

"You'll pay for it" Remorse, the "bite" of conscience
Compulsive-obsessive states-ScruplesNeurotic guilt and
objective guilt-Negative morality Guilt in a Christocen-
tric world.

IX DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 209

The diversity of character-Static approach: types and
categories Dynamic approach: conscious and unconscious
mechanisms True heredity and pseudo-heredity Nega-
tive Identification-The case of a psychopathic swindler-
Persona (the social role) and true personality Things of
the psychological and of the ontological order, a parallel
-The symbol of "putting on clothes'VThe supreme ob-
ject of identification.

X PSYCHIATRY AND THE LIFE

OF THE SPIRIT: I 240

Madness in the creative process and in the spiritual en-
counterKierkegaard and Abraham-Psychology and the
mystery of the person-Neurosis and sanctity-The strong
are confounded Jung's theory of the collective uncon-
sciousAn atheist's dream of refusal-Archetype and nest
figure-Jung and Christianity.

XI PSYCHIATRY AND THE LIFE

OF THE SPIRIT: II 268

The moral attitude of the physician-False "spirituality"
in the approach to neurotic suffering "Morbid" and
"healthy" in the patient's spiritual life-The communion of
distrust-Loss of faith as a sign of psychic disorder-The
infantile and the child-like.

X CONTENTS

V THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 90

Freud's early studies on hysteria The unconscious The
universe of our mind mysterious but not unfathomable
The theory of libido An embryology of the psyche Re-
lation of primary thought processes to later forms of
thinking The Ego and "fields" of the unconscious-
Transference Sublimation.

VI THE THIRD REVOLUTION 115

The basic concepts of psychoanalysis are philosophically
neutral Freud's views on religion The theory of "noth-
ing but" A hypothesis concerning the origin of the
Judaeo-Christian religion Overextension of the psycho-
logical method ("psychologism," Husserl) The inverted
Renaissance Things of the natural order (economic, bio-
logical, psychological) elevated to a state of primacy
The third revolution Phases of a spiritual landslide,

VII SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 149

After the "contra" the "pro"-The nature of empathic
knowledge-Its relationship to other "non-scientific" forms
of insight (knowledge by connaturality of Saint Thomas,
poetic knowledge, Einfuhlung, Bergsonian intuition, "ex-
plaining" versus "understanding") -Psychoanalytic insight
is primarily empathic insight The terminology derived
from the natural sciences-Psycho-physical unity-Symbol
and Reality-Unfolding form and design: the entelechy of
Aristotle a transcendental principle In and out of Plato's
"cave"-Empathic insight and charity.

VIE GUILT AND ANXIETY 178

Sickness and culpability-The subjective experience of
guilt-A biological theory of anxiety-The tiger inside the
lady-A phobia of sharing meals A phobia of heights

CONTENTS XI

"You'll pay for it'VRemorse, the "bite" of conscience
Compulsive-obsessive states Scruples-Neurotic guilt and
objective guilt-Negative morality-Guilt in a Christocen-
tric world.

IX DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 209

The diversity of character Static approach: types and
categories-Dynamic approach: conscious and unconscious
mechanisms-True heredity and pseudo-heredity Nega-
tive Identification-The case of a psychopathic swindler
Persona (the social role) and true personality-Things of
the psychological and of the ontological order, a parallel
-The symbol of "putting on clothesVThe supreme ob-
ject of identification.

X PSYCHIATRY AND THE LIFE

OF THE SPIRIT: I 240

Madness in the creative process and in the spiritual en-
counter-Kierkegaard and Abraham-Psychology and the
mystery of the person-Neurosis and sanctity-The strong
are confounded Jung's theory of the collective uncon-
scious-An atheist's dream of refusal-Archetype and nest
figure Jung and Christianity.

XI PSYCHIATRY AND THE LIFE

OF THE SPIRIT: II 268

The moral attitude of the physician-False "spirituality"
in the approach to neurotic suffering-"Morbid" and
"healthy" in the patient's spiritual lif e-The communion of
distrust-Loss of faith as a sign of psychic disorder-The
infantile and the child-like.

Xll CONTENTS

XII BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY 290

A historical argument Spiritual "illusions" destroyed:
the famous three "insults" A descending scale and new
synthesis"!" and "it" (the objective method) as com-
pared to "I" and "Thou" (the empathic method) in their
relation to a personalist concept of man and society A
movement toward personalism Beyond psychology.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

I

The Controversy

What thought can think, another thought can mend.
Robert Southwell, Look Home

When I was a medical student, we used to have one or
two lectures on psychiatry each week. Psychiatry was a
purely medical subject, and I remember that in our
weekly schedule, it was sandwiched in between "Ear,
Nose, and Throat" (from nine to ten) and "Surgery"
(from eleven to twelve). Strictly speaking, the subject
was called "Psychiatry and Neurology/* and our lec-
tures were mostly given by a white-haired Geheimrat
who had earned his academic chair by a famous paper
on "Hemichorea associated with a lesion of the superior
cerebellar peduncle' 7 (which can be translated as Saint
Vitus's Dance on one side of the body caused by dam-
age to a certain part of the brain). Just as "Ear, Nose,
and Throat" were all three the domain of one professor,
so were neurology and psychiatry.

These lectures were given in a huge, dome-shaped
amphitheater, and included, like all other clinical lec-
tures, a demonstration of patients. The Geheimrat

3

4 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

talked for half an hour about a disease in a purely theo-
retical fashion (symptoms, course, diagnosis, prognosis,
treatment). Then the door on his right would open and
a patient would be brought in, accompanied by a nurse
and an assistant. The lectures were invariably boring
until the appearance of the patient. There was always a
moment of suspense before that door opened because,
unless the lecture was about neurology, the patient
would be an insane person, and everybody knows the
weird experience of being confronted with a lunatic.

We would already have heard the details of the life
history of some Berlin Hausfrau, say an official's or a
merchant's wife. Then the door would open and we
would be confronted with a woman in blue hospital
garb. (Why the "Neurology and Psychiatry" costumes
were blue in many hospitals I have never known.) Her
hair was usually done up in hanging braids, and she
would either be crouched and motionless, or would
enter stamping, hitting, and screaming invective, or she
would instantly make for one of the students and try to
sit in his lap.

This was drama, and the weird effect was emphasized
by the fact that the Geheimrat was calm and detached,
talked to the patient in a friendly, human way, and by
the closely knit and carefully prepared scientific refer-
ences he presented. Since the references (symptoms,
course, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment) were
framed in exactly the same way as those used in "Ear,

THE CONTROVERSY 5

Nose, and Throat" and "Surgery," we did not feel that
there was anything about psychiatry which would make
it essentially different from any other medical subject.
If anyone had cornered us in those days and asked us
the question: "What about religion and psychiatry?"
I am sure we would not have known what he was talk-
ing about. It would have sounded just as rational as a
question about religion and pediatrics that is to say,
not rational at all.

Those people in blue led in through the door on the
right who were not insane were neurological patients
(persons suffering from tumors of the brain, or soften-
ing of the spinal cord, or degeneration of nerve path-
ways, or other maladies of the nervous system). In all
such cases one can apply methods of thought and inves-
tigation resembling those which one applies when deal-
ing with a broken leg or typhoid fever. In cases of in-
sanity one can do so legitimately only up to a certain
point. In the universities in which I studied, we were
taught very little about a chapter of psychiatry which
is commonly presented under the heading of "Neu-
roses."

Now there are living in our midst thousands and
thousands of people (there is a strong possibility that
they form the majority of mankind in our present civili-
zation) who suffer, or produce suffering among those
around them, in a most puzzling manner. They live in
mortal anxiety, or they are unable to hope, or they are

6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

entangled in mysterious hatred, they are out to destroy
that which would give them happiness, they are inca-
pable of trusting, or they are being oppressed by some-
thing which is best called insatiable remorse. They
form a huge army of suffering, dissatisfaction, frustra-
tion, and assault. They are not in blue uniforms like
those patients who came through the door on the right;
they are not distinguished in that way from the mass
of people around us.

While I use the metaphor of a huge army, I realize
that it is not quite justified. Instead of the solidarity of
an army, there is an element of self -isolation in each of
these cases, and the entire phenomenon is so amorphous
that at first glance it seems to resist any systematic
attempt at clarification. This may be one of the reasons
why our Geheimrat spoke so little of such things;
"symptoms, diagnosis, course, prognosis, and treatment"
were no longer applicable. If an observer could, at one
glance, behold all the neurotic suffering and entangle-
ment in the world today, and could look into the hearts
of these unhappy people, he would get the impression
of something quite infernal.

Infernal is a good word for it. Many of our neurotic
patients express the thought literally: "This is hell on
earth/ 7 Those around them often say: "Life with that
person is like hell on earth." The mystics state that hell
is a perpetual state of inability to love. Berdyaev once
made a remarkable comparison between Dante and

THE CONTROVERSY 7

Dostoievsky. He said that Dante represented the world
image of Medieval Man for whom heaven, hell, and
purgatory were something like neat topographic enti-
ties. Dostoievsky, says Berdyaev, speaks for modern
man in a manner analogous to that of Dante; but the
drama of Dostoievsky's man is such that each individual
life is a Dantesque microcosmos, mysteriously pene-
trated by all three worlds. The three worlds are no
longer merely three neat circles, mapped out in geo-
metrical fashion, but all of us the Raskolnikovs and
Stavrogins, the Alyoshas and Myshkins carry in our
souls very real elements of a Dantesque cosmos, with
eternal potentialities.

The world of neurosis is one which cannot be easily
sandwiched in between "Ear, Nose, and Throat" on one
hand and "Surgery'' on the other. Concepts arise which
seem strangely unrelated to the curriculum of the medi-
cal student, concepts such as Love and Hatred, Fear
and Hope, Guilt and Freedom. These are concepts
which have figured for many centuries in the vocabu-
lary of philosophers and theologians. Now, as if from
nowhere, they suddenly turn up in the dictionary of
clinicians.

Thus we are, in the present study, entering a bor-
derland in which there seems to exist a state of con-
fusion. Those who have already been there for ages,
the philosophers and theologians, do not want to give
up their domain to recent intruders. The intruders, on

8 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

the other hand, feel that the ancient occupants had no
claim to it in the first place. Some representatives of
both sides feel that a modus vivendi can be found by
which the area could be settled jointly.

Today, the controversy concerning "psychiatry and
religion" is as widespread as was the one concern-
ing biology and religion in our grandfather's time,
and probably even more heated. It is presently being
discussed in technical books and journals, in popular
lectures and magazines. It forms the subject of novels
and plays. Hardly a day passes that I am not ap-
proached on the subject, by physicians, medical stu-
dents, nurses, ministers, and priests. Many of these
people speak of it as if it represented a troubling per-
sonal problem. I am also asked to deal with the ques-
tion in lectures and before discussion groups of various
kinds, Catholic and Protestant alike. There is no doubt
that all this began with the advent of psychoanalysis,
and that without psychoanalysis it would never have
come about. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis is by no
means the only starting point.

For instance, some years ago a professor of philoso-
phy, an expert on Plato and Kierkegaard, told me about
an incident that occurred during one of his lectures on
ethics. His students had produced an illustrated maga-
zine, containing an article reporting that a person's
moral principles depend on the function of the frontal
lobes of the brain. When parts of the frontal lobes are

THE CONTROVERSY 9

removed, all moral restraints are apt to go. The students
felt that morality must therefore be a matter of biologi-
cal evolution, animal training and so on. In other words,
morality depends on the function of colloidal substance
in the same way that sugar metabolism depends on the
pancreas. It is obvious that this argument is completely
opposed to the Christian idea of morality. However, it
has nothing to do with psychoanalysis and it refers to
the branch of science known as the physiology of the
brain.

Similarly, students often approach me regarding what
they consider the doubtful metaphysical nature and
absoluteness of morality. But they use a different argu-
ment. They point out that social mores are determined
by cultural and biological conditions: though to us kill-
ing is sinful, the Eskimos let their old people die from
exposure (I have never been able to determine whether
this is true) and regard it as right. Since concepts of
right and wrong are thus determined by custom, they
say, it is sheer superstition to believe that they are of
supernatural origin. Again this argument has nothing
to do with psychoanalysis. It forms part of a widely
accepted philosophy, prevalent among many cultural
anthropologists and social psychologists, called cultural
relativism. However, both arguments have in common
the premise that morality cannot possibly be anchored
in a metaphysical space; it is a product of, and condi-

1O THE THIRD REVOLUTION

tioned by, elements of the material order, such as brain
cells or geographical conditions.

Nevertheless, psychoanalysis itself still represents the
biggest challenge to religious values. Just as the nine-
teenth-century controversy between biology and re-
ligion would never have started without Darwin, the
present-day controversy between psychiatry and reli-
gion would never have started without Freud. Today
Darwin's theory of evolution does not seem to have as
much bearing on Christianity as people thought fifty
years ago. With psychoanalysis, however, it is quite dif-
ferent. To the uninitiated, Freud's papers on psychology
read for the most part like straight pornography, his
pamphlets on religion represent sheer atheism. All this,
the believing man thinks, cannot help having a negative
effect on Christianity. On the other hand, it is confusing
to learn that some serious religious thinkers, Catholic as
well as Protestant, uphold psychoanalysis as a theory
and as a tool of treatment, and that in the Soviet Union
where atheistic materialism is the state doctrine, psy-
choanalysis is banned. This is typical of our time. All
things seem to be complex and elusive.

However, this puts an even greater obligation on us.
We cannot afford to stand by and wait for things to
sort themselves out. The better one becomes acquainted
with the psychoanalytic movement, the more one real-
izes that it represents the opening of a new era no less
significant than the Galilean era in physics. Our image

THE CONTROVERSY 11

of the * 'interior world" will never be the same as it was
before the year 1894. The scope of this change will be
perceptible only much later, in its historical perspective.

Moreover, we are-particularly in America-in the
midst of a tremendous development in all the psycho-
logical and social sciences, one of such dimensions and
potentialities that it would be no exaggeration to call it
a "revolution." Let us, for the want of a better term, call
it the Comtean revolution. Auguste Comte, the nine-
teenth-century philosopher, dreamed of a world in
which revelation and faith would be entirely supplanted
by science. Science in this case means first the science
of man, that is, psychology and sociology.

Is it possible that we in this country are entering the
age of Comte without realizing it? In the pages that
follow a lot will be said to justify such an apprehension.
Although the outward appearances are much less dra-
matic, the dehumanizing and destructive forces inher-
ent in this development are no less formidable than they
were in the case of the other two revolutions which
arose out of the nineteenth century, the Marxist and the
racist ones. This is an extreme comparison, but, as far
as moral nihilism is concerned, the "third" revolution
has full potentialities of matching the other two.

Nevertheless, buried in it are also the most precious,
creative currents. There are many reasons why we as
Christians cannot afford to ignore this revolution. The
situation is in a way similar to the one which presented

12 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

itself in the thirteenth century: there exist outside the
Christian sphere vast continents of thought which wait
to be integrated. Since the beginning of modern times,
the area of the gospel has been a frontier area. The
Christian life is a life of challenge and response, even
in the world of ideas.

In the face of these developments, a defensive atti-
tude on the part of Christians becomes destructive. The
temptation to ward off or shut out the seemingly alien
is a sign of sterility. He who has the truth and does
nothing but hoard it, finds himself in the role of the
debtor who buried his talent. If our lives are guided by
fear of error, rather than the love of truth, we are no
better than those people whose lives are dominated by
a fear of sin rather than the love of good.

This is a time when, in the world of ideas, we need
the spirit of courage and discernment which character-
ized people like Saint Thomas Aquinas. Saint Thomas,
who was concerned with one aspect of the unity of
truth, namely the integration of philosophical thought,
had no need to bother with the integration of scientific
discovery or with the relation between science and
value. The sociologist, Georg Simmel, has remarked that
all science has its natural limits; whenever any particu-
lar branch of science attempts to give answers of univer-
sal validity, answers on ultimate questions concerning
Man and the Universe, it oversteps its borders and goes

THE CONTROVERSY 13

wrong. This thought was already implicit in Greek
philosophy. What makes it so important for us today
is the fact that secularism has created a philosophical
vacuum in which science automatically expands. It is
one of the aims of this book to rediscover the true bor-
ders of various sciences. Blurred demarcation lines
have to be retraced. Therefore in the following chapters
scientific discoveries will have to be discussed side by
side with the philosophy of the discoverers. The former
are admirable, and the latter are frequently question-
able and flimsy. If this side-by-side consideration at
times gives the impression that the present study is
founded on an anti-scientific bias, it is erroneous.

There is a second reason for the necessity of a study
such as this. The world is full of mental anguish. Our
mental hospitals cannot cope with the number of pa-
tients who seek admittance. Alcohol and drug addic-
tion are on the increase; so is the number of broken
marriages. All these are signs that men are torn by
irrational fear and hatred. Now just as psychologists
and sociologists exhibit a bold belief in a scientific cure-
all for these conditions a naive "optimism of the tech-
nique" the religious person is inclined to the opposite
error, a naive simplification by which faith loses its
heroic quality and becomes a patent formula.

Modern man is stranded, but the preachers of the
gospel are in danger of developing an "I-told-you-so-
if-you-only-had-followed-me" attitude. In practice this

14 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

frequently leads to the situation that believers, the
priests and levites of the parable, pass by while Mod-
ern Man, beaten and helpless in the ditch, has his
wounds attended to by some other fellow. A purely
negative attitude has had, as many Christian writers
have pointed out, a devastating effect in the early
phases of the social revolution in the last century;
Pope Pius XI made the famous remark that the tragedy
of the nineteenth century was that the Church lost the
working classes. Let us hope that in the future it will
not be noted as a tragedy of the twentieth century that
we have been standing by while a most important phase
was being fought in the struggle for the human soul.

II

The Case of the
Old Immigrant

Portions and parcels o the dreadful past.
Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters

In those amphitheater lectures in my medical-student
days, the boundaries of the world of insanity seemed
clearly determined. The people who came through the
ominous door were as different from us, the students in
the audience, as an abscessed thigh is different from a
healthy thigh. The borders of the world of neurosis,
however, are blurred and not quite perceptible. The
existentialist philosophers tell us and they tell us noth-
ing newthat despair and anxiety, hatred and distrust
lurk in a potential pit which surrounds us all, no matter
how healthy we think we are.

There are people today who think, for reasons which
we shall understand better at a later point, that the
distinction between "psychosis'* and "neurosis" does not
hold any more. However, every lay person knows that
most people who are confined to our state hospitals are
sicker than those around us who are subject to what is

15

l6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

commonly called morbid anxiety. This implies some-
thing of which we are certain namely, that there are
degrees of severity in psychological disturbances.

We may ask ourselves: what really constitutes a
degree of severity in psychological disorders? The ques-
tion is best answered by examples, and in citing them
let us assume an important fictitious premise that you
have known the following three persons very well for a
long time, as well as one knows one's best friends.

You meet the first friend and he has an expression
of sadness: he looks as if he had just been crying. You
find out that for three days he has hardly eaten or slept,
and he seems to have lost all interest in his usual activi-
ties, either work or recreation. On inquiring you find
out that three days ago, through an unfortunate acci-
dent, he lost a close and beloved relative. In other
words, he is in a state of grief and mourning. This is a
depressive state, to be sure, but by our common stand-
ards it is "quite normal." It would not be quite normal
if your friend ignored his bereavement and had no re-
action whatsoever. In that case, you would rightly think
that there must be something "wrong with him." From
the point of view of the preservation of life and of
social conduct, it is "abnormal" to eat too little, to sleep
too little, and to show no interest in work or recreation.
Similarly, if your friend's state lasted too long, it would
constitute a true illness. Without going into the philos-
ophy of illness, we can say that symptoms of grief and

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 1J

mourning represent a strange duality familiar to the
physiology and pathology of the body: something
which is against the intrinsic laws of life (not eating,
not sleeping, complete lack of interest) is, in i a given
situation and to a certain degree, normal and seems
even to fulfill a healthy purpose. In fact, were symptoms
of grief completely absent, serious disturbances might
be expected at a later stage in life.

Consider, however, the following case. You meet a
second friend whom you have known all your life. You
are driving a car and you offer him a lift. He declines
and you urge him. Finally he confides to you, quite
bashfully and with all the obvious signs of embarrass-
ment, that he now^has great difficulty getting into any
closed vehicle. He says he would rather walk than be-
come panicky inside a bus or automobile. He also suffers
from tenseness and choking sensations on meeting
people. He used to have these latter feelings on occa-
sion before, almost ever since he remembers, but they
have recently become worse. He knows that all this is
"crazy," because he used to enjoy riding. He himself
thinks that the whole thing goes back to his battle ex-
periences in northern France. Ever since he had the
horrifying experience of having been cut off from his
unit for twenty-four hours, he has not been the same.

The third friend is one whom you have not seen for
some time. Suddenly you receive a letter in which he
says: "For personal and humanitarian reasons, I have

l8 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

passed exams which are based on liberty. God helps
those on whom decension has not come through trans-
mogrification?" When you meet him you notice that his
face seems to have changed. He looks harassed. He tells
you that this very morning he detected an almost imper-
ceptible cloud of dust which flew into his room through
the fireplace. This was a sign of warning. The entire
thing is "mixed up with the white slave traffic." He hears
voices which tell him those things. An experience like
the third encounter is extremely startling. One of the
things which make it so startling is the fact that you feel
as if your friend were "no longer the same person."

Now this leads us to an important observation. If we
ask ourselves what actually makes the third case appear
"more severe" than the second one, the immediate,
spontaneous answer is not based on practical consid-
erations; it is not that the third person seems in danger
of harming himself or other people; or that he seems
to be less well equipped, through the function of ra-
tional judgment, to handle the practical exigencies of
everyday routine. This impression of "severity" is a sim-
ple primary experience, an experience which you do not
need to analyze in its components. There is in the third
case an element of tragic otherness, of mysterious es-
trangement. Everyday language always indicates best
such primary qualities of experience: in French the
word for insane is aliene. One feels that the man in the
second case (who, in traditional terminology, is called

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT ig

"neurotic") is somehow less strange. There are, in the
psychic life, degrees of immediate familiarity. If a hier-
archy of deviation from the norm seems to exist, it is
actually in terms of that "familiarity of experience."

If one studies the involved controversy which at one
time in psychiatric literature arose around the distinc-
tion between "neurosis" and "psychosis," and analyzes
scientific justifications for such a distinction, one can
discern the following trends. In a psychotic person a
"larger part" of the "total personality" is affected than
in a neurotic person. In a psychotic person, the core of
the personality is changed; neurosis affects a more pe-
ripheral part. In psychoses the contact with reality is
more disturbed than in neuroses. As far as the observer
(you in meeting your three friends) is concerned, the
so-called function of empathy is maintained to a higher
degree in the case of a neurotic than in the case of a
psychotic patient.

What is meant by this last statement? By empathy
is meant the function by which one re-feels another
person's feelings, or re-experiences his experiences; it
is the well-known function of "putting oneself into an-
other person's place." What enables us to "understand"
the first case the mourner so much more immediately
than the last example the psychotic? It is an element
of immediate understandability, and that element has
two components.

One is empirical: we know from experience that peo-

2O THE THIRD REVOLUTION

pie have certain facial expressions after certain things
have happened to them. This has nothing to do with
empathy. It is the same as the knowledge which we
gather from inanimate nature; it is acquired in the same
way as the knowledge that water begins to bubble after
having been heated to a certain point. The second com-
ponent is this: when you listen to the story of your
friend's bereavement, you understand his reaction as
if you were he. Even at this point attention should be
drawn to a remarkable inner relationship. The three
ways in which the severity of psychic disorder were
characterized the degree to which the total personality
is affected, the degree to which the person has lost con-
tact with reality, and the degree to which we perceive
his plight with immediate empathic understanding are
actually related to one another. The fact that our third
friend is no longer the person we have known; the fact
that he does not share reality with us in the way in
which one breathes the same atmosphere what else
does this convey except that we are no longer able to
be with him in the same immediate manner in which
we are with the mourner?

Those with clinical experience might doubt this state-
ment. They might maintain that they are able to re-
experience the experience of the third man, the psy-
chotic patient, with the same ease as those of the pre-
ceding two. However, our clinician is probably confus-
ing two mechanisms which are related to one another

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 21

but which are not quite the same the mechanism of
interpretation and the mechanism of empathy. What
we are discussing here is simple and naive co-experi-
ence, something which all human beings have and
which one cannot reduce to any technical components.
But it is not quite the same thing as sympathy and pity.
You might have more sympathy (meaning pity) for the
insane person than for the first two. However, this does
not imply that you are really able to put yourself into
his place.

Let us now consider a fourth example. Toward the end
of the Second World War, we had a patient in a medi-
cal ward a woman in her thirties, pale, sick-looking,
apparently underweight, who lay in bed, motionless,
staring into space. She had been entirely mute for
twenty-four hours, refusing to eat and completely sleep-
less for several days. The physician who had been treat-
ing her gave her history. She was married, had four chil-
dren, and her husband had been overseas in active com-
bat for four years. She had been told that he was due
to have his first furlough in Canada, but two weeks be-
fore his arrival, she received a cable that he had been
killed in action. After this, she slowed down in all her
actions, became unable to eat, or sleep, and she had
ideas that there was a weird plot going on in downtown
Montreal, a plot of mysterious intrigues and machina-

22 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

tions aimed at her life. She also heard voices accusing
her and threatening her.

This woman suffered from what, in psychiatric termi-
nology, is called a reactive depression, or to be still
more specific, an abnormal grief reaction. Now if we
try to apply to her the criteria mentioned above, the
test of "put yourself in her place," we observe the fol-
lowing. A good many of her reactions are immediately
understandable. If one had had her experience, one
would also be sad, retarded in one's actions, and unable
to eat or sleep. The expression "abnormal grief reac-
tion" seems paradoxical because in such a case it is nor-
mal, as we have already seen, to experience grief with
all its psychological and physiological concomitants.
Moreover, if she suffers from what seems a quantitative
exaggeration of normal mourning, we remember imme-
diately that the motive, in her case, is also of abnormal
magnitude. Hers is not just a common stoiy of bereave-
ment; the circumstances of her blow are extraordinary,
and you immediately "feel with her" and concede that
you, too, might be "bowled over" to the same degree as
she. If she had passed through her terrible experience
without any perceptible reaction, the psychology of
common sense would regard her behavior as abnormal,
and rightly so, because it is "normal" to go through a
reaction of grief. In other words, what makes our pa-
tient a clinical problem at all is not the reaction of sad-
ness by itself but the degree of that reaction. For those

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 23

who are interested in the philosophy of sickness in gen-
eral, it is interesting in this connection that there are
also in the field of physical illnesses reactions which are,
in themselves, physiological but abnormal only in de-
gree. In her case the reaction has assumed such pro-
portions that her life might be endangered if no help
were given to her.

Now let us regard another component of her illness,
the experience of the mysterious plot, the voices, etc.
It is obvious to everybody that these elements no longer
constitute a quantitative exaggeration of grief. This is
not, even in an exaggerated form, the normal experience
one has at the loss of a beloved person. If you try the
"put-yourself-into" test, the symptoms do not immedi-
ately "belong." You might perhaps say: "If I were in
her shoes, I might also have gone mad," but the content
of her madness is qualitatively different from what is
known to be normal in the reaction of mourning.

Here we have to anticipate something which will be-
come clearer in later parts of this study: a distinction
between the traditional psychiatry of the medical
schools on one hand, and psychoanalysis on the other.
Classical psychiatry, before the advent of psychoanaly-
sis or in complete disregard of it, would have had the
following scientific theory. It is known from the relation
of cause and effect in the field of physical illness that a
uniformity of causes may have varying effects. For
every housemaid who develops a skin rash by using a

24 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

certain metal polish, one can show nine others who use
the same polish without developing any rash. For every
nurse exposed to tubercle bacilli who develops severe
pulmonary tuberculosis, one can show nine others who
develop pulmonary tuberculosis either not at all or to
a much lesser degree. And for every woman who after
bereavement becomes insane, like our patient, one can
show nine who remain normal. Traditional psychiatry
would state that there was present in our patient, in a
latent form, a predisposition toward a derangement of
the function of the brain which is associated with delu-
sions (bizarre erroneous ideas) and hallucinations
(false sensory perceptions). The emotional blow, or
perhaps the physical debility following it, acted as a
trigger mechanism to set a mental breakdown in action
for which she already had the potentiality fully present
in her character.

The psychoanalyst, however, would say: if we know
this woman's entire past, back to the earliest phases of
her life, and provided that we understand the symbolic
language of her unconscious, then that seemingly alien
element of her reaction (the story of the plot, and the
voices) become as "understandable" to us and as logi-
cally motivated, as the depression itself.

In other words, the amateur or untrained psycholo-
gist (anybody with common sense) understands this
woman's abnormal exaggerated grief reaction, but a
psychoanalytically trained person is theoretically capa-

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 25

ble of understanding the superimposed elements of in-
sanity. I say "theoretically" because in order to under-
stand them he would have to know not only the imme-
diately preceding experience, the sudden bereavement,
but many remote facts of our patient's history. How-
ever, in principle the causal connection which enters
into this process of "understanding" is the same it is
a psychic connection, a connection of cause and effect
in the psychic order.

According to psychoanalysis, our patient's condition
appears to consist of two elements: one which is famil-
iar to everybody, namely, the seriously aggravated state
of mourning; and one which is "alien/' namely, the plot,
the voices, and so on. In reality, there is no such divi-
sion. It is only that the first one is immediately under-
standable, and the second remotely understandable.
The first element every human being understands who
ever mourned a loss. The second one is understandable
only to those who have acquired a particular kind of in-
sight. But it is understandable, and that is the most
important thing of all.

I have stated that for this second mechanism of under-
standing, the one employed by psychoanalysis, we need
to know something about "the symbolic language of
the unconscious." Perhaps another example will help to
explain exactly what this means.
John L., a man in his sixties, was brought to the hos-

26 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

pital following an attempt at suicide. He had been de-
pressed and anxious for three weeks preceding his abor-
tive attempt to throw himself from a high building.

John had been born in a Scandinavian country in
1877, one of a family of nine children. The father had
married twice and John was the youngest of five chil-
dren of the first marriage. The remaining four children
of this marriage were girls. He was one and a half years
old when his mother died, and six years old when his
father remarried. The stepmother was not readily ac-
cepted into the family by the children, and the oldest
daughter, aged seventeen, left home at that time. The
patient, of course, had no recollection of his mother.

John's father and stepmother were very strict with
him. He was always afraid of them, although he recalled
that, when he was fifteen, he and his stepmother were
good friends. On the other hand, he stated that his step-
mother "was always complaining to my father against
me/' and this made John afraid of her. He felt that she
favored her own children to the disadvantage of himself
and his full sisters, and the latter always felt resentful
about this. He said that he was not a willful or ill-tem-
pered child, although he often tried to get his own way
by fighting for it but these attempts were never success-
ful. At one point, while giving his history, he said, "I
never knew exactly where I belonged." He said that he
was a tidy child because he was compelled to be so, and

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 2/

he was now pleased with his early training because he
had since found it useful in looking after himself.

He stated quite definitely that his childhood was un-
happy because of the strictness of his parents, and that
he was rather glad when, at the age of ten, he was sent
away to boarding school. This change was a relief and
he was sorry when the end of the school term came
along and he had to go home on vacation. His father
was a fanner, who worked hard for a living, but he usu-
ally had adequate means. At times, John helped on the
farm.

He continued his studies at the boarding school for
six years. He did well but he left for financial reasons
before completing the final class. He had enjoyed
school, where he had been a good mixer. He said he
never felt particularly shy; he liked certain games, such
as football, and he was fond of skiing.

After leaving school at sixteen, he became a clerical
worker in the office of an importing firm. After work-
ing there for six years, he became a clerk in a depart-
ment store. He enjoyed selling, and he liked his job.
However, he left Scandinavia for the United States in
1909 at the age of thirty-two. When asked why he left
his homeland, he spoke of the "Viking instinct" he
wanted to see the world. He also said that he was dis-
appointed in his hope of marriage at the time. I noted
that his family name was Anglo-Saxon; but when ques-

28 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

tioned about this, he said it was also typically Scandi-
navian.

Later information, obtained from another source, re-
vealed that his leaving his home country was more or
less a flight: he had actually embezzled some money
and apparently was about to be prosecuted. Soon after-
ward, he changed his name from the Scandinavian to
a similar-sounding Anglo-Saxon one.

John arrived in New York a friendless stranger but
with the ability to speak English. He had already saved
some money and had no apprehension about the future.
He planned to go to California and started by way of
New Orleans. However, in New Orleans he became ac-
quainted with some businessmen and, through these
contacts, succeeded in establishing himself in a small
haberdashery. He ran this shop for five months and was
doing rather well but found that he could not tolerate
the heat. Because of this, he returned to New York and
found work there. After three months, a job was offered
to him in Ontario at one of the Canadian branches of a
chain of men's clothing stores. He spent a year there.
He was very successful in his management of this store
and as a result was promoted in 1911, to the supervision
of one of the larger branch stores in Montreal, where he
remained ever since.

He was a hard worker by any standards. He would
begin the day at 6 or 7 A.M. and frequently work until
10:30 at night, with very brief intervals for meals and

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 2Q

only an occasional rest period, which he would spend
lying down in his office at the back of the store. During
the last few years before admission to the hospital, he
had not been working at night because of fatigue at the
end of the day. He usually bought food for his evening
meal on the way home and felt that this, together with
the actual preparation of the meal, was a tiresome
chore.

He used to smoke approximately 15 cigarettes daily
but had recently been smoking about twice this amount.
He enjoyed alcohol, at present mostly brandy, but was
never a heavy drinker. His sleep had always been good,
even the last few weeks before the attempted suicide,
and only occasionally did he have a broken night. Of
late, his memory for names seemed to be impaired but
he had had no difficulty in managing his work or keep-
ing the financial records at the store. He had not been
making errors in accounts.

John gave up his social activities during the past few
years because of his fatigue at night. He had once
been a keen reader and enjoyed history and biography;
he was fond of music and drama; but in recent years he
had confined himself solely to reading the newspapers.
Since settling in Montreal, he had had very little time
for sports.

He was unmarried. As a young man, while living in
Scandinavia, he had been engaged twice. He broke the
first engagement himself because, as he put it, his mate-

30 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

rial prospects at the time were rather poor. On the sec-
ond occasion, he was about to become engaged to a
wealthy girl, but her father opposed this and insisted
that they should not even correspond for a year before
becoming engaged. The girl complied with her father's
wish, and John left Scandinavia shortly afterwards.

At home, any mention of sex had been taboo. As a
boy and young man he associated freely and easily with
girls. After emigrating, he never met a girl whom he
desired to marry. He has always been discriminating
and, as he put it, "snooty" with regard to making friends
with persons of either sex. He denied any difficulty in
sexual adjustment. He had had sexual relations at inter-
vals throughout his life, apparently never with any
woman with whom he was emotionally deeply involved.

He was not worried about money except for the pres-
ent fear that he would not be allowed to carry on at his
store and consequently lose his main source of income.
He had had no financial losses.

This patient denied ever having had any previous at-
tacks of depression or anxiety. However, it was learned
that in 1937 he had been admitted to a Montreal hos-
pital in a state of unconsciousness, and the diagnosis of
barbiturate poisoning was made. His present sickness
came on immediately after he had experienced certain
difficulties with the authorities with regard to his busi-
ness license. While this inquiry was under way, the
question of his citizenship came up. The authorities dis-

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 3!

covered that lie had lost the citizenship of his home
country, merely by allowing it to lapse; and, since he
had never applied for Canadian citizenship, he was
technically stateless. The situation produced in him a
sudden despondency and gloomy outlook. He visual-
ized his business taken away from him and thought he
would be deported by the Canadian authorities. He
saw himself arriving at a Scandinavian port as an old
man, only to be rejected by his homeland because of
the fact that he had lost his citizenship there. His home
country would send him back to Canada without per-
mission to enter, and he dejectedly pictured himself in
his declining years, an unfortunate old man shuttled
back and forth across the ocean without permission to
enter either country.

The patient was neatly dressed, co-operative, though
somewhat constrained. He walked and talked slowly
and his facial expression was one of depression. He said
that he felt depressed, admitted that he planned to
commit suicide and said that it was not just an act of
impulse. However, he admitted that he had hesitated
just at the point of jumping from the window. The main
content of his spontaneous remarks was his preoccupa-
tion with the question of citizenship. The idea that he
would be shuttled back and forth across the ocean
seemed to haunt him.

His orientation with regard to time, place, and per-
son was intact. His memory for both recent and remote

32 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

events was good. His mental capacity of retention and
recall were not tested. He had a good grasp of facts of
general information and his intelligence and judgment
seemed to be good.

He had some insight into the nature of his condition
in so far as he realized that he was suffering from a de-
pression. He was unaware of the fact that there was
something morbid about his preoccupation with certain
ideas, such as that of wandering homeless between two
countries. However, he felt that once the question of his
citizenship was solved, his depression would clear up.

Contact was made with the consulate of his home-
land in Montreal to help John with his problem. It was
through the consulate that it was learned that a short
time before he left his homeland, in 1909, he had em-
bezzled money. He evidently had to leave his country
to avoid going to jail. It was also through this inquiry
that we found out that John had changed his name to
an Anglo-Saxon one similar to the Scandinavian origi-
nal. The officials of his country were aware of his his-
tory and also knew that, except for his one transgression
of the law, he had a clean record. It was evident that
John had never applied for an extension of his citizen-
ship or for naturalization because in doing so he would
inevitably have disclosed the skeleton in his closet.

The physicians at the hospital never let the patient
know that they were aware of his true history. How-
ever, when this critical period of his life, dating back 35

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 33

years, was discussed or when the question of his real
name came up, a certain tension and restlessness were
observed.

Finally, a meeting between the patient and the con-
sul general was arranged. The latter was an old gentle-
man in his eighties, considerably older than the patient
himself, with a rather fatherly attitude and a remark-
able understanding of our patient's peculiar situation
and the psychological concomitants. After discussing
the matter of citizenship with John, the consul laid all
the cards on the table and told him frankly that bis full
history was well known to the officials, but that there
was now no danger whatever of legal involvement and
that everything had been "forgiven and forgotten."

This interview had a dramatic and striking effect on
the patient; he recovered visibly within a short time and
was able to be discharged one week later.

Let us submit this story first to an amateur psycholo-
gistthat is, to a person who knows nothing about the
science of psychiatry or psychoanalysis. There is a lot
in this story which he will immediately understand. The
insecurity of old age is a fact only too well known in our
time. Here is an old man who suddenly becomes aware
of the possibility of having his source of livelihood cut
off. He has been working hard for several decades, fore-
seeing an old age of relative security. If you add to this
the problem of citizenship, the papers and documents

34 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

with their symbolic meaning of "belonging," the con-
firmation of "self/' the story becomes highly under-
standable. Almost anyone might become depressed and
anxious under such circumstances, and quite a few
would be driven to despair and suicide.

However, there is a part of John's story which seems
to exceed what we might expect of ourselves if we were
in the patient's shoes. It is the fantasy of the two coun-
tries refusing entry so that one would be shuttled back
and forth across the ocean for the rest of one's life. To
be sure, the world of Immigration Departments, Pass-
port Control offices, and Police Stations represents a
haunting atmosphere for a great number of people, and
there is a lot of objective reality to justify such feeling.
Nor is the experience of being shuttled back and forth
between two countries beyond the realm of possibility,
as the recently publicized case of the man who lived on
a ferryboat in the Far East confirms. Nevertheless, there
was a bizarre element about John's fantasy, particularly
about the persistence with which it was held, and the
psychoanalytic interpretation is as follows:

Country in the language of our dreams, in the meta-
phors of everyday speech, and in the language of poets
has a parental significance. It is not a coincidence that
we speak of "fatherland" (patria), of "Mother Earth,"
and so on. To those who work with psychoanalytical
concepts, it is not surprising and it is at the same time
most important to know that John's history, from his

THE CASE OF THE OLD .IMMIGRANT 35

early life, is typical of the "rejected child." It can easily
be visualized how he must, in his childhood fantasies,
have been running back and forth between father
(fatherland) and stepmother (foreign land), being re-
fused a port of entry, a harbor of acceptance and of
sheltering.

Here we have made an important discovery. In deal-
ing with John's situation, we are confronted with two
worlds. There is the world of manifest reality, with its
real and objective sources of anxiety the insecurity of
old age, of the expatriate, the guilt and anxiety about a
skeleton in the closet. But the other world, behind
this one, is the world of infantile fantasies which is no
less fear-inspiring than the world of objective reality.
Of this second world the patient is only partly con-
scious. However, these worlds are not independent of
one another. There exists a living bond between the
two, a relationship which is called dynamic. The fantasy
of being shuttled back and forth across the ocean with-
out permission to enter either of the two ports would
not be so overpowering if it did not correspond to an
infantile feeling of an entirely different content-
namely, the feeling of being pushed away by father
and stepmother. In fact, we have very strong reason to
believe that our patient would have been able to handle
the real and objective elements of insecurity in his life,
had it not been for the fact that his present situation
reactivated feelings which were buried but not dead.

36 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

We do not wish here to go into many other relevant
things: the possible motivations for the embezzlement,
the nature of the patient's guilt feelings, the way he
apparently drove himself at work throughout his life in
Canada, and the mechanism of his suicidal ideas. But
one tiling should be pointed out. The consul of his
home country brought about a striking cure of the
patient's depression not only through the fact that he
reassured him about his status as a one-time culprit and
ex-citizen but because he, the consul, represented not
only the "fatherland," a personal principle, but the fig-
ure of a forgiving and loving -father. The accidental age
difference between patient and consul helped the situa-
tion. In other words, just as the objective threats of the
patient's real situation were tremendously reinforced
by unresolved threats of an early, infantile origin, so
was the cure reinforced by the fact that the man who
did the reassuring in objective reality represented an
archaic figure of profound emotional meaning. And
there is something else the scene of "everything is for-
gotten and forgiven" had so powerful an effect because
our patient carried around with him not only the image
of a punishing, haunting father (an image which he
was able to reconstruct, at least partially, from the con-
scious recollection of his childhood) but also the image
of an understanding, loving, and forgiving father. In
order to grasp the outcome of our story it helps us a lot
if we assume that in both instances, the inability to

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 37

enter either of the two countries as well as the final
scene of reconciliation, our patient had an experience,
metaphorically speaking, of "having been here before."

The appearance of the aged consul on the scene pro-
vided something identical with what the ancient Greeks
called katharste, a certain point of climax and relief in
the action of a tragedy. We say in idiomatic English
about a person who is beset by conflicts that he is "all
tied up in knots." Katharsis in the language of the Greek
dramatists is a disentanglement of knots, and it is pre-
cisely in this sense that Freud re-introduced the word
into the terminology of psychologists.

It is noteworthy that the success we had with the
consul general was not accidental. The psychiatrist who
got him into the picture was fully aware of the Freudian
implications of the case. He introduced the scene with
the old consul quite consciously and intentionally as a
cathartic, a "deeply stirring" element.

The reader who has no technical training in this field
should stop for a moment and ask himself a simple ques-
tion. When we continued beyond the point to which
our amateur or naive psychology had led us through
empathy ("putting ourselves in his shoes"), we intro-
duced tentative interpretations which do not immedi-
ately seem to have the character of evidence. If there is
any evidence at all, is it the same as experimental evi-
dence in the mathematical or biological sciences? Or

38 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

are these interpretations (of the hidden motivations,
the symbolic disguise) more closely related to empathy?

The answer is not difficult. The evidence of the world
of archaic imagery behind the world of objective real-
ity, and the dynamic relationship between the two, can
be obtained by an empathic process rather than by the
kind of methods used in the experimental sciences.
(This does not mean that the method of proof as em-
ployed by the experimental sciences does not come in
at all. As we shall see, it comes into the picture in a
secondary way. )

We can summarize by saying that psychoanalysis has
not only employed empathic knowledge as a scientific
tool, it has done more: it has pushed back the frontiers
of empathy. This fact is much more important than it
may seem at first sight, and in the following chapters we
shall see its historical significance.

Those who know anything about the history of sci-
ence would assume off-hand that, in the history of psy-
chology, knowledge gained by empathy preceded sci-
entific knowledge and was replaced by it. "Let's be
more scientific" is, in the minds of most people, a motto
for the progress of human thought, with "scientific" in
this connection meaning "along the lines of the natural
sciences." From what we know about the history of
Western thought, we would expect a scientific lecturer
to say something like this:

"Before the advent of brain physiology, people used

THE CASE OF THE OLD IMMIGRANT 39

to explain cases like the one of the depressed patient,
John L, with something resembling poetic intuition,
comparing the fatherland to the father, the adopted
country to the stepmother, and seeing in the patient's
melancholy preoccupation an allegorical repetition of a
childhood story. However, with the progress of science,
it has been found that diseases of the mind are diseases
of the brain. We know now that in our patient the
function of the frontal lobe is disturbed in certain
areas . . ."

The amazing fact is that the development of psychi-
atry was not at all like this. In fact, it was nearly the
opposite! If we use science in the usual sense which
implies laboratories, experiments, quantification and
so on, we see that the development of psychoanalysis
was preceded by the development of those methods or
was simultaneous with it. Therefore, in order to under-
stand what psychoanalysis is really about and how it is
related to a certain philosophy of Man and the Universe,
we have to study other trends of development in psy-
chiatry. We have to look at psychoanalysis against the
background of other sciences which developed during
the past hundred years. This means a detour but later
it will be seen that the detour is unavoidable if we want
to come to grips with the real subject of this book.

Ill

The Mechanics of Man

Oh, the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this ma-
chine called Man! Dickens, The Chimes

The history of psychiatry in the nineteenth century
the background out of which psychoanalysis developed
is dominated chiefly by two trends. On one hand,
physicians strove to arrive at clear concepts of diseases;
on the other hand, they attempted to localize mental
functions in certain areas of the brain.

These two trends, although quite independent of
each other, are typical of the outlook which prevailed
in general medicine during that time. The first trend is
summarized by the word "nosology ." Nosology (from
the Greek nosos, meaning illness ) is the branch of medi-
cal science which occupies itself with the classification
and definition of illnesses. In psychiatry this involved
some tedious work, and most of it was done in France
and Germany, roughly from the middle to the end of
the century. At that time, quite independently, the doc-
trine that "mental diseases are brain diseases" was es-
tablished and the foundations laid for the localization
40

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 41

of mental functions in the brain. The reader may well
wonder: "What's the practical use of classifying dis-
eases, and, even more so, what has it to do with the
present subject?" In order to explain, we have to re-
count briefly the position of nosology in the history of
medicine in general.

One hundred years ago there existed an illness called
"dropsy," meaning an abnormal collection of fluid in the
tissues of the body, particularly the abdomen and the
legs. This disease has completely disappeared from the
textbooks. But it has not at all disappeared from our
hospital wards. In adjoining hospital beds you may see
two patients with an abnormal collection of fluid in
abdomen and legs. -Though they resemble each other
closely, so much so that you are convinced that they
suffer from the same condition, it turns out that one is
Jthe victim of a certain heart condition and the other of
a certain condition of the kidneys. The symptoms are
similar, but the mechanisms behind the symptoms are
quite different; needless to say, the treatment differs
too. In a third bed you see a thin and emaciated patient
whose body has collected very little fluid, yet you learn
that he is suffering from the same kidney ailment,
though in a different stage. In other words, as far as the
three patients are concerned, you are baffled to discover
that the two who resemble one another in symptoms
differ in illness, and the two with different symptoms
suffer from the same illness.

42 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

This shift of emphasis is extremely important, and
it characterizes the entire development of medicine in
the nineteenth century. The trend was to get away from
symptom concepts (dropsy, consumption) to diseases
(renal, cardiac diseases, tuberculosis, etc.); this devel-
opment was inaugurated by morbid anatomy, bacteri-
ology, and so on. It was, after all, the anatomist who
discovered that the two seemingly identical cases of
"dropsy" were the outcome of two entirely different
disturbances, as in our examples of the heart and of the
kidney. There are trends in present-day medicine, in
the mid-twentieth century, which modify all this; but
the progress originally achieved by nosology cannot be
estimated too highly.

One cannot blame the psychiatrists of the nineteenth
century for wanting to follow in the footsteps of in-
ternal medicine. They felt that a similar development
away from symptomatic concepts to "true entities" was
in order in their field. Originally the situation was quite
similar to the one in medicine. What "dropsy/' "con-
sumption/' and so on were to the physician, "persecu-
tion mania/' "religious mania/' "stupor," and so on were
to the psychiatrist. Patients were labeled according to
their prominent symptoms and their morbid preoccu-
pations. Gradually psychiatrists began to realize that
there was something beyond the symptom; that the
psychiatric disorder followed some intrinsic law of de-
velopment of which "persecution mania" or "stupor"

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 43

were only external manifestations, just as "dropsy" and
"consumption" may be two different manifestations of
the same process in the pathology of organs.

However, from the beginning psychiatrists worked
under a decisive handicap. We have seen that "dropsy"
had to be abandoned as a concept, after a sufficiently
great number of cases had been studied at post-mortem;
it was only by this method that it was possible to see
in how many different ways "dropsy" can come about.
In psychiatry all attempts to come to a true concept of
illness seemed to be doomed from the outset because in
the majority of psychiatric disorders there are no ab-
normal findings at post-mortem. In the majority of
cases, no matter how deranged they have been during
life, at post-mortem the brain is normal even under the
most powerful microscope. Therefore morbid anatomy,
under whose influence the entire aspect of medicine
was vastly changed during the nineteenth century, was
of help to the psychiatrist only in that minority of ill-
nesses in which one is able to find lesions of the brain.
In that minority, as we'shall presently see, considerable
progress was achieved in a certain direction. But the
psychiatrists found that about four-fifths of the popu-
lation of "asylums" was made up of patients whose cen-
tral nervous systems were, to all intents and purposes,
anatomically healthy. If psychiatry still insisted in imi-
tating the development of internal medicine ("from
.symptom to disease"! ), it had to try other avenues. And

44 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

so, the psychiatrists of the French and German school
began to study the life histories of thousands of mental
patients with the most tedious and painstaking methods.

The results were quite startling. It would lead us too
far to go into details; it is enough to say that the out-
come was comparable to what we have seen in internal
medicine. You may find, in a psychiatric hospital, one
patient who looks as lifeless as a statue and another
who is in a state of extreme agitation and frenzy, and
it may surprise you to hear that these two conditions
are external manifestations of the same thing. Today
we know much better why this should be so, but to a
physician of the eighteenth century it would have
seemed meaningless or even paradoxical. Therefore one
must not underestimate the historical significance of
the "nosological" trend of the nineteenth century, al-
though today its value has to a certain extent become
relative and questionable.

If we are able to say that the listless patient and the
agitated patient present opposite manifestations of dis-
turbances which are, in a mysterious intrinsic manner,
identical, our nineteenth-century psychiatrist made this
important discovery by a method which is purely de-
scriptive. If we take cross-sections of the lives of the two
patients at the time of their respective illnesses, we find y
of course, that they suffer from two things which are
contrary in all their qualities. It is only in studying hun-
dreds of entire life histories in a longitudinal way, as it

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 45

were, that one discovers that the two dissimilar states
seem to replace each other so much so that one comes
to the conclusion that they must be haphazardly dif-
ferent expressions of the same thing.

As I have said, this method is purely descriptive. The
patients' lives are treated as externalized objects. Em-
pathy does not enter into it. That nineteenth-century
school investigated mental sufferings as if they were
psychic objects of which one can establish a psychic
morphology. Though this is scientifically quite valid,
its limits are narrow and its scope is soon exhausted.
Moreover, it is intimately associated with mechanistic
tendencies. If groups of disorders are established in the
same manner in which one classifies species in general,
one's outlook on psychiatry is bound to point in certain
directions. That entire approach contributed, for ex-
ample, to an attitude of biological determinism. If there
are patterns of mental sickness which can be labeled
and pigeonholed in groups, the most obvious conclu-
sion is that human lives are "processes," that the drama
of an Ophelia or a King Lear rolls inexorably off a tape
which has its origin in a constellation of chromosomes
and chemical molecules.

The nosological movement in psychiatry, historically
important as it was, is intimately linked with biological
determinism, perhaps not so much as a well-defined
philosophy but as a philosophical "atmosphere." There-
fore the reader will not be surprised to find that there

46 THE THIBD REVOLUTION

exists a historical connection between this movement
on one hand and the eugenic outlook of the Nazis on the
other. The establishment of "true disease entities" was
finally linked to a policy of sterilization which aimed at
extirpating mental agony by crude methods of biologi-
cal selection. Of course, the nosological psychiatrists
cannot be blamed for this. It is mentioned only to illus-
trate to what extent their work of description and clas-
sification implied the existence, in mankind, of prede-
termined types. Biological determinism means not only
this, however. It also implies that, as long as suffering
can be studied as a classifiable and repetitive pattern,
it must be left alone until the power of our microscopes
and our chemical methods is enough advanced so that
we can do something about it.

From a psychological point of view, from the point
of view of what happens in the encounter of physician
and patient as two human beings, the descriptive ap-
proach made for a marked therapeutic pessimism. It
could not be otherwise. Disease was studied as if it
were an externalized object; the highest aim was to ape
the disease concept of internal medicine. Therefore
there was only one place from which help could be
expected the laboratory.

Before we go on to give the reader a glimpse into the
world of the laboratory we should, in passing, mention
another movement which is related to the science of
classification the movement of phenomenology. This

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 47

movement has been strong on the Continent, particu-
larly in Germany and France. It originated with modern
German philosophers, particularly Edmund Husserl
and Karl Jaspers.

Phenomenology is essentially a descriptive science.
Its essence is to study psychic phenomena as they are.
What does the world in which a melancholy man moves
really look like? What is the difference between our
everyday suspicions and an insane person's ideas of
persecution? Phenomenology gives as accurately as pos-
sible an inside view of our mental states but does not
attempt to interpret them in the way in which we inter-
preted our case history. Moreover, it does not aim at
treatment. Therefore it, too, often ends up with an
attitude of describing, comparing, and labeling.

Phenomenology is mentioned here not only because
the term will occasionally be used in these pages later,
but also because the phenomenological trend in psy-
chiatry is closely related to those interesting border
areas between psychology and philosophy which we
encounter in the existentialist writers.

Psychiatry in the nineteenth century was also domi-
nated by the axiom, "Diseases of the mind are diseases
of the brain/' The implication was that with a knowl-
edge of the mechanism of the function of various brain
centers, we were bound to explain all deviation of ex-
perience and of behavior. Descartes had said that

48 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

the human organism can be compared to a clockwork.
Biichner taught that the brain secretes thoughts as the
liver secretes bile.

The first steps in this direction did not appear pro-
pitious. Around the second decade of the nineteenth
century there lived first in Vienna and later in Paris a
fashionable doctor, named Gall, who claimed to be able
to localize nearly all traits of a human person in various
areas of the brain. He did this by palpating the surface
of the skull. It is hard today to understand his tre-
mendous success but there it was, one of the great social
fads in medical history. (Even in Balzac's novels so-
phisticated characters in Paris drawing rooms described
a person as not possessing the bump of paternal love. )
Gall's methods of scientific discovery were peculiar, to
put it mildly. For example, it struck him that people
with a great ability to express themselves through the
spoken word had rather protruding eyes. From this he
concluded that in these people the frontal part of the
brain must be very well developed so as to push the
eyes forward and hence he felt that the faculty of
speech in man must be localized in the frontal lobe of
the brain.

The amazing thing was that in 1848, thirty years after
the publication of Gall's work, Bouillaud, an ardent
admirer of Gall, did find a connection between lesions
of the frontal lobes of the brain and an impairment of
the function of speech! In 1861 a French physician,

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 49

Broca, was able to relate the loss of articulated speech
to circumscribed lesions of a certain part of the left
frontal lobe. Broca found that, in spite of the brain
lesion, his patient's speech muscles were not at all
paralyzed. The patient was able to move the muscles
of the lips, the cheeks, the tongue, the palate, the larynx
yet that meaningful harmonious synthesis of muscular
movement which makes a spoken word was somehow
lost. For example, in order to say the word bright" we
have not only to be able to make the B sound (with
our lips), the R sound (with our tongue), the I sound
(with a combination of movements of respiratory
muscles, larynx, and throat), and the T sound (with
tongue and teeth). The totality of the sound "bright"
is not just a mathematical summation of all those noises.
Something new has been produced, and although all
the simple relay stations in the brain for these simple
components (their location is known) may be intact,
the motor-pattern "bright" somehow does not come
about when a certain area in the brain surface is de-
stroyed. In 1865, two doctors by the name of Dax,
father and son, showed that in the majority of people
such lesions would have to occur on the left side of the
brain.

The British neurologist, Bastian, in 1869 was prob-
ably the first to claim that we think in words, and that
word and thought cannot be separated. Actually, since
Bastian's time a concept has crept into neuropsychiatry,

50 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

which keeps coming up again and again in all the in-
vestigations on "brain and mind" an idea that motor
patterns of words are stored in a mysterious fashion
inside brain convolutions, ready to be reactivated when
they are needed. Since then it has been more or less
implied that in the left third frontal convolution, the
motor patterns of words were deposited in some form
of physical trace comparable to the relief of a phono-
graphic groove. The centers from which actual simple
motor commands go to the speech muscles (tongue,
pharynx, larynx, etc. ) provide a sort of pick-up system.
In 1874 Wernicke discovered that lesions of the first
temporal convolution and adjoining areas (in most peo-
ple on the left side) produce a state in which the pa-
tient, though hearing perfectly well, does not under-
stand the spoken word. This state in its pure form is a
perfect counterpart to the state described by Broca.
Just as in Broca's form of "aphasia" (cerebral speech
disorder) the patient is able to move the muscles neces-
sary for the production of sounds such as B, R, I, T, but
has completely lost the motor plan of that meaningful
sound pattern "bright," a patient with Wemicke's apha-
sia is able to perceive all the sounds which make up the
word "bright" but these sounds do not arrange them-
selves into a meaningful acoustic pattern. He hears a
sentence but to him it remains a hodge-podge of sounds,
an experience similar to the one we all have when listen-
ing to a foreign language. It is noteworthy that such pa-

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 51

tients are able to talk freely (unlike a "Broca" case);
in fact, they often talk too much, probably out of their
feeling of inadequacy. But their speech is a meaning-
less conglomerate of words because they are unable to
do what we do automatically all the time control the
meaning, grammar, and syntax : of our words by under-
standing what we ourselves are saying.

Soon after Wernicke's discovery, many other centers
were located: one for reading, one for writing, one for
calculating, one for music, and so on. The left hemi-
sphere of the brain * was mapped out as a mosaic of
centers of "higher functions." These centers are con-
nected with association fibers. Disturbances such as
aphasia, alexia (loss of the ability to read), agraphia
(loss of the ability to write) were interpreted as de-
structions of centers or cutting off of their connections.

There is no doubt that some of the clinical observa-
tions of that time were a little forced to fit into this elec-
trician's model of the human mind. This was later
shown in critical studies by the great English neurolo-
gist, Sir Henry Head. However, the working concept
achieved extraordinary triumphs. In at least one in-
stance it was possible to predict the existence of a
certain brain disorder on the basis of the anatomical
diagram, and the postulated brain disorder was subse-
quently observed with the lesion exactly as predicted, f

* In left-handed people it is the right hemisphere.

f In lesions of the inferior part of the left parietal lobe a disturb-

52 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

This was truly a triumph of the scientific method, com-
parable to those instances in the history of astronomy
in which a star whose existence has been mathemati-
cally postulated is subsequently discovered. Nobody
can blame the nineteenth-century scientists for becom-
ing very enthusiastic over all this. The day did not seem
far when every disturbance of thought, feeling, and
willing would be a matter of "centers" and "pathways"
a few batteries exhausted here, a little wiring discon-
nected there. Descartes, with his clockwork, and Biich-
ner with his thought-exuding organ had obviously en-
tered the right path which would lead to the unraveling
of that mystery the human mind,

ance called apraxia is observed. The patient afflicted with this dis-
order is able to move both hands perfectly well and to recognize
objects; yet he is not able to handle them properly. Confronted with
a toothbrush, he might try to stuff it into his pocket; confronted with
a pen, he might put it into his mouth. There is always a helpless and
unco-ordinated fumbling. The interpretation was that there are stored
in the left lower parietal lobe traces (our phonograph grooves) for
complex patterns of motor activity in man. From this center, fibers
reach the motor center (the "pick-up" which actually gets the muscles
of our hands into action) on the same side (left) and on the opposite
side (right). The latter would have to pass through a complex
bridgelike structure, the so-called corpus callosum. Hence Liepmann
postulated in 1905 that in isolated circumscribed damage to the
corpus callosum, those complex motor patterns of useful movements
could not be projected from the left parietal area over to the motor
centers on the right, and therefore in such a case the patient would
suffer from an isolated apraxia in his left hand ( the "pick-up" motor
center on the right side of the brain controls the left hand). This
clinico-anatomical picture, postulated by Liepmann in theoretical con-
siderations, was actually observed in 1907 by Van Vlieten.

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 53

Of course, one might still argue that the disturbances
observed in those cases of circumscribed brain lesions
are fairly "peripheral" when we consider the entirety
of a human person. A person may lose his capacity to
speak or to write or to recognize objects and so on, and
yet certain basic features which we commonly associate
with such terms as "personality" or "character" are not
affected. Some readers may have encountered victims
of cerebral stroke who suffered from speech disorders
and who, in spite of being deprived of mechanisms of
communication or even concept formation, did not
seem altered in their basic features. Their goodness or
warmth or humor, or their coldness, rigidity, or ped-
antry are still perceptible through a veil, as it were, of
organic damage. Even marked impairment of memory
may affect such traits of character surprisingly little.

On the other hand, rather early in the development
which we are following here, observations seemed to
indicate that the moral core of a person may be affected
by the cutting of certain brain fibers. In 1868, during
the building of the transcontinental railway in Amer-
ica, there occurred the famous case of the crowbar.
During a blasting operation, a worker was hit in the
forehead by a crowbar which sliced both frontal lobes
from the rest of the brain. It is possible that the crow-
bar was affected by the heat of the blast and there-
fore sterilized because, in spite of this extensive brain
operation under anything but aseptic conditions, no

54 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

signs of local infection were observed and the work-
man lived. The result was a neat, quasi-experimental
ablation of certain parts of the brain in a human sub-
ject. The psychological effect was remarkable. The
workman who, up until the time of the accident, had
apparently been puritanical to the point of rigidity,
adopted the opposite "pattern of behavior/' He became
dissipated and promiscuous; his actions were now face-
tious and cynical, and he swore like a trooper. Changes
similar to the ones in this historical crowbar case were
later encountered by many other observers in cases of
lesions of the frontal lobes. To use the detached lan-
guage of behavioristic psychology, there was a "loss of
acquired inhibitions." It is obvious that in such a case
the personality, the character of the person, is much
more altered than in the case of cerebral lesions which
result in pure disturbances of cognitive function or
communication.

Around the time of the First World War and in the
years following, the textbook concepts of cerebral "cen-
ters" and "connections" for higher intellectual functions
seemed to lose ground. The more one studied cases
with detailed psychological methods and tried to cor-
relate these findings with anatomical investigations, the
more it became obvious that such functions as speech,
recognition of objects, performance of delicate move-
ments, and so on could not be explained on the basis
of a mechanic's blueprint. Sir Henry Head, in present-

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 55

ing his own observations and at the same time subject-
ing the nineteenth-century school of brain localization
to a critical analysis, began to make fun of the "diagram
makers" and their concept of the human psyche which
came somewhat close to a plumber's ideal. This was the
time of Bergson, of the phenomenological school of
philosophy in Germany, and of the so-called Gestalt
school of psychology, i

The Gestalt school represented a movement to get
away from the atomistic and mechanical concept in
psychology which often leads to a superficial aping of
the mathematical sciences but not to that which one
wants to study. Employing methods of the so-called
Gestalt school, Goldstein and Gelb studied a German
soldier, Herr Schneider, who had received during the
war a circumscribed lesion in the occipital lobe of the
brain, in an area which has something to do with visual
recognition. Their observations were published in an
extensive work, entirely devoted to the strange world
in which Schneider lived. The two scholars (one an
eminent neurologist, the other an eminent psycholo-
gist) had practically lived with Herr Schneider for sev-
eral years and succeeded to an uncanny degree in shar-
ing this strange world of visual agnosia with him. What
it actually amounted to was an extraordinary feat of
empathy. Sir Henry Head hailed this work as marking
the end of an era (that of the "diagram-makers"), and
the beginning of a new one. Philosophically speaking,

56 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

the Cartesian Utopia of a reconstruction of the 'liuman
mind" on the basis of a model of centers with connect-
ing wirings seemed to have vanished.

Long before that time, Hughlings Jackson, the father
of modern neurology, had adopted a critical attitude
toward "centers" and "diagrams." The conception of
chains of nerve cells and its application to clinical locali-
zation had led to such triumphs in neurology that it was
only too tempting to apply the same concepts to higher
intellectual functions. There is no greater sign of Hugh-
lings Jackson's genius than the fact that, unlike his con-
temporaries, he resisted this temptation. With regard to
such phenomena as speech disorders, he warned his
students to "consider our subject empirically and after-
wards scientifically" and that "to locate the damage
which destroys speech, and to localize speech, are two
different things." This is a more simple expression of
what Head meant when after an almost lifelong study
of the subject he said that "there are no cortical centers
for normal mental activities, but there are certain areas
within which destruction of tissue produces a disorder
of some particular mode of behavior."

This is a very brief history of cerebral localization up
to the twenties of this century. While the concept of the
Cartesian clockwork was badly shaken by neurologists
such as Head, Goldstein, Monakov, and Pierre Marie,
by psychologists like the ones of the Gestalt school and

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 57

by philosophers such as Bergson, it was at the same
time buttressed from elsewhere. Here I should like to
mention only two directions from which help came.
One is the theory of the conditioned reflexes of Pavlov,
the other is Watson's behaviorism.

Pavlov's reflexology can be briefly explained as fol-
lows. A reflex is an automatic reaction of the organism
to a stimulus. This reaction is independent of conscious-
ness. When one pricks a sleeping person s toe, he with-
draws his foot. He does not necessarily wake up. What
happens is this: the stimulus (pin prick) sets off a bio-
logical reaction in a receptor organ of a nerve cell. This
nerve cell belongs to the lower part of the spinal cord
and sends a fine filament all the way down into the big
toe. The reaction produced by the pin prick travels at a
speed of about two hundred miles per hour up to the
spinal cord. There it is relayed to an entire battery of
nerve cells with outgoing filaments which lead to
muscles of the leg. A message is conveyed to these
muscles to contract. This contraction is carried out so
as to remove the toe from the danger zone.

When a dog is shown a piece of meat, his salivary
glands and the mucous membrane of his stomach se-
crete a juice of a chemical composition which is needed
for the digestion of meat. This, too, is a reflex. Profes-
sor Pavlov extended this simple experiment by sound-
ing a certain tone whenever the piece of meat was held
before the dog. After repeating this combination of

58 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

stimuli (meat and tone), it was possible to obtain a
secretion of digestive juice by sounding the tone alone,
without producing the piece of meat. In other words
an event the tone, which is in no way associated with
digestion may be artificially isolated from the animal's
total situation and be made to become a stimulus to di-
gestion. This fact had been known empirically by ani-
mal trainers and circus people for many centuries. But
it was scientifically evaluated first by Pavlov, and in an
ingenious way elaborated to a theory which was to em-
brace the entire world of human conduct. Without
further elaboration on our part, the reader can easily
see why a theory of psychology which, in its roots, goes
back to the principles of animal training should have
become the officially proclaimed basis of psychology in
the Soviet Union.

Behaviorism, chiefly associated with the name of
Watson, is another approach to psychology which at-
tempts to remain strictly scientific in a sense in which
the school of brain physiology or the reflexology of Pro-
fessor Pavlov are scientific. To make the theory of be-
haviorism best understood, let us refer once more to
our initial remarks on the empathic function. A be-
haviorist would criticize our concept of empathy in
words which might run approximately like this: "The
process of 'understanding' which goes on while you are
listening to a sad person's life story is not a scientific
method. The variables are too great. How much you

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 59

'understand' depends entirely on your own make-up,
on your own background, your own life history, and on
the mode in which your depressed patient expressed
himself. The entire thing is purely subjective, and true
science is objective." Behaviorism attempts, in its
method, to eliminate intuition and empathy as much as
possible from the field of psychology. It relies to a large
extent on the observation of animals, and works with
the premise of a purely experimental setting, as if intu-
ition did not exist. For example, as we shall see, a be-
haviorist might study the psychology of rivalry and
competitiveness by studying the behavior of a group
of animals during feeding time and comparing it with
the behavior of children, attempting to use as much as
possible methods with which we are familiar from the
natural sciences, such as statistical analysis and graphs.

During and after the Second World War the neuro-
physiological approach to the "human mind'* received
a new impetus, comparable only with the one initiated
by the first discovery of brain centers one hundred years
before. It would not further our argument to go into the
fascinating story of the electro-potentials registered
from the normal and abnormal human brain, and the
electrical stimulation of brain areas in conscious pa-
tients during brain operations. The reader who would
like to study these phenomena is referred to technical
manuals dealing with them. However, another subject

60 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

should be mentioned here briefly the science called
"cybernetics."

With the development of the radio tube it was pos-
sible to develop calculating apparatuses to an incredible
degree of perfection. As is well known, these machines
are able to solve mathematical problems which a com-
pany of skilled mathematicians could not solve in a life-
time. They can also solve involved economic problems,
problems of logistics for military purposes, and so on,
as long as each problem can be fed into them in a cer-
tain form. A similar principle is employed in appara-
tuses which govern the activities of machines with com-
plicated functions for example, guided missiles. These
apparatuses are able to receive information and to relay
it to an executive mechanism in such a way that a de-
sired course of action is maintained. If you are rowing
a boat parallel to the shore of a lake and the current
of the waves is such that your boat would be directed
toward the middle of the lake, you correct this error
more or less automatically, by the way in which you
handle your oars. Now an automatic steering device
registers the position of its rudder; if external forces
have changed the rudder so as to endanger the desired
course, the course is corrected. The device by which a
machine exploits information received from outside to
maintain its own steady course is called the "feed-back."
This feed-back system has been evolved to such a
height of perfection that mechanical steering devices

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 6l

are able to react with much greater reliability and ac-
curacy than human beings do. The feed-back principle
combined with the "memory tube" (a tube which stores
information) is able to achieve a lot of that which until
recently has been strictly reserved to the function of
the brain. Although one of the most recent calculators
contains 23,000 valves and the human nervous system
contains about fifteen billion cells, the basic principle
is the same. Theoretically one ought to be able to con-
struct a machine which functions like the human nerv-
ous system. The entire physiology of the human nerv-
ous system is based on exploiting information ("in-
put"), in such a way as to maintain an even course.
When the scientists concerned with cybernetics ven-
ture predictions about the implications of their science
in a future society, the reader who is a humanist gets
gooseflesh. It is not so much the vision of machines with
nervous system-like systems. It is when the science of
cybernetics is applied to questions affecting the rela-
tions of human beings ("communicating animals") and
the life of their society that we have to brace ourselves
and take stock. However, before we do this, let us
admit that Sir Henry Head rejoiced too early. What he
thought had been the end of diagram-making was just
the end of a prelude. The concepts of the people who
had explained "diseases of the mind as diseases of the
brain" by drawing diagrams of centers with associations
were simple in comparison with the development which

62 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

has come about with present-day neurophysiology in
conjunction with cybernetics. Indeed, it looks as if the
era of the diagram-makers had just barely begun.

During what one might call the first phase in the his-
tory of brain physiology the phase of Wernicke the
physiological diagrams were crude. At that time some
critical psychiatrists advocated human understanding
as opposed to scientific explaining, a re-experience of
the patient's conflicts as opposed to a discovery of elec-
tric short-circuits. They scoffed at the physiological
ideal and found a name for it "brain mythology." They
may have been struck by the crudeness of the diagrams.

Now we have entered a second phase. The body of
scientific facts has been very much expanded. The
physical and mathematical foundations are much more
solid. The new impulse which that movement has re-
ceived by the methods of cybernetics is best charac-
terized by quotations from Norbert Wiener's book:

Man, with the best developed nervous system of all the
animals, with behavior that probably depends on the long-
est chains of effectively operated neuronic chains, is then
likely to perform a complicated type of behavior efficiently
very close to the edge of an overload, when he will give way
in a serious and catastrophic way. This overload may take
place in several ways: either by an excess in the amount
of traffic to be carried, or by the excessive occupation of
such channels by undesirable systems of traffic, like circu-
lating memories which have increased to the extent of be-

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 63

coming pathological worries. In all these cases, a point will
come quite suddenly-when the normal traffic will not have
space enough allotted to it, and we shall have a form of
mental breakdown, very possibly amounting to insanity.
Thus the human brain would seem to be fairly efficient
in the matter of the short-distance connectors, but quite
defective in the matter of long-distance trunk lines. This
means that in the case of a traffic jam, the processes involv-
ing parts of the brain quite remote from one another should
suffer first. That is, processes involving several centers, a
number of different motor processes, and a considerable
number of association areas, should be among the least
stable in cases of insanity. These are precisely the processes
which we should normally class as higher, and we obtain
another confirmation of our expectation, which seems to be
verified by experience, that the higher processes deteriorate
first in insanity.*

In this chapter we have grouped together several trends
in the history of the mental sciences: the localization
of brain function; Pavlov's physiology of conditioned
reflexes; behaviorism; electrophysiology; cybernetics.
All these seemingly ill-assorted disciplines have one
thing in common. They study human actions with the
same methods which are applied to the mechanics of
inanimate matter. They are branches of the natural sci-
ences. At least one of them, behaviorism, explicitly
makes it part of its program to get away from empathy,
because of what it considers its lack of scientific validity.

* Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.,

64 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Ingenious as these discoveries are those in neuro-
physiology and localization represent triumphs in the
history of science the moment one's philosophy allows
them to replace that which is gained by empathy that
is, by "poetic/' non-scientific knowledge, one runs into
a zone of absolute zero, a wasteland of dehumanization.
In fact when the Russians hoped for a long time that
brain physiology and a more and more intricate system
of Pavlovian apparatuses would eventually solve all
psychological problems, they were aiming toward an
image of Man which is the only one compatible with
the Marxist philosophy.

A "science of human behavior" which is exclusively
based on physical data is a peculiar shadow-image of
truth. Imagine the following Wellsian fantasy: At a
time when all riddles of brain localization and neuro-
physiology are solved, there exists a scientist who can
really trace at once all the chemical processes in every
cell of a brain and understand their interaction. That
which is experienced as Hope and Despair, as Love
and Hatred can be understood entirely in terms of neu-
ronal and electronic mechanisms. Whatever melan-
cholia means in terms of existence matters no longer.
Knowing the area in which the brain cells are firing in
the wrong direction, our scientist can regulate the dis-
turbance hormonally or electrically. He is able to dem-
onstrate with mathematical symbols what is going on
in Hamlet's brain while he beholds his uncle in prayer.

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 65

In fact lie is even able to trace all the chemical proc-
esses and their causal sequence up to this point, right
from Hamlet's birth. Though our scientist would be
able to grasp the most extraordinary machine, what he
grasps develops into a nightmare: the mystery of con-
sciousness and, with it, human freedom and human
values lie somewhere outside that machine.

Some of the scientists to whom we owe most in the
field of brain localization have clearly seen this. But
their insight is nothing new. Plato, as if he had foreseen
behaviorism and neurophysiology, outlined the philo-
sophical pitfall with surprising clarity. He has Socrates
in the Phaedo compare a man whose ideas on the hu-
man mind follow along these lines

to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind
is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he
endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in
detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is
made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would
say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the
muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have
also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which con-
tains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the
contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend
my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved pos-
turethat is what he would say; and he would have a simi-
lar explanation of my talking to you, which he would at-
tribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign
ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to

66 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have
thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought
it better and more right to remain here and undergo my
sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and
bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or
Boeotia by the dog, they would, if they had been moved
only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not
chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant
and running away, of enduring any punishment which the
state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes
and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that with-
out bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I
cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do
because of them, and that this is the way in which mind
acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless
and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot dis-
tinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feel-
ing about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming.*

The opposite attitude has been expressed quite re-
cently by Professor Bykov of the Soviet Academy of
Science. After reviewing the most recent findings on the
functioning of the brain, he expresses the hopes that
"we shall, in concert with capable and talented investi-
gators throughout the world, be able to perceive the
laws of thought, behavior and instruction. This will
mean that we are gaining the highest blessing that of
knowing ourselves/' f Though Bykov in this last phrase

* Phaedo, translation by B. Jowett.

f K. M. Bykov, "New Data on the Physiology and Pathology of

THE MECHANICS OF MAN 67

echoes Socrates' famous admonition ("know thyself '),
he advocates what Socrates branded as a wrong method.
The recent advances of brain physiology are wonder-
ful, but the one thing they will obviously never bring
about is knowledge of ourselves. Thus we see that a
science the physiology of the human nervous system
which is, like all science, philosophically neutral,
achieves two contrasting meanings, depending on two
different views regarding the nature of Man.

the Cerebral Cortex," U.S.S.R. State Academy of Science, Moscow,
1953.

IV

The Mechanics of Society

And Satan rose up against Israel: and moved David
to number Israel.

And David said to Joab, and to the rulers of the
people: Go and number Israel from Bersabee even to
Dan, and bring the number of them that I may know it.

And Joab answered: "The Lord make his people a
hundred times more than they are but, my Lord the king,
are they not all thy servants: why doth my Lord seek this
thing, which may be imputed as sin to Israel."

Chronicles 21:1-3

To the statistician, the mass observer, you are one unit
in a crowd. To a physicist you are a mathematical for-
mula, to the chemist a compound of substances, to the
biologist a specimen. The behaviorist sees you as an ani-
mal modified by conditioned reflexes. ... So significant
you are, so universally relevant. But how and by what
right? Beware of asking; that way lies theology.

Ronald Knox, Stimuli

It is a natural reaction, when we read the history of
scientific discoveries, to feel enthusiasm. Such discov-
eries are an expression of man's creativeness. When we
trace the history of physics from Archimedes to the
quantum theory; or the physiology of the heart from
the time of Harvey up to the most recent discoveries on
68

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 69

the stimulus conduction; or chemistry from Lavoisier
to present-day biochemistry; or Doctor Bouillaud's re-
search on the brain to modern discoveries on electro-
physiology of the brain, we experience something which
is a mixture of awe and aesthetic pleasure. "An unde-
vout astronomer," wrote Edward Young in Night
Thoughts, "is mad."

We feel alarmed, however, when a particular disci-
pline of science assumes a monistic tendency, becomes
all-explanatory, and even hints at Utopian develop-
ments. When the "brain mythologist" of the nineteenth
century foresees a time in which all aberrations of the
mind can be explained on the basis of false wirings,
so that poetic and intuitive feelings can be excluded
or invalidated, we are embarrassed. When the Marxist
elevates the wired model man-machine the homme
machine to a position which entirely occupies meta-
physical space, we recognize it as a devilish distortion.

What is true about the mechanics of the human indi-
vidual is equally true about the mechanics of human
groups. The social sciences, particularly the psychologi-
cal branches of sociology, are collecting a big conglom-
erate of observations on the reactions and interactions
of groups of people. However, there is a great differ-
ence between doing this and doing the things described
in the preceding chapter. In the latter the laboratory
methods and the individual problems tackled are clear
and unequivocal: one can make valuable studies of

70 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Pavlovian physiology without believing in Marxist phi-
losophy; one can do research on localization in the
brain and remain a good Christian. However, when the
interaction not of nerve cells but of groups of human
individuals is studied, it frequently occurs that the va-
lidity of the method and the validity of the underlying
philosophy of the social scientist become inextricably
interlaced. This is a symptom of tremendous impor-
tance, and it marks an entirely new phase in the history
of science.

Let us take a few random examples from the social
sciences. First, there is something which might be called
the magic of numbers a widespread, though rather in-
nocuous, obsession. Since quantification, the world of
graphs and percentages, is associated with objectivity,
some people feel its results must be "truer" than state-
ments which we conclude, by reasoning, to be right.
That is why a quantitative analysis is often applied to
a qualitative problem. Thus it is stated in a social psy-
chological study on the "pleasing personality" * that
"with women the multiple correlation between pleas-
ingness and adjustment combined with expressiveness
is .71, and when steadiness is added to expressiveness
the multiple correlation becomes .79." The author,
equipped with mathematical tools ("difference divided
by sigma of difference"), has tackled the following

* Edwin G. Fleming, "Pleasing Personality," Journal of Sodal Psy-
chology, III, 100-107, 1932.

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 71

problem: "When a person has personality, it is generally
meant that he has a pleasing personality. Now what is
a pleasing personality?" Evaluating the opinions given
by individuals about members of their own and the
opposite sex he observes, with scientific caution: "Al-
though the differences are not statistically reliable, it is
interesting to note that men consider men less steady
than women do, while women consider women less
steady than they do men." He immediately adds an
interpretation of his findings (a procedure not quite
scientific): "This is undoubtedly a reflection of greater
familiarity with one's own sex." Using common sense,
most people would arrive at a different interpretation,
namely, rivalry with one's own sex.

Thus we see that we come up with nonsense if we
give to the quantitative method a position of absolute
primacy, and if we think that it is only by the quanti-
tative method that we ascertain truth. What the sci-
entist attempted to do in the present case was to settle
a question of value with the aid of scientific method.

One might argue that it is an error to introduce the
scientific method into problems involving value, but
that it is an error without serious consequence. This is
not quite so. Whenever one introduces quantitative
methods in an area in which a hierarchy of values exists,
one is apt to corrode those values. In order to have num-
bers work properly they have to be on an equal basis.
In order to add fifteen toadstools and fifteen roses, one

72 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

has to make them into equal objects: fifteen toadstools
and fifteen roses are thirty plants. To the person to
whom the metaphysical has its intrinsic weight, quite
independent of social references, a great deal of the
social sciences is not as neutral as science should be.
Because in order to become numerical material, all that
which is of the metaphysical order and which has mean-
ing in the life of the individual soul has to be equalized
with arbitrary elements of die social and economic
order. Take, for example, the following table ("atti-
tudes toward baptism") from a study which concerns
the problem of conformity of opinions:

TABLE*

Public attitude Private attitude
No. % No. %

1. In favor of sprinkling 46 90.20 8 15.69

2. Either form of baptism 4 7.84 86 70.59
8. In favor of immersion 3 5.88
4. No attitude 1 1.96 4 7.84

* From Richard L. Schanck, "A Study of Change in Institutional
Attitudes in a Rural Community," Journal of Social Psychology, V,
121-128, 1934.

The author, who introduces certain statistical concepts
into this problem ("the hypothesis of the J-shaped dis-
tribution as a form of distribution characteristic of in-
stitutional behaviors"), states that "it would seem prob-
able that in the economic field objective checking on
neighbors' behavior would be easier than in the field

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 73

of religion*" He believes "(i) that a feeling of com-
munity loyalty caused many of these individuals [the
subjects under investigation] to believe the way they
thought most people in the community believed and
(2) that biased individuals in the community who are
given to the expression of their opinion tend to create
an illusion regarding community opinion that not al-
ways corresponds with the real facts. Those who do the
talking in the community tend to be taken as commu-
nity spokesmen/' At this stage the naive reader begins
to be impressed. In fact this is the phase (so often ob-
served in this kind of investigation) when something
which we have known from common-sense observation
is presented with mathematical underpinnings. This air
of objectivity is emphasized by the style: "That these
conclusions were not too far fetched was strikingly illus-
trated at a later date . . " or, "It seems probable that
there is a stage in attitude change when attitudes are
maintained in a group because of illusions how univer-
sally the attitude is held by other members. This state
is one which F. H. Allport has referred to as a condi-
tion of 'pluralistic ignorance/'' Or, "This making an
entity of an institution (religious Church community)
as the source or author of an opinion is one of the results
of 'pluralistic ignorance/ " The last sentence, if I under-
stand the terminology correctly, means: People think
that they ought to hold the same opinions as others.
In certain matters (including religious ones) they are

74 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

under an illusion about this. Their belief is not shared
by others to the same degree as they think. Hence the
difference between private and public attitude in the
table. This mistake also causes them to believe that
there is a Church which is a mother and keeper of faith.

It is quite possible that I misunderstand the meaning
and aim of such studies, but one thing is certain. When-
ever the bulldozer of statistics rolls through the flower-
ing meadow, followed by the steamroller of sociopsy-
chological evaluation, nothing can survive. One might
argue that faith can be investigated on the natural,
either social or psychological, plane and not emerge
the worse for it. This is true but that is not our point.
What we want to show here is that the very method
itself, and the position of the problem, postulate an
equalization. For science of this sort, supernatural val-
ues have to be dehydrated and hardened before they
can be investigated. Take a sentence like this: "Further
investigations of this hypothesis are now being carried
on in industrial, political, religious and economic fields/*
The very way in which the word "religious" is used in
this sentence is alien to the Christian. Either the Church
is the Mystical body of Christ, or it is nothing a fascia
in the social structure, arbitrarily accounted for some-
where between the "political" and "economic" fields.

It is doubtful whether Saint John the Baptist and
Saint Paul foresaw this particular kind of paganism.
But there is no doubt that they would have preferred

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 75

to be beheaded or crucified by ancient pagans than
see the sacrament of baptism and the community of
saints benevolently reduced to percentile columns in
a study on "pluralistic ignorance." Thus we can say that
things such as "religious attitudes'' can be dealt with as
elements of the social fabric, in statistical analyses, and
in mass equations only on the basis of a fiction. They
have first to be deprived of their metaphysical char-
acter, as it were, and treated as if they did not belong
to the order of Grace.

The atmosphere of apparent objectivity in which the
social psychologist works is actually a result and an
expression of an urban, technocratic civilization which
squeezes the unique and mysterious element out of
things which are of the spirit. A number of sociologists
realize this paradox and have made attempts to deal
with the "problem of values." Whenever we encounter
values, however, we arrive at the point at which science
stops.

Values-good" and "bad," or "beautiful" and "ugly"
are not the object of science. A mathematician meas-
uring a triangle or a circle, or relating the number 73
to the number 17, does not ask which one is beautiful,
ugly, good, or bad. In the world of chemistry the carbon
atom is in no way "better" than the hydrogen atom. A
zoologist, unless he is at the same time a poet, does not
compare a rooster with a gander from a moral or aes-
thetic point of view and if he does, he gets his poetry

76 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

and his science badly mixed. In natural history, in the
old days before the advent of modern science, people
used to make statements about the lion being nobler
than the wolf; of course, no scientist would say any-
thing like this today. It is in the nature of scientific
method that it has to exclude the world of values, the
moral or aesthetic hierarchy of "good" and "bad," in
order to arrive at correct results.

Let us consider further what happens when we try
to apply scientific method to the world of values and
we shall confine matters to aesthetic values, rather than
spiritual or moral values. (It is interesting that a belief
in aesthetic values is the one thing people hold on to
longest. Even the most avowed amoralists and atheists
believe in aesthetic values. Dostoievsky, who had such
keen insight into the modern spiritual dilemma, once
remarked that the world will be saved by Beauty. I
have seen many atheists in rapture over a Bach fugue
or Haydn quartet; they little realized that they would
have to burn all the great musical scores in a bonfire if
they really lived what they preached.)

We say that certain things are more beautiful than
others. A symphony of Mozart 1 is more beautiful than
jukebox music; a Rembrandt painting is more beautiful
than a magazine cover. But there is no method in the
social sciences which would help either to support or to
deny this hierarchy of values. A sociologist might find,
by questionnaire methods, that there are areas in which

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 77

93 per cent of all the people prefer magazine covers
to Rembrandt paintings. In another area the reverse
may be true. We might even find factors which would
account for these differences in taste. Yet the question
of intrinsic value what makes one thing more beau-
tiful than another remains untouched.

A team of research workers might tackle Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony over a period of ten years. The physi-
cists on the team could make statistical studies and
graphs of the acoustical wave-lengths and amplitudes.
The psychologists could scrutinize Beethoven's child-
hood history minutely. The social scientists could exam-
ine the European outlook at the end of the Napoleonic
era. And so on. No matter how much data our scientific
team compiled, it could not "explain" a single bar of the
musical experience we call the Ninth Symphony. Nor
could the combined team come to any conclusion as to
whether or not the Ninth Symphony is more beautiful
than the latest hit from a musical show. From this ex-
ample alone, we must conclude that there exists a great
number of truths which are not accessible to what one
commonly calls scientific investigation i.e., to an area
of human endeavor in which experiments, or numbers,
or the accumulation of facts dominate. Values are trans-
scendental They lie in an area which accumulative
knowledge cannot reach.

When Francis Bacon discussed the method of sci-
entific investigation, he was far from claiming that it

/8 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

was the only method by which to find truth. On the
contrary, he clearly distinguished scientific method
from poetic insight. His genius saved him from the
disastrous fallacy to which a great number of people
succumb nowadays grading these two different work-
ings of the human mind, and believing that scientific
truths are "truer" than poetic truths. All Bacon said was
that some insights are obtained in one way and others
in another way. If he had pronounced a warning at all,
he would probably have sounded one against applying
"Poesy" to truths which are only accessible to the sci-
entific method. If he had been able to foresee our mod-
ern phase, he would no doubt have given the opposite
warning. Some of the statements of the later schoolmen
on scientific subjects are funny when read today just
because of the simple confusion of methods of thinking.
The student of the social sciences who believes in
spiritual values is particularly interested in those trends
which are anti-human and which carry in themselves
the seeds of negation. He soon encounters another fal-
lacy which is closely related to the one just discussed.
This fallacy may be stated as follows: Men have always
known that apples fall to the ground, not up to the sky.
However, only with the mathematical analysis of this
phenomenon, as developed by classical physics, were
laws formulated which eventually led to a knowledge
and mastery of physical forces quite undreamed of be-
fore. In like manner, people have always 'Toiown" about

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 79

the "forces" which govern the relationships between
groups of human beings such as rivalry and the forma-
tion of social hierarchies yet our knowledge of these
things is at present the same as our knowledge of inani-
mate nature before the time of Galileo. Only by the
discovery of laws governing group relations comparable
to the laws of classical physics can we arrive at a social
science in the proper sense of the word.

This trend can be studied in its purest and most co-
herent form in cases where experimental psychology of
animals is introduced with the explicit hope of discov-
ering exact laws which can then be applied to human
beings. Of course, in such experiments both empathy
and moral value must be discarded as factors interfer-
ing with scientific validity.

An experimental psychologist, who has contributed
important observations on the social psychology of ani-
mals, studied the mechanism of rivalry in Callus do-
mesticus, or the common rooster.

Beginning at 16 weeks of age [he writes *] six young
roosters are arranged in a hierarchy of dominance, the order
being determined by the number of individuals in the group
that each rooster is able to defeat in physical combat ( So-
cial Reflex No. 2). This order of ranking is revised at inter-
vals of four weeks from the i6th to the s6th week. Begin-

*Carl Murchison, "The experimental measurements of a social
hierarchy in Callus domesticus" Also, "The direct identification and
direct measurement of Social Reflex No. i and Social Reflex No. 2,"
Journal of General Psychology, XII, 3-39, 1935.

80 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

ning immediately after being taken from the incubator,
these same individuals had been tested at frequent intervals
in the Social Reflex Runway. This test consisted simply of
releasing two individuals from opposite ends of the runway,
and observing the time and distance traversed by each in
running to the other (Social Reflex No. i). Various opera-
tions from the techniques of physics were applied to these
data. This was followed by the application of the simple
measurements of time and space. When plotted as a func-
tion of Social Reflex No. 2, it was found that Social Reflex
No. i, when plotted in terms of space alone, was almost
truly linear. A theoretical correction of the abscissa units,
which agreed with the empirical data, satisfied the require-
ments of linear function. It was pointed out that this method
of measurement and analysis was initiated as a result of
reflecting on the discussion of the social sciences by Spek-
torsky, Sorokin, Har, and others to the effect that no genuine
laws have ever been formulated in the field of social science.
It was pointed out that this or some similar method, built
on the presupposition that the method operates on behavior
quanta common to the social conduct of all social animals,
can reach through the medium of covariable techniques to
the eventual formulation of law.

This last remark (the italics are mine) apparently in-
cludes human beings in the phrase, "all social ani-
mals/' It is a fairly illustrative example. The mechanism
of rivalry and competition is studied in an animal, the
rooster, which is so familiar and well-known that it
promises to be an excellent object for such a study. Defi-

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 8l

nitions and experimental methods are as precise as they
can possibly be. "Social discrimination in Callus domes-
ticus is identified as it is measured in the Social Dis-
crimination Cage/' As far as the social interaction and
group behavior of roosters goes, it is conceivable that
we can "arrive at the formulation of law" only by the
discovery "through the medium of covariable tech-
niques" of "behavior quanta." If "social rivals' 5 includes
human beings, it is impossible to see how volumes of
this science can tell us anything about man nearly as
profound as Shakespeare tells us on one page.

However, as we have said, such a study of the rooster
is valid for anyone who is interested in certain aspects
of the behavior of animals. A naive "optimism of the
technique" comes in merely at the point where the in-
vestigator foresees a sqrt of physics of the interaction
of living human beings in general. He vaguely postu-
lates the possibility, and he is cautious in formulating it.

We are going many steps further when we consider
certain trends in social psychology proper. The work
of Jurgen Ruesch is fairly representative of this. In his
studies, the physics of communication are applied to
the study of interhuman relationships.

Data pertaining to the ways and means by which people
exchange messages, to the correction of information through
social contact, and to action undertaken as an outgrowth
of communication are handled successfully within the sci-

82 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

entific model of communication. . . . The Communication
Model is used with success whenever two or more biologi-
cal or social entities have to be related to each other. Where
the scientist has only one entity to contend with, the com-
munication model is less suitable.*

Here the relationship of man to man is studied as if
society consisted of entities comparable to the entities
which the physicist studies. The investigator, deceiving
himself into an attitude of concreteness and of handling
primarily given data, handles his "entities" so that in
the end they become empty abstractions. He acknowl-
edges the difference which exists between tliinking hu-
man beings, animals, and pebbles. But he tries to force
human relationship into a frame of physical references.
Cybernetics, the "feedback," and Heisenberg's principle
of indeterminacy contribute to the "model." The human
encounter is projected onto a screen of physical mat-
rices. It is noteworthy that for this to be possible the
Hellenic concept of Man and human values has to be
discarded; the Christian concept is not even mentioned.

In the traditional, class-theoretical, Aristotelian approach,
an event was grouped with other events into classes domi-
nated by similar characteristics. The establishment of a class
of events was determined by the question of regularity in
terms of frequency of recurrence, and therefore the indi-
vidual case has no place in Aristotelian thinking. . . .

* Jurgen Ruesch, "Synopsis of the Theory of Human Communica-
tion," Psychiatry, XVI, 215-243, 1953.

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 83

In the present-day, field-theoretical, Galilean approach,
events are studied with respect to the field in which they
take place, and an attempt is made to specify the conditions
under which an event might occur. Functions are conceived
as forces; as a result value concepts, dichotomies, and other
old-fashioned alternatives have gradually disappeared.* In-
asmuch as the laws in the field-theoretical approach are not
based on class characteristics but upon the relationship be-
tween an object and its field, similar principles can be ap-
plied to a single case also. While in the traditional class-
theoretical approach the characteristics of an object were
completely determined in advance, in the field-theoretical
approach the characteristics and dynamics of an object are
determined by its relationship to the surroundings. In social
science, the field-theoretical approach is more to the point
than the class-theoretical approach because all human be-
ings are surrounded by an environment and all scientific
observations have to be made from some position located
in the environment.!

This "field-theoretical, Galilean approach" is actually
Cartesianism pushed to an ultimate degree of absurd-
ity. Hommes machines make up a societe machine, and
the living together of human beings is like the Bell Tele-
phone System, though somewhat more complex. The
premisenamely, to replace the "class-theoretical, Aris-
totelian" approach by something concrete is fictitious.
The concreteness of the human subject is conjured

* The italics are mine,
fflli

84 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

away. Where there has once been the Community of
Man there is now the Mechanism of Communication.

Something similar can be observed in a comparatively
recent psychological discipline, the study of group dy-
namics. This is a trend in research which occupies itself
not with the single person but with groups of people
or even with people en masse. There exist group dy-
namics "laboratories" in which the relationships of per-
sons are determined. With and without their knowl-
edge, groups of human beings are observed in social
intercourse through one-way mirrors, with phono-
graphic gadgets. Rivalry and leadership, hostility and
submission, the mechanisms of "democracy" and of
hierarchies are scientifically studied. "Leaders" are be-
ing planted without the knowledge of the group for
the purpose of creating a definite psychological setting
such as subordination or rejection. The point is that
interactions of numbers of human beings are experi-
mentally manipulated and in the end represented in
graphs or other mathematical formulations or some-
how in the form of "laws." Here, too, the ideal (whether
explicit or not does not make any difference) is that the
social sciences should at some time reach a degree of
exactitude and predictability which would match those
of the natural sciences.

This is not only an academic fallacy. If this type of
psychology, with the mechanisms of group formation, of

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 85

hierarchical domination and so on, expressed in "be-
havior quanta" or in the "communication model/' could
lead to a revolution in group psychology comparable
to the Newtonian revolution in physics, there would be
only one result the destruction of everything that hu-
man beings cherish.

As we shall later see, the perfect psychological situa-
tion between human beings is the real meeting of "I"
and "Thou." This situation differs in essence from the
one which exists when man is confronted with inani-
mate nature the meeting of "I" and "It." In order to
fit "Thou" into a frame of mathematical references, you
must be reduced to an "It," and thus the relationship
becomes dehumanized. If anyone ever succeeded in
establishing laws about the relationships of men to one
another, comparable to the laws of physics, he would
create a world in which metaphysical values have no
place.* Freedom, love, and the personality itself would
be denied. Everything that makes human relationships
human would be lost.

It is obvious that not all social psychologists share
the hopes of arriving at a physics of group mechanisms.
Nor do they all work on the scientific premise of living
in a valueless world. If, for instance, a scientist studies
the mechanism of racial hatred in a social entity he

* This is the reason why many social psychologists who work on
the "model" refer to Bertrand Russell and John Dewey for their
philosophical basis.

86 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

must, consciously or not, assume moral laws which are
anchored outside the area of his science.

Nevertheless, the world of our experimental psychol-
ogist, with his ideal of "behavior quanta/' merges im-
perceptibly into a large ill-defined area composed of
social psychology, industrial psychology, and sociology,
in which the relationships of human beings are studied
in large groups, with the premise that human happi-
ness and discontent can be studied scientifically in
order to be engineered. The premise is a sort of scien-
tific ideal. Human society is studied in a vacuum ap-
paratus which has first been emptied of the breath of
the gospel.

In the history of science, as Whitehead has shown,
methods do not make their appearance in a haphazard
way. They arise out of the general cultural atmosphere
of the time. On the other hand new scientific methods,
in their turn, mold the cultural and social tissue. It
stands to reason that the conglomerate of methods and
the extreme methodological ideals associated with them
should make their appearance at this moment, when
industrialization and mass production make the smooth
working-together and living-together of large numbers
of people necessary.

As we have seen, these sciences must, at least to a
large extent, work on the premise that there is no
uniqueness and mystery to the person, or to his rela-

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 87

tionship with God, or to his relationship with other
persons. Some of the more radical exponents of this
trend postulate quite explicitly that anything of the
metaphysical order has to be discarded if we want real
progress in the direction of social engineering. K. R.
Popper * observes quite correctly that "the metaphysics
of history impede the application of the piecemeal
methods of science to the problems of social reform/'

"Piecemeal methods/' in this connection, is not a
deprecatory expression. On the contrary, Popper, a
physicist who ventured into this field because he had
been "interested for many years in the problem of the
backwardness of the social sciences," states that "piece-
meal social engineering" is our only salvation.

His argument runs as follows: All attempts at social
engineering thus far in the course of history have been
Utopian, or at least have had some Utopian element.
Therefore they have all had somewhere in their origin
an element of the metaphysical, the spiritual, the non-
scientific, and thus tended to be authoritarian. Even the
Marxist revolution, the biggest attempt at social engi-
neering in modern history, in spite of its atheistic-ra-
tionalist philosophy, had an undercurrent of faith and
of religious ideal. It had a messianic and Utopian taint,
and was therefore doomed to fail in its aim. Or per-
haps it had the wrong aim. At any rate, the author re-

K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1950.

88 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

marks that there is only one way to construct the ma-
chine of human society rationally and dispassionately,
in the same manner in which the physicist works you
have to discard first anything which is, even in the re-
motest, of the spiritual order.

Popper advocates "what I may term 'piecemeal social
engineering' in opposition to Utopian social engineer-
ing/" not so much because the former works better
(it is too early even for Popper to tell), but because
the latter is invariably corrupted by a metaphysical
idea. All the misery of Western man, his failure to run
on scientific ball-bearings, is traced back to Plato who
is treated throughout Mr. Popper's book as Public En-
emy Number One. Popper's survey has somehow the
air of the Great Inquisition. He pursues with remark-
able zeal his aim "to further the transition from the
tribal or 'closed society' with its submission to magical
forces, to the open society which sets free the critical
powers of man." From Aristotle, who is not quite as
bad as Plato but bad enough, down through the course
of history to Mr. Toynbee, who gets poor marks in his
capacity as a Christian but is recommended for his his-
torical erudition, every suspect is investigated. In fact,
the timid reader who does not agree with the author's
ideas, is bound to develop a vision of Popper's "closed"
society with himself left out in the "open."

This work is quoted here not because of its position
in the current sociological literature. In fact, there are

THE MECHANICS OF SOCIETY 89

quite a few sociologists who seriously criticize it. It is
quoted because it is symptomatic of a powerful trend
in the present-day social sciences. In works of this sort
we find the crystallization of a lot of elements which
otherwise are still in flux.

In summary, let us repeat that there is, of course,
"nothing wrong" with the social sciences as such. Need-
less to say, the science of statistics, the observation of
group relations, and all such things may in themselves
be valuable. What Socrates said in the Phaedo, in com-
parison to Professor Bykov, also applies here: when our
concept of values is distorted, when the idea of the
human person and of human community is lost, then
methods which are innocent in themselves become cor-
rosive.

V

The Dawn of Psychoanalysis

I not remembring how I cried out then
Will cry it o'er again: it is a hint
That wrings mine eyes to 't

Shakespeare, The Tempest

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to
the full Marcel Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone

We return now to psychoanalysis. The argument of this
book is historical in the widest sense of the word. An
attempt is being made to follow the dialectics of ideas:
to see how certain problems arose and how certain solu-
tions came about. In this chapter we are going to out-
line psychoanalytical concepts as they originally devel-
oped.

Only if we look at psychoanalysis emerging, as it
were, out of the background of the nineteenth century
are we properly capable of understanding its historical
meaning. Therefore in the present chapter we are laying
emphasis more on the "classical" than on the later
periods of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has devel-
oped into a huge body of observations, theoretical con-
90

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS Ql

cepts, therapeutic methods. Freud himself corrected
and changed some of his original concepts as time went
on. Moreover, new schools began to split off from the
Freudian tradition. Some of the more recent develop-
ments of Freudian psychoanalysis and of those deriva-
tive schools will be touched upon in the later chapters
of this book whenever this is necessary from the point
of view of our argument. Nor did psychoanalysis stop
at the understanding and treatment of the neurotic
patient, or the formation of a new psychology; quite
early it began to deal with cultural and religious ques-
tions and with mankind en masse. This aspect will also
be discussed in a later chapter.

In the middle iSgo's Freud published, first with
Breuer and later alone, a series of studies on hysteria.
"Hysteria" in the language of the psychiatrist is some-
thing different from "hysteria" as used in everyday Eng-
lish. The latter word has the connotation of becoming
"emotional," or excited and noisy. Hysteria in medical
terminology is a condition which imitates a physical,
frequently a neurological, disorder. For example, people
with half -sided numbness of the body (hemi-anesthe-
sia) are usually victims of a lesion, such as a hemor-
rhage, in certain parts of the nervous system which are
concerned with the function of sensation. However, a
condition of hemi-anesthesia may also occur in a patient
without any organic lesion of the nervous system what-
soever. Such a symptom (provided that the patient is

Q2 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

not a malingerer that is, intentionally and purposefully
faking a sickness ) is called hysterical.

Until 1894, hysterical symptoms were defined pre-
cisely in such a negative way by the absence of any
organic lesion which would account for their presence.
With the observations of Freud and Breuer the hysteri-
cal symptoms received a more positive definition for the
first time. Let us imagine that a soldier returns from an
extremely harassing experience in combat (say at Dun-
kirk) with hysterical blindness. This means that he is
blind, but without evidence of organic lesion of the
visual apparatus from cornea to the visual cortex of the
brain. This soldier is subjected to hypnotic sessions
(with or without pharmaceutic aid) and given the hyp-
notic suggestion of battle experiences under Dunkirk-
like conditions. He recalls, under hypnosis, many dread-
ful details which he cannot recall under the ordinary
wakeful conditions of history-taking. At the same time
he yells and cries like a child under the influence of
something horrifying. As he wakes up from this session,
he may have regained his eyesight.

In Freudian terminology, the original horrifying ex-
perience (Dunkirk) is called "trauma" (wound). The
inability to recall some of the most wounding details
of the experience is called "repression." The lively recall
under hypnosis is called "abreaction" or "acting out"
or "katharsis? All these concepts are well known to
most people today because everyone has done a certain

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 93

amount of reading in abnormal psychology. Now let us
consider the theoretical concepts which Freud intro-
duced to explain his observations. Our soldier's first
reaction (like anybody else's) might have been to cry
and yell in horror when he was cut off from his unit,
cornered with no chance of escape, and shot at from all
sides. However, he did not give way to this impulse
because it is "cowardly" that is, not compatible with
accepted moral standards. Now there exists in the
psychic universe of each person a law of conservation
of emotional tension which is comparable to the law of
conservation of physical energy in nature. The "amount"
of emotional tension repressed cannot just vanish. It is
directed into another channel and it re-appears under
the formation of a symptom (blindness). The symptom
is produced by a "conversion" (transformation) of emo-
tional tension. Under hypnosis the emotional tension
finds an outlet which had first been blocked: the patient
yells and cries with horror, and with this re-conversion
the symptom of blindness disappears. This is the reason
why this type of hysteria has since the early studies of
Freud and Breuer been generally called "conversion"
hysteria the idea of the hysterical symptoms being
something into which "psychic energy" has been "con-
verted"

These early investigations were the test tube experi-
ment, the small-scale model of all that psychoanalysis
later developed into. Soon it was found out that the

94 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

overt psychic injury (Dunkirk) was only a superficial
immediate cause. It was one link in a chain, or rather

a

in an involved net of chains which reached right back
into the dawn of the patient's history.

In other words, the idea of the trauma had to be
abandoned. There was rather a multiple set of traumas.
It looked almost as if life itself had been a tissue of in-
juries and, what was even more astonishing, the earlier
one went back into the patient's past the more trau-
matizing the events seem to have been. In order to
understand this better, one may illustrate it with the
biology of physical wounds, and with certain observa-
tions on the subjective experience of time. Microscopi-
cally small wounds inflicted on embryonic tissue in ex-
perimental embryology have a more fundamental effect
on the structure of the mature organism the earlier they
are inflicted. A small cut which would escape notice if
inflicted on the mature body after birth can produce
entire malformations if applied to the embryo. The mal-
formation is more monstrous the earlier the cut occurs.
If we assume that a similar law exists in our psychic
development, we understand much better why things
which go wrong in a minor way ("minor" by grown-up
standards ) may have a tremendous impact on the for-
mation of habits and on the structure of character when
they happen early in life to a psychic tissue which, like
embryonic tissue, is still fully charged with potentiali-
ties.

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 95

Moreover, we know from careful biological and psy-
chological studies that one's idea and experience of time
changes in a way which represents the inverse ratio of
a person's age. Everybody knows that, as we grow older,
time seems to move faster. When we think back to our
childhood, one springtime seemed to be separated from
the next by ages. As life goes on, the seasons move
closer together. For an old man the past ten years seem
to have succeeded each other rapidly. In the same way,
the first few years of infancy seem eons long, and the
first few days an eternity.

Thus, contrary to our test-tube example the story of
the blind soldier the trauma which stands out in such
a striking way has to be replaced by a vast multiplicity
of experiences. This is also true as far as the symptom
is concerned. Sudden blindness one outstanding illness
appears in the history of our patient like a sharply
defined, punched-out event. Such cases of conversion
hysteria are not frequent nowadays, and readers who
are not physicians will see very few of them in a life-
time.

In a patient who complains of the fact that he feels
tense in the presence of strangers, that he has an ex-
perience of anxiety when he is newly introduced to
someone, that he suffers from insomnia, from stomach
ache, headache and from lower back pain, the situation
is quite different. His complaints are diffuse, there are
several of them, and more often than not he is unable

g6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

to give a definite time at which all this began. Thus
we see that in contrast to the first observations which .
initiated the psychoanalytic development, in most cases
we are far from having to deal with one symptom, oc-
curring suddenly. We would invariably be wrong if we
assumed the existence of one trauma, the punched-out
event. Quite early it was discovered that hypnosis is a
poor method to investigate the unconscious significance
of a symptom and to heal it; there are much better
methods for this.

The basic principle of psychoanalysis was neverthe-
less contained in the very first writings of sixty years
ago. Experiences are stowed away into something which
is called the unconscious; the emotional tension asso-
ciated with them cannot vanish into nothingness; the
neurotic symptom is the product of a metamorphosis.
Whatever has been withheld from conscious life, for
any reason, breaks back into it under disguise.

Even at this early stage the concept of the uncon-
scious had acquired something peculiar. The existence
of an unconscious was nothing new. It was known that
the material of things remembered is stored away in us
somewhere outside consciousness. If someone asks you
how much three times seven is, you do not calculate;
you answer from memory. But since you have not been
thinking of the solution before you were asked, you
must have produced it from some unlit corner of your
mind. This is the neutral, bland concept of the uncon-

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 97

scious of the classical phase of experimental psychol-
ogy. However, in cases of conversion hysteria the un-
conscious was not bland. It acted as if it withdrew cer-
tain elements because they were too heavy to bear, re-
leased them again in clever disguise, and could only
with difficulty be tricked into releasing them with their
full charge of feeling. The relationship between the con-
scious and the unconscious part of the mind was, quite
contrary to the simple example of learned material,
part of the human drama. The relationship was, as we
put it nowadays, dynamica, term we have already ex-
plained in the case history of the old immigrant. Our
blind soldier, while spectator and part of a scene of
horror, had been under a moral conflict. His eyes said:
"We do not want to see!" In order to trace symptoms
back along the stream of the psychic, along thousands
of rivulets into their hidden origins, methods much
better than that of hypnosis had to be employed. One
of these methods was the free association of thoughts.
Most of our thinking during the day, particularly
when we talk, is directed toward a goal. We intention-
ally set out to think about something, or we want to
get something across. Thus our trend of thinking is
shaped into a pattern. It has a theme. It rarely happens
that our thoughts float freely without any mapped-out
direction. This occurs only in certain situations for
example, for a short while before we fall asleep. This
kind of thoughts appear, on the surface, meaningless*

98 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Moreover, for many reasons it is not easy during ordi-
nary wakeful thinking to let our thoughts drift in such
a manner. This type of thinking enters, as an important
element, into poetry. In fact, contemporary poetry has
enriched and deepened the stream of poetic imagery
precisely by this method and it is the reason why so
much of it appears at first sight as a crazy-quilt. It has
also quite consciously been employed in the novel, par-
ticularly by James Joyce. The apparent incoherence of
those free-floating thoughts becomes suddenly mean-
ingful when one looks at them more closely. One is able
to recognize a pattern in the seemingly patternless, a
grouping and coherence of a sort which is different from
the logic of wakeful thinking.

These laws were discovered quite independently of
Freud, by C. G. Jung at the beginning of this century.
Jung's discovery consolidated the foundations of the
psychoanalytic theory. The laws which seemed to gcfr-
ern the "crazy" flow of freely associated thoughts as
in a completely relaxed person shortly before falling
asleep were found to be closely related to the same
laws which governed the connection between symptom
and unconscious conflict in conversion hysteria. In fact,
it was seen that there is no such thing as "meaningless"
in the psychological order, provided that one admits
the basic Freudian contention that there exists a dy-
namic relationship between the unconscious and the
conscious. When the unconscious was no longer viewed

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 99

merely as a storage-room for multiplication tables, ge-
ography, and birthday dates the moment it became
personalized, as it were the entire distinction between
meaningful and meaningless in the realm of the psychic
disappeared. Particularly such manifestations of mental
life as dreams and the mistakes of everyday life (for-
getting, slips of the tongue, and so on) which had hith-
erto most frequently been regarded as senseless, sud-
denly "made sense" literally.

Whoever explores the unconscious has to study that
which, in the light of wakeful coherent thinking, ap-
pears absolutely or comparatively meaningless: free-
floating thoughts, dreams, and the mistakes of everyday
life. Actually the neurotic symptom belongs in this very
order of things. It "makes no sense" to be afraid to be
alone in a room, or to be afraid of any height higher
than the third floor, or to ruin one's life by drinking,
or to become suspicious every time your husband has
missed the bus and is ten minutes late, or to have to
look ten times to see whether the gas Jet in the kitchen
is closed. In other words there exist in the psychic order
two sets of phenomena which are senseless in the light
of logical thinking: those which are abnormal (such
symptoms as I have just haphazardly enumerated) and
those which are normal (free-floating thoughts, dreams,
and everyday lapses).

It often happens that patients who have done no
psychoanalytic reading, and who are asked to remem-

100 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

ber their dreams, come into the office for their second
session and report their "first" dream with the remark:
"It's completely crazy." And in a certain sense they
are right. Psychoanalytic studies have shown that all
those "normal" things which pass through our head
when we are "not thinking about anything in particu-
lar" and all the "abnormal" things which are regarded
as "crazy" (the common symptoms of insane and of
neurotic patients ) are intrinsically connected. A study
of the first set of phenomena elucidates the second set.
Their coherence is different from the logical coherence
of, let us say, algebra and geometry. But that vast dark
universe of the "meaningless" which exists outside the
world illuminated by logic becomes one meaningful
structure once we have introduced certain tentative
premises. Before we form concepts, before we think in
words, and before we begin to think in logical abstrac-
tions we go through an infantile phase in which the
universe of our mind consists of sensation and imagery.
The connection between that preconceptual rock bot-
tom and the upper layer of logical conceptual thinking
is mysterious. But it is not unfathomable.

This is a tremendous step forward. As we have al-
ready said, it is no exaggeration to compare this, in the
history of psychology, with the Galilean revolution in
the history of physics.

The next element to discuss in psychoanalytic theory
is the concept of libido. To explain this better one has

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 101

first to mention certain trends in the natural sciences
of the nineteenth century which entered into its for-
mation. One of these trends is characterized by the
well-known law of the conservation of energy that the
total amount of energy in the universe remains exactly
the same, even if the forms of energy change continu-
ously into one another. The other trend is the theory
of electromagnetic energy as elaborated by Maxwell
which simply says that all forms of energy except
gravity are, as it were, "different expressions of the
same thing." Thus visible light, X-rays, heat, ultra-red,
ultra-violet, and radio waves are all electromagnetic
waves. They differ from one another only by something
quantitative, namely wave lengths.

Another concept which enters into the theory of
libido lies outside the realm of physics. It is borrowed
from a biological discipline: embryology. The embry-
ologist studies the human form from the stage of the
fertilized ovum until birth. He follows the cell division
after conception, when the cells form a round compact
cluster (morula), then a hollow ball with an opening
(gastrula), dim ancestral phases of life through which
we all pass up to more and more differentiated ar-
rangements of tissues and organs, until finally the hu-
man body emerges as it appears at birth. During that
process the most extraordinary transmigrations occur.
It is as if Nature tried things out, rejected them as not
feasible, and started them all over in a new form. And
these "stabs/ 7 these achievements by "trial and error/'

102 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

are repeated in the life, before birth, of every human
being. Thus, for example, the kidneys as we know them
in the human body after birth, are actually our third
pair. In each human embryo Nature makes two stabs
at kidney formation which are rejected as if not appro-
priate, so to speak, for a human body. Only the third
try remains for keeps. Similarly, the gradual unfolding
of the form of the heart, of the central nervous system
are developments of such marvelous complexity that
they represent scientific disciplines in themselves; entire
libraries are devoted to the embryology of these organs.
Even the uninitiated reader will readily understand
that the science of embryology contributes a great deal
to the understanding of the abnormal. It is obvious, for
example, that the malformations with which some chil-
dren are born, can be understood only on the basis of
embryology. Thus, the condition commonly known as
harelip is due to the fact that two peninsulas, which
form part of the upper lip of the embryo, do not fuse
and remain gaping. The original morphology of the
face of the human embryo presents a weird picture.
Whoever sees a photograph of that stage for the first
time is shocked. There are three flaps of tissue converg-
ing toward a hole, the mouth. Under normal circum-
stances they are later to form the upper lip with its
symmetrical line swerving toward the angle of the
mouth on either side and the characteristic trough
which stretches from the middle of the nose straight

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 103

down. The fact that in the case of a harelip two out of
these three flaps do not fuse shows that a process has
been arrested before its completion. This is the mech-
anism of many malformations. It is even the origin of
certain tumors which grow in the adult body.

In other diseases it occurs that the organism reverts
to forms or functions which are normal during an em-
bryonic phase. For example, in certain diseases of the
blood, there occur blood cells which under normal con-
ditions circulate only in the embryonic blood. The same
is true about certain phases of inflammatory reactions
that is to say, when the organism is in danger. Thus we
see that besides arrestation at embryonic stages there
occurs also a regression to earlier forms of life.

I have gone in detail into the theoretical elements
borrowed from physics and from biology, which entered
into Freud's theory of libido, because a knowledge of
those elements makes this theory much more under-
standable. We have already seen that in the theory of
the conversion symptom the human person was con-
ceived as a universe in which no "emotional tension"
can be lost. Just as in the steam-engine heat is converted
into mechanical energy, thus in a child inner conflicts
and the tension associated with them may be ''con-
verted" into hysterical convulsions.

Libido, in the original meaning, means pleasure as
well as desire for pleasure. The word is used by ancient
authors in either of these two meanings. In the Freudian

104 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

theory all forms of pleasure are intrinsically related to
one another, not unlike the way in which the various
forms of electromagnetic energy are on the basis of
Clerk Maxwell's theory. Incidentally, during a later de-
velopment, the concept of libido was widened so as to
comprise all forms of love. Psychoanalysis does not say
that the pleasure of eating, the pleasure of walking,
sex pleasure and the rapture of artistic creation are all
"the same thing." We know that they are not and no
theory, no matter how clever, could convince us that
they are. Nor does physics claim that light, X-rays,
radio waves, and heat are all "the same thing/' But just
as Clerk Maxwell's mathematical procedure by which
they were, in a sense, regarded as "the same thing"
helped us understand an enormous mass of physical
data, so Freud's procedure by which all forms of pleas-
ure are, in a sense, regarded as "the same thing" helps
us to understand an enormous amount of psychological
data.

It goes without saying, incidentally, that, despite all
this, physics cannot tell us anything about the true na-
ture of energy. The existence in the cosmos of that
which is called "energy" is elucidated through the me-
dium of mathematical abstractions but the thing itself
is as mysterious as ever. So is the existence of Desire
and Pleasure in the psychological universe.

Phenomenologically, that is to say on the basis of
subjective experience, all forms of pleasure differ from

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 10$

one another. Nevertheless, they all (whether associated
with sex, or with eating, or with the experience of
beauty in nature or in art, and so on) have something
in common. This is also true as in the case of pain. A
toothache, a pain of the shin-bone, the experience after
receiving the news of the death of a beloved person-
all are entirely different. Yet they all have something in
common.

Now according to the psychoanalytic theory the vari-
ous forms of desire and of pleasure are related to one
another by a most extraordinary law of development.
According to this theory, the most intense form of bod-
ily pleasure, sexual orgasm, is ontogenetically (em-
bryologically) related to all forms of bodily pleasure.
(The words "ontogenetic" and "embryologicaT in this
connection refer to life after birth.) It has its typical
ontogenetic history. Libido, in its most archaic form, is
diffusely experienced all over the body. In its earliest
phase it is related to genital pleasure of the mature body
as a simple, undifferentiated structure (matrix) of em-
bryonic tissue is to the post-natal body with fully devel-
oped organs. However, even during those earlier
phases, there exist areas of higher concentration, as it
were. While in the infant the entire skin is erogenic,
those places in which skin and mucous membranes meet
the oral, anal, and urethral area are more so than the
rest of the skin. On that archaic level it seems that the
most powerful "sense" of communication, and of rela-

106 THE THIRD HEVOLUTION

tionship with the world outside the body, is through
the sense of touch, and there particularly through the
material exchange of matter which is not of the body-
namely, food and excrement.

Even these phases "primitive" as they appear to our
abstract, adult mode of thinking are highly significant
phases of development. It could not be otherwise if
one thinks of the time experience unimaginably mag-
nified, and of "wounds" becoming more decisive the
earlier our psychic tissue is affected. It is exceedingly
difficult to reconstruct such an image of ourselves and
of the world in which each one of us lived at one time.
Moreover, the thinking of scientifically trained people
is such that, at best, such an archaic image of the world
of experiences is one thing and our adult mode of think-
ing is another. It is hard to grasp the meaningful, or-
ganic connection between the two.

We have seen that during an early phase of life the
cells form a hollow ball with a mouthlike opening. An
entire class of water animals does not develop any fur-
ther. The so-called coelenterates remain forever in the
gastrula phase. A gastrula is, in the most literal sense
of the word, "all mouth." Now, according to Freud's
ontogenetic concept of the development of libido, some-
thing analogous exists in the psychic development of
the infant. During the so-called first oral phase of our
libidinal development we are "all mouth," in a passive
receptive way, not unlike coelenterates. The pleasure

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 10/

sensation in the oral area at the insertion of the nipple
and the actual feeding is the earliest and dimmest pre-
historic phase which leads up to genital sexuality. This
phase is followed by the second oral phase, around the
development of teeth, during which the child begins
actively and aggressively to "go out" for food, and dur-
ing which part of the pleasure is not only intake but
also destruction (second oral phase). The passing of
fecal material through the anal opening is associated
with pleasure sensation (first anal phase). Later the
child learns to retain or give fecal material at will, and
during this phase (second anal phase) the retention
and the "giving" of material is associated with pleasure
or with spite. These early infantile phases which are
called pregenital change at a time, around the age of
four, in which there occurs for the first time concen-
tration of pleasure and desire in the genital area. This
first genital phase during infancy is something which
one might regard as an abortive form of puberty. It
subsides during the so-called phase of 'latency" (from
about the age of four to about the age of ten) which is
followed by prepuberty and then puberty.

In order to outline the libido theory of neuroses in its
most fundamental points one would have to add many
things. For example, it is important to realize that ac-
cording to this theory there is an early phase during
which love knows no extraneous object. It is restricted
to the immense world of the individual's own body.

108 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Moreover, at that stage the border between self and the
outside world is still blurred in a way which is difficult
to reconstruct for us grown-up people. The mother who
is actually an object of love is still something like a
huge organ-like extension of the self. The object of love
is a sort of pleasure-giver, not yet exteriorized by the
self, and in an archaic, "magic" way part of the subject.
"Lust demands infinity"; this saying of Nietzsche is
particularly appropriate to that earliest phase of our
libidinal development. At the time when that pleasure-
giving mother becomes outlined as a clear object out-
side ourselves our aggressive, destructive instincts are
developed. And when the child realizes that the stream
of love emanating from the mother is not solely directed
toward himself but partly beamed at others, he wants
to eliminate those competing objects. This is the time,
around the "first genital phase," when the boy experi-
ences the father or any other male figure as a com-
petitor for the mother's love. As is well known, this con-
flict is named Oedipus conflict after the famous Greek
story of Oedipus who killed his father and married his
mother without realizing their identity. In girls the
Oedipus drama has the same powerful impact but its
plot is more complex and less well understood. Nor-
mally the Oedipus conflict is resolved by the process of
identification. During the 'latent" phase the boy begins
to pattern himself after the father, the girl after the
mother. We shall later come back to the mechanism of

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 10Q

identification. (In fact, several of the mechanisms out-
lined here in an elementary way will be encountered
again later.) This refers also to another aspect of the
psychoanalytic theory which is closely related to the
theory of libido that is, the organization within our
unconscious of our instinctual drives and of our forces
of restraint.

The Ego that is, our self at every second of our
wakeful existence (the T' which experiences and
thinks) is continuously between two energy fields, as
it were. First, there are instinctual forces which demand
the fulfillment of desire (the Id). Second, there are
forces which demand restraint and punishment (the
Super-ego ) . These latter have originally been extrane-
ous but they became incorporated, and their life within
us is, curiously enough, in many ways not unlike that
of the instincts. Id and Super-ego are both forever pul-
sating at the rim of consciousness. And just as the pilot
of a plane is directed by the principle of radio pulses
which make themselves heard the moment the airplane
deviates from its route, the Ego, our conscious self-
awareness, finds itself under healthy circumstances in a
balance between instinctual and restraining forces.
Since the Super-ego is derived from real people, paren-
tal figures, whom we have "internalized," it has its own
natural history in every individual. It is perhaps first
always a purely inhibitory force but then it develops
also a positive function: there is a part in us which is

HO THE THIRD REVOLUTION

pleased, like the benevolent parent, when we do some-
thing good. Of course, in neuroses we are usually much
more concerned with the primitive or even cruel aspect
of the Super-ego. This too will be more fully discussed
in connection with problems pertaining to our main
theme.

With reference to Freud's theory of libido, several
things should be remarked at this stage of our discus-
sion. A great number of people have a strong resistance
against the idea of infantile sexuality. A theory which
regards the most innocent pleasures of childhood as
early forerunners of the genital pleasure of the adult
appears revolting. We frequently find behind this feel-
ing the idea that infantile pleasure, for example of suck-
ing, is pure while sex is "dirty" or bad. Actually there
is nothing in Christian doctrine which makes sex as such
"dirty" or bad. That there exists a first genital phase
can hardly be denied on the basis of simple clinical ob-
servation. The fact that man, contrary to animals, has
two puberties, an abortive one and a proper one, with
a latent phase in between the two, opens up an entirely
new aspect of the development of the human personal-
ity. We do not like to associate childhood with hatred
and destructiveness, yet our reasoning is strangely dis-
torted if we think of the innocent age, the age without
guilt, as also the age without evil. Actually it would be
an extraordinary paradox to assume that hatred and
envy, fantasies of murder and destruction made their

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 111

grand entry into the human personality only with the
full development of reason.

Another aspect of psychoanalysis which we have to out-
line here briefly is the phenomenon of transference.
Not long after the psychoanalytic method proper had
been inaugurated, Freud was struck by a peculiar fact.
During treatment the physician became an object of
love and hatred. The patient's attitude toward the doc-
tor went through phases of an intense emotional color-
ing. These phases were mysterious. They could not, like
ordinary love and hatred, be explained by the actual
situation. The mystery was solved when it was found
that in such a setting the physician was not a neutral
figure but represented, under disguise, a powerful figure
from the patient's infantile background. Usually he was
a parental figure, a father or a mother, or a sibling
figure, a brother or sister. The love or hatred experi-
enced during the treatment were not directed toward
the analyst, but toward someone else in whose place he
stood. The patient was not aware of this. But when it
was interpreted to him at the proper moment he learned
to realize something which is so highly important to us
if we want to understand ourselves; namely, that all
our emotional relationships are tainted by a carry-over.
That which determines our earliest relationships the
original "plot" which is played between ourselves and
those huge over-lifesize dramatis personae of the fam-

112 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

ily-has an impact on all the later dramas of life. We
paraphrase it, we vary it a bit, but what we really
want to do is to play it over and over again. And the
reason why so many things go mysteriously wrong be-
tween ourselves and people around us, at school, at
work, in marriage, is that we repeat performances of a
play which was actually, in every single case, unique.
This carrying over of unfinished business, let us say
from the relationship "son-father" to the relationship
"patient-doctor," is called transference. A great deal of
analytical treatment consists of interpreting again and
again this transference to the patient until the gap
between infantile fantasy and objective reality gradu-
ally widens. This, in fact, is the aim of all psychoana-
lytical therapy. It is not an exaggeration to say that the
patient is well when he is able to encounter people in
his everyday environment without endowing them with
qualities which are borrowed from the persons who
populated the primeval stage.

There is one more psychoanalytical concept which has
to be briefly explained in order to make the following
discussions clearer the concept of sublimation. The
word "sublimation" is borrowed from chemistry. There
it means the changing of a substance from its solid to
its gaseous state, without passing first through the liquid
state. In psychoanalysis it means the transformation of

THE DAWN OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 113

instinctual drives into forms of human energy on a more
elevated level.

This concept existed, in various aspects, long before
Freud. For example, it was a rule during antiquity that
athletes should remain sexually abstinent before some
sports event; this ascetic practice would enhance their
athletic prowess. Several famous artists have stated that
sexual abstinence increased their creativeness. All this,
contrary to the psychoanalytic concept, refers to the
conscious level. Like some other psychoanalytic con-
cepts, the idea of sublimation was anticipated by nine-
teenth-century German philosophy this one particu-
larly by Schopenhauer. In psychoanalytic theory, due
to the ideas of quantities of energy and so on, the con-
cept of sublimation has a strongly mechanistic flavor.
But it corresponds to an obvious fact just the same,
and one can readily see why it should play a great role
in neuroses and their therapy.

In connection with the concept of sublimation, we
can anticipate something which will later be elaborated.
The idea of sublimation shows clearly that something
mechanistic, a "process" analogous to a chemical one,
an image borrowed from the test-tube, is poorly defi-
cient in comparison with the thing for which it stands.
Actually it has vast implications. For example, suppose
I could show that a headmaster of a school who is an
outstanding educator has "sublimated" his 'latent ho-
mosexuality" in his work. In this case I would demon-

114 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

strate something for which all clinical terms are primi-
tive symbols. I would actually, without realizing it, be
touching upon something of the ontological order at
any rate something which is beyond the clinical and the
psychological. This is a thread which we shall have to
pick up again at another phase of this discussion.

VI

The Third Revolution

It is simply incomprehensible how anybody can con-
sider the Christian doctrine of redemption as a guide for
the difficult life of today. Joseph Goebbels, Diaries

Only that which is replaced, is destroyed.

Auguste Comte

The things which have been explained in the preceding
chapter may be true or not. But the question whether
they are true or not is not a philosophical problem. To
dispute the basic tenets of psychoanalysis on philo-
sophical grounds would be just as wrong as to dispute
certain tenets of physics on philosophical grounds. All
we can say is that nothing discussed in the preceding
chapter is incompatible with a Christian idea of the
nature of man. On the contrary, we shall see that these
^tenets fit in perfectly with such an idea. If the tenets
are, as we think, empirically established, there is no par-
adox. Anything true is part of Truth itself.

It is therefore the more surprising that psychoanalysis
is considered a vicious onslaught against Christianity,
in fact against any religious belief. There are two main

Il6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

reasons for this which we have to discuss separately.
First, Freud did not stop at factual statements to which
the tests of veracity can be applied. He ventured into
philosophy and expounded his ideas on religion. Sec-
ond, Freud's psychological concepts, by a strange his-
torical development, fused with many of the scientific
concepts of the nineteenth century. Sciences which,
from the point of view of method, are quite opposed to
one another, form strange combinations. Psychoanalysis
has been confirmed, in parts, by brain physiology; the
social sciences have borrowed working concepts from
psychoanalysis, and so on. All this is well and good.
But it means that certain distinctions which are very
important to the clarification of our present thesis have
become blurred. When one is dealing with hybrids, it
is hard to get a clear idea of basic premises.

Philosophy itself has a unifying power. Just as all
people who believe in the Divinity of Christ and the
work of the Redemption are united by certain basic
concepts, people who have abandoned their belief in
the supernatural are united by other basic concepts.
Thus, all sciences pertaining to Man have a tendency to
coalesce into a sort of body which is entirely separate
from a Christian anthropology.

Let us first discuss Freud's philosophy of religion and
then certain present-day trends with which it falls in.
Freud himself has written several essays on religion;
there are numerous papers on this subject by his pupils.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 117

We cannot discuss Freud's views on religion in as great
detail as we should like, but this has been done by sev-
eral writers.* The general nature of Freud's views on
religion can be summarized in two points.

First, Freud's method in dealing with anything spiritual
is reductive. This means that Freud reduces everything
which, to the religious believer, is in the supernatural
order, to something in the natural order. For example,
the idea of God, says Freud, is a father image projected
on the sky. The child originally has a concept of an
omnipotent father who is able to fulfill all his needs. In
the degree to which the child develops a grasp of real-
ity, that image of the father is gradually erased. Instead
of it, a fantasy figure, a father in heaven, becomes im-
bued with the same qualities of omnipotence and pro-
tectiveness.

To take another example, Freud would say that the
idea of Holy Communion is derived from the primitive
state (or childhood) of mankind, when the rite of oral
incorporation of the father, in cannibalistic or sacri-
ficial ceremonies, was common.

In other words, God is nothing but the father and
Holy Communion is nothing but cannibalistic oral in-
trojection. In fact, anything in the spiritual order is

* B. G. Sanders, Christianity after Freud, London, 1949, in which
the author brings out several illuminating details. Also Roland Dalbiez,
La mtthode psyckanalytique et la Doctrine Freudienne, Paris, 1936.

Il8 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

"nothing but." This is quite logical for Freud. If one
denies the existence of things beyond the natural, the
only possible conclusion is a philosophy of "nothing
but," a philosophy of debunking. This is common to
all materialist trends of the nineteenth century, in-
deed to all schools of thought which look on nature as
something outside a Christo-centric sphere. To a mod-
ern astronomer the earth is nothing but an insignificant
speck in the galaxy; to the biologist man is nothing but
some chance product of an evolutional process which
has no transcendental meaning; to a dialectical materi-
alist cultural achievements are nothing but by-products
of the economic struggle.

This theory of "nothing but" appears the more devas-
tating the more it advances toward things of a psychic
nature. This is why the "nothing but" of Freud appears
more threatening to the faithful Christian than, let us
say, the "nothing but" of the post-Copernican astrono-
mer. Actually, in principle it is the same thing. Only
with the Freudian reductive philosophy the opposing
fronts are drawn up much more clearly than before.
The "nothing but" of Freud is the complete inversion,
the upside-down, the perfect mirror image of the Chris-
tian position. Whereas Freud tells us that God is noth-
ing but a father figure, or that the idea of the Eucharist
is nothing but oral introjection, a Christian philosopher
would say: "Even in the child's relationship to the
father, there is contained a crude foreshadowing of our

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 11Q

relationship to God," or "Even in the earliest sacrificial
rituals, there is contained a crude foreshadowing of the
idea of Holy Communion," and so on. Saint Paul speaks
in these terms quite explicitly: "God, after Whom all
fatherhood on earth is named" (Eph. 3: 15). The situa-
tion is similar to certain law-suits in which two testi-
monies are given which contradict each other com-
pletely. Here for once it is quite impossible that both
parties are right. Contrary to the history of other clashes
between science and religion, in this case a compromise
or a settlement out of court will not do.

The most remarkable of all the reductive statements
is this: Religion is nothing but an obsessive-compulsive
neurosis. This brings us to our second point, the his-
torical theories of religion which Freud developed in
various papers and which the reader can study in detail
in the author's original works. A compulsive-obsessive
neurosis is a state in which the patient sees himself
forced to go through apparently irrational acts. He may

V

have to wash his hands a certain number of times in
situations in which handwashing is actually not war-
ranted; he may have to touch certain objects; he may
have to avoid the touching of o&er objects; he may
have to avoid certain steps on the staircase or repeat
certain other steps a given number of times, and so on.
There is something "ritualistic" *bout many of these
compulsive-obsessive acts. For eaftniple, some of them
are carried out before going to btfl and unless they are

120 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

carried out the patient cannot sleep in peace. Moreover,
these acts usually have no practical meaning, and when
they are carried out repeatedly one can sometimes ob-
serve a preference for "magic" numbers, such as three
or seven. It occurred to Freud quite early in the course
of his studies that all great religions appear like obses-
sive-compulsive mechanisms on a large scale trans-
posed into mass psychology, as it were. From this he
concluded that religion is a compulsive-obsessive neu-
rosis. Indeed, the liturgical ritual and the ascetic ideal,
i -A r o elements which all the great religions of the world
Ivjve in common, bear a striking resemblance to the
eovap';?sive symptoms of neuroses. There are certain
Ettlivick^ls in whom even the inner experience accom-
panying religious activities is similar to that encoun-
tered AE ear<n>ulsive neurotics.

It is du^otenstic of compulsive-obsessive patients
that in e^Hv childhood, before the latent phase, a
trauma or a set of traumas occurred. This trauma is as-
sociated with guilt. The obsessive thought or the com-
pulsive act of the patient can be shown to represent an
unconscious re-enacbnent of the traumatic experience,
or an unconscious act of penance a ritual to ward off
punishment threatening from without. Almost all chil-
dren, for example, luv- : .^.apulsive tendencies during
pre-puberty. These u^ai^uously self-imposed rituals
of penance have something to do with the re-awaken-
ing of the sexual in^faet during the second genital

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 121

phase, which brings with it a re-awakening of precon-
ceptual infantile feelings of guilt.

In studying the phenomena of religious practice,
Freud came to the conclusion that there must exist an
analogy in the history of mankind. In a dim faraway
prehistoric phase, some horrible offense must have been
committed. When man lived through his early infancy,
in a social structure which is best described as "the
horde of sons," the Big Crime, the killing of the father,
was carried out. All ideas of sacrifice, particularly all
sacrificial rites, can be explained on this basis. In his
papers on religion, particularly in Moses and Monothe-
ism, Freud elaborated this hypothesis in sweeping, dar-
ing lines to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of the
origin of Judaism and Christianity (which he conceived
as a logical development of Judaism).

A factual criticism of this theory has been made by
others, and therefore should not be repeated here. Con-
sidering that all this was written by an atheist of the
nineteenth century, the reader must be struck by some-
thing else. This is not quite the language and the
thought of the typical "debunking' 7 scientist. A logical
positivist could not have painted such a tableau. To him
the idea of reconstructing the story of a primeval horde
of sons, of the Great Patricide by which something like
, collective guilt came into the world, must appear mad.
It is not quite the language of science. If one compares
this story with the writings on religion from the time

122 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

of the Enlightenment, one feels indeed that something
new has been added. Anyone who has read the typical
anti-religious pamphlets by nineteenth-century scien-
tists cannot help feeling that there is in Freud's writings
on religion too much of the other nineteenth century,
the century of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the century
of spiritual restlessness. That entire story of the one
horrid transgression which, after millenniums of "la-
tency/* brings the origin of "religion" about, is (quite
irrespective of its merits with regard to truth or falsity)
somehow not the proper thing for a scientific atheist.
Mr. Popper would undoubtedly detect a metaphysical
scent in it.

As Sanders in his critical study has already pointed
out, there is actually nothing in Freud's analysis which
would explain why the sons felt guilty at all after kill-
ing the father, and why such collective guilt would
establish itself once and for all in the hearts of men.
There is nothing on the psychological plane which
would account for such a strange story of inheritance.
There are remarkable points of resemblance with the
Christian version, the story of the Fall. "Paul, a Roman
Jew from Tarsus, seizes upon this feeling of guilt and
correctly traced it back to its primeval source/' * It is
remarkable that Freud should use the word "correctly."
If a modern scientist, without any faith in the super-
natural, without any acknowledgment of that which is

* Freud, Moses and Monotheism.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 123

of the order of Grace, set out to debunk religion and
produced his own homemade theology this is just
about as close to the world of revelation as he possibly
could come.

There are two big schools of anti-Christian philoso-
phy in the world today: dialectical materialism in
Russia and scientific positivism outside Russia. Freud's
anti-religious writings do not fit into either of them.
They are not quite rationalistic enough. They are odd.
They emphasize too much an element of tragedy. And
it is most characteristic of all scientific materialism
(whether of the Russian or of the Western variety) that
it denies tragedy. Its solutions are simple and pat.
Therefore we should not be surprised that Freud's
papers dealing with the historical origin of monotheism
have not had a profound influence on the reading public
as a whole. They have created nothing in the popular
mind like the wave following the post-Darwinian evo-
lutionist literature; there is nothing in these writings
to "catch on."

It is quite easy to disprove Freud's theory on its own
terms. One does not even need to bring in theology.
The argument is flimsy, regardless of what one's faith
or lack of faith may be. If one accepts Freud's theory
of the development of libido, one thing (e.g., the Eu-
charist) cannot be another thing (primeval cannibalistic
ritual). The relationship is quite different. Supposing
you were enthralled by the beauty of the face of

124 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Michelangelo's "David," and I opened a textbook of
human embryology and showed you a picture with
bulblike eye buds, a gaping slit for a mouth, and the
arches of gills underneath. You might say: "Isn't it mar-
velous how the human face can develop out of that
_form!" Or: "How mysterious! Why do we all have to
pass through this stage? If nature meant us to have
a face, why not just have one?'* These remarks would
be justified. But if I tried to destroy your enthusiasm
by saying: "My dear man, David's face is nothing but
two bulblike buds, a slit, and arches of gills under-
neath," you would doubt whether I was in my right
mind. And quite rightly so, because the one thing just
is not the other. What is more, in order to understand
the form and beauty of the face of "David," we do not
need to know anything about embryology. As a matter
of fact, that knowledge might even detract, if anything,
from the aesthetic enjoyment.

It is important to realize that the "nothing but"
philosophy contains in addition a grain of Manichaean
hatred of nature. When a man says that a rose is noth-
ing but humus and manure (because this is the stuff out
of which it grows), he is not only wrong. He also im-
plies that the rose cannot be such a beautiful form as
all that because it is made up of something which is
"not nice." This element is common to all debunking
_ philosophies. A very common debunking formula is con-
tained in this thought expressed by Mr. Popper: "It is

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 125

well known that the terminology of mysticism, the mys-
tical union, the mystical intuition of beauty, mystical
love, have in all times been borrowed from the realm
of relations between individual men, and especially
from the experience of sexual love. . . ." This is true.
It is generally accepted that the Song of Songs refers
to human love and to mystical union at the same time.
One can interpret it either way. But Popper's objection *
not only means that mysticism is nonsense because it
cannot be formulated scientifically; it also means that
mysticism must be nonsense because its terminology is
borrowed from something "low." There is in the "noth-
ing but" or debunking approach a subtle, hidden con-
tempt for the flesh, a hatred of nature. The psychoana-
lyst turned philosopher is just like the positivist, a dis-
guised half-brother of the Puritan.

The fallacy has still another aspect the overexten-
sion of the psychological method, beyond the domain
of psychology. If someone decides, merely on the basis
of psychological observation, what God is, what Holy
Communion is, what Mystical Union is then there is
no boundary to psychology. This would mean that psy-
chology can answer all problems, and that things have
no true essence.

Many modern thinkers who took a destructive line,

* Mr. Popper's argument has, of course, nothing whatever to do
with psychoanalysis; it is the principle behind his argument which
interests us.

126 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

from Nietzsche to Jean-Paul Sartre, have succumbed to
this fallacy. The same thing can be said about the ob-
servations on "religion" by representatives of the so-
called cultural psychoanalytical schools who are be-
lieved to have rejected Freud's materialism. It is most
remarkable that Husserl, just around the beginning of
this century, and apparently without being aware of the
beginnings made by Freud, warned of the danger of
what he called psychologism. Little did he realize the
disastrous social implications of all this.

Like all materialist philosophies the Freudian, too, con-
tains inner contradictions, certain idealist* elements
in disguise. For example, if one really believed whole-
heartedly in the primacy of blind instinctual drives and
determination by the irrational, the entire idea of sub-
limation would make no sense. Freud has indicated time
and time again that sublimation is the ideal solution of
the neurotic conflict; Thomas Mann says that this alone
puts him in line with the great humanists. But this
means the introduction of a moral principle which is not
intrinsic to the system. As we have already pointed out,
in psychoanalytical literature sublimation is usually de-
scribed in mechanistic terms. Since instincts, if they
were freely expressed, would clash with social taboos,

* The word "idealist" is not meant in the technical sense of a defi-
nite philosophical school but generally as indicating the opposite of
"materialist/*

THE THIRD REVOLUTION * 127

they are channeled into something else. Actually no-
body really believes in such a crude machinery. The
very formation of the concept of sublimation implies the
existence of something beyond it. Does anyone really
believe that families are founded, orphans are cared for,
the sick are tended to, cathedrals are erected, sympho-
nies are composedonly because instinctual drives are
blocked by society? The adherence to the "machinery"
when it comes to these questions is due to the fear which
all authors of mechanistic systems have of the idea of
finality. Even if one accepted the mechanistic concept
to that extent, the question would still have to be an-
swered as to why "society * began to inhibit instinctual
drives in the first place.

There is a resemblance between this paradox and the
famous one in which the Marxists are involved. If one
took the Marxist philosophy literally, it would be non-
sense to go to prison for it, to face Siberia or a firing
squad, to endure hunger and sickness, or to do any-
thing at all so that later generations, after our death,
should live in a society in which justice reigns. Yet this
was the moral philosophy of many early Marxist revo-
lutionaries.

It has frequently been pointed out that in Marx's
philosophy of history, with the proletariat, the down-
trodden class, in the role of a savior there is something
like a prophetic and messianic afterthought, not at all
in step with dialectics* There is something similar the

128 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

matter with Freud's theory as to how religion came
about. As we have seen, it bears strange resemblances
-to the Christian "myth" itself. With all its distortions,
it is derived from somewhere beyond the biological
diagrams.

In view of the oddity of Freud's books on religion,
their subtlety and complexity, their hidden element of
tragedy which removes them from the category of pop-
ular literature, we must ask ourselves: How can those
ideas possibly find an expression in the social structure?
How can they shape the outlook and the philosophy of
the common man in the way in which the post-Darwin-
ian evolutionist ideas did?

There are various reasons for apprehension about the
effect of these ideas. First, the philosophy of "nothing
but" of reduction is the most widely accepted psycho-
analytic tenet. This has really penetrated popular
thought, in contrast to Freud's historical theory of Ju-
daeo-Christianity. It is most harmoniously in step with
a general phase of moral and spiritual devaluation.
There are a great many people with college educations
who have only an imperfect knowledge of what psycho-
analysis is really about, yet the "nothing but" philosophy
expresses clearly what they have been somehow aware
of all the time. Even if they would not go the whole way
about libido or the nature of the unconscious, they
would readily admit that God is nothing but a glorified

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 12Q

father image, and that the church is certainly only a
mother image, a womb. This movement of devaluation
is happening on a considerable social scale.

In addition to the regular body of knowledge which
is part of our education and culture, there is a second
body, the Encyclopedia of Better-Knowing. Not only do
we know things; we are at the same time "enlightened"
about them. This phenomenon is part of a movement
which might be called the Inverted Renaissance. During
the Renaissance, as everybody knows, philosophers and
theologians intruded in matters which were strictly of
the scientific order. Whatever the historical details may
have been in the famous case of Galileo, science did not
benefit from such a theological intrusion at the begin-
ning of modern times. There is no reason why philoso-
phers and theologians, who deal with things of the
metaphysical order, should become involved with such
questions as the number of teeth in a horse's mouth,
or the elliptic curves of stellar movements. The dread-
ful mistake was made and very soon the opposite proc-
ess got under way; today we are at the height of the
reaction. Today science takes its revenge for what hap-
pened four hundred years ago. There are continuous
forays and occasional invasions into the domain of met-
aphysics. The results are always disastrous.

This can be best demonstrated by the case of Darwin.
It sounds incredible, but there is a direct line leading

130 THE THIBD REVOLUTION

from Darwin to Hitler. It seems grotesque to link up the
innocent passenger of the good ship Beagle, one of the
finest examples of what a scientist should be, with the
concentration camps of Belsen and Buchenwald. Yet
the fact remains that there is a link. Darwin's theory
of the survival of the fittest has to be judged on its own
merits, as a scientific hypothesis. It referred to animals,
not to men. But it contributed, quite independently of
the intentions of its originator, to something which one
might call the climate of our times. The beginning was
harmless enough: pamphlets were tossed from rectories
into laboratories and back. However, it was not long
before men like the German Nietzsche and the French-
man Gobineau appeared on the scene. These men
thought that it might not be such a bad idea for society
if the stronger ones stepped on their less well-endowed
brethren meaning human beings. Even at that stage
there was something academic and, in a sense, aristo-
cratic about the entire affair. If one had known one of
those thinkers personally he would undoubtedly have
said: "They talk like that, but they don't really mean it."
It took another generation for this thought to have any
influence on the lives of people, and it finally "made
history"

Several things had to happen to achieve this success.
This philosophy agglutinated with other similar trends.
There was Wagner's and Schopenhauer's irrational
"death magic"; there existed a political philosophy of

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 131

strength and superiority; there followed the political
and social setting of Central Europe in the era following
the First World War; and certain personalities (who
are always ready to make a mass distribution of ideas
in a cheap edition) appeared on the scene. In other
words, it took three generations for a new scientific con-
cept to have its full impact on the world of values. An
element of the natural order, the biological nature of
Man, was elevated to a position of primacy. Three gen-
erations later the human image was distorted beyond
recognition.

Unlike Darwin, and in this respect more like Freud,
Karl Marx supplied his own philosophical superstruc-
ture for the theory of economic determinism. Actually,
Marx also began with a "nothing buf r theory. The ques-
tions of whether there exists such a thing as surplus
value, and whether things of the spirit are really noth-
ing but accidental by-products of what happens on the
economic plane, are really quite academic. Das Kapital
is a book of the same kind as The Origin of Species,
except perhaps that it is drier and less readable. In the
case of this "reductive" theory too it took three genera-
tions, and a similar mechanism of agglutination and
vulgarization, until the finished product was achieved
in our century. The important point is that here too
something of the natural order was elevated to a posi-
tion of primacy over the spirit. The result has been a
most fiendish form of dehumanization, something like

132 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

a preternatural spectacle in which the human form can
no longer be discerned. I agree with those who believe
that the prophet himself would not recognize his prod-
uct today. After all, Marx with all his hostility against
the existing order, with all the blustering jargon and
furious invective, seems primarily to have been moved
by a human feeling for social justice and a human dis-
satisfaction with the ills of the early period of indus-
trialization. This moral motivation got completely lost
in the historical development.

The unspeakable things which happened when the
biological was allotted a position of primacy in Ger-
many, and when the economic was allotted a position
of primacy in Russia, should give us a fair warning.
"A man will reap what he sows; if nature is his seed-
ground, nature will give him a perishable harvest; if
his seed-ground is the spirit, it will give him a harvest
of eternal life" (St. Paul, Epistle to the Gal. 6, 8* ).

The "nothing but" which is the core of Freudian philos-
ophy is bound to have an impact no less formidable.
One cannot just say these things in an atmosphere of
academic neutrality. The situation is precisely the same
as in the two other "revolutions." The entire philosophi-
cal superstructure which the creator of psychoanalysis
delivered, together with his discovery, was not much

* Knox translation.

THE THIBD REVOLUTION 133

more than an academic play. Despite all the fun Freud
made of the "moralists," he himself was a man of great
moral nobility. There are numerous facts about his own
life to substantiate this. It is the same theoretical para-
dox which one encounters in so many of the early dia-
lectical materialists.

However, the psychological revolution has already
sped far past the aristocratic and esoteric stages; it has
entered the phase of vulgarization. The philosophical
utterances of the second and third echelons lack the
lonely and tragic element of the original theorists. They
are related to Freud as some of the German and Aus-
trian experts on the philosophy of the race were to
Nietzsche and Gobineau. What is even more remark-
able, the process of agglutination which we have seen
in the development of the biological revolt is quite ad-
vanced. We have seen that behaviorism and the reflex-
ology of Pavlov were originally quite opposed to psy-
choanalysis. They discard the empathic-intuitive ele-
ment in psychology as unscientific. They accept only
the homme machine of Descartes, the mechanistic
model, as the last image of truth beyond which there is
nothing. So does the cybernetics man turned psychi-
atrist. In so far as Freud introduced the terminology of
the "model" (the "quantum" of libidinal energy which
is shunted back and forth), he has outwardly assimi-
lated his system to that of the homme machine. This is
one of the reasons why he is a determinist and regards

134 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

the idea of free will as an illusion. Moreover, as we
have seen, there are large areas in the social sciences
in which, for the purpose of scientific inquiry, numbers
of people in their relationships to one another are
treated under the fictitious premise of a mechanism.
The same is true about large sectors of anthropology
and comparative sociology. In other words, the psycho-
analytic movement has fused with a body of the most
divergent kinds of science which deal with human
problems.

It is a huge body of synthesis, of cross-breeding in
which psychoanalysis as such, the art of the healing
dialogue, can no longer be recognized. What interests
us most is the fact that those sciences can be used for
managerial purposes; they can easily be employed
as a tool for the manipulation of great numbers of
human beings. Moreover, they have an imponderable
but vast influence on the common sense of values. As
far as the first feature is concerned one is able, even
now, to discern signs of things to come. It is little real-
ized to what extent behavioristic and psychoanalytical
knowledge is already being used for managerial pur-
poses.*

The beginnings look harmless to the superficial ob-
server. A chewing gum company wanted to know why
people chew gum. An advertising agency which em-

*For detaik see Ralph Goodman, "Freud and the Hucksters,"
The Nation, CLXXVI, 143-145, 1Q53-

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 135

ploys psychologists undertook the task of research.
They produced three reasons for gum chewing "for
oral comfort, for release of tension, to express symbolic
hostility and aggression." The advertising agency next
made a comprehensive sociological survey "of a coal-
mining area in eastern Pennsylvania, where gum sales
were well below the national level/' Mr. Goodman
states:

It discovered that the area had a relatively high rate of
illiteracy, a large foreign-born population, and a low stand-
ard of living. Putting the results of the two studies together,
the agency laid out a campaign for this particular region.
The theme was frustration and the relief obtained by chew-
ing gum. The idea was presented in a series of comic-strip
ads. The first showed a child unable to do a simple, every-
day task and overcoming his difficulty after an adult gave
him a stick of gum. A second showed adults conquering
frustration in the same way. The strips used a minimum of
words so as to avoid the impression of insincerity and reach
a not too literate public.

The firm reported that sales in the test area increased
at a much higher rate than in the rest of the country
during the year that the campaign ran. As a result the
campaign was expanded to fourteen other markets*
After quoting startling examples to show how outstand-
ing social psychologists who have earned considerable
scientific reputation go in for this sort of thing, the
author observes:

136 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Social scientists in the past have paid attention to the
irrational patterns of human behavior because they wish to
locate their social origins and thus be able to suggest
changes that would result in more rational conduct. They
now study irrationality and other aspects of human be-
havior-to gather data that may be used by salesmen to
manipulate consumers. No one can believe that chewing
gum will relieve the basic frustrations of Pennsylvania coal
miners.

The author shows how the same science is used in
other "markets," less irrelevant than chewing gum, in-
cluding the psychology of political influence. It does
not take much imagination to expand all this into the
science of an Orwellian society.

Apart from the danger of a tool for mass manipula-
tion and social engineering, there is the general climate
which these sciences create. They work more or less on
the basis of a creed, which is this: values, particularly
moral ones, are nontranscendental, and lie on the same
plane as the social, economic, and psychological func-
tion investigated; they are contingent on, and a product
of, social, economic, and psychological data which
themselves are arbitrary and shifting.

I say "more or less" because there is a small number
of persons who are stricken with doubts. It is the gen-
eral atmosphere which counts. One could call this the
materialism of the better classes. Anyone engaged in
empirical work is entitled to put in an appearance as a

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 137

philosopher. It is in this "philosophy" that the strangest
bedfellows, such as the behaviorist and the psycho-
analyst, meet. It has the unifying power of faith. To
observe this one can open any scholarly journal or
manual in those fields practically at random. The ele-
ment which is perhaps more than anything else remi-
niscent of the hatching period of nihilism is that ubiq-
uitousness, certainty, and peculiar touch of banality
which is so difficult to define a characteristic sort of
petit bourgeois mediocrity which is associated with a
contempt for the spirit.

If anyone had attempted in the late Ws to make a
forecast about the future cultural climate of Germany,
he would have followed a completely wrong track in
studying Husserl or Scheler or Jaspers. What he should
have done was to study the philosophical utterances
of dozens of obscure professors of anthropology, politi-
cal science, and so on. Today, if we take philosophy
from the mere point of view of the prognostic symptom,
it might be quite wrong to pick the writings of, say, Mr.
Niebuhr. The philosopher seems at times as detached
from the main current as the artist. Therefore, if we
want to study Weltanschauung as a symptom we have
to go to other sources. It is the philosophy of the tech-
nicians which provides the index.

Mr. Kinsey, a zoologist who earned his original sci-
entific reputation by his work on the gall wasp, does
not mince words when he speaks of the moral values

138 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

of man: "The mores, whether they concern food, cloth-
ing, sex or religious rituals, originate neither in accumu-
lated experience nor in scientific examinations of ob-
jectively gathered data. The sociologist and anthropolo-
gist find the origins of such customs in ignorance and
superstition, and in the attempt of each group to set
itself apart from its neighbors/' * Theodore Schroeder,t
a psychoanalyst, came to the same conclusion earlier
and quite independently: "The evil of all morals lies in
their subjective and 'unconscious' sources; in their im-
mature or morbid sentimentalisms, rather than in the
resulting moral dogmas/'

One can see that Schroeder is emotionally less de-
tached than Kinsey. He feels more passionate about the
subject, perhaps because he has seen more of what hap-
pens to people who cling to moral laws. This may be
the reason for his bitterness: "Every variety of 'split
personality' (or moralist) must see human conduct and
human situations through conflicting feelings. . . /*
After thousands of years of what Kinsey brands as ig-
norance and superstition, it is not easy to formulate a
revolutionary ideal so that the ordinary reader under-
stands it. Thus Schroeder finds a formulation which
cannot be immediately clear to everybody: "The amor-
alist's new standard of values is a measuring of the in-

* Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. W. B. Saunders Co., 1948.
f Theodore Schroeder, "Attitude of an Amoral Psychologist," Psy-
choanalytic Review, XXXI, 329-335, 1944.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 139

fluence of any conduct or creed, in accelerating or re-
tarding the psycho-evolutionary processes/' In case the
reader is misled into believing that this program may
settle the huge problem only tentatively or in part, the
author is quick to add: "That is an amoralist's substitute
for dl moral standards and judgments/' The same
author had already attempted to formulate a new ap-
proach which would once and for all do away with what
we have been taught on grandmother's knees. This for-
mulation is not more propitious than the other, but
since it is characteristic of a widely adopted jargon it
should be given here:

Everywhere "education" is subordinated to religio-moral-
istic sentimentalism, and therefore by the psychological im-
peratives which make for the perpetration of infantile im-
pulses and intellectual methods. These imperatives include
the religious temperament and its anti-scientific method for
promoting social progress; and for the promulgation of the
morally approved emotional and ideological symptoms of
the "split personality/'

Instead of education by moralistic or idealistic indoctri-
nation we substitute an amoral education for mental matur-
ing. . . . Thus we produce a realistic peace of mind which
can be enjoyed only by well-unified personalities, who know
how to live in harmony with the natural laws of psycho-
social relations. This peace of mind must be distinguished
from many popular delusions of peace. . . .*

* Theodore Schroeder, "Really New Education for Social Living,"
Psychoanalytic Review, XXVIII, 363-371*

140 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

In order that the reader should not consider this a
mere restatement of the position of many other psycho-
analysts, perhaps also to set off its radical formulation
properly, this paper is entitled: "Really New Education
for Social Living/' In contrast to these dim views, ex-
pounded by a behaviorist and a psychoanalyst, there
are others who are more optimistic. It is the optimism
of psychological progress of which we spoke. The hu-
man heart in its relationship to other men and to God
is treated as if psychological mechanisms and concepts
were the final formula. This trend is even more startling
than the pathos of Dr. Schroeder. It represents an atti-
tude of quasi-objectivity which acknowledges moral
values but makes them subject to the test of science
and technique. This is extremely widespread. An entire
book could be written about this phenomenon alone.
But one haphazard example will suffice. A sociologist
in a paper on "Love" * states:

Sullivan's definition is a helpful beginning: "When the
satisfaction or the security of another person becomes as
significant to one as is one's own satisfaction or security,
then the state of love exists." But his approximation is static,
unilateral, and still tinged with the Christian morality
which honors sacrifice of oneself to another as an ultimate
good, though it may thwart the development of both. Erich
Fromm's notion of productive love, and his insistence upon
the legitimacy of self-love, appear more analytically pre-

* Nelson N. Foote, "Love," Psychiatry, XVI, 245-251, 1953.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

else and valid: ". . . Love is an activity and not a passion
... the essence of love is to labor for something and 'to
make something grow/ . . . To love a person productively
implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only
for his physical existence but for the growth and develop-
ment of all his human powers . . . without respect for and
knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into
domination and possessiveness."

This is a fairly representative sample. Agape is being
investigated in its mechanics, under the premise that
the natural plane represents the whole. It is measured
against the views of two social psychologists who have
come to different results, as in the good old days when
pathology professors used to dispute the definition of
"inflammation/' The charity of Christ does not quite
make the grade. The point is not that "Christian moral-
ity" is here represented in a perfectly distorted way.
The remarkable thing is how one investigator's defini-
tion is discarded because it is "still tinged" with Chris-
,tian morality. There is a peculiar equating of that which
lies in the order of psychological and social mechanics
with that which is of the transcendental order. Geth-
semane, which is a mystery, is treated as if it were a
proposition. Saint John of the Cross, Saint Francis of
Assisi, and Our Lord Himself become, as it were, sub-
jects of a sociological investigation on "personality in-
teraction" or something of that sort. What makes all
this so hideous is not so much the factual error; it is

142 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

something which is perhaps best described as a loss of
the metaphysical sense. One author, under the much
more cheerful title "Towards a Science of Morality/' *
outlines his basic approach as follows:

The key to a science of morality may be found in a re-
mark made by Sigmund Freud to the effect that, rather than
ask about the purpose of life, we should ask about the pur-
poses for which men live. The fact of the matter is that men
do have purposes and that, from the viewpoint of these pur-
poses, actions are not indifferent Some actions result in the
purposes which instigate them: these actions are good.
Some actions have consequences which interfere with the
attainment of certain ends: these actions are bad.

In the history of spiritual landslides, there always
comes a moment which is characterized by the search
for the simple formula. The word of God, as revealed
in its simplicity in the Ten Commandments or the Ser-
mon on the Mount, is related to the preceding quo-
tations as food is to synthetic chemicals. The life in
Christ Crucified which is still the life of many un-
known people who pass one every day on the street
is of such immediacy that we cannot imagine how it
can be replaced by "recent findings."

It is only on the basis of the search for the simple
formula that we can explain the statements of authors

* Isidor Chein, "Towards a Science of Morality," Journal of Social
Psychology, XXV, 235-238, 1947.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 143

who advocate a radical and deep-reacting approach.
Such statements are associated with an air of impa-
tience and urgency. Dr. Chisholm,* in his famous ad-
dress on "the re-establishment of a peace-time society/*
associated in a sweeping line the eternal re-occurrence
of wars with the existence of moral standards. Dr. Chis-
holm's proposals for an enduring peace are daring and
visionary. He insists on security through the elimination
of the occasion for valid fear of aggression, This could
come about by "legislation backed by immediately
available combined force prepared to suppress ruth-
lessly any appeal to force by any peoples of the world."
Secondly, he advocates an "opportunity to live reason-
ably comfortably. . . ." Thirdly, and this is the most
remarkable part of his dissertation, he insists on "an
elimination of neurosis/' and this is the main part of
his speech. In order to eliminate neurosis (so that peace
can be preserved) we must look for its cause in the
world in which we live:

The re-interpretation and eventually eradication of the
concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of
child training [says Dr. Chisholm], the substitution of intel-
ligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of
the old people, these are the belated objectives of all psy-
chotherapy. Would they not be legitimate objectives of
original education?

* G. B. Chisholm, 'The Re-establishment of a Peace-time Society,"
Psychiatry, IX, 3-11, 1946.

144 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Dr. Chisholm feels that we have no time to lose. An-
other world catastrophe may be imminent. Therefore
quick action is needed, and although he is far from hav-
ing found the entire solution for the formidable prob-
lem he has at least a preliminary suggestion.

Can such a program of re-education or of a new kind of
education be charted? I would not presume to go so far,
except to suggest that psychology and sociology and simple
psychopathology, the sciences of living, should be made
available to all the people by being taught to all children
in primary and secondary schools, while the study of such
things as trigonometry, Latin, religions and others of spe-
cialist concern should be left to universities.

A member of the discussion commented on the
paper with the following remarkable words: "It is pre-
cisely the purpose of psychiatry to discover in a sci-
entific way the wellsprings of human nature even as
-those who are working in the religious field have en-
deavored to find those wellsprings in an authoritarian
way from the Book, from the Bible, from tradition.
I will not, in order to maintain the protective colora-
tion, indicate where General Chisholm thinks this feel-
ing (a sense of inferiority and guilt and fear) origi-
nated. I am sure we should not betray that secret. Suf-
fice it to say, however, that I would that this address
were mailed to all the ministers and priests in the
United States."

We would not have quoted those papers from authors

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 145

in completely different fields if they were not repre-
sentative of a great number of those engaged in the
social sciences. These things are perhaps not always ex-

"pressed with the same fervor, They certainly are not
literally adhered to in the private lives of those who
pronounce them. The few people quoted here express
bluntly what hundreds of others assume more or less
without formulating it. For many intellectuals in pre-
Hitler Germany it was the smart thing to believe in the
primacy of the biological. For the charming people who
populate Chekhov's stage it was the smart thing to be
nihilistic. They never bothered to think this thought
''through" so that they might be able to behold the end,
the potential result, the concrete precipitate. They were
not able to imagine their own persons in a world in
which this thought was part of the fabric of a lived
reality. It is strange that some people can think of de-
humanization only in terms of Stalin, others only in
terms of Hitler. To many the democratic procedure it-
self has become something like a rite of protection. A

. glance at history shows that evil never puts in an ap-
pearance twice under the same guise.

Of course there is no war between Christianity and
paganism, as there has been in Russia and Germany,
but there are continuous border incidents, and counted
up they may amount to a war. Perhaps a state of war
exists and we do not realize it. In modern times for-
mal declarations of war are no longer necessary. Under

146 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

the Comtean idea of a science of man, disciplines which
methodologically do not necessarily fit together, such
as psychoanalysis and behaviorism, anthropology and
psychology, psychiatry and sociology, form a kind of
unified structure. They are held together by a common
philosophical basis. They are beginning to form a sort
of Corpus Non-Mysticum. The fulfillment of Auguste
Comte's dream of a world dominated by science is not
far off.

Psychoanalysis is so strongly imbedded in all this that
it is difficult to recognize its basic features. Many Chris-
tian critics of psychoanalysis are evidently handicapped
by the thought that one has to accept all the tenets.
Moreover, they cannot believe Freud's statement that
psychoanalysis, purely isolated as a therapeutic method,
is philosophically neutral; that it helps to free the pa-
tient from his neurotic shackles and enables him to re-
discover his basic set of beliefs, whatever they may be.

This distrust is understandable. Theoretically these
statements of Freud are true. But in the reality of a
living relationship between patient and physician all
this is modified. The mechanism of transference and
:~ counter-transference represents many subtle currents;
precisely in this lies its therapeutic strength. The unique
encounter, the meeting of two human beings, with all
the re-enactment of a forgotten drama, the re-presenta-
tion of that which is "familiar" (of the family) -this is
the true principle of healing. And with all this goes the

THE THIRD REVOLUTION 147

unspoken, the silence, that which makes a psychic
whole out of something which might be only a psycho-
logical trick. But the spirit is part of this. The philo-
sophical setting of such a relationship does not have to
be formulated to be there. The spirit of the psycho-
analyst or, as it happens in many cases, his denial of the
spirit comes in.

That Comtean edifice of which I spoke is already so
vast that our Catholic critics come to overlook a simple
fact. The psychoanalytical method in itself can be made
philosophically neutral. There exist a number of psy-
chiatrists, with a Christian set of beliefs, who use psy-
choanalytical methods with great advantage. Moreover,
as we shall presently see, psychoanalysis does not quite
fit in with that formidable structure philosophically and
historically.

Freud in his youth was deeply influenced by Goethe's
anti-mechanistic philosophy of nature. One cannot help
feeling that, but for a trivial change in his own history,
he might have shared the fate of other men who started
off with the nineteenth-century positivist bias, and
ended up by embracing metaphysical reality, as did
Bergson and Whitehead. In their lives, as in Freud's,
the year 1900 marked approximately the middle. There
are more parallels. In Bergson's case the change was
probably prompted by the discovery of the immediacy
of psychic data. That change, that decisive transcen-

148 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

dental move, did not come about in Freud's case. This
is historically one of the reasons why psychoanalysis
now forms, to a startling degree, part of the positivist
revolution.

The thing to keep in mind is the fact that its roots lie
somewhere else. Its basic intuitions come from a world
which is quite opposed to that of scientific positivism.
But there is no use fooling ourselves: this is the world
by which the psychoanalytical movement has been to
a large extent absorbed and assimilated. And there is no
use fooling ourselves about something else. At first sight
the examples given here seem disjointed and haphazard.
But there is no doubt about it: the communications ex-
pert who abolishes "value concepts" and other "old-
fashioned alternatives"; the sociologist who rejects the
Christian concept of love in favor of more up-to-date
psychoanalytic findings; the general who abolishes tra-
ditional morality for the establishment of a "peace-time
society"; the "amoralist" who advocates a "really new
education for social living"; the social psychologist who
investigates scientifically how to soothe the frustrations
of coal miners; the zoologist who informs us about the
true origins of sexual morality they all belong together.
They are signposts on the way. Ahead of us lies the fan-
tastic possibility of a world in which human happiness
is technically assembled. In that Comtean revolution
there are no atrocities. There are no martyrs. Man>
the image of God, is led to a painless death.

VII

Signs of Something New

I I denounce evil as evil, is there really much gained?
But if I call that bad which is actually good, great harm
is done.

Goethe, in Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe

The final cause is an end, and that sort of end which
is not for the sake of something else, but for whose sake
j everything else is; so that if there is to be a kst term
of this sort, the process will not be infinite; but if there
is no such term, there will be no final cause, but those
who maintain the infinite series eliminate the Good with-
out knowing it (yet no one would try to do anything if
he were not going to come to a limit); nor would there
be reason in the world. Aristotle, Metaphysics

From the preceding chapter it looks as if psychoanalysis
were hopelessly interwoven with Freud's own philoso-
phy as well as with the general nihilistic stream of our
time, so much so that it would be better to leave it
alone; any attempt to integrate it with a Christian phi-
losophy of Man would be futile. Indeed this has been
the feeling of many people. We have already indicated,
however, how dangerous such a negative attitude can
become. Having considered all the negative aspects
the "contra" we shall now examine the "pro."

149

150 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

To show what is in favor of the psychoanalytical
theory, one can cite clinical experiences. There are vari-
ous examples throughout this book which partly serve
this purpose, and which indicate that the psychoana-
lytic interpretation illuminates the inner "dynamics" of
a case to a much greater extent than any other school of
psychiatry heretofore. This refers to all kinds of troubles
which arise in the psychic order, whether sexual per-
versions, psychoses of persecution, morbid reactions of
grief, or so-called psychosomatic diseases. An apparent
hodge-podge of human ills assumes something like an
interior order when viewed in the light of the psycho-
analytic concepts which we have outlined.

However, to what extent does psychoanalysis fit in
with the Christian idea of Man?

In connection with the case history of the suicidal
old immigrant, where we touched upon the concept of
empathic knowledge, we examined two aspects of the
process of understanding. One is empirical: we know
by experience that under certain circumstances people
look sad and cry, just as we know that under certain
circumstances bubbles will begin to rise in the water
inside the kettle. The other aspect to the understanding
of human reactions is that we are able to be inside the
sad individual while he tells us his story, and "under-
stand" his reactions in a way essentially different from
the way in which we "understand" what is going on in-
side the kettle. Through the development of the expert-

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW

mental method in the natural sciences, we have ac-
quired to an extraordinary degree the ability to predict
and "explain" processes in inanimate nature. If one
combines concentrated hydrochloric acid with a piece
of marble, one is bound to obtain calcium chloride and
carbon dioxide; science tells us exactly why. But it
would be ridiculous to say: "Put yourself in the marble's
place. It had to react like that. You'd do the same/* In
this way we cannot partake of the processes in inani-
mate nature; human consciousness is not made that
way.

This distinction is very old. It goes back to Greek
philosophy and Dionysius the Areopagite.* Saint
Thomas speaks of "knowledge by connaturality" as op-
posed to other forms of knowledge in which we are not
"co-natured" with objects of the external world. Bacon's
"poesy" or poetic form of insight (as distinguished from
the scientific) is related to Saint Thomas's "knowledge
by connaturality." Bergson distinguishes "analytical"
.from "intuitive" knowledge. He illustrates this by refer-
ring to a study of movement. He takes the example of
a stick drifting in a stream. He says that we can study
the stick's movement in two essentially different ways.
We can time the passage of the stick past certain points
on the shore of the stream; from this we can describe
the movement of the stick mathematically. But we also

* Jacques Maritain, "On Knowledge by Connaturality," Review of
Metaphysics, IV, 473-478, 1951.

152 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

can float in the stream ourselves with the speed of the
water and thus obtain an experience of movement
which is essentially different from mathematical ab-
straction. Both approaches to movement, though inde-
pendent, are equally valid. The German philosopher,
Dilthey, speaks of knowledge by Einftihlung (there is
no single word for this in English; perhaps the closest
translation is "the process of getting the feeling of some-
thing from within'*). A modern school of philosophy in
Germany makes a distinction similar to Bergson's, using
the term "explaining" as opposed to "understanding."
These philosophers apply the word "explaining" to
those situations in which we deal with a chain of physi-
cal causes (the action of hydrochloric acid on marble)
and the word "understanding" to those in which we deal
with a chain of motivations (the sad man's story).

Thus we can follow this distinction between two
kinds of knowledge like a thread in the history of philo-
sophical thought. To be sure, we have enumerated vari-
ous concepts which are not identical. One cannot say
that empathy, and Saint Thomas's "knowledge by con-
naturality," Bacon's idea of "poesy," Bergsonian "intui-
tive knowledge," the idea of "Einfiihlung* and the
"understanding" of recent German philosophers are dif-
ferent words for the same thing. But these concepts
overlap to a remkrkable degree, and the one feature
they have in common is the assumption that there exists
a method of insight which is as valid as the method of

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 153

the mathematical-experimental sciences, although es-
sentially different from it.

There is no doubt that Freud gained all his important
insights by empathy. Consider, for example, the mecha-
nism of transference. The way in which those seemingly
irrational waves of affection and hostility which well up
in the patient during treatment were elucidated, the
way in which all the subtle currents which modify the
relationship between physician and patient were recog-
nized for what they are all this is entirely removed
from the world of the experimental laboratory. It is a
fact that all great psychoanalytic discoveries were first
of all felt from within. For a reason which we shall pres-
ently discuss, this is best seen in some of those writings
which do not refer to sweeping theoretical concepts. In
Freud's little-known essay on the psychology of "the
uncanny" ( das Unheimliche), he sets out to investigate
the experience of the uncanny, or the eerie. The gist of
his argument is that we experience all those things as
uncanny which, in the depth of our unconscious, we
actually can (know). As it often happens, the negation
which our conscious employs (the syllable "un") serves
only to conceal that which, for some reason, we do not
want to see. That which appears as eerie does so be-
cause it is the appearance of something which up to
that time has led a secret life within us. Freud quotes
a lot of literature to substantiate this, particularly ex-
amples from one of the poets of the weird and uncanny,

154 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

the great German romantic writer, E. T. A. Hoffmann.
The question whether Freud's argument is correct or
not is irrelevant. The point is that this essay, in its entire
structure, in the way the thought is presented and elab-
orated, is a perfect example of poetic knowledge. It
could be an essay written by any great poet-critic from
Goethe to T. S.' Eliot, but it has nothing to do with
natural science, with any area of human endeavor in-
volving quantification, verification by experiment, and
soon.

The fact that psychoanalytic insight is primarily em-
pathic insight, as contrasted with scientific knowledge,
is concealed and complicated by several features, par-
ticularly by the fact that Freud himself from the begin-
ning presented his discoveries within a framework of
terms which were borrowed from the natural sciences.
There are several reasons for this. The originator of
psychoanalysis was a child of the nineteenth century.
He had been educated in the laboratory and the neuro-
logical ward; his first studies, such as his work on in-
fantile spastic conditions and on the pharmacology of
cocain, were purely scientific. Therefore it was most
logical for him and his early followers to use the lan-
guage of the natural sciences. As we have seen, there
are certain aspects of physics (particularly thermody-
namics) and biology (particularly ontogenesis) which
lend themselves splendidly to conveying basic psycho-

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 155

analytic concepts by the way of approximate analogy.
When we speak of an "amount of libidinal energy*'
which is "split off' or "channeled into" something or
"sublimated" or "displaced/' we use the language of
physicists or chemists to make concepts out of some-
thing essentially preconceptual. The preconceptual,
archaic, infantile world of imagery, which forms the
key to the world of neurosis, reminds us of Edgar Allan
Poe's "unthought-like thoughts that are the thoughts of
thought/' Technical terminology for such things at best
partakes of the nature of parable. As Karl Jaspers has
pointed out, we fool ourselves if we think that the ter-
minology of psychoanalysis really proves that it is some-
thing of the same order as physics or chemistry. Actu-
ally, there is no such thing as an "amount of libidinal
energy" which would fit into a system of references
comparable to that of the sciences. Love and hate, joy
and mourning cannot be quantified.

Moreover, all those forms of "nonscientific," intuitive
knowledge which we have been discussing, are some-
how deeply linked up with the world of values. It is
noteworthy that Saint Thomas speaks of "knowledge by
connaturality" in connection with the moral virtues. A
human being has an immediate knowledge of concepts
such as chastity, courage, and so on because it is part
of human nature to have such knowledge. The Germans
introduced the idea of Einfuhlung before Dilthey, in
ihe time of Herder, in connection with the problem of

156 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

beauty. In other words, intuitive and empathic insight
get us "mixed up' 7 with values and anyone who at-
tempts to create something comparable to the experi-
mental sciences will instinctively shy away from all this.
It is historically interesting that Jaspers' observation
was anticipated a long time ago in fact, at the very
dawn of the psychoanalytical development. When
Freud's Studies on Hysteria appeared in 1895, they
were enthusiastically reviewed by Alfred von Berger,
professor of the history of literature at the University
of Vienna. The reviewer, who was a poet, critic, and
literary historian, remarked that "the theory itself is in
e fact nothing but the kind of psychology used by poets."
He illustrated this by examples from Shakespeare.* In
contrast, Krafft-Ebing, who was chairman of the Soci-
ety of Psychiatry and Neurology in Vienna when Freud
read his paper, "The Etiology of Hysteria," in 1896,
remarked: "It sounds like a scientific fairy tale." f These
were the reactions of the artist on one hand, and the
nineteenth-century scientist on the other. It was only
by an extraordinary feat of poetic intuition that an en-
tire early world could possibly be opened up, a world
which is still far removed from circumscribed concepts,
a world of feeling particularly of proprioceptive, \

* Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Basic Books,
1953, Vol I, p. 253.

f Ibid., p. 263.

t "Proprioceptive" are those sensory impressions which arise from
within the body, for example, the sense of impressions by which the
position of joints, the tension of muscles, etc., are conveyed.

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 157

tactile, and gustatory (taste) feelings. It presents a
sort of somatic cosmos, a liuge universe of sensation,
a carnal universe in which no stars nor sun or moon
exist, in which space and time, as far as they are there,
must surely be qualities quite different from the space
and time of our reasoning mind.

A most extraordinary oneness of the psychic and
bodily is associated with the early Freudian ontogenetic
stages. The psychoanalytical approach to psychoso-
matic medicine the field of medicine which studies the
psychological roots of organic disease helps us to see
this.

For example, it has been known for some time that
serious illnesses of the lower bowel (certain types of
colitis) are associated with definite patterns of emo-
tional conflict, in fact with certain character types. But
it was only by psychoanalytic studies and by the intro-
duction of psychoanalytic concepts that the relation-
ship between those forms of colitis on one hand and
the emotional conflict on the other were clarified. By
going back to the primitive meaning of "giving" and
"retaining" in the function of the bowel, to an early,
undifferentiated, archaic psyche, such illnesses can be
adequately interpreted. This interpretation is also im-
portant for their treatment.

Another example: it was first observed about thirty
years ago that peptic ulcer of the stomach is associated
with a certain "nervous" type of person. It did not take
long to find out that the type of person predisposed to

158 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

peptic ulcer frequently has certain well-defined char-
acteristics. They are the characteristics of a person of
spartan habits, with a high sense of duty, a person who
drives himself hard, a giver rather than a receiver in
the exchange of life, a person of natural asceticism
not infrequently found among hard-working profes-
sional people of today. One could leave it at that and
say that such a person is apt to eat quickly, is unac-
customed to pay attention to the enjoyment of leisure
associated with meals, and is prone to gulp down food
without noticing whether it be too hot or too cold.
However, careful psychoanalytic studies by Franz Alex-
ander and his school showed that there is something
more to it than that. Deep down, without being aware
of it, such people have a great need to "receive"; they
are people whose hard spartan shell covers a yearning
for tenderness and caressing, in other words, a yearn-
ing to be mothered. It is understandable, on the basis
of what we have said about the embryology of love,
why the stomach should be the anatomical site in which
that conflict manifests itself. The psychoanalytical elu-
cidation of such a case shows that our patient was not
quite prepared to be the giver without adequately re-
ceiving. From the point of health (wholeness), there
was something wrong about his spartanism.

These two examples alone imply the existence of that
"world" which corresponds largely to a preverbal stage;
at any rate, to a stage in which abstract concepts are

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 159

not yet formed. In that world there exists a oneness of
the physical and the psychic which it is difficult to rep-
resent in our adult mode of thinking. One more example
which might bring us still closer to my meaning comes
from many of the expressions we use in everyday lan-
guage. "I cannot stomach him." "He makes me vomit."
"I like you so much, I could eat you." "I took him in at
a glance/ 7 "The milk of human kindness/* "111 make
you eat your words/' These and many similar expres-
sions * are metaphors which are coined as if eating
and drinking had a significance far beyond the mere
need to sustain bodily and caloric energy. Numerous
psychoanalytic observations bear this out: there is an
archaic phase in which the oral opening is something
like an opening of the Ego through which people and
objects are "taken in," gobbled up, destroyed or incor-
porated, or ejected. In this body image there is no dis-
tinction between the psychic and the physical, and
there is no such thing as a metaphor. In this image the
metaphor and the world of objective reality are one
in a peculiar way which resists description for an obvi-
ous reason our language is not made for it.

Or is it? When someone says about another person:
"I cannot stomach him," we might be inclined to say:
This is not to be taken literally. The stomach is a sac-

* Cf. Karl Stern, J. B. Boulanger, and Sheena Cleghorn, "The Se-
mantics of Organ Language. A Comparative Study of English, French
and German," American Journal of Psychiatry, CVI, p. 851.

l6o THE THIRD REVOLUTION

cular enlargement of the digestive tube; it consists of
a certain type of mucous membrane. This mucous mem-
brane excretes such and such juices. Of course, the
stomach is not there to take people in. It's just a silly
way of wording things/' The psychoanalyst says: "Such
a stomach as you have just been describing is an ab-
straction of the anatomist. As a matter of fact, we all
arise out of a world in which we have swallowed per-
sons. The thing was not an anatomical mechanism; nor
was it purely psychic: it was both. The description of
the physiologist refers to artificially isolated phenom-
ena. The expression, 1 cannot stomach him/ corre-
sponds to a reality which we can reconstruct tediously
out of the observation of the lives of children, of folk-
tales, of the dreams of grownups, and so on. But one
cannot say that that reality is a lesser reality than that
of the anatomist or physiologist, the reality which is a
product of abstractions."

For hundreds of years people have been saying: "He
gets under my skin," or "I have been itching to do such
and such." Only now, on the basis of the psychoanalytic
mode of approach, can we demonstrate objectively that
skin disorders do arise out of repressed hostility or of
repressed desire. For an equally long time people have
been saying about one another: "He gives me a head*
ache," or "He's a pain in the neck." Only now do we
realize, on the basis of careful investigations carried
out with physiological and psychoanalytical methods,

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW l6l

that people do give headaches and pains to one another
in quite a literal way. Before the advent of psychoso-
matic medicine (which can be historically demon-
strated to be a direct descendant of psychoanalysis),
people would have taken the expression, "He took it
too much to heart/' as a mild poetic metaphor. Now
we know that people do take "it" to their hearts in a
literal sense. The way in which we use names of organs
in our language reflects the language in which these
organs speak to us. All this can obviously have only one
meaning: besides the anatomy of Vesalius, another kind
of anatomy has always existed. One might call it folk-
lore anatomy; one might call it poetic anatomy. The
point is that in a scientific Cartesian world it is only
that first kind of anatomy, the anatomy of Vesalius, that
counts. The heart is a muscular pump of a certain ap-
pearance, a certain weight and a certain mechanism.
The psyche, on the other hand, is a universe all by
itself. In such a world it is quite impossible that "it ?>
can be taken to heart because "it" and the heart belong
to two universes which live side by side without com-
munication. Yet in folklore anatomy, psychophysical
unity has always been preserved. And now this psycho-
physical unity has been rediscovered under the impact
of psychoanalysis. The anatomy of folklore spoke of a
reality which was forgotten in a Cartesian world. This
plane of reality has now been re-entered.
Thus we witness the extraordinary phenomenon that

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

psychoanalysis, which originated in the laboratory and
the clinical ward of the nineteenth century, has become
a powerful current which establishes a reunion of that
which man has tried to unbind or disjoint, the psychic
and the physical. This current goes against all those
movements from Manichaeism down to Cartesianism
and Positivism which have, in a sense, attempted to pro-
duce a ghastly fissure in the image of the world.

This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why in Freud-
ian theory the "sexual" concept is enlarged to such an
extent that it comprises eros in the widest possible
sense. Nothing puts in an appearance in a purely ab-
stract ghostlike form. Everything psychic has its pri-
mary sensory, carnal form. A witty critic of the psycho-
analytic theory once remarked that dream interpreta-
tion according to Freud is easy, since every object in
nature is either convex or concave. There is some truth
in this. When you consider for a moment that the mas-
culine principle is the principle which attacks, pierces,
fertilizes, and that the feminine principle is the receiv-
ing, containing, and nourishing principle, then you ar-
rive at a continuum, a series of images which extends
all the way from anatomical structures to psychic forms.
If you prefer, you can invert the series. Apart from the
social hierarchy of Man and Woman which fluctuates
historically, there is something which one might call
the Eternal-Masculine and the Eternal-Feminine in the

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 163

human soul; but this is expressed in physical forms even
down to the life of cells: the lance-shaped, mobile
spermatozoon pierces the ovum.

Another example is that of the experience of birth.
There are numerous examples to indicate that the mere
act of being born is associated with anxiety. To leave
the sheltering womb, to change from the passivity of
placental nourishment to the act of breathing is a tre-
mendous revolution. The first breath we breathe is as-
sociated with primeval anxiety. Being born means
accepting something new and unknown and leaving
security irretrievably behind. Here, too, there exists
a continuum of images from the primeval carnal ex-
perience, which we all share, to thousands of other
forms of being born. The idea of the Masculine and
Feminine in us has been profoundly elaborated by Jung
in his idea of Animus and Anima. The idea of the ex-
perience of birth has been elaborated by Otto Rank.
Both are, in a sense, elaborations of Freudian concepts.
What characterizes Freud's approach is the insistence
on going through that continuum of images down to
the soil that is, to the carnal archaic experience in its
concrete immediacy if one wants really to understand
a psychic disturbance and do anything about it. Quite
irrespective of the validity of this, it is historically most
remarkable and it is certainly no coincidence that in a
world of mechanistic concepts and abstractions, the

164 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

psychic reality could only be rediscovered by the way
of the carnal.

However, what we are discussing here refers not only
to the body image, but to sensory impressions and
imagery in general. A middle-aged woman was having
difficulties in her relationship with husband and chil-
dren. The most conspicuous facts of her childhood his-
tory were these: she had been the oldest of four chil-
dren, and her mother had died when she, the patient,
was six years old. Shortly after that the father remar-
ried. A lot of her childhood story was taken up by her
description of a <c bad" stepmother and the disappoint-
ment over her father she experienced at the time of his
second marriage. At a crucial point of her analysis, she
produced the following dream: C 7 saw the face of a
woman. There was nothing else. Suddenly she changed
into another woman. At that moment the light went off
and it became dark. I called a man to put the light on
again. He tried, but he did not succeed." She said that
the appearance of the man who was unable to repair
the light reminded her of the caretaker of her church.
The caretaker was "the same type" as her father.

This dream, like all dreams, is overdetermined, to use
psychoanalytical language. This means it can be inter-
preted on different levels of the patient's history, and
various interpretations are correct. There is the history
of the two mother figures, and of the father who, in

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 165

her fantasy, failed to put on the light after it had gone
out. The situation of transference is also implied. The
doctor was clearly at fault in his inability to find the
light. If the patient lacked insight, it was I who did not
throw light on the situation. From a technical point of
view there are many facets to this dream which are not
related to the present phase of our discussion. I should
like to discuss only one.

Here light stands for love, and darkness for the op-
posite, lack of love. With the appearance of the second
woman the light goes out. The dream uses the same
imagery as the poets and mystics of all ages. One might
explain this quite simply. To be left alone in the dark
is the earliest experience associated with a farewell from
mother or from others close to us. Or there might be
something less relative, something more intimately re-
lated to the experience of light and darkness. The im-
portant thing is the fact that in the language of the
dream we encounter light, a basic sensory experience,
just as basic as the feelings arising from within the
body or from the skin, and we find that it is at the same
time, in some peculiar way, love.

We moderns are biased in such a way that we think
that the "true nature" of light is represented only by
Newton's corpuscular theory, or Huygens* wave theory,
or the quantum theory (which is a sort of synthesis of
the two). We forget that these are mathematical ab-
stractions, and that the simple act of seeing is the only

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

way for us to experience light. Newton created our cur-
rently accepted theory of colors. Goethe, who was in
a continuous revolt against the rationalism of the eight-
eenth century, evolved another theory of colors which
is nonmathematical and "naive"; it is more of a physi-
ology of colors. No physicist takes Goethe's theory seri-
ously. Goethe fought an almost Quixotic battle against
the theory of Newton. He never came to admit that
reality can be presented on different planes, and in each
single instance the presentation is true.

Newtonian light, the light of primary sensory experi-
ence, and the "metaphoric" light of Platonists and poets
and of Saint John ("in Him was life, and the life was
the light of men and the light shineth in the darkness,
and the darkness did not comprehend if), are three
different aspects of the same thing. Now the first aspect
does not exist in the world of the unconscious. There
we encounter only the light of immediate sensory ex-
perience, and the setting in which we encounter it is
such that it is intimately associated with the third as-
pect, the spiritual light, the light of the poetic meta-
phor. Here the reality of logical abstraction does not
play any role; on the other hand, the two other levels
(sensory imagery and its metaphoric "sphere") pene-
trate one another to a degree which is known to us only
from poetry.

Our modern mind is such that deep down we harbor
some sort of hierarchy of realities: we more or less feel

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 167

that the reality of physics is the objective thing, that
the reality of our sense perceptions is less reliable, and
the reality of allegory is most arbitrary and unreliable.
This was not always so. When Saint Thomas, for exam-
ple, in his commentary on the Gospel of Saint John
speaks of "Light," he changes from the sensory to the
spiritual and back again, as if he regarded both planes
as of equal validity. We must leave it to the philoso-
phers to explain whether there is a spiritual reality
which corresponds to the reality of sensory perception,
and which is not just an outcome of a haphazard play
of verbal parallels. For anyone acquainted with the
Platonist-Augustinian tradition, which enters strongly
into the thought of Saint Thomas, such a picture of the
world comes as close to an adequate presentation of
reality as anything ever will. It is interesting to note
that a philosopher of nature like Goethe, who had no
formal knowledge of Christian philosophy, went very
far in this direction. At the end of Faust, during a po-
^etic description of the Beatific Vision, occur the follow-
ing famous lines:

All that which passes
Is mere Analogy,
The Unattainable
Here is Reality

From such examples as our patient's dream and even
more so the symbols of "organ language" in their rela-

l68 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

tion to psychosomatic medicine, it looks almost as if
psychoanalysis had come to rediscover something like
the reality of the allegorical.

We have seen aspects of psychoanalysis which lift it out
of the currents of our century, the century of dialectic
materialism and of logical positivism, right into the
mainstream of the Hebrew-Christian and Hellenic tra-
dition: the eminent role of the function of empathy
(which is related to knowledge by connatural! ir/j; the
trend to re-establish a psychophysical unity in the con-
cept of the human person; moreover the "reality of the
allegorical." These features alone should make psycho-
analysis as a discipline suspect in the eyes of all mate-
rialistic thinkers.

However, there is another feature which moves the
Freudian concept of the personality even closer to a
quasi-metaphysical position: the ontogenetic theory.
What does the Freudian schema of "stages" actually
mean? What is implied by the entire sequence from
an early undifferentiated quantum of libidinal energy
which rests in itself, and at the same time extends in
an ill-defined way into the world of objects, from that
through the oral and anal phase to the first genital
phase, through the phase of latency to the phase of
puberty, from puberty to a stage of love which continu-
ously sacrifices parts of itself? It is a tremendous story
of unfolding. However, any process of unfolding be-

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW l6g

comes meaningful only by that wliicli is to be unfolded.
If anything develops it is the end toward which it de-
velops which gives meaning to the development. To a
botanist who studies all the phases of an oak, from the
acorn to the mature tree, his observations make sense
only because he has the end, namely the oak, in view.
I remember how fascinated we used to be by our lec-
tures in embryology. We happened to have a professor
who was an extraordinarily gifted teacher. But the thrill
which he was able to convey was due to the fact that
we knew the outcome of the whole thing the human
form. The cluster of cells called morula possessed a
meaning by virtue of the idea of a developed human
being. The idea of a process of becoming without the
idea of finality is a paradox. The fact that something
unfolds possesses a meaning only by virtue of that into
which it finally develops, is called entelechy.

It is the tragedy of psychoanalysis that it was evolved
by a nineteenth-century scientist who was very careful
to remain what one used to call "scientific." In order
to remain scientific, in that sense, you have to exclude
anything which is transcendental, in other words, which
."goes beyond" that which is perceived by our senses
and can be measured. Entelechy is a transcendental
principle. If one stops to think what makes an acorn
develop into an oak tree, one has already gone beyond
science. One can describe and measure the plant in
each phase of that development. One can divide this

170 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

movement up into one hundred thousand or one million
"stills," but the movement itself, the process of becom-
ing, is more than a sequence of one minion simple
phases it is a flow in which the end (tree) is already
contained in the beginning (acorn). Or, differently ex-
pressed, the acorn contains a potential principle which
points beyond itself toward the tree.

One may assume that most embryologists of the nine-
teenth century had the characteristic positivist outlook
of the scientists of their time; in that case, they had,
strictly speaking, chosen the wrong field. If when asked,
"Why are you studying all these various phases in the
life of the embryo?" the student answers, "Because I
am interested in the way the finished human form
comes into being," he has confessed to a metaphysical
outlook, whether he knows it or not. He implies a
design. However, in the case of an embryologist of the
body this is not so obvious, and one can perhaps dis-
guise it. Not so in the case of an embryologist of the
psyche. The moment we introduce the Freudian onto-
. genetic principle into psychology, we leave the world
of experimental psychology with its stopwatches, tape
measures and graphs behind, and enter the world of
an unfolding form. It is easy for an embryologist to find
a title for his story. He might call it, "From the primi-
tive cell to the human body." For a man who writes
on the development of the person it is much more dif-
ficult to find an appropriate tide: "From primitive nar-

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 171

cissism to . . ." To what? "From primitive narcissism
to maturity/* But "maturity" is only another word for
the end of a process of development. It can have only
two meanings, the first of which is relative and there-
fore temporal. A Chinese, a Russian, or an Englishman,
or representatives of three different centuries of the
same country, would probably have entirely different
definitions of what thay call mature. Even so, the defi-
nitions would still be arbitrary; in the case of Russia it
would depend a lot on whether Lenin or Tolstoy did
the defining. If we accept a genetic theory of the per-
son, then the primeval psychic structure must contain
potentially the psychic form very much as the simple
cell contains the physical form the end must give a
meaning to the beginning in a manner which transcends
all social or economic or historical determinants. This
is the second meaning of maturity: there must be a
design for Man.

In the seventh book of the Republic, Plato tells the
famous parable of the cave. It is the story of prisoners
in an underground den, chained in such a way that
they are unable to move their heads around toward
the den's opening. Outside the den, in the light, figures
of men are walking. Some of these men are carrying
objects. Beyond those figures a fire is blazing so that
the shadows of the moving figures are thrown against
the cave's wall. And beyond the fire is the sun in the

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

sky. These moving shadows then are the only things
the prisoners are able to see. They can have no concept
of the origins of the shadows. As is well known, in this
parable the figures and objects outside the cave rep-
resent ultimate reality, the world of Ideas, and we are
the prisoners who, in this life, are able to see only dim
shadows. Plato tells us how the released prisoner is in
such a state that in the beginning he finds it difficult to
discern the real persons and the objects they are carry-
ing. "When he approaches the light his eyes will be
dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all
of what we now call realities/' When the prisoner re-
turns to the den, he is first at a disadvantage compared
with his fellow prisoners. "Imagine once more, I said,
such an one coming suddenly out of the sun to be re-
placed in his old situation; would he not be certain to
have his eyes full of darkness? . . . Men would say
of him that up he went and down he came without his
eyes; and that it was better not even to think of ascend-
ing." * If we disregard for the moment the relationship
between ultimate reality and mere shadow which exists
in Plato's philosophy, this parable serves well to illus-
trate the point to which we have come.

The resistance against the sexual theory of Freud is
not only due to the fact that the theory is "sexual."
Many people who are free from prudishness share that
resistance. Anyone who comes out from a world which

* The Republic, translation by B. Jowett

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 173

js bathed in the light of reason into the embryonic night
of the flesh; from the clear landscape of everyday wake-
ful thinking into a world of archaic somatic imagery;
from a world in which Vergil's poems and Bach fugues
symbolize an ultimate meaningfulness into a world of
"castration fear" and "oral destructiveness"; anyone who
enters that prerational world from the light outside is
like one of Plato's returning prisoners. He cannot see
anything.

The reverse, however, is also true. If someone comes
to believe that the Freudian concepts are all there is to
the nature of Man, he loses sight of the ultimate design.
The seemingly bizarre and fantastic Freudian story of
a libidinal chrysalis makes sense only if there is an
image of the human personality which is beyond that
and yet completely real. Freud has beautifully de-
scribed the healthy development of the person, from
narcissism to object-relationship that is to say, from
an undifferentiated, pre-ideational, amorphous con-
glomerate of feeling toward a person with a capacity
to love. The Christian goes one step further. He gives
transcendental coherence to the story. Love is God.
God gives an ultimate meaning to human existence. To
come back to Plato's parable, beyond the cave, beyond
the figures, beyond the fire, is the Eternal Sun.

It will be recalled that in Plato's parable the return-
ing prisoners, who tell about the things they have en-
countered in the light outside the cave, are received

174 THE THIRD HEVOLUTION

with hostility by their fellows. Indeed, there seems to
be an element of hostility and destructiveness in all
materialist and reductive philosophers. There is an ele-
ment of spite in debunking. Max Scheler and, even
more so, Gabriel Marcel have emphasized how full of
resentment the Marxists are when they indulge in their
philosophy of "nothing but" This view is not com-
pletely justified. Both Marx and Freud were sensitive to
the lies and the hypocrisy of the society in which they
lived. The "nothing but," with all its crude materialism,
implies apart from the ressentiment a moral movement,
a holy impatience, something of the prophetic spirit of
the Old Testament. If Marx, instead of saying, "Religion
is nothing but the opiate of the people," had told some
of the members of the ruling class of the early indus-
trialist period, "Woe unto you who use religion as an
"opiate for the people," he would have had a strong
point. Many people, from the Prophet Isaiah to Leon
Bloy, have said the same thing. If Freud had told some
of his patients, "What you call religion is actually your
neurosis," instead of claiming that religion is a neurosis,
he would have stated a frequently observed truth. If
they are taken in the proper spirit, the debunkers ful-
fill an important function. They stir us out of our com-
placency. We see so frequently in practice that "reli-
gion" is unconsciously used as a channel of aggres-
siveness. The Reverend Mr. Davidson, in Somerset
Maugham's Rain, is a famous example of something

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 175

which, unfortunately, is commonplace. It is also pos-
sible that a young woman who joins a religious com-
munity which occupies itself particularly with unmar-
ried mothers may be in an inner state which makes her
unable to provide motherly or sisterly love to such girls;
she may enter on this path not in a spirit of charity
but, unknowingly, out of unresolved conflicts which
make for cruelty. Of course, common sense has always
known about this. Such things have recently provided
themes, perhaps influenced by psychoanalysis, for Cath-
olic novelists. What should be emphasized here is the
fact that the "nothing but," though philosophically
wrong, contains a movement toward moral purification.

This point is closely related to something else. Anyone
who has been able to gain psychoanalytic insight must
feel humbled. A gaze into the interior reveals a great
deal of frailty of which we have never been aware. A
parade of human misery files past in our clinics, suicide
and murder, cynicism and despair, drunkenness and
promiscuity, miserliness and suspicion and all the time
you feel: "But for a trivial difference of circumstances,
not at all merited, there go V 9 The moral values have
not changed. But it has become quite difficult for one
to feel superior. As a matter of fact, according to psy-
choanalytical teaching you have to know your own
.depth first to be able to help these people precisely

176 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

because they represent your own latent possibilities.
This is a challenge to Christian consciousness.

It is also the reason why, if somebody's moral philos-
ophy is based on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the
acquaintance with psychoanalysis often deepens his
natural charity. The judge of a juvenile court, a man of
deep religious convictions, once told me how his atti-
tude toward the delinquent had changed ever since he
had taken instruction in the psychology of his young
defendants. This instruction had been given to him by
a professor of psychology, a Dominican priest \vho was
psychoanalytically oriented. The judge told me that he
used to be rigid and dry, relying on the letter of the
law, in his attitude toward the youngsters. In retrospect
it seemed to him that he had gotten nowhere. This
man, who goes into meditation before each court ses-
sion, told me that now he understood and tried to love
these young people. When he talked to them, it was
as if he felt what they must be feeling. He said that
the result of his work was so much enhanced that it
now seemed as different as day from night. A Catholic
psychoanalyst from France once remarked that his char-
ity was enormously deepened ever since he himself
had been analyzed. This has nothing to do with moral
relativism; it means only that the hard soil of recep-
tivity has been plowed and enriched.

From what we have said in this chapter two things
have become clear. First, psychoanalysis contains pre-

SIGNS OF SOMETHING NEW 177

cious elements which point in the direction of a Chris-
tian personalism. In order to see this one has to divest
it of the philosophy of its founder, and of all the accre-
tions which have been gathering to imbed it in the
current of "the third revolution." Second, while no psy-
chological discovery, however startling, can undo or re-
shape Christian values, on the plane of practical exigen-
ciesin the educational field, in the field of therapy,
and so on those who regard the Gospel as the basis for
their lives can only gain from all genuine discoveries.
For the rest of this book, we shall enlarge on these two
points.

VIII

Guilt and Anxiety

The problem of evil and of wrongdoing is part and parcel
of the problem of freedom.

N. Berdyaev, Dostoievsky

One aspect of present-day psychiatry, and of psycho-
analysis in particular, which evokes in many people a
sense of apprehension and distrust, is the problem of
guilt. It would almost seem as if the reality of good
and evil, of innocence and culpability were being ques-
tioned with the advent of "depth psychology/'

There have, of course, always been extreme cases in
which everybody acknowledged that a morally repre-
hensible act had been carried out under conditions
which exclude guilt. If someone commits murder while
insane, the judgment of common sense and of the law
courts regards him as a patient rather than a criminal.
The so-called McNaghton rule in British law reflects
this attitude, though the courts do not always accept
expert psychiatric testimony with regard to insanity.
If the railroad worker described in chapter III com-
mitted acts of delinquency after the crowbar accident
which deprived him of his frontal lobes, it was obvious
178

GUILT AND ANXIETY 179

to his pre-Freudian contemporaries that he was not
guilty in any moral sense. However, even in such cases
of organic impairment of the function of the brain, the
question of guilt was not always unequivocal. In certain
types of organic illness of the brain, an attack may occur
during which the patient is not conscious of what he is
doing, although all his actions seem well co-ordinated.
Occasionally in such a state a crime is committed. Some
psychiatrists of previous generations hesitated to regard
such an organic condition as an exculpating element in
the case of a crime, because it was impossible to prove
that the patient's consciousness was altered while the
crime was committed. There is no doubt that under this
theory many a man has been innocently condemned.
The situation is complicated by the fact that many
patients with organic disorders of the brain have also
psychogenic (psychologically determined) disturb-
ances. Automatic actions which appear well co-ordi-
nated, but which occur in a state of altered conscious-
ness, have been known for a long time. The French
clinicians used to call them "fugues" and in German
medical literature they are referred to as "twilight
states." When they appear in the daily newspaper, they
are described as "amnesia." A patient "comes to" in a
place which is strange to him, and claims not to know
how he got there. Investigation reveals that he must
have carried out complicated actions for several hours
or even days while in a clouded state; yet he has no

l8o THE THIRD REVOLUTION

recollection of the entire period. Sucli an occurrence
may be purely psychogenic. William James's famous
Mr. Brown, who one day found himself in a store sell-
ing groceries and who a few months before had been
a minister in another town, is undoubtedly a "twilight"
case. Ogden Nash's absent-minded Professor Primrose
may belong in the same class. In classical psychiatric
literature, until one was able to record the electro-
potentials of the brain, there used to be a simple rule
of thumb for all such cases: when in doubt, find out
whether there is a motive for escape in the life situation
of the patient. If there is, then his "twilight" attack was
psychologically determined. If not, there was likely to
be an organic disorder of the brain. (William James's
and Ogden Nash's patients, although the authors make
no point of it, must have had "motives for escape.")
Long-lasting twilight states are possibly always of psy-
chogenic origin.

Today, when we know something about the electro-
potentials of the human brain, things are no longer so
simple. During the war, a boy of fourteen whose aunt
told me that he had the habit of suddenly disappearing,
was treated. After his disappearance he would turn up
the following morning in some such place as a dowTi-
town back yard, without the slightest notion how he
got there and what had happened during the interven-
ing time. When I spoke to the boy, he told me that his
father was overseas and that he and his mother, who

GUILT AND ANXIETY l8l

worked, were boarding with an uncle and aunt. The
boy described the uncle as "very hard" and "down on
me/* The old rule of thumb provided a "motive for
escape/' but just to be on the safe side the aunt was
asked about a possible history of brain injury. She re-
membered that at the- age of nine the boy had been hit
by a streetcar, and his skull fractured. Tracing the elec-
tropotentials revealed a pattern typical of so-called
"psychic seizures" in the area of one of the temporal
lobes of the brain. Before the discovery of electro-
encephalography, the boys "twilight" state would cer-
tainly have been regarded as of a purely "psychologi-
cal" nature. This story is told first to show that a state
of disturbance may be organically caused and yet its
content the actual choice * of symptoms may be psy-
chologically determined. Secondly, in the minds of most
people, an organically caused disturbance cannot pos-
sibly be associated with the concept of guilt, while a
psychologically motivated disturbance is not so easily
exculpated. The dichotomy is no longer as simple as
one used to think.

If our young patient had hit his uncle over the head,,
and claimed loss of memory during this act, the situ-
ation would have been quite complex. Before the era
of electroencephalography, a great number of experts

* The word "choice" here does not imply a conscious, intentional
act.

1&2- THE THIRD REVOLUTION

would have regarded him as guilty. It is not at all clear
why this should be so. The fact remains that, to many
people the world of physical cause and effect is associ-
ated with determinism, the world of motives (psycho-
logical causes) with freedom.

Then there is the question of the subjective experi-
ence of guilt. Many psychiatric patients have ideas of
guilt which are obviously morbid. Most lay people are
able to spot delusions of guilt; in fact, there is some-
thing quite startling about them. An admired and re-
spectable citizen, known for a life of integrity, suddenly
commits suicide. Such a catastrophe is frequently due
to the sudden eruption of irrational self -accusations.
There is a state around the middle or the early decline
of life which is characterized by such a seemingly mys-
terious eruption. The victims are usually people who
have been overconscientious rather than the opposite
throughout their lives. We know now that their over-
conscientiousness represents in latent, potential form
the fiery lava of guilt which finally descends on them;
this has been borne out by psychoanalytical studies.
Some patients see their entire past as drenched in "sin/ 7
while others pick out some trivial incident and magnify
it to bizarre dimensions.

An elderly lady, a dutiful housewife and mother, who
had nursed her husband faithfully for two years during
a final illness, broke down after his death. She was

GUILT AND ANXIETY 183

brought to the hospital in an agitated state of despair.
Nothing, not even capital punishment, she said, would
be enough to atone for what she had done. Finally, with
signs of dread, she revealed that thirty years before
she had done something very wrong. During subse-
quent interviews it became evident that a friend of her
husband's had on one occasion made a harmless "pass"
at her while she was alone with him. It is important to
know that her husband had been a drinker, difficult
to get along with, and particularly aggravating during
his final illness. According to her daughter, who sup-
plied this part of the information, the mother had
borne her husband's behavior with great patience until
she finally succumbed to this morbid depression, albeit
only after his death. We shall not go into the psycho-
analytical interpretation of this story. It is quoted only
to illustrate with a particularly crude example the dis-
crepancy between objective guilt, on the one hand,
and the subjective experience of guilt on the other. In
this case there is no guilt at all. However, there are de-
grees in the experience of real guilt and these degrees
are just as puzzling to the observer as the affliction of
the melancholy widow. Tolstoy describes vividly the
tortures of remorse to which Anna Karenina finally suc-
cumbs; at the same time other ladies of high Russian
society talk casually about their extramarital exploits
in the manner in which one discusses sports events,

184 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

without the least sign of bad conscience. There lies a
mystery.

The problem of guilt is inextricably interwoven with
the problem of anxiety.

A student nurse was so tense and anxious that she
found herself unable to go on with her studies. When-
ever she was called to the office of the head nurse, the
superintendent of nursing, or in fact any woman who
was above her in the hierarchy of nursing, she devel-
oped a rapid pulse, her knees began to shake, her
voice became hoarse, she grew pale and her eyes
had a fearful expression. This reaction did not de-
velop because of an expected reproach; it accompan-
ied any routine call. Nor did it depend on whether
there was anything severe or forbidding in her supe-
rior's manner. The girl was intelligent and pleasant,
and her record at the nursing school was good. Yet she
felt that her reaction was uncontrollable and that it
was sufficient reason for her to stop her career. It did
not take long to find out that any female person in
authority unconsciously represented a maternal image
to the patient. Any maternal image inspired fear. But
the true origin of fear was the girl's own hostile reaction
to the mother, a reaction of which she had never be-
come conscious and which she had never resolved.

In following the case only to this point, we see three
things: the reaction of fear in the absence of objective

GUILT AND ANXIETY 185

danger; the fact that the feared object represents some-
thing else in disguise namely, some archaic image
which must be endowed with extraordinary power; and
a poorly controlled force within the anxious subject.
What does this mean? The word fear is used by psy-
chologists to connote the reaction of the organism to
danger. If one walks alone in the forest and is con-
fronted by a wild animal, one experiences the emotional
state called "fear," and at the same time one has all
the physical symptoms which our student nurse re-
ported. The skin is pale, the mouth feels dry, the heart
beats fast, the knees shake, the pupils dilate, one may
have a tendency to empty bowels and bladder. If the
blood could be examined biochemically at that moment,
one would discover certain things in addition, such as
the fact that the blood sugar is rising. The great Ameri-
can physiologist Cannon has developed a widely known
hypothesis concerning this reaction. He drew people's
attention to the fact that all these autonomic * reactions
are controlled by the medulla of the adrenal gland and
the sympathetic nervous system. Then he stated hypo-
thetically that the entire reaction had a teleological
significance or, in other words, a meaningful purpose.
The "meaning" of this reaction, according to Cannon, is

* "Autonomic" because most of these reactions cannot be controlled
by our intention. You can willfully open or close your fist, but you
cannot willfully make your pupils wider or narrower, your heart beat
faster, etc.

l86 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

to prepare the organism either for fight or flight. The
skin turns pale, because all the blood supply is geared
to be at the disposal of the muscles; the muscles become
tense to the degree of tremor to be ready for action;
the blood sugar rises in order to supply the muscles with
food; the pupils dilate to enable one to see as well as
possible; the bowels and bladder are emptied to make
the body light. Incidentally there are neurophysiologi-
cal data which would indicate that animals may have
all these reactions without the subjective emotional
state which we call "fear."

Neurotic anxiety is defined as fear without danger.
If one adopts Cannon's teleological theory of fear, one
faces a remarkable paradox there is good reason to
believe that even in the presence of objective danger,
many situations occur in which the physiological re-
actions associated with fear are no longer meaningful
for man. If you were to find yourself alone in your
house at night, knowing that a man with a gun had
sneaked in to kill you, it is doubtful that your organism
would be more easily defended if you quickly emptied
your bowels and bladder before meeting him. In other
words, there are many situations, at least for civilized
man, in which the physiological reaction of fear is
meaningless, from the point of view of Cannon's crite-
ria, or even harmful.

In the case of anxiety the situation is even more para-
doxical, because no objective danger appears to be pres-

GUILT AND ANXIETY 187

ent Our student nurse behaves as if there were a tiger
in the underbrush, or as if there were a gunman wait-
ing in the dark. It is one of the merits of Freud to
have shown that a danger actually does exist in these
situations. However, contrary to the reaction of normal
fear in man, the source of danger lies not in the out-
side world but within the depth of the person. The situ-
ation of the student nurse is somewhat similar to those
picture puzzles we used to study when we were chil-
dren. A pen and ink drawing of many intricate lines
would be presented with a caption: "Where is the
tiger?" or "Where is the dog?" or "Where is the child?"
Only after studying the drawing from many angles did
the missing figure become discernible. Our student
nurse who experiences all of Cannon's symptoms poses
the question: "Where is the tiger?"

Psychoanalytic theory claims the tiger must be some-
where. Since we cannot see him, we must look for him,
in contrast to the situation described in the famous
poem, inside the lady. Consider this extraordinary phe-
nomenon. Not only is there an aspect to the reaction of
fear which makes it appear anachronistic, even under
the circumstances of objective danger as if the human
organism had to repeat reactions which at one time
were meaningful but there is the further element that
our young lady reacts to an image of her inner reality,
an image which looms in the subterranean layers of her

l88 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

person ready to endow the harmless figures of objective
reality with immensely threatening power.

The mystery of anxiety and guilt comes more clearly
into view when we approach certain cases of phobia
that is, anxiety which is not "diffuse" but tends to be
associated with certain situations. A young married
woman was obsessed with a panic-like fear of eating
in the presence of strangers. She could not accept din-
ner invitations, she could not eat in restaurants, or in
any situation which involved anyone except her hus-
band. There was one abnormal feature about her child-
hood on which she dwelt at length: she referred to it
as a "foreigner complex." She was born in Canada of
parents who had immigrated from Yugoslavia. Her
mother tongue was English and, as far as appearance
and language were concerned, there was nothing to
distinguish her from other North American girls. Yet
her Slav name bothered her a lot. At school she felt that
she had been regarded as "the Polack"; particularly
during extracurricular activities, such as recreation or
choir practice, she felt decidedly the "outsider/* the
Yugoslav girl who was not considered as belonging to
the group. There were eight children in her family,
five girls and three boys. First came a boy followed by
three girls, then came twins (a boy and a girl), then
another boy and the last child was a girl. Our patient
was the girl twin.

There were many indications that she had appeared

GUILT AND ANXIETY l8g

at an awkward moment in the history of her family.
After the three girls one child, the boy, would have been
enoughto put it in a way in which it was probably
never consciously formulated by anyone in the family.
As is well known, parents' feelings at the arrival of chil-
dren are not always feelings of love and acceptance.
There is a great body of scientific evidence to prove the
Freudian contention (originally an hypothesis) that
the mother's anxiety and the mother's ambivalent feel-
ings during the early phase of feeding has a decisive
influence on the world of feelings in which the child
finds himself when grown up. According to that Freud-
ian "embryology/' the earliest fantasies of destruction
are those associated with biting and swallowing. In our
patient's setting all the food of love had to go for two,
and it is not difficult to see the point in psychoanalytical
theory. Eating together is the oldest symbol of fraternal
love; Plato's Symposium is the love-feast par excel-
lence. Yet it was just the idea of the shared meal which
struck terror into our patient's heart, so that she began
to tremble at the approach of the situation. This inter-
pretation was borne out by the material she provided
under treatment. That world of troglodytes, with its law
of "devour or be devoured," is potentially slumbering in
all of us. Her particular history had been such that this
law still entered into her relationship with other people.
Incidentally, the story of her "foreigner complex" also
becomes more understandable: the fact that in early

1QO THE THIRD REVOLUTION

childhood she had the feeling of being the undesired
one, the intruder in the group, had been repressed. It
was transposed, as it were, onto the social and racial
plane, a plane on which it was also more easily tolerated
than in its original form. What little we have discussed
about this patient's case is enough to indicate a few
important points. "Fear without objective danger" be-
comes meaningful if we trace it back to its original
setting. The "unfinished business" of early history is
re-enacted in situations which bear all the character-
istics of disguise; the original tragedy becomes all but
unrecognizable.

Two more examples will illustrate what we want to
say about the problem of objective guilt as compared
to neurotic guilt. A prominent businessman from out-
of-town was first seen in a hotel in Montreal. He was
in bed in a suite on the first floor, under the influence of
alcohol and barbiturates, but still in a depressed and
anxious mood. His state was so deplorable that I felt
he might have to be hospitalized. When I mentioned
this he became, like so many patients, even more anx-
ious, but the reason he gave was curious: he was afraid
he might have to be hospitalized on one of the "higher"
floors of the hospital. By this he meant any floor above
the third. For several years he had been suffering from
a morbid fear of heights, so much so that he could not
attend any business meetings in the usual tall office
buildings without "doping himself' with great amounts

GUILT AND ANXIETY 1Q1

of sedatives. Even then he often had to leave the meet-
ing in an inner state of panic after ten minutes, using
any excuse which came to mind. During the war he had
some important government function besides his busi-
ness and at times he would be summoned on short no-
tice to go somewhere by plane. It was often necessary
for him to refuse. While his history was being taken
he suddenly said: "I am going to tell you something you
ought perhaps to know. Ive never told this to anybody
before. . . ." He had grown up in the north of England
under very poor circumstances. His father had been a
peddler. "I used to get along well with my father, I
think, but one day we had a most awful row, and I told
him I wished he were dead. And the most extraordinary
thing happened. That very day my father went out and
never returned. He was drowned in the moors."

Without going into the remaining details of this
man's history, something should be mentioned at this
point. We not infrequently see men who suffer from
jivhat one might call "fear of success/' Just when they
are at the height of their career, they do something to
fail; they engineer this failure with the sureness of a
sleepwalker and one can often show conclusively that
the failure has been engineered as a kind of atonement.
In these cases success, in the language of their uncon-
scious, means a tremendous aggression against the
father, and failure is an irrational penance which is
attained with an inner necessity which is startling. This

1Q2 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

necessity is reminiscent of the compelling force of the
laws which govern the physical universe. Though no
such failure had yet occurred in our patient at this time,
it soon became apparent that his fear of heights was to
be understood metaphorically. He had had a rocket-like
career, which put him "high above" the father's position
in life. But when he had reached the zenith, he became
panic-stricken by height in the literal, spatial sense.

As a matter of fact, it is perhaps incorrect to say that
his fear of heights is to be understood metaphorically.
On the contrary it is almost as if our everyday meta-
phors are to be understood in terms of such things as
our patient's phobia. In the world of our unconscious,
there is no such thing as "high above" in a purely figura-
tive sense. In that area of existence everything is matter,
and there is nothing outside matter. It is one thing to
say figuratively "I have soared so high, I'm dizzy with
success/' But it is truly horrible to endure this con-
cretely, in a world in which, as we have shown, meta-
phor and reality are one.

It is a well-known fact that the first dream which the
patient recounts during his first session is frequently a
"giveaway." It is almost as if, in anticipation of that
first interview, the unconscious makes a frantic attempt
at a solution of conflicts. A young man was interviewed
in a serious anxiety state with depression; he literally
trembled and cried. He was of eastern European de-

GUILT AND ANXIETY 1Q3

scent, and one of the main features of the family situ-
ation was a rigid and autocratic father. Almost all the
other members of his family had been seen for various
neurotic conditions. The patient's depression, with all
the details of its development, was most characteristic
of situations of repressed aggressiveness with guilt and
self -punishment. During the first session he was asked
whether he might be able to recite any dream he hap-
pened to remember. He said that only the night before
he had dreamed the following: "I found myself in a
room I did not recognize. I had in my hand a long point-
ing stick, one of those things lecturers use for pointing
at lantern slides. I pointed at a light above me. I
touched it with the stick and it broke. That moment
I heard my fathers voice behind me saying: 'Youll pay
for this!' I turned around, saw my father standing right
behind me, and woke up." This "first" dream was crucial
in a typical way; it contained in a condensed version
the mechanism of his anxiety state. Knowing his family
and knowing something about the inner meaning of his
illness, it had already been suspected that his father
had made him pay for something. The dream confirmed
this suspicion. Even without the orthodox methods of
dream analysis, one can say that he must at one time
have felt threatened by reprisals for his phallic aggres-
siveness (the pointing rod). "The light above" may
stand for authority, or the lamp may have a maternal
and feminine significance this would depend on other

1Q4 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

psychological material, and it is of no particular interest
to us at this moment

These three examples all have certain features in
common. As I have already indicated above, they all
refer to a world of archaic imagery. This world, which
is fantastic compared to the world of objective reality
in which the adult moves, is at the same time purely
concrete; it consists only of somatic and spatial
concreteness. One could say that "guilt" is actually an
abstract concept, and in such a world of early fantasy
the abstract concept has no place.

Secondly, the fantasy of aggression and destruction
on one hand, and the fantasy of punishment on the
other are so intricately interlaced that it is hard to say
what is actually the source of anxiety. After working
with these patients, one is almost tempted to say that
it is purely academic to know which it is that inspires
anxiety grinding the brother up or being ground up,
outdoing the father or being outdone. The fact that in
the beginning there is no abstract concept, but merely
a spatial and somatic image, with certain physiological
equivalents is again apparent in the etymology of
many words. For example, remorse is, literally speak-
ing, "that which bites 'back. 9 ' The reversal of oral ag-
gression, as the earliest and crudest prototype of that
which we later call guilt, is clearly expressed in this.
Remorse, in that naked somatic sense, is never experi-
enced by a healthy person. Only our lady who was ter-

GUILT AND ANXIETY 1Q5

rified of eating in the presence of other people experi-
enced remorse on that level of primeval concreteness.
Thirdly, if we interpret the three instances as in-
stances of self-punishment, we see another remarkable
feature: in objective reality there is either nothing, or
very little, to punish. The patient is afraid of a danger
which does not really exist, and this danger represents
a punishment for something he desired to do but never
did. The widow who broke down with morbid delusions
of guilt after her husband's death felt guilty about a
harmless incident with one of her husband's friends
thirty years before. Psychoanalysis would demonstrate
(in cases in which analytical investigation is possible)
that at that time she most probably had strong tempta-
tions which were repressed. Under certain psychologi-
cal constellations, repressed wishes evoke more violent
guilt feelings than many real acts which, from the point
of view of Christian morality, are objectively wrong.
In the case of our widow, we also see that that force
which produces the experience of guilt in her, has a
quality which one might call maximalism if this word
were not already used for something else. In the fan-
tasy of these patients, nothing short of complete and
utter annihilation will do for atonement, and no forgive-
ness is possible. This becomes quite clear in psychotic
depressions. But even in the two cases of phobia (fear
of eating and of height), the anxiety has this "all-out"
quality. True guilt is related to debt. In several Ian-

196 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

guages, the words for guilt and debt are synonymous.
But the "guilt" which we have encountered in our three
cases has, unlike true debt, an element of inexhausti-
bility. It cannot be paid off and be done with.

In this connection it is necessary to refer once more to
compulsive-obsessive states. Everybody experiences
compulsive-obsessive symptoms, if not in their fullness
at least as little quirks. We have already said that almost
everyone, particularly during adolescence, goes through
a phase during which he "has to do funny things/' such
as avoiding the cracks in the pavement, or counting
windows, or skipping every second step on the stair-
case, or going back a certain number of times to see
whether the gas jet is closed or the door is locked at
night. The German novelist Jean Paul describes a
schoolmaster who had to crawl out of bed several times
at night to see in the light of the moon whether his
shoes were placed perfectly parallel. The composer
Anton Bruckner was tortured by a compulsion to count
windows, and frequently he had to return to his study
to make sure that the manuscript of a symphony was
covered by an extra sheet of paper.

In some people, these compulsions become so serious
that they can badly handicap the patient's life. They
certainly deprive him of his happiness. What the Cath-
olic theologian calls "scruples" also belong in this cate-
gory. In retrospect the person finds a flaw in his con-

GUILT AND ANXIETY 1Q7

fession, and has to make it over and over again. Or he
has to repeat a certain prayer over and over, because
something may have been wrong with it. One peculiar
aspect of compulsions is that the patient has partial or
full insight: he knows that the act he feels compelled
to carry out is "crazy," and yet the compelling force
seems irresistible. Moreover, when he makes an effort
to resist the compulsion (for example, if he tries hard
not to count the windows), he is filled with anxiety
which gradually mounts until he carries his ritual out;
then a momentary relief from tension follows until the
first faint impulse appears again.

Closely related to those compulsive states are cases
of a "compulsive character," as they are commonly
called. These people, unlike compulsive-obsessive neu-
rotics, do not suffer subjectively and would never seek
the help of a psychiatrist. Everybody knows someone
of a compulsive character in his own personal experi-
ence. The office manager cannot begin his work in the
morning unless three sharpened pencils lie in parallel
arrangement on the right side of the blotter, the cal-
endar is at the left top side of the blotter, the files are
clipped together in sequence, and there is a perfectly
clean sheet of blotting paper. If any of these things is
not "just so/' the manager is disturbed; he is either un-
able to work, or he starts off the day on the wrong foot
It is often difficult for this type of person to regard his
work as finished because there are always a few minor

108 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

items invisible to the naked eye to adjust before the
work can be thought complete. In everyday psychology
a person of such a compulsive character is therefore
referred to as a "perfectionist/* Though such a person
does not necessarily suffer himself, he may cause suf-
fering in those around him.

Closely related to compulsive acts as encountered in
compulsive neurosis are obsessive thoughts. These are
thoughts which "come to" the patient apparently
against his will, and are recognized, with full insight,
as morbid. The patient '"has to" think an obscene word
during a certain prayer or during a ceremonial recep-
tion, or the sight of any sharp instrument suggests the
idea of killing his own children. It can easily be seen
how alarming this symptom may be to the patient.

When we contemplate the subjective aspect (phe-
nomenology) of these symptoms, they all have some-
thing in common. The patient seems to say: "I know
this is crazy, but I cannot resist it" Carried to its logi-
cal conclusion, this means that an idea is an extraneous
something which enters the mind, and not something
produced actively. This is not as paradoxical as it
sounds. Even under normal circumstances there are
two elements to the subjective experience of thinking.
When one says, "I could not rest until I had this mathe-
matical problem solved," one thinks of one's conscious-
ness as an agent. When one says, "I was sitting on a
bench when the thought occurred . . . ," one thinks

GUILT AND ANXIETY 1Q9

of one's consciousness as a recipient. The great French
psychiatrist Pierre Janet, the most important forerunner
of Freud, called people with compulsive-obsessive
symptoms psychasthenic. This expression implied that
their psyche was too weak to prevent certain thoughts
from intruding. It even implied that the healthy psyche
is strong enough to keep those thoughts "out/' but that
they are potentially there to pounce on it. This concept
of Janet's conjures up an image of consciousness com-
parable to a torch-lit camp in the jungle surrounded by
animals prowling in the dark, and ready to intrude the
moment the fire goes out and the defenses are weak-
ened.

When we contemplate the content of these symp-
toms, we make a simple observation. These examples
of compulsive acts all resemble penances. An overstrict
parent or a cruel headmaster could say: "You go back
and do these stairs over again, and woe unto you if
there is even a suspicion you might have touched one
of the steps in between! You'll have to do them all over
again. . . ." Or, "I want you to count all the windows
and don't dare miss one before you come home." How
horrible, you would say, to encounter in reality a per-
son who imposes such penances on a child. And yet
the majority of people (perhaps everybody) carry such
a person around, in potential latent form, inside them-
selves.

There is nothing punitive about obsessive thoughts,

2OO THE THIRD REVOLUTION

however. On the contrary, it is as if something which
is not tamed at all welled up in the patient. In fact,
they simply express crude unbridled aggression. In the
language of psychoanalysis, such thoughts originate in
the "area" of the unconscious which is called the id.
The compelling thoughts w r hich resemble penances
arise from that area of the unconscious which is called
the superego.

There is a good deal of confusion regarding the na-
ture of the superego in psychoanalytical literature and
in textbooks. Freud himself was not consistent through-
out his life when it came to these concepts which he
had created. The triad by which the human person is
represented in a schematic diagram (superego, ego, id)
may have to be discarded again in a hundred years.
Nevertheless, as a diagram which enables us to explain
phenomena, it is indispensable. The situation is com-
parable to that created by the physicist Bohr in his
planetary model of the atom. Subsequent studies
showed that things were more complicated; yet many
discoveries in atomic physics were based on Bohr's con-
cept of a nucleus which corresponds to the sun and
electrons which correspond to the planets.

Some of the textbooks, particularly some of the popu-
lar writings on psychoanalysis, state flatly that the word
-superego is just another word for conscience. Some
statements of Freud would lead to the same assumption.

However, consider the examples which we have dis-

GUILT AND ANXIETY 201

cussed in this chapter: the girl who is stricken by terror
at the idea of eating in the presence of others; the man
who is seized by panic while he is "high up"; the young
man who in his dream vision (and in the agony of his
waking hours) pays dearly for having rebelled against
the father; those who are compelled to go through
painful bizarre compulsive rituals. The stage on which
all their dramas of fear and penance are played differs
from the world of Good and Evil, from the world of
virtue and wickedness of which Plato and Aristotle
speak, as a nightmare differs from the mild light of day
in which the objects of wakeful reality are bathed. One
of the keenest and most decisive intuitions of Freud
is the fact, so easily discernible in the examples quoted
above, that the currents emanating from the primitive
superego have much in common with our instinctual
drives.

The young lady with the eating phobia does not
really expect punishment (as our reason conceives of
this idea). To her, it is just a crude, brutal question of
% eating or being eaten. The compulsive patient does not
really undergo penance, as our reason understands the
word. He experiences a seemingly irresistible urge
which leads to mounting tension. The tension is tem-
porarily relieved when the urge is satisfied but it soon
returns like the first pianissimo of a slow crescendo.
The eating phobia, the phobia of heights, the compul-
sive acts all have the earmarks of blind force and of

2O2 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

cruelty. With regard to our two phobic patients, I have
said that the act of aggression (eating; killing) and the
act of atonement (being eaten; falling) penetrate one
another. They are interchangeable. They represent
drives, except that in the fantasy of atonement the drive
is centripetal instead of centrifugal, so to speak: it is a
"drive" all right, but turned against the person himself.
We understand why compulsive acts resembling pen-
ance, and obsessive thoughts resembling aggression,
are so often found in one and the same patient. As we
have said, the patient's self resembles a campfire weakly
protected against animals prowling in the dark. But the
species of prowlers is irrelevant: the patient cannot
resist the urge either to self-punitive or to aggressive
thoughts. The famous French psychiatrist Henri Ey
objects to the term superego. The prefix "super," he
says, is misleading. Actually the archaic infantile imag-
ery of punishment is on the same level as the untamed
animal of aggressiveness. In his diagram the superego
and the id are on the same level. They surround reason
on all sides.

What then is the difference between guilt and neu-
rotic guilt? The concept of guilt is closely associated
with the concept of justice. Guilt has the quality of
proportion.* The greater your wrong, the guiltier you
are. There is something about this proportion which can

* As Aristotle has pointed out so beautifully, ethics is related to
harmony.

GUILT AND ANXIETY 203

almost be quantified. If you find and keep a hundred
dollars which belongs to your neighbor, common sense
would say that you are much guiltier than if you took
a couple of postage stamps from him without returning
them. A compulsive-obsessive ("scrupulous") person
may feel guiltier for not having returned a couple of
postage stamps than a man convicted of the theft of
one hundred dollars. Secondly, objective guilt can be
assuaged. Like debt, to which it is related, it can be
paid. Neurotic guilt is insatiable. You cannot appease it.
You cannot pay it off. Thirdly, objective guilt does not
necessarily depend on emotion. A man may regard him-
self as guilty and be perfectly relaxed about it. Neurotic
guilt is so inextricably interwoven with anxiety, that
that which is experienced subjectively is at times only
the anxiety without conscious feelings of guilt. Finally
(and this is related to point number one) neurotic guilt
is related to repressed drives just as much as to realized
acts. Objective guilt refers to realized acts only.

All this points in favor of those who draw a clear
line between conscience on one hand and the primi-
tive superego on the other. The former is the prod-
uct of consciousness and the light of reason; the
latter is unconscious it becomes consciously manifest
only in a masked form. Conscience has all the charac-
teristics of human reason, primarily those of harmony
and of proportion; the superego is originally related to
primitive libidinal drives. Conscience is associated with

204 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

wise self-restraint; the superego is related to blind
self-destructiveness. Basically no dread is involved in
conscience; the superego, with its element of back-firing
aggression, pulsates with anxiety. To be sure, positive
elements enter into the formation of the superego at a
later stage of the child's development. But conscience
contains something which transcends our psychological
data.

In a previous chapter we indicated that there is a
basic difference between the embryology of the per-
sonality as conceived by Freud, and the embryology of
the human body as studied by the anatomist. The or-
gans, in their post-uterine shape, have normally lost
their embryonic structure once and for all; while psy-
chic functions of the highest order, such as agape and
conjugal love, seem to retain in a shadowy and latent
form all the previous archaic phases of libido, and there
is a continuous possibility of regression. Something
similar seems to exist as far as the relationship between
conscience and superego is concerned, with the possi-
bility of reverting back to archaic levels, and the pos-
sibility of a penetration of the archaic into the mature
structure.

The cases which I chose to illustrate our argument
were somewhat extreme and had a strongly clinical
flavor. There are innumerable borderline problems
which indicate more clearly the penetration of sub-
kyers into the area w T hich we call conscience. These

GUILT AND ANXIETY 20$

are the problems which most urgently need to be taken
up by parents, educators, and priests, For example,
there is the guilt associated with masturbation. The
ideal of chastity is one of those moral truths from which
no scientific investigation can take anything away; this
is in the nature of things. However, its psychological
aspect (what theologians call "the natural plane") is
quite problematic in the light of what we have said.
Entirely new vistas open up. All adolescents I have
ever seen who were oppressed with anxiety or depres-
sion or compulsive rituals on account of masturbation
felt that way primarily because of what had happened
to them during their first genital phase and only sec-
ondarily because of the Jansenist or "medicaT threat
This means that during the phase of early infantile mas-
turbation something happened in these people of which
the adolescent anxiety is just a reactivation; the founda-
tion was laid before the advent of reason. Of course,
during adolescence a bit of hellfire adds to the anxiety.
Although I am opposed to our moral relativists who
advocate the abolition of "sexual taboos" on the basis
of scientific discovery, I have much more sympathy
with them than with our Jansenist teachers of morality.
The former act often out of natural charity while the
latter often give vent to neurotic cruelty under the cloak
of moral teaching.

Chastity is a lofty ideal. It can be taught only in a
positive form, however, well integrated with a teach-

2O6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

ing of the ideals of charity and justice. Taken out of
the context of the Gospel and presented in an isolated
form as a conglomerate of donts, it becomes a diaboli-
cal distortion of truth. The medieval poet Langland
wrote: "Chastity without Charity shall be chained in
Hell!" Moral nihilists and Jansenists (and there is a sur-
prisingly large number of Catholics whose thinking,
particularly on sex, is Jansenistic and basically Mani-
chaean) are brothers-in-arms. Both disfigure the Chris-
tian image of man.

This circumstance often forces Christian psychiatrists
into a sort of two-front war. In our work we frequently
encounter victims of perverted education in matters of
sex. Christian morality as it is lived, particularly in the
Anglo-Saxon countries, has been predominantly nega-
tive during the past few centuries. When we take clini-
cal histories, we always ask questions about religion
as a matter of routine. Quite often, in the case of
Protestants, the patient will say: "My father was a
good Christian. He never drank or smoked or played
cards. . . ." In the case of Catholics, we often have
religion outlined in terms of all that has been avoided
in the sexual field, such as adultery, birth control, and
masturbation. One gets an impression that the Gospel
is limited to a list of sexual prohibitions outlined against
a frame of eternal fire. It all becomes a matter of donts
which, if done, lead to eternal perdition. Why is there
nothing neurotic about the severe asceticism of Saint

GUILT AND ANXIETY 20/

Don Bosco or Saint Francis of Assisi or Saint John of
the Cross? Because their asceticism was, within the
hierarchy of the personality, in the place where it be-
longed. In other words, it was subordinated to charity.

This then seems to be part of the Christian tragedy:
guilt reaches into the transcendental above and the
temporal-accidental below. Just as love, on the natural
plane, has a forerunner in an element of crude posses-
siveness, the moral idea has a forerunner in an element
of dumb fear. Psychoanalytically speaking, every man
is his own primitive ancestor. In order to face his guilt
in the light of the Gospel, the neurotic has to be freed
.from the dim, wordless anxiety which is the mark of
slavery and which derives from a world without free-
dom. Neurotic guilt is ancestral. It stems not only from
an infantile archaic world; it is not only of the biological
order. It keeps us imprisoned in a pre-Christian pagan
circle.

In an unredeemed world, guilt is deadweight. All it
can do is pull down. In the world of the Gospel, guilt
is no longer deadweight; it becomes building material.
In Greek tragedy, the guilty man is haunted by the
Furies. Guilt is purely of the past, it follows from be-
hind, it does not beckon from in front. It is part of a
world of binding necessity, not of free motivation.

When Saint Paul confronts fear and love, he is not
merely talking history but he is saying something onto-
logical. In our relationship with Christ, the sense of sin

2O8 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

is inseparably associated with love. The Good Thief did
not indulge in lengthy self-accusations. He made a sim-
ple act of love, and he was answered: "This day you will
be with me in Paradise/' Beyond the region of neurosis,
beyond the psychological altogether, the problem of
guilt is the problem of love. "Much is forgiven her, for
she has loved much."

IX

Development and
Identification

Another human being, as far as he is a person, cannot
be a mere object. There is only one way to participate
in another person that is to re-live his free acts, in other
words to identify ourselves with his will, his love, and
all the rest of him.

Max Scheler, Mans Position in the Cosmos

The multiform wisdom of God which is set forth lucidly
by Scripture, lies hidden in every cognition and in every
nature. It is also evident that all kinds of knowledge
minister to Theology; and that Theology takes illustra-
tions and uses phrases pertaining to every kind of
knowledge. St Bonaventure

Freud, by introducing a genetic principle into his psy-
chology, unwittingly supplied a lot of material for a
metaphysical concept of man. As we have seen, the
moment one tells a story of unfolding, one implies a
transcendental principle the entelechy of Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas.

Those who believe in the primacy of the spirit have
still another reason to be fascinated by this story of

209

210 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

formation, the genetic principle. The question of the
formation of personality in itself has strong moral im-
plications. Consider the diversity of character people
as different as Hamlet and Falstaff, Don Quixote and
Sancho Panza, Alyosha Karamazov and Smerdiakov,
Faust and Wagner! How does character ("a person's
moral and mental make-up") come about?

This question can be approached in two ways. One
can group people statically into certain types and have
it over with, or one can attempt dynamically to trace
the development of traits back to a meeting of two
currents: formative forces from within and formative
forces from without

The static attitude is a tacitly assumed premise in
many books on characterology. The four classical tem-
peraments (sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phleg-
matic), which played so considerable a role in antiquity
and the Middle Ages, formed a static concept. People
were pigeon-holed. If in those days one had known the
laws of heredity and chromosomes, one would undoubt-
edly have assumed that temperaments were produced
very much as are colors of eyes, pigment, and hair.
The same attitude is implicit in more recent so-called
typologies, such as the one introduced by Kretschmer
and later confirmed in a modified form by Sheldon.
Kretschmer was struck by the fact that certain forms
of insanity do not affect people at random, on the basis
of chance occurrence. He found that mentally healthy

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 211

persons with a certain type of personality are affected,
when they become psychotic, by a certain psychosis,
those with another type of personality, by a different
type of psychosis. Thus mankind, instead of being di-
vided into four groups, as of old, was divided into two
groups. Though there were complicated subdivisions,
the approach was essentially static. Kretschmer's work
grew directly out of the development of nosology. It is
the approach of the butterfly collector; types are de-
scribed and labeled. Nevertheless, there is something
to Kretschmer's and Sheldon's work which makes it
interesting for us in the present context the correlation
between body-build and character. The formative prin-
ciple which determines the structure of the personality
and the formative principle which determines the struc-
ture of the body are interrelated. This again is one of
the facts which are so obvious to our folklore psychol-
ogy. Poets have always been aware of it:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o 9 nights:
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

It is impossible to visualize Don Quixote as short and
stocky, and Sancho Panza as long and thin. It is no co-
incidence that a systematic interest in this problem
arose with Goethe and the characterologists of the Ro-
mantic school. It is most remarkable that this trend

212 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

should form part of a current which reacted against
the rationalism of the eighteenth century. The body is
not conscious; it forms part of our "unconscious." The
idea that that which is unconscious should express in its
form something psychic is quite alien to the spirit of
the eighteenth century. The work of Kretschmer and
Sheldon in our century was a scientific step in that
Goethean direction. However, even their work, particu-
larly that of Kretschmer, is similar to that of the classi-
cal biologist who was mainly interested in description
and classification.

It is interesting that all typologies should be so sug-
gestive. No matter how one classifies people, whether
into the four categories of antiquity; or the two cate-
gories of Kretschmer (schizothymic and cyclothymic);
or the two categories of Jung (intravert and extravert);
or many others, one begins to see such types. For this
reason it seems easy to establish a new series of types
and make them famous. After studying Kretschmer,
you find offices or restaurants crowded with Kretsch-
merian types. After reading Jung, or one of the typolo-
gies created by famous educational psychologists, you
begin to see their respective types all over the place.
You wonder why you never saw them before. The dan-
ger in all this pigeonholing is that it robs the personality
of its mystery, of the uniqueness which is wrought in
all human development.

Parallel with a static way of looking at human char-

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 213

acter (the view of the butterfly collector) is the dy-
namic trend. This is contained in Goethe's expression,
"gepriigte Form, die lebend tick entwickelt" * It is
this dynamic approach to the formation of character
which attracts the Catholic philosopher. Life with the
Gospel and the sacraments implies development. On
the natural plane we have to distinguish between two
things in the psychology of development. There are
conscious mechanisms, which are dealt with in works
on educational psychology, all the way from Plato to
our time. And there are unconscious mechanisms. It is
here that psychoanalysis has contributed a great wealth
of observation. In this connection, we shall deal particu-
larly with the phenomenon of identification, as under-
stood by the psychoanalysts, and the mechanisms re-
lated to it.

I have already indicated that the borderlines of the
archaic ego are not clearly defined. During the earliest
phase of feeding, we are something like an extension
of the mother, or the mother is an extension of us. This
is the time when, in our fantasy, either the living objects
in our surroundings are incorporated and swallowed by
us, or we are swallowed and incorporated by them. After
all, in the earliest phase of our life the main relationship
between us and the world of objects is one of intake
and elimination. If you grant the existence of a pre-

Form imposed, yet livingly evolving.

214 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

verbal, preconceptual world in which the somatic and
psychic are still one, an undissociated and undifferen-
tiated form (and all the facts of observation point at
the existence of this world), then you will understand
why there is at that stage such an extraordinarily inti-
mate exchange between us and the personalities with
whom we are in contact. They become food for our
growth, or we become engulfed by them, or we expel
them. But the relationship which we have on our con-
scious, rational, grown-up level such as choosing our
friends, and keeping them at distances graded accord-
ing to our sympathy this is not possible. Walter de la
Mare's observation on Miss T.,

Ifs a very odd thing,
As odd as can be,
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T.,

is not necessarily true with regard to our psychic growth
not according to Freud, at least. Here the process is
rather reversed. Miss T. turns into that which she eats.
If this is true it means that the mechanism of imita-
tion, which is so important in the formation of the per-
sonality and in education generally, is preceded by
some sort of archaic forerunner, a process for which
the word "imitation" is misleading because it implies
the conscious and intentional. The term "identification"
is much better. Particularly in the early infantile phase

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 215

the mechanism of identification is on a primitive, vege-
tative plane something comparable to biochemical as-
similation. Mechanisms of identification which are char-
acteristic of later phases of childhood are more active
and are associated with a greater detachment from the
object of identification. But even these mechanisms are
still quite remote from conscious intentional imitation.
On this basis, Freud's concept of "pseudo-heredity"
becomes understandable. By pseudo-heredity is meant
the fact that a resemblance in character between child
and parent is not necessarily due to a transmission of
traits through chromosomes but may come about in a
purely psychic way, i.e., precisely through identification.
Proofs of the mechanism of pseudo-heredity are en-
countered daily in our work. In one of the Social Wel-
fare Agencies there was a woman whose only child, a
young man of twenty-three, disappeared without a
trace. Seventeen years before, her husband had done
the same. Needless to say, she was heartbroken; she
did not even know whether her son was still alive. It
seemed incredible that this experience should happen
under identical circumstances twice in her lifetime!
Every psychiatrist has seen several cases of a similar
constellation of circumstances. It is highly unlikely that
there should be a sex-linked quality of "running-away-
from-home-without-a-trace" anchored in the chromo-
somes, which would manifest itself regardless of outer
circumstances. Without further investigation one can-

2l6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

not exclude the fantastic possibility of such a mechani-
cal transmission of destinies. But with further investiga-
tion one finds that everything points in the direction of
"pseudo-heredity" or identification in the sense in which
Freud has used these terms.

There are a few noteworthy points about this story.
It is obvious that this boy did not sit down at an early-
age and plan to do what his father did, once he grew
up. From other similar situations it is not even likely
that he consciously imitated his father's action when he
did so, at the age of twenty-three. Moreover, it is likely
that the mother unconsciously repeated something in
her attitude which prompted the son to run away. He
re-enacted a drama, and she may have contributed her
role to the re-enactment. In other words, this is not an
imitation of the father's action in the sense in which
actors re-enact the assassination of Julius Caesar on the
stage. It is much less conscious and planned than that,
much less intellectual and arbitrary. There is more of a
"must" in it; it is more "biological." Yet it is less bio-
logical than if it were really anchored in the chromo-
somes in such a way that it would have to roll off the
tape quite mechanically and independent of outer cir-
cumstances, as we see it in certain hereditary illnesses.

Again we have entered a strange layer of the psychic,
a realm in which freedom is not the same as in delib-
erate planning and yet is not excluded as in a machine.
Contrary to those processes which are laid down in the

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 21/

chromosomes and roll off the tape, we can get at this
process of pseudo-hereditary destiny in the psychoana-
lytic situation and modify it.

To illustrate the meaning of identification in the
Freudian sense, we have chosen an example of abnor-
mality because it lends itself exceptionally well to this
purpose. The mechanism of identification is just as im-
portant, however, for the understanding of the normal
growth of the personality. Under normal circumstances
the Oedipus conflict is solved by a healthy identification
of the boy with the father. The father changes from a
rival into a model. In order to attain to the love and
admiration of the mother the boy must become like the
father. For this reason the boy goes, or rather under
normal circumstances should go, through a phase dur-
ing which he patterns himself after the father. This
phase of the father model or father hero replacing the
father rival has its greatest significance from around
the age of four well into pre-puberty, around the age of
twelve.

In girls this development is more complex and less
well understood. The original profound maternal iden-
tification, or rather undissolved maternal union, through
which we all pass is in girls replaced by a phase during
which the father is an object of love, the prototype of
all masculine love objects which are later to come. After
this, also chiefly during the latent phase, the healthy
girl should go through a second phase of identification

2l8 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

with the mother. Then the mother rival turns into a
mother after whom the girl models herself and who
helps the girl to accept her womanhood as something
positive.

The fact that the original maternal identification is
more primitive and archaic, and that later phases of
identification stand somehow in between a profound
biological fusion on one hand and conscious willful imi-
tation on the other, is also expressed in the choice of
symbols and fantasies, particularly in dreams. A patient
who suffered from psychoneurotic depressions of ob-
scure origin had this repetitive dream: *7 find myself
at the end of a wharf and a high wave leaps up behind
me to swallow me." This woman's mother had gone
through much anxiety when the patient was a little less
than two years old. Water is an ancient maternal sym-
bol in all cultures. We arise out of the water: Hydor
men ariston. This is expressed in numerous myths such
as the birth of Venus. On the other hand, the maternal
principle as something which is threatening to engulf
her corresponds to an early phase of our particular pa-
tient's existence.

Another patient, a married woman of twenty-nine,
was treated for severe psychoneurotic depressions. The
most conspicuous complaint was a deep-seated dread
of sexual intercourse. The patient was a healthy, well-
developed woman, the wife of a customs official. They
had five children. The husband was a healthy, seem-

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 21Q

ingly well-adjusted and considerate man. On the level
of objective reality there was nothing which would ac-
count for her sexual maladjustment. One noteworthy
feature was the fact that she dreaded utterly any at-
tempt at preliminary tenderness. If there had to be sex
relations at all, it was better to be taken brutally, with-
out caressing. It was only under such conditions that
she was at times even able to achieve orgasm. At one
phase of her treatment she reported this dream: *7 am
hiding in the water of a swimming pool before an at-
tacking enemy. Even though I am in i]\e water the
enemy, who is a soldier in uniform, threatens to set me
on fire. He uses a big flame-thrower which sprays a
fiery jelly, and in this way the water catches fire."

A frequent dynamic principle in cases of this sort is
the fact that the patient, at an early phase, witnesses
the sexual intercourse of the parents. Such an experi-
ence to the child means catastrophic violence. In the
child's world such an event is cataclysmic, brutal, and
just the opposite of loving union. In this example the
male partner is a soldier (her husband wore a customs
official's uniform) whose weapon is one of brutal de-
structiveness (the flame-thrower), and in order to pro-
tect herself from it she has to go back into the pool
from which we all come. At the same time that element
of identification explains the imagery. She is identified
with the mother-victim. Incidentally her ambivalence
toward that role is quite obvious. In order to be able

220 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

to achieve sexual gratification at all, she has to re-enact
a scene of violence.

In both these examples the mother with whom the
patient identifies is symbolized by something which
corresponds to an early ontogenetic image. Moreover,
in each of these two cases the patient shares the fate
of the mother, she identifies with a mother to whom
something happens. Nevertheless it should be noted
that the mechanisms are different. In the first case the
patient is passively engulfed by something which might
destroy her. In the second case the patient dives ac-
tively into that same thing a gesture of hiding from
danger, at the same time a gesture by which she be-
comes subject to danger.

In the case of male juvenile delinquents we not infre-
quently see that there has never been any wholesome
identification with the father, or with any paternal
figure. Deep down the patient is still strongly identified
with the mother and is simply terrified of that tender
core, and fights it with all his might. He becomes de-
structive and brutal. He "acts" tough and hard because,
deep down, there is no genuine toughness and hardness
in him. The best thing which can happen in cases like
this is that, while w r e are working with the patient, he
goes through all the vicissitudes of transference, hos-
tility, and love-until he begins to identify with the
physician. What happens is a delayed process of some-
thing which should have happened before, in the nat-

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION

ural setting of the family. In the English language the
word "role" has several meanings. In cases like these
juvenile delinquents, the patient actually develops from
role-playing toward an acceptance of his role in life.

It should not surprise us to find that the process of
identification in the language of the unconscious is often
symbolized by the putting on of clothes. A sixteen-
year-old girl who had never identified in a positive,
healthy way with her mother and who was always in
search of her place in life as a woman, produced re-
peatedly during the analysis a dream in which she was
choosing clothes in a ladies* store. She would waver
between tweed suits on the one hand, and cocktail
dresses and evening gowns on the other.

We see in these last examples that the person is no
longer suffering, through identification, from what hap-
pened to someone else but is actively following some-
one else's pattern. He is no longer a victim, but a fol-
lower; he is no longer being molded, but he models
himself.

It is obvious that a lot of what goes wrong with
people is due to what goes wrong with the process of
identification. It happens quite frequently that a boy
is not able to dissolve his identification with the mother.
This may be due to fear of the father, or it may be due
to the fact that the father is not close enough to the
child. In order to facilitate a strong identification with
the father, the latter must be the son's friend. There

222 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

must be a meeting on a level in between; the father
must share the boy's interests during the latent phase;
he must stoop so that the boy can stretch himself. The
mother herself must have a certain degree of love and
natural admiration for the father to facilitate such a
paternal identification on the part of her son. There are
a great number of variables in this mechanism and
therefore it is not surprising that many different things
often go wrong with it. If the maternal identification
is maintained too strongly the element of femininity is
too strongly emphasized in the son's personality. This is
one of the elements which contribute to the genesis of
homosexuality.

The same holds true with reference to girls. If the
mother, for any number of reasons, should not lend
herself to a healthy identification, the girl is unable to
resolve her "Electra complex" and identifies too strongly
with the father. In the case of conscious hostility against
the parent of the same sex, an irrational hostility which
is carried into the later phases of childhood and into
adolescence, one speaks of an unresolved "Oedipus con-
flict" or "Electra conflict," In such a case the pattern of
negative identification may be established. The child
develops traits which are precisely the opposite of the
traits of the parent who is the object of hostility. In the
end the child's personality is related to that of the
parent as a negative film is related to a photograph.
If the father is a spendthrift, the son becomes a miser,

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 223

and vice versa; the daughter of a mother with Victorian
and puritanical background becomes as promiscuous
as a prostitute. Usually these people do not enjoy their
state of rebellion at all. Apart from other mechanisms,
which I do not want to discuss in this connection,
mechanisms which are associated with incestuous desire
and guilt, there is this mechanism of negative identifi-
cation. Out of hostility arises an image which is the
complete negation of the mother. The combination of
Victorianism and puritanism do not represent purity in
the sense in which Christians understood it. There is
frequently nothing but an unhealthy form of repression.
The daughter lives that which the mother has so inade-
quately repressed.

We have seen that the process of identification begins
before there is any rational understanding or verbal
communication. The child seems to be close to that
preverbal world for a long time, even after speech and
rational understanding have developed. He is closer
to it, at any rate, than we grownups are. This explains
why that which is never expressed in words influences
the formation of character as much as that which is ex-
pressed. In unhappy marriages it often happens that
parents make a point of keeping their conflict from the
children: there is never any row in front of them; trag-
edy is carefully kept hidden. Nevertheless, when chil-
dren from such marriages are later analyzed they reveal
unconscious material which corresponds exactly to that

224 THE THIRD KEVOLUTION

which has been kept from them. In such cases the
child's unconscious is the closet which contains the
parents' skeleton.

The trouble is that, in the world of our infantile ego,
there is something like a law of "all or none/' To us
grownups there are very clear gradations of hostility:
some unhappy marriages are less unhappy than others.
The child's dim, prehistoric experience of hostility is
frequently bizarre, blown-up and distorted. There are
two huge troglodytic images one of an aggressor and
one of a victim. Both images are over-life-size, and have
an all-out quality, perhaps more so the earlier the im-
print is made. A lot of the sadistic pattern with which
some people walk through life is caused by the aggres-
sor whom they have "taken in" at an early phase. A lot
of the masochistic pattern of others is due to the fact
that they are permanently identified with the victim.

To what extent does a child really identify himself
with what he grasps intellectually in the image of a
person? To what extent do those features enter which
lie underneath the threshold of rational understanding-
all that which is lived, but not communicated? These
are questions difficult to answer in any given case. Some
years ago a young man of eighteen was treated who
presented the classical picture of the so-called "asocial
psychopath." He played the role of a big shot, and in
order to attain this purpose he swindled, embezzled,
forged checks and traveled under assumed high-sound-

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION

ing names. His asocial pattern was quite primitive. He
was a messenger boy for a big store and, when sent on
errands for which he had to be given cash, he would
use it for his own purposes. When he was sent to get
sleeping-car reservations for one of his bosses, he
stopped at a famous hotel, took a suite of rooms, posed
as the representative of a well-known New York firm
(he looked considerably older than his age and, like
so many of his kind, cut a good figure) and invited
girls up to his suite. There he had lavish sessions with
champagne and the rest. When all the cash was spent,
he would forge checks. This boy had considerable in-
sight and even something like remorse. However, his
insight did not prevent him from relapsing time and
again.

He came, like many patients of this category, from
a good family. He was the youngest of five. There was
nothing wrong with his brothers and sisters. They all
were respectable people and had found their station in
life. The patient was a late-comer. There was a dif-
ference of seven years between him and the second
youngest. The father was a consulting engineer who at
one time had occupied an excellent position with a
fabulous income. However, at one point in the family
history the father had suffered a tragic crash and lost
all his money. After that he tried hard to make a come-
back and, in order to achieve this, carefully maintained
a social fagade. He kept up his office at the same "good

226 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

address" and in the same grand style. He maintained all
his club memberships and had lunch at the same places
as before all this with the aid of loans from relatives.
The idea was that he could regain his original eco-
nomic position if he did not lose face socially; he was
compelled to keep up an entirely false front.

Our young patient was four years old when the crash
happened. During my frequent contacts with him, it
became increasingly apparent that this factor had been
most decisive in his development. In contrast to the four
older children, he had grown up with a father who lived
a life of make-believe. One might perhaps best express
it by saying that this boy did not identify himself with
a person but with a role. The entire thing was inti-
mately associated with the Oedipus conflict. It is re-
markable that the father was an unshakable optimist
who year after year saw "the big comeback" just around
the corner. The mother seemed to bear all the worries
of those years. The only dream the patient ever re-
ported during our several years of contact was the fol-
lowing: "I meet a poor girl who lives in dismal slum-
like surroundings, and I buy her a palatial house in the
best residential district! 9 It is interesting that, in relat-
ing this dream, he associated the luxurious house with
the actual home of a well-known gambler.

In this boy's father there existed a marked discrep-
ancy between the person's social role and the true per-
son. This play-acting was bound to have a bad effect

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 227

on the son's development. Such a rift between outer
appearance and inner character exists in many of us.
Many psychologists have made a distinction between
"social ego" and ego proper, between "role' 7 and per-
son. Jung called the social ego persona in contrast to
personality. The word persona is derived from the con-
cept of the mask. The actors on the stage of ancient
Rome wore masks with mouthpieces through which
the words sounded (per-sonare) . The person in his
social role is often quite different from the person as
he appears in his intimate life. Many people become
more dependent on their own persona. Their social ego,
their role as bank president or railway conductor, has
the same function as the exterior skeleton in crustaceae.
They are so united to their social ideal that they would
collapse, and very little would remain, if one robbed
them of their position in society. Children's growing
selves are quite sensitive to this discrepancy. By a num-
ber of factors they become identified with social ideals
rather than with human beings of flesh and blood.

Tragic examples of this were encountered in our work
in an Old Age Counseling Service which was run in
association with social welfare agencies. We saw old
ladies emerging from the poorest downtown rooming
areas of Montreal, speaking and moving in the manner
of the Edwardian drawing room, lavender scent and all.
One elderly bachelor appeared with double-breasted
suit, wore his pince-nez attached to a black cord, and

228 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

addressed me in a peculiarly stilted manner. Two days
after the first interview, I received a letter indicating
his address in a manner which somehow succeeded in
imitating the formal letterheads of the upper-class so-
ciety of his childhood days. He indicated to me in a
few lines how pleased he was to have obtained insight
into my workthe sort of note the Governor General
of Canada might have written. This man, who was on
the point of starvation, came from a family which forty
years before had been close to the Prime Minister, and
which entertained on Sunday afternoons in their home
a young student who himself was later to become Prime
Minister.

My first impression on encountering these people
was that I was dealing with what is called "genteel pov-
erty." I felt that they overemphasized their higher social
origin because of the humiliating situation of receiving
"charity," and hence the lavender scent and the formal
letters of acknowledgment. On studying these cases
more closely, however, I discovered that the situation
was almost the reverse: they did not re-enact the Ed-
wardian drawing room because they received public
assistance they had become recipients of public assist-
ance because they kept up the Edwardian drawing
room. It could be shown in every one of these cases that
quite early in childhood the person had identified him-
self strongly with the persona, the social role and the
social ideals of a parent, that his entire attitude toward

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION

life had become unrealistic or, it might be better said,
un-real. It was exceedingly difficult to approach these
clients psychotherapeutically, not only because of their
advanced age but because it was well-nigh impossible
to penetrate the mask and meet the human being. They
were culturally displaced persons; one had the feeling
of encountering petrifactions.

During the process of identification children absorb,
as if by osmosis, our sense of values. If our scale of
values is that of an external hierarchy, our children can-
not grow. Nobody can grow on synthetic stuff. Saint
John of the Cross said that "ambition in the hierarchy
is an abomination before God/* and this applies not only
to ecclesiastical hierarchy but to social hierarchies in
general.

The importance of the good example and model in
education has always been known. The new vista
opened up by psychoanalysis is the mechanism by
which that which is not expressed in words communi-
cates itself. Here is something like an embryology of
learning; a scale that reaches from the quasi-mystic par-
ticipation of the infant in the person of the mother into
later phases, in which that which is not spoken and even
withheld or disguised is nevertheless effective; a dy-
namic interchange between parent and child which
reaches very far beyond the borders of consciousness.

Freud has remarked how baffling it is to see patients
go through life relentlessly haunted by a cruel, puni-

230 THE THIBD REVOLUTION

tive superego while it is clear that their parents were
anything but cruel or overdemanding. In these cases,
he claimed, it can be shown that the parents themselves
had a powerful, morbid superego. This element did not
overtly enter into the upbringing of the children. Never-
theless the child adopts, as if by silent agreement, that
part of the parent's personality.

A lady of sixty-three was treated for a serious state
of melancholia. She suffered from bizarre delusions of
guilt. She was convinced she was condemned to eternal
perdition because of "impure thoughts/' Some time be-
fore she had acutely broken down, she had developed
involved compulsive rituals which forced her to go on
praying all night until she was exhausted and fell asleep
in the morning. Like so many patients of this kind, she
paced restlessly up and down the ward and would speak
of nothing but hellfire. The most pertinent fact about
her childhood history was the loss of her mother in
early infancy. The father did not remarry. She de-
scribed him as a gentle, mild-mannered man who was
* Very kind" to her. The only distinct episode of her
childhood she remembered was a remark made by her
father about the question of getting remarried: he felt
that, if he remarried, he might bring misfortune to the
family. From the way she put it, it was obvious that he
did not mean that he might be marrying the wrong
woman. He was actually expressing some dark and
sinister prophecy that anything which would make life

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 23!

easier for him would inevitably be followed by disaster.
It was precisely this element, and not the kind and lov-
ing care of her father, which threatened to destroy her
when the forces of her own ego had grown weak.

Thus far we have dealt with the unconscious process
of identification only in one direction. In all these epi-
sodes, it is the "I" who identified himself with someone.
It would need an entire chapter to describe the way in
which we unconsciously identify others with others
with persons who at one time, usually in early child-
hood, played an eminent role in our lives. Compared
with the objective reality in which we adults live, the
persons of our early life are overcharged with emotional
significance. They are larger than life-size. And they
have the peculiar property of being able to stain the
image of persons whom we encounter subsequently.
Anyone who has acquired a little knowledge of psycho-
analysis, particularly through the reading of popular
treatises, knows that a man's choice of a wife is influ-
enced by the character of his mother, his sister, or any
woman who was prominent in his childhood. Naturally
the same thing holds true with reference to a woman's
choice of a husband and her early relationships to male
figures. No case of irrational hostility in marriage could
be explained without the psychoanalytic theory of inter-
personal relationship. It is as if the earliest human fig-
ures who surrounded us had been endowed with such
affective power that it lasts for a lifetime.

232 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

A great deal of our work consists of difficulties of
interpersonal relationships difficulties at work with su-
periors or with co-workers; or difficulties in the family
with one's marital partner or with one's children. Many
of these difficulties are not based on the actual data of
the objective situation; they are of a neurotic nature.
Or they are partly based on the objective situation but
they are endowed by the patient with an extra some-
thing which is not really there. For example, in the
office the boss may be difficult to get along with. But
for some peculiar reason the employee, who has to
endure this difficulty, seems neither able to dissolve or
surmount the relationship nor to stand it. He cracks
under it. He has brought a problem of his own into the
relationship. Without the employee's knowledge, the
boss becomes a figure stained with an affective dye
which the employee has carried over from somebody
else. He is part of what some German psychoanalysts
call the "nest situation." And all figures of the nest situ-
ation are dramatis persowe par excellence. We meet
them again and again in the most clever disguises. The
word "identification" is possibly wrong in this connec-
tion; it might be better to speak of "transference," if
this term were not associated with the therapeutic situ-
ation.

Thus we see how identification enters into develop-
ment; the subtle currents by which conscious and un-
conscious penetrate one another; the analogy which

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 233

exists between somatic forms and those forms which
are psychic, but not conscious; the extension of the
laws of organic growth and the laws of assimilation far
beyond the limits of consciousness, into the unfolding
of the highest form the person.

Let us assume that the psychoanalytical observations
about the development of the personality are correct;
that there really exists an archaic ego which is inter-
twined with the body image in a way difficult for
grownups to define; that there is an early form of iden-
tification which is nothing but oral incorporation; that,
even later, more mature forms of identification are
still related to this psychophysical unit; that identifi-
cation is something simpler and more intimate, less in-
tellectual and more immediate than intentional imita-
tion.

If all these observations are correct, then Christian
philosophy has found support from a most unlikely ally.
The entire concept is quite strange to us modern people.
We think much too mechanistically. It would not be
strange at all to a person brought up in an Aristotelian-
Thomist tradition. It presupposes the living idea of a
unit of body and mind from which we have become
quite alienated by the development of the last few cen-
turies. Of all the psychological systems, this is the one
which approximates most closely a parallel to things
which are actually of an ontological order. This expkins

234 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

what we have already observed: when logical positivists
and dialectical materialists deal with psychology, they
have a preference for Pavlov or for behaviorism. There
is no danger that the Holy Ghost will ever dwell in a
machine.

In psychoanalytic theory, things are not so mecha-
nistic even when they seem so. For example, in psycho-
analytic articles on religion the observation is often
made that Holy Communion is an act of oral incorpora-
tion. Usually this is stated in such an aggressive vein
of nineteenth-century Knowing-Better-Than-You, that
the apparently debunked Christian asks himself tim-
idly: "Is it true? Holy Communion just oral incorpora-
tion?" In a way, it certainly is. As I have mentioned, con-
trary to the mechanism of organic nutrition, during the
process of (identification by) oral incorporation, as
Freud first observed it, the child turns into that which
it takes in. St. Leo says: "Participation in the Body and
Blood of Christ produces in us no other effect than to
make us pass into that which we take" (Sermon 63 De
Passione Domine 12, 0.7 PL 54,357). Saint Thomas
says:

Corporal food is first converted into him who eats it, and
through this conversion it repairs the losses of the organism
and gives it the necessary increase. But the Eucharistic
food, instead of being transformed into the one who takes
it, transforms him into Itself. It follows that the proper
effect of the Sacrament is to transform us so much into

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 235

Christ that we can truly say: "I live, now not I 5 but Christ
liveth in me." (In Sent, Lib. IV, dist xii, qu.2, a.i, qu a i.)

Other writers use a language which may sound re-
volting to some people for example, Saint Francis of
Sales: *

But what do you understand by spiritual digestions of
Jesus Christ? Those who digest material food will feel a
new vigor through their whole body, by the general dis-
tribution which is made through it. So those who digest well
spiritually, feel that Jesus Christ who is their food, diffuses
and communicates himself to all the parts of their soul and
body. They have Jesus Christ in their brain, in their heart,
lungs, eyes, hands, tongue, ears and feet. But this Savior,
what does he, thus circulating everywhere? He straightens
all, he purifies all, he mortifies all, he vivifies all, he loves in
the heart, he understands in the brain, he breathes in the
lungs, he sees in the eyes, he hears in the ears, and so of
the rest

This feeling of revulsion is nothing new. It is not, as
one might think, due to the fact that we live in a sci-
entific age. It is indicated in one of the most dramatic
episodes of the New Testament. When Jesus said, "For
my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.
He that eats my flesh and drinks my blood, abides in
me and I in him" (John 6, 56-57), He knew that "his
disciples murmured at him" and He asked, "Does this
scandalize you?" It did. Many of them "went back and
walked no more with him" (6, 67),

* Meditations on the Love of God.

236 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

The appalling idea occurs that it might be thought
that I am attempting to "explain scientifically" some-
thing which is of the supernatural order. I should feel
like one of those nineteenth-century professors who
wanted to "rescue" revealed religion by explaining the
appearance of manna in the desert on the basis of the
latest discoveries in biology and meteorology. What is
being attempted here is actually the opposite. It means
that depth psychology approaches areas in which it
becomes difficult to discern the psychological from the
ontological, areas in which all analogies become myste-
rious and impenetrable.

The same people who have discovered that the most
archaic form of identification is that of oral incorpora-
tion, tell us that belief in the Holy Eucharist is a sign
of infantile regression. It is, if they mean child-likeness
in its vastest, metaphysical sense. Christians accept this
on the highest authority. "Unless you are converted to
little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of
Heaven/' "Unless a man be born again, he cannot see
the kingdom of God." The sacramental life follows, as
Saint Thomas pointed out, all the various phases of
growth as we know them from the natural order. What
is true about the sacramental life, is true about spiritu-
ality in general. In later phases the process of identifi-
cation, as I have said, is quite different from conscious,
intentional imitation. There is profound need for a

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 237

model. We cannot grow without a trellis. This mecha-
nism is removed from the intimacy of oral incorporation,
yet it occurs on a deep level. The dream of die child
who tried on many clothes is a frequently occurring
pattern. We are in search of a person to put on. But
there is an important difference from the role of the
actor. We become that which we put on.

It almost seems as if Saint Paul knew about the sym-
bols of the unconscious. He speaks of "putting on"
Christ. This phase of identification is no less real than
the Eucharistic one. It is hard for us ordinary people to
realize what it means "to put on" Christ. But we get an
idea from the lives of the saints. Incidentally, there is
one remarkable feature about this form of identifica-
tion. Don Bosco was surrounded by children. Saint John
of the Cross lived in the night of Gethsemane. Saint
Benedict Joseph Labre had no place to rest his head.
It is as if each Saint chose one facet of a huge image.
We cannot quite think of Saint John of the Cross spend-
ing his life with children, or Don Bosco remaining in
contemplative solitude. Their gifts were diverse. In this
respect we see again that Grace builds on Nature.

At any rate, whether we think of Christ in the sac-
ramental life or of Christ as causa exemplaris, the main
point of our argument is this: there exists a remarkable
analogy between two mechanisms of becoming. What
depth psychology has discovered about the laws of
growth on the natural plane bears an uncanny resem-

238 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

blance to the laws of growth as they have been known
on the spiritual plane. Of course, the idea that the su-
pernatural is analogous to the natural is not new. Only
here it is applied to a new set of observations. If God
wanted to communicate with Man, it is reasonable to
think that He would choose those channels which are
most intimate to us, that He would bend down to reach
us at the simplest yet deepest level.

Without being aware of it, people meet figures from the
scenes of their childhood all their lives.* I have been
dealing for a long time with a patient who kept chang-
ing his working places because there was no boss with
whom he was able to get along. Although some of his
employers may have been bad people, it was unlikely
on the basis of mathematical chance that they all were
that bad. It did not take long to find out that the patient
was in the habit of coming across his deceased father
in the cleverest and most unlikely disguises as a plant
manager who bellowed at him over the phone, as the
chief editor of a newspaper who refused to give him a
raise when he thought he deserved one, as a merchant
for whom he kept books. All his reactions to these em-
ployers were strangely violent, infinitely more so than
the situation warranted. He did not know it, but he saw
one man behind the mask of all those men: that man

* In psychoanalytic literature the term "identification'* is not ap-
plied to this mechanism.

DEVELOPMENT AND IDENTIFICATION 239

was his father. This sort of thing is so very common
that one is almost inclined to think that it is the bizarre
distortion of something which in itself is normal.

The theologian is not surprised at this, because it has
an eminently normal yet supernatural counterpart. It
has a meaning in the process of salvation. Our Lord
has indicated frequently that any human being who
is in need of love is Himself dressed up for the occasion.
"Whatsoever you have done to the least of my
brethren, you have done unto me. . . ." "I have been
hungry, and you have fed me. . . " "Whoever says
that he loves God and hates his brother is a liar. How
can he love God whom he does not see, if he does not
love his brother whom he sees?" Just as our disturbed
employee beamed hostility, which had actually been
aimed at his father, toward his superiors throughout
his life, we are asked to beam the love we have for God
to anyone whom we happen to come across, to our
neighbor.

The latter process does not need to be conscious.
Whatever you have done to the least of His brethren,
whether you knew it or not, you have done unto Him.
In psychoanalytical terms, Christ points at Himself in
the causa exemplaris as one object of identification, and
in the least of our brethren as another object of identi-
fication. In the first case, you identify yourself with
Him; in the second case, you identify someone beside
yourself with Him.

X

Psychiatry and the Life
of the Spirit: I

But the foolish things of the world hath God chosen,
that He may confound the wise; and the weak things of
the world hath God chosen, that He may confound the
strong. Corinthians I, i: 27

At least once each year during our clinical conferences,
a student brings up this question: "You say that this
patient suffers from a schizophrenic process, and one
of the symptoms you point out is the fact that he hears
voices. What about Saint Teresa of Avila or the
Prophet Ezekiel? They heard voices and had \isions.
Why do you not regard them as psychotic?" There are
several things one can say to elucidate the problem on
the natural plane. As in all these questions there exists
no pat, mathematical solution. There will always be a
gap which only faith can fill. To begin with one can
say that two psychic phenomena can belong in the
same category, and yet one be normal and the other
pathological. They are phenomenologically the same
240

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 24!

but, within their respective contexts, they have two en-
tirely opposite values. At one time the composer Zelter,
the friend of Goethe, spread the rumor that Beethoven
had gone insane. One of the reasons for this was that
Beethoven, after the "Hammerklavier" Sonata had gone
to the printer, sent a message to his publisher stating
that he would like to add one bar, consisting of two
chords, to the slow movement. This bar was to be added
at the beginning, preceding the first bar of the original
version. The slow movement of that particular sonata is
one of the longest movements in musical literature; that
anyone could, as an afterthought, wish to add one more
bar to this huge structure (and with definite signs of
anxiety) must have appeared mad indeed. At another
time Beethoven implored his publisher to add two stac-
cato dots to something already in print. Gustave Flau-
bert, a master of prose, on one occasion found that an
adjective was not quite adequate to convey accurately
his shade of meaning (in this case the color of a beetle)
and he changed the word. After that he found the
sentence somewhat out of balance, changed other
words, and ended up by rewriting several preceding
pages.

Phenomenologically, as far as the objective observer
can see, this is compulsive behavior. If a civil servant
or a businessman showed such a pattern in his work it
might seriously impair his efficiency, and we might be

242 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

inclined to regard him as a maladjusted person. Flau-
bert suffered from epilepsy. There are some experi-
enced clinicians for example, Bleuler who claim that
compulsiveness is frequently found in the working pat-
tern of so-called idiopathic epileptic patients. I have
seen two epileptic patients, on different occasions, who
worked on ship models in an occupational therapy class.
Neither of them ever quite finished his model. The
models looked finished to all intents and purposes, but
the patient could still see some flaw, a little bit to be
done here or there, a little touch which somehow never
was the final one. Dostoievsky, another great epileptic,
wrote a novel of about two thousand pages to describe
the events of a few days, and his notes, discovered after
his death, showed that this novel was conceived only
as an introduction to the real one which never came
about.

If we applied to the actions of creative artists the
word "compulsive'* it would be quite meaningless clini-
cally. A mechanism which might signify a serious char-
acter disturbance if we encountered it in the business
of everyday life has achieved an entirely different mean-
ing rediscovered in this different setting, the creative
process.

To go one step further, there are reliable witnesses
who tell us that Mozart heard his works, before he com-
posed them. He not only heard them in the way most
composers hear before or while they write. He heard

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 243

all the physical qualities as well strings, woodwinds,
brasses, and so on. He wrote down what he heard. If
this is true, and from Mozart's creative pattern it might
well be true, he was hallucinated. A hallucination is
the "sensory perception of an object which is not pres-
ent." If he was hallucinated, was he a sick man? Nobody
would call Mozart's symphonies the creations of a sick
mind, even if it were historically proved that he heard
them with all the qualities of acoustic perception, as
our psychotic patients hear voices. Thus we see that
something which is phenomenologically abnormal (to
be hallucinated is not the norm ) is not necessarily path-
ological. It may be supra-normal, above the norm.
There are other features which distinguish Mozart from
an insane man: he was remarkably well integrated in
his environment; none of his actions were "crazy."
Moreover, the things which he did hear were significant
and beautiful to a great number of people, though per-
haps not to everybody. He did not insist that what he
heard could be heard by everybody else, nor did the
mystics. For example, it can be said about Saint Teresa
that she was, apart from her supranatural experiences,
a practical woman with a sense of humor, quite dif-
ferent from a schizophrenic. And so were many other
geniuses of art and the life of the spirit. All this shows
that a person can see things or hear things which no-
body else sees or hears, and yet be healthy or even

244 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

"healthier" than most of us; the word "health" is etymo
logically related to "whole" and to "holy"

Nevertheless there always remains an element of
madness in the spiritual encounter. Just think of Abra-
ham, the father of Faith. What would happen today if
a man took his son to the summit of a mountain in
order to kill him as a sacrifice to God? No matter how
much he tried to persuade us that God had told him
to do so, we would not hesitate for a moment to treat
him as insane. Whenever in the history of revelation
man and God meet face to face, as it were, something
happens which is not at all normal. This is the sign of
paradox which marks the entire story of revelation.
Unlike the God of the philosophers, who is an object of
demonstration, the God of revelation in His relation-
ship with man does not proceed more geometrico; it is
a relationship of love. God loves man with the madness
of love, and He tries man's love to the point of mad-
ness. It is only in this way that we can understand the
story of a jealous, angry God of the Old Testament, a
God who chooses one particular people from other
peoples; a God of whom Abraham is an archetype-
yet He really did sacrifice His only Son. It is a mad
story, and those who get involved must be affected by
divine madness. "God is a devouring fire."

Think what would happen today if a man undressed
in the public square, as Saint Francis of Assisi did, and
flung his clothes in his father's face. Or consider Saint

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 245

Benedict Joseph Labre, who actually never did what
we call "useful work/' He was refused entry into reli-
gious communities. For the greater part of his life he
migrated on the highways of Europe from one place
of pilgrimage to another. He embraced a peculiar form
of poverty, sleeping under bridges and in doorways,
living off people's refuse. Most of the time he was un-
kempt, unclean and covered with vermin. Today there
would be a big file on him in one of the Social Welfare
agencies; there would be "personality tests," and he
would be classified in category E by army physicians.
When it comes to the life of the spirit, our concept of
normalcy breaks down because it is a concept of con-
formity, of the juste milieu.

In this connection it is quite understandable why
Kierkegaard was so deeply affected by the image of
Abraham's sacrifice. Protestantism in the early nine-
teenth century seemed to him to have become almost
a routine religion of respectable people. Protestant
writers such as Schleiermacher expressed the romantic
mood of the time and "religion" was often not much
more than the feelings you have when you look at over-
whelmingly beautiful scenery, such as a sunset. One
can be moved by scenery and one can like it but one
cannot love it as a man loves his mother or his wife
or his child. One cannot be deeply, irrevocably com-
mitted to it. The quixotic element, the craziness, is miss-
ing. That element is what Kierkegaard saw in the story

246 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

of Abraham. This is what he postulated in a living rela-
tionship with God. It is a total abandoning, a foolish
surrender from man to God and God to man. The
saints move outside the juste milieu and belong to what
well-integrated bourgeois people call the 'lunatic
fringe."

Thus we see that clinical concepts which refer to
reason and order in the practical things of everyday life
lose their significance when we enter the life of the
spirit. We have indicated in other places that psychi-
atry and psychoanalysis are unable to penetrate into
the mystery of the Person. Nowhere does this become
as apparent as in connection with the supernatural life.
The natural sciences and technology occupy themselves
with problems; the classical descriptive psychiatrist of
the nineteenth century labeled and pigeonholed human
beings; the experimental psychologist tests his subject
and symbolizes functions in a graph; the psychoanalyst
uses a dynamic formula. And all the while the contours
of each single human person are far outside the range
of comprehension, imperceptibly dissolving into some-
thing which is of the metaphysical order.

We have seen that the psychoanalytic approach is
more related to a Christian concept of the human per-
son and more akin to the movement of charity, than
other psychological methods. Yet when we approach
the range of divine folly, the clinical formula fails. And
this is a good thing. Man would cease to be man if there

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 247

were not altitudes of existence in which the distribution
of elements is changed and the cosmic rays are more
powerful, so that our ordinary instruments are out of
working order.

Saint Therese of Lisieux, who was deeply attached
to her father, received the news that he was afflicted
by an illness which entailed much suffering. She stated
later that these were the happiest days of her life. By
common standards that is a mad statement. It is easy,
almost too easy, to apply the formula. Words offer
themselves freely, words like "masochistic/* "identifi-
cation/' and so on. And on the natural plane these terms
are probably quite in order to "describe the mecha-
nism/ 7 as we say if we look at it isolated from the entire
context But in isolating that which is of the natural
order we obtain an artifact, something which does not
at all describe reality. It is appallingly insufficient.

Saint Angela de Foligno was a married noblewoman,
the mother of several children. She lived a carefree,
apparently quite promiscuous life. She lost her husband
and her children. After that she embraced a life of
penitence, and went through the most extraordinary
mystic states associated with terrifying "temptations/'
On one occasion, we are told, she "burned her flesh."
She adopted a life of voluntary poverty and had a large
following of people who worked with her in caring for
the sick and the poor. Her influence on her surroundings
was apparently extraordinary. After two years of inner

248 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

torment, of a land which is the earmark of the mystical
life, she attained a high state of mystical elevation and
her statements on prayer, and on the love and beauty
of God belong to the best of mystical literature. What
she went through before she got there is described in
words which are shocking and scandalizing to any mod-
ern reader, regardless of his clinical experience or lack
of it:

In order, therefore, that I might not feel myself exalted
by the magnitude and the number of the revelations, visions,
and conversings with God, and that I might not be puffed
up with the delight thereof, the great tempter was sent unto
me, who did afflict me with many and divers temptations,
wherefore was I afflicted both in my soul and in my body.
The torments of the body were verily numberless and were
administered by many demons in divers ways, so that I do
scarce believe that the sufferings and infirmity of my body
could be written down. There remained not one of my
members the which was not grievously tormented; neither
was I ever without pain, without infirmity, or without weari-
ness. Always was I weak and feeble, and full of pain, so
that I was compelled to be almost continually lying down.
All my limbs were as though beaten, and with many troubles
did the demons afflict me. Thus was I perpetually sick and
swelled, and in all my limbs I did suffer pain, so that it was
difficult for me to move myself. Nevertheless, was I not
weary of lying still, neither was I yet able to eat sufficient.
In short, the sufferings of the body were great, but those
of the soul were beyond all comparison, more bitter and

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 249

more numerous, and all were inflicted by the same demons.
I can only liken myself unto one who is hanged by the neck,
his hands tied behind his back and his eyes bound, and who
is left hanging by a rope upon the gallows; and although he
hath no help or remedy or support, he doth, nevertheless,
continue to live in that even torment and cannot die. And
I do affirm that even more desperately, and with greater
cruelty was I afflicted by demons, for they hanged my soul
and all its strength was overwhelmed and departed from it.
And seeing how that I had no power to oppose them, my
grief was so great that at times I was scarce able to weep
for rage and for grievous suffering. Moreover, I wept with-
out obtaining relief, and ofttimes was my rage so great that
I could scarce refrain from rending myself and beating my-
self most grievously, thus causing my head and all my mem-
bers to swell. When my soul beheld itself cast down and all
its virtue departed from it, then it made great lamentation,
and then did I cry unto my God.

After this I did endure another torment, for every vice
was re-awakened within me. Not that albeit re-awakened
they had power to overcome my reason, but they did occa-
sion me much tribulation. And not only did I remember
those vices which assailed me in times past, but many others
which I did never before know entered into my body and
did inflame me and cause me the utmost suffering. But be-
cause they had no lasting power over me they did afford
me great consolation when they began to weaken and leave
me. This was the work of the demons into whose hands I
perceived I had been delivered, but when I do remember
how that God was afflicted here below and in poverty, I
would that mine own sufferings might be increased twofold.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

At times was I thrown into a most horrible darkness of
spirit by the demons, wherein it did appear that all hope of
good was withdrawn from me. Then those vices which were
dead inwardly in the soul were revived outwardly in the
body, both those which I did never before feel, and those
which I did have af oretimes. And I did suffer so greatly that
I was constrained to put actual fire upon my body in order
that it might quench the burning of desire; and this I did
continue to do until my confessor forbade me. And when I
was in that darkness of spirit methought I would have
chosen rather to be roasted than to endure such pains.
Wherefore did I cry aloud and call upon death, desiring
that it should come in any form whatsoever if only God
would permit me to die. And unto God did I say: "Lord,
if Thou wilt send me into hell, I pray Thee tarry not, but
do it instantly, and since Thou hast abandoned me, make an
end of it now and plunge me into the depths/* Presently
I perceived that this was the work of demons and that such
vices exist not in the soul, for never would I have consented
thereto. Howsoever, the body doth suffer violence, and so
great is the grief and pain that if it should endure the body
would not be able to bear it. Moreover, the soul doth find
that all its strength hath been taken from it, and albeit it
doth in no wise consent unto vice, yet can it not resist
And seeing that it doth act contrary to the will of God, it
loseth all hope of being able to resist and is tormented by
those vices.

Among others, God did permit one vice to enter into me
the which I had never before known, but I did clearly per-
ceive that it entered into me by Divine permission, and it
was so great that it did exceed all others. Upon the other

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 251

hand was there given unto me a certain virtue, manifestly
wherewith to oppose the aforesaid vice and by means of
which God did most potently set me free. Wherefore even
if I had not already possessed a sure faith in God, this one
thing alone would have inspired me with such a faith and
a certain hope, of the which I could in no wise doubt. For
virtue did increase and vice did diminish, and I was so
upheld by that virtue that I could not consent unto wrong-
doing, and likewise by means of that virtue was I so enlight-
ened and strengthened that not all the men who were in
the world, nor all the demons, could have persuaded me to
commit the smallest sin. Hence proceedeth the aforesaid
faith in God. The aforesaid vice was so great that I am
ashamed to speak of it, and of such potency that if the vir-
tue had tarried in coming to succour me, neither shame nor
suffering nor any other thing whatsoever would have suf-
ficed to restrain me from instantly falling back into sin.
And all this did I bear for the space of more than two
years.*

Subtract the world of Grace from all this, "and nothing
but neurosis remains. In that respect there exists a
parallel between the mystic and the creative artist, ex-
cept that the mystic goes through a process in which
the flesh, the bones, the sinews, the nerves are even
more exposed than in the life of the artist. It is almost
too tempting, not to wheel the psychological micro-
scope into focus. Yet what would we attain by it? It is,

* From An Anthology of Mysticism, ed. by Paul de Jaegher, SJ.
The Newman Press, Westminster, Maryland, 1950.

252 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

as Jung once said, like attempting a description of
Cologne Cathedral by examining its stones chemically.
Nowhere does Pascal's antithesis of the greatness and
misery of man come out as poignantly as when we look,
with the chemist's eye, at the psychological humus
from which sanctity grows. If there were nothing be-
yond the psychological, all the saints from Simeon
Stylites to the Poverello, to Benedict Joseph Labre, to
Therese of Lisieux, would indeed make up a fools'
parade. Yet there is no area in which the "nothing but,"
the reductive principle, is more absurd than the life
of the spirit. Under that aspect the spirit evaporates,
and life itself becomes reduced to a desiccated speci-
men.

Pascal has said: "Knowledge has two end points
which touch one another: one is the pure, natural ig-
norance which all men have w r hen they come into this
world. At the other end are the great men who, after
having traversed all human knowledge, know that they
do not know, and who come back to their original state
of ignorance; this, however, is a knowing ignorance, an
ignorance which looks through itself. Those who have
abandoned the first state of ignorance, and never
reached the second one, have a varnish of saturated
wisdom. They play the role of the initiated ones. They
are the people who obscure the world. Their judgment
is falser than anybody else's." These words are so ap-
propriate whenever one comes across a study in which

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 253

something which is of the supernatural order is boiled
down to its psychological substrate. With few excep-
tions, most psychoanalytic studies which deal with the
supernatural bear that stigma. Nevertheless, we have
to admit one thing: the psychological plane and the
spiritual plane are not independent of each other. On
the contrary, they are most intimately connected.

Consider the following example. Helene Deutsch *
in discussing Saint Bernadette Soubirous, observes why
little Bernadette came to see the "Lady," at the time
of her original vision. She analyzes little Bernadette's
relationship to her mother, to the remaining children
of the family, the actual situation on the day of the first
apparition, particularly the role of Bernadette's sister
who had waded across the river before Bernadette.
Finally the psychoanalyst speaks of the symbolic sig-
nificance of the cold rushing river and the "Lady/* One
can say, as Helene Deutsch does, that the child's inner
constellation was such that at that moment she had to
produce a hallucinatory Great Mother. This psycho-
analytic interpretation is probably quite correct, though
it says nothing about the question of the reality of the
apparition. If nothing exists beyond the psychological,
it is the only possible explanation. If something else
does exist, as every Christian believes, there is another
explanation: suppose the Blessed Virgin were to choose

* Helene Deutsch, The Psychology of Women. Grune & Stratton,
1948.

254 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

a certain time and place to appear, would she not
choose a girl who was, on the natural plane, best pre-
pared for the encounter? Would she not choose some-
one whose psychological constellation was such that it
offered a natural response? One has to be "hungry" to
be filled by God "with good things" (Luke i, 53). "I
have to decrease so that you may increase." This is a
principle which one can discover at every step along
the history of salvation. The election did not go to the
mighty Egyptians, but to a little tribe of slaves just
the sort of people who might have dreamed up the story
of special election it is the sort of myth you would
expect them to come up with, as a "compensation" for
their humiliation. And so it goes, all the way down to
the weak and enslaved people of the Roman imperial
time who, according to Nietzsche, had to invent a
shackled and suffering God in order to extol the state
in which they found themselves. That extraordinary
neediness, that specific frustration of those to whom
the revelation comes that is a very real sign throughout
the entire Judaeo-Christian history. It is the sign of
paradox which marks the divine encounter.

On the other hand, since Nietzsche, this very fact
has become the psychological temptation par excel-
lence. It is one very particular aspect of the "nothing
but." If one scrutinizes the life history of any saint or
of any mystic carefully enough, one will always find
the psychological reason why the supernatural hap-

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 255

pened when it happened. When God comes into our
life, He "comes in handy/' To those who think exclu-
sively in psychological terms, this makes the super-
natural experience suspect. At the same time it explains
the initial caution of the Church when she is confronted
with such phenomena as the apparitions of little Berna-
dette. In the last analysis, there is only one perfectly
reliable criterion. It is, by their fruits you shall know

them*

f

There are an infinite number of points at which neu-
rosis touches upon the metaphysical. Anyone engaged
in psychoanalytical work comes up against ultimate
questions all the time. He may get engaged in a battle,
like Freud himself. He may, like Jung, find himself in-
volved in a sort of Gnostic experiment. He may, like
Adler, run into the problem of social consciousness and
social conscience. Or he may see himself forced to intro-
duce so-called "cultural values'' into the original dy-
namic model, as various dissident psychoanalytic
groups do. In dealing with neurosis, one always en-
counters something which lies beyond the purely psy-
chological order. It just cannot be avoided: the human
psyche is a metaphysical meeting place.

Jung was originally a follower of Freud. He belonged
to a small group of psychiatrists in Zurich, led by Eugen
Bleuler, who accepted psychoanalysis within the frame-
work of the traditional, academic psychiatry of the med-

256 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

ical schools. This was not only a revolutionary step; in
German-speaking countries, it was unique. Even today
the psychiatric departments of nearly all German medi-
cal schools keep more or less aloof from psychoanalysis.
Jung and Freud can be seen together in an early group
photograph of the participants at a psychoanalytic con-
vention in Weimar. Soon, however, Jung came to con-
clusions which varied from classical psychoanalysis so
much that a break became inevitable.

In the original Freudian concept, the unconscious
contained -nothing but repressed material. According to
a famous comparison, the Freudian concept of the un-
conscious resembles an attic into which all those things
are stored which cannot be retained elsewhere in the
house. The only difference is that what is repressed
does not behave like old wicker chairs, bundled letters,
or tailors* dummies; it is alive. It makes a noise which
often disturbs life in the living room, or it even puts in
an appearance at an inconvenient moment. In the
course of his work with patients, Jung came to the con-
clusion that the unconscious contained not only dis-
carded material. It seemed also to contain positive ele-
ments which could not be explained on the basis of a
mechanism of disposal. Apart from the function of re-
pression, the unconscious seemed to represent a creative
principle.

Jung's point of departure was his observation that
his patients produced some dream images, daytime fan-

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 257

tasies, paintings and verbal utterances which could not
be explained on the "discard" principle and which,
moreover, bore an extraordinary resemblance to the
imagery and symbols of the great religions and of an-
cient myths and folklore. From this he concluded that
we have not only an individual unconscious (which is
probably nothing but the lively attic) but also a collec-
tive unconscious, a deep vault in which ancient images
are stored, images which we have inherited from the
human race. Jung called those images "archetypes/' It
is well known that this was just his starting point and
from it Jung evolved his own school of analytical psy-
chology.

It is obvious that the religious element plays a great
role in the Jungian type of analysis. It is also obvious
that this school opens up fascinating problems for a
Christian philosopher. There exist two separate sets of
controversy. One involves a confrontation of the con-
cepts of Jung with those of Freud. The other involves
a confrontation of Jung with Catholic philosophy.
Strange as it may first appear, these two controversies
are related to one another and cannot be treated sep-
arately.

This can be illustrated by an example. About nine
years ago I treated a patient who had been referred
to me for psychoneurotic depression. She was an un-
married woman of twenty-eight, a member of the Com-
munist Party employed by a Communist paper. She

258 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

knew nothing whatever of my own convictions, or she
would probably never have come to see me in the first
place. After about thirty sessions, she mentioned reli-
gion. She had come from a middle-class background,
and had been brought up as a Presbyterian, but during
adolescence had begun to identify herself more and
more with the underprivileged and the poor and to
study Karl Marx. As with so many ardent young Com-
munists who originate in that particular layer of society,
she had a good deal of unconscious religious motiva-
tion, apart from personal difficulties which had opened
the way of dissent to her. She left her family, joined
the Party and, out of misled idealism, lived a life of
hardship and deprivation.

During that particular session, when she came to talk
about matters of faith, she used an argument which one
frequently encounters in atheists. Of all anti-religious
arguments it is the most tragic one, and the most diffi-
cult to refute. Dostoievsky has presented it in the im-
mortal passage of The Brothers Kararnazov in which
Ivan speaks to Alyosha. The patient spoke of the bru-
talities and unjust sufferings of this world (this was
during the war), particularly the sufferings of children.
She said that all this was quite incompatible with the
idea of an all-loving, all-knowing Father in Heaven.
At one point she said: "Even if there were a God, a God
who permits such things to happen I'd rather have
nothing to do with him. No, thanks. I'd rather get on

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 259

without him/' With this she had a remarkably strong
reaction; she cried bitterly. Obviously this was not the
proper kind of atheism for a Marxist; she was too much
involved for that.

At the next session, she started by relating the follow-
ing dream: "It is night. Tm walking along a dreary
country road, quite alone. A drizzle of rain and snow is
coming down. It is cold and dark. Suddenly a sleigh
comes up behind me. It stops. On the coach seat is an
old man. Inside the sleigh is a young man. They ofer
me a lift. I decline by saying that I'd rather walk alone.
The sleigh moves on." She immediately associated this
with the preceding session. She said it reminded her
of what she had said about God. "Here I am, alone in a
dark and cold world. God stops to offer me a lift. But
I decline, and prefer to walk on alone/' With this she
cried again. One does not need to know Jung's theories
to become aware of the religious nature of this dream.
Man walking alone in the cold darkness and spitefully
refusing an offered lift! What a story for a modern
Christian existentialist. There is something almost Bib-
lical in it, with the simplicity of a parable which lifts
it out of an individual setting into a region of universal
validity. Which one of us can rightly say that he him-
self is not, at least in potentiality, the subject of the
dream. It is the drama of modern man. The trinitarian
element (Old Man, Young Man, Vehicle) makes it even
more "archetypical" in the Jungian sense. I later dis-

260 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

cussed this and similar productions of other patients
with analysts of the Jungian school, and they told me
that life constellations and images such as that are quite
common in their experience. To them there was no
doubt about the "archetypical" interpretation.

In this girl's neurosis, however, the figure of the
father and the figure of the brother played such a role
as to allow an entirely different interpretation. Her re-
lationship with the father and the brother, and the
nature of her transference to the physician at that par-
ticular point of the analysis, were such that her "refusal
of the lift" had another meaning besides the one of
which she became aware. Her spontaneous thought
associations which touched upon her relationship with
God made the interpretation valid on a certain plane.
But the individual interpretation which refers to her
early story is equally valid. Dreams and other manifes-
tations of the unconscious can have several meanings,
all of which are true. This was recognized quite early
by Freud himself. He spoke of overdetermination. For
example, a man who dreams that he is scolded by his
boss at work may be referring to his actual working situ-
ation (the so-called manifest dream content) and at
the same time to a forgotten childhood scene between
the father and himself. Here, however, we are refer-
ring to something more specific namely, the co-exist-
ence of the "archetypical" and the "individual" plane of
symbolic condensation.

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 26 1

The idea of two such planes of reality, superimposed
one on the other, is quite familiar in the history of
Christian thought. When Peter and John rushed to-
gether to the empty tomb after the resurrection, John
arrived earlier but he hesitated, and Peter went in be-
fore him. John went in after Peter, saw and believed.
The Fathers of the Church say that this story has, apart
from its immediate significance, another meaning. The
two apostles represent, as "types," the story of the sal-
vation of the Jews and the Gentiles. Taking it in this
sense the story also has a prophetic meaning just as,
in the story of Abraham and Isaac, Abraham prefigured
the Divine Father. When Christ said on the cross to
Saint John the Apostle: "Behold your Mother/' He
meant not only Saint John but He addressed all man-
kind. Patristic literature contains many similar exam-
ples; the episode is a symbol, and the concrete historical
event is the condensation of something transhistorical,
and both are equally true.

There is something analogous in Jung's psychology.
The dream of our patient has two meanings: one mean-
ing is historical. It refers to a unique, one-time setting
in the patient's life, namely her relation to her father
and brother. Then, transposed onto another plane, the
religious symbol appears. That symbol, from the point
of view of the patient's life, is transhistoricaL In the
actual therapeutic situation the patient is perhaps never
helped unless he "works" his conflict "through" on the

262 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

personal, historical, "Freudian" level In most cases,
perhaps in all, the patient has to live his problems, as
it were. He has to experience it in the flesh, in the con-
crete analytical situation, Even if Freud had believed
in the reality of all things of the spirit, he would prob-
ably have opposed Jung, simply on a clinical empirical
basis. Jung himself compared the analytical procedure
with death and rebirth. In order for this to be possible,
it is necessary for the patient to journey once more
through the embryonic night.

We have pointed out that the success of psycho-
analysis consists in widening the gap between two
worlds. One world is that of infantile fantasy and of
everything with which our infantile Ego endows the
objects of reality at every second of our existence. The
other world is that of the adult Ego, that part of us
which alone is capable of experiencing the reality of
everyday life without distortion. In order to strengthen
the adult Ego, the patient has to be led up against the
actors and scenes of the primitive stage setting. This is
tedious and painful, and it is done only by repeated
experiences. The process of healing is similar to that of
immunization by repeated small infections. Yet the
Jungian discovery was tremendously significant. The
fact that the young woman of our story experienced
a spiritual crisis at that moment of the analysis was no
accident.

Perhaps we are all on a dark and cold road and at one

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 263

time God offers us a lift. The fact that the Jungian
"archetype" and the Freudian * nest figure* not only do
not exclude one another but are even complementary
is no coincidence. It is linked up with the mystery of
the Incarnation. God is our father and Christ is our
brother. God Himself has acted with us on two levels.
Throughout the drama of salvation up to the Incarna-
tion, the Sacrifice, and the Resurrrection He was a
definite historical person. He was part of "once upon a
time/' but He is also universal and timeless. Whatever
was "once upon a time" also belongs to the future.
"Time future contained in time past." Just because we
are human; because our primeval experiences, all those
things which determine us, are things of the flesh; be-
cause the figures which shape our fate are Father,
Mother, Brother, Sister because of all this God took
human flesh. Between Jung's "archetype" and Freud's
"nest figure" there exists not only a psychological con-
nection but a mysterious ontological correspondence.
On this basis, we now understand more fully why
Freud, who denied the reality of the Spirit, came to the
conclusion that God was nothing but a father figure and
reconstructed "the Christian myth" as a neurosis.

Some Freudian critics of Jung's work argue that the
"archetypes" cannot possibly have an importance in the
origin of neuroses because they represent material we
have learned rather than rock-bottom primitive experi-
ence. Our patient, for example, has learned about God

264 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

or the Holy Trinity by a kte (as neurotic patterns go)
process of intellectual knowledge, in her Bible class, in
Sunday school, and so on. Therefore the archetypes
belong to a superficial layer of consciousness and cannot
have a strong affective charge. If one denies this and
assumes that the archetypes are anchored even more
deeply than our individual experience in life (as is im-
plied in some of Jung's statements), one would have to
assume a sort of Platonic foreknowledge of things of the
spirit-learning in Sunday School things which we have
already known in a previous existence.

However, the ontological correspondence between
the Freudian "nest figure" and the Jungian archetype
makes this whole argument irrelevant. Another patient
who had received a little conventional religious instruc-
tion as a child, but lived all his later life in an entirely
irreligious atmosphere produced the following dream
during analysis: *7 am naked in a garden. Suddenly a
huge man appears. I become frightened and hide be-
hind some bushes." The patient associated some
thoughts with this image but not the story which would
immediately come into most people's minds. I finally
asked him whether this reminded him of anything he'd
ever heard He seemed to rake his brain but could not
think of anything. When I finally mentioned the story
of Adam, he recognized it immediately and was sur-
prised that he hadn't thought of it before. It would
be sterile and formalistic to start an argument as

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 26$

to whether the imagery was borrowed from learned
(but forgotten) material, or whether there is such a
thing as archetypical stories which already exist in us
when we "learn" them. In the Judaeo-Christian order
of things, the scene of shame while facing the Father is
part of man's eternal story and it is not learned acci-
dentally, whether at Sunday School or in some other
way.

Many people wonder how Jung's theory can be recon-
ciled with Christianity, since there are many arche-
types, and only some of them are Christian in the way
in which our patient's archetype was. In Jung's papers
the primeval images of the great religions of the East
often seem to play a greater role than those of the
Hebrew-Christian religion. So do American-Indian, or
Germanic, or other types. Indeed, in Jung's writings and
in those of his school one frequently finds the atmos-
phere of the Museum of Comparative Religion, an air of
detachment and condescension, which deprives matters
of the spirit of their devouring fire. By studying "reli-
gions" on the same plane as psychology, the Jungian
analyst is apt to acquire the benevolent neutrality
which characterizes many of our sociology professors.
As a German philosopher friend of mine once remarked
with a pun: "Das gleich Gultige wird gleichgiiUig"
(that which is equally relevant becomes irrelevant).
The curtain of the temple is conjured away with an ele-

266 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

gant flourish. The border between Nature and Grace
exists no longer, and no longer are you mortally en-
gaged. Matters of the spirit are part of a noncommittal
therapeutic method; Jacob no longer wrestles with the
Angel in a horrible grip which leaves him forever limp-
inginstead he takes his daily hour of gymnastics.

The Jungian school frequently fell in with neo-
Gnostic movements which were fashionable in the Eu-
rope between the two wars, and which were profoundly
dissociated from the spirit of Christianity. It is probably
all this which kept Catholic scholars away from the
Jungian movement for a long time. One should have
thought that the idea of the Holy Ghost not stopping
at the border of consciousness would appeal to Catho-
lics but, until very recently/ it did not. The reality of
non-Christian archetypes does not need to have a neu-
tralizing and killing effect. When Saint Paul speaks of
"God who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spoke
in times past to the fathers by the prophets/' many hold
that he does not refer to the Hebrew tradition alone.
The prefiguration of the Incarnation can be traced in
all people; in the Hebrew people it can be traced in a
very special way.

It seems to me (and this has hitherto not been stud-
ied enough) that the significance of Jung's archetypes

* Compare the analysis of Jung's psychology by his most outstand-
ing disciple among Catholic scholars, God and the Unconscious, by
Fr. Victor White, O.P.

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: I 267

lies in the fact that, in the history of the patient's neu-
rosis, they point forward. To explain this on the basis
of our example of the young Communist woman: the
"Freudian*' constellation (the girl's father and brother)
is that which has happened; the Divine Father and Son
is that which, speaking in terms of the soul's move-
ment, toill be, that which is preparing itself in her. We
shall presently come back to this. The trouble with most
of the Jungian studies is the impression they convey
that Grace did not come in at all; as if the Freudian
structure had only been enlarged by simply adding one
floor: that of the "collective unconscious/'

XI

Psychiatry and the Life
of the Spirit: II

He who is starving to death must be fed before he is
taught; likewise it is better for the needy "to obtain pos-
sessions than to pursue philosophy" [Aristotle] though
the latter be of greater worth.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summ. Theol. II, Ilae, qu.32, a.3

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild

At every word,
Methought I heard one calling 'Child*

And I replied 'My Lord/

George Herbert

Now we come to the general question of the role of
religion in psychotherapy. Many people say, if there
were more faith in the world we would not have to
cope with so much neurosis. This may be true as far as
the role of religion in the total fabric of society is con-
cerned. Even so it is a statement of doubtful validity.
In past times when the Church dominated the life of
society, there existed neurotic upheavals albeit with a
different clinical appearance. One has only to remember
the hysterical disturbances which, in the Middle Ages,
268

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 269

took often the form of widespread epidemics. These
disturbances have disappeared and others have come
instead. It is quite possible that the mentally suffering,
like the poor, will always be with us. Even if overt anxi-
ety has increased tremendously in our time, as it seems
to have, it is dangerously fallacious to link this up with
the position of the person within the order of Grace.
What do we know about the true spiritual state of any
soul? One can show many atheists who have never
known a sleepless night or a dark hour, as against saintly
people of the most intense mystic life who are torn by
the temptation of despair. If a person suffers from a
phobia, one often hears this remark: "If he would only
pull himself together!" Many religious books on psychi-
atry, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, and written by
well-meaning people, are on the same level. They say
instead: "If he would only have faith!" The fallacy is
the same. It treats the neurosis apart from the category
of suffering.

On the deepest, ontological level, it is true that where
there is Neurosis there is something wrong with Faith,
Hope, and Charity. If the Redemption had its full con-
crete impact now, in Time, there would be no anxiety.
But then there would be no cancer, or tuberculosis, or
head colds either. It is true that Christ said to his disci-
ples when they were afraid: "Oh ye of little faith." But
He Himself knew the agony of the darkest night.

Apart from the fallacy of the pat formula and the

270 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

easy spiritual recipe, there is another fallacy. It is more
hidden. When we say about the neurotic sufferer: "If
he only had more faith . . ." we ourselves fall into the
danger of Pharisaism. We are tempted to say, or we feel
without quite realizing it: "Look at me, I believe and
I have no anxiety. I thank you, God, that you have not
made me like those."

None of this is said to minimize the healing power
of faith. Faith is one thing; the religious argument is
another. The religious argument as a therapeutic meas-
ure stands refuted by Job, a man writhing in the grip
of melancholia. After his friends have been going at him
in repeated sessions, he bursts forth: "How long do you
afflict my soul, and break me in pieces with words?
Behold, these ten times you confound me, and are not
ashamed to oppress me. For if I have been ignorant,
my ignorance shall be with me" (Job 19, 2-4). Job was
healed by faith, not by his friends' discourses.

During psychotherapy, particularly during psycho-
analysis, it is very tempting to take the "religious line/'
like Job's friends. For example, when our Communist
girl had her tearful crisis, it seemed the obvious thing
to pitch right in. Her relationship to me was such that
I could easily have used persuasion. This was even more
tempting after she had produced the dream which she
herself realized was related to God. This is the moment
when the physician has to resist the temptation to be
a preacher. After all, she herself had supplied the inter-

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 27!

pretation, and clinical experience shows that this is
much more potent than any direction on the psycho-
therapist's part. In such a case there is danger that the
patient might exploit the religious plane in order to
escape the conflict on the natural plane. Philosophical
discussions are at times used as a tool of resistance;
philosophy is employed to camouflage something else.
In the psychoanalytic process the praeter-verbal (all
that which lies outside the territory of the spoken
word) is as important as that which is spoken. The total
moral attitude of the physician, though never formu-
lated, forms the rock bottom. Just as in a piece of music
the rests are as important as the tones, the unspoken
is as important in the psychotherapeutic process as
the spoken. "Ce sont les silences qui comptent" a
French psychoanalyst once remarked. This is the reason
why a psychotherapeutic procedure, no matter of what
school, is one thing when conducted in a hedonistic
laissez-faire atmosphere, and quite another when con-
ducted in the atmosphere of the Gospel though neither
philosophy may ever be a point on the agenda.

In this connection we once more touch upon the
question of moral judgment, which has already been
dealt with in the chapter on guilt. It is a time-honored
tradition in the history of medicine that the physician
is not to judge his patient morally. This principle can
be followed from antiquity right through the Christian
era. Apparently in all civilizations, it is one of the un-

272 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

written rights of patients to be treated without moral
judgment. Even during the puritanical Victorian period,
when moral condemnation and a sort of Pharisaical dis-
crimination belonged much more to the overt me-
chanics of society than now, the same unwritten law
prevailed. A patient who had acquired a venereal infec-
tion extramaritally, or a young girl who had committed
an abortion, had the right to be treated like any other
medical case, in an atmosphere of moral detachment-
regardless of the physician's personal philosophy. In
the psychiatrist's case this point assumes special sig-
nificance, but the situation is fundamentally the same.
The psychiatrist works continuously in that peculiar
twilight in which it is impossible to distinguish between
freedom and necessity, and it is his work to widen the
area of freedom. But he must give the sick person the
benefit of the doubt. Neurotic patients are extremely
sensitive to this. They "feel" it if there is even a trace
of condemnation, though never formulated, in the very
depth of the physician's mind. And once that exists,
the therapeutic relationship is destroyed. Nowhere does
the saving power of charity become more apparent.

It often happens, for example, that the patient, out
of motives which are related to certain phases of trans-
ference, wants to "arouse" the physician of whose Chris-
tian convictions he is aware. Or he wants, uncon-
sciously, to be condemned. This is not a healthy desire
for moral restitution but a wish to re-enact, on the

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 2/3

therapeutic stage, an infantile scene. This happens par-
ticularly in patients with asocial or antisocial behavior.
A tliirty-four-year-old married woman, the mother of
two boys (one eight, the other six) was referred to me
because of a serious character neurosis which mani-
fested itself in drinking, promiscuity, and various forms
of social scandal which were at times quite startling.
She had been brought up as a Catholic but had ceased
practicing her religion many years before. Like many
character neuroses of that particular asocial pattern,
her state bordered on the psychotic. On one occasion
she told the story of having had sexual relations with
a man, not her husband, in front of her two boys. There
is no doubt whatsoever that I should have lost her if I
had begun to "preach/' or appeal to her sense of recti-
tude, or do anything along those lines. At times it was
apparent that she related her stories (which were true)
in the most scandalizing terms because she wanted a
(moral) beating. The fact that her desire for punish-
ment, rejection, or condemnation within the psycho-
therapeutic situation was frustrated contributed power-
fully to her moral regeneration. This sounds paradoxi-
cal. There is no contradiction between this and what
has been remarked in the preceding paragraph. On the
contrary. Whether the physician maintains an attitude
of "Judge not!" out of supernatural motives, or whether
he maintains a neutral attitude because he thinks that
morality is a pragmatic but arbitrary social fiction

274 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

these are two opposite worlds from the point of view
of the inner dynamics of treatment, particularly the dy-
namics of transference. When I am confronted with a
case of antisocial or asocial tendencies, no matter how
scandalizing to my sense of moral harmony, my psycho-
analytic knowledge of myself teaches me that, but for
a trivial change of circumstances, I might be in the
patient's boots and doing the things he is doing. This
is where psychoanalysis has deepened and enriched the
Christian moral conscience. On the other hand, this is
precisely the point at which the Christian moral con-
science is able to deepen and enrich psychoanalysis.

In this connection we have to refer briefly once more
to Jung. In cases like that of the promiscuous woman,
one can observe that during the therapeutic process
fantasies and images turn up which seem to be related
to Jungian archetypes. This is at times the first indica-
tion of a creative solution of the neurotic conflict. Fre-
quently one is able to explain the choice of symbols
merely on the basis of the mechanism of transference,
and out of the fact that the patient is approaching the
road toward sublimation. This is obvious whenever the
symbols are not religious.

I worked at one time in an out-patient department
with a juvenile delinquent. This boy, whom I saw first
when he was sixteen, had a long record of seriously
antisocial activities, with trials in Juvenile Courts and
several periods in reformatories. He was a pleasant,

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 275

very intelligent lad who had, among other things,
lacked any healthy kind of identification with the
father. He had not been able to cope with unconscious
homosexual trends, and behind his destructiveness was
a terrible fear of weakness and passivity. His relation-
ship with me was very stormy. A lot of the things he
did and said were based on mechanisms quite similar to
that of the patient quoted above. On one occasion he
reported the following dream: "The violinist Isaac Stern
is playing the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I am stand-
ing behind him with a half-size violin, and we both play
the concerto unisono, stroke for stroke." The patient
knew that I was interested in music; so was he. He actu-
ally played the cello, at that time, as a beginner. Even
for someone not acquainted with the Freudian method
of interpretation, the identity of the concert violinist
with the doctor must be obvious from the identity of
names. Without touching upon all the implications of
this dream, the state of his relationship to me at that
time is also obvious. His strong craving for identification
is beautifully symbolized. Now the choice of symbol is
no coincidence. The fact that the relationship is "non-
carnal" to that extent, that it expresses itself in music
and in musical instruments, is not only due to an un-
conscious "censor," a "beautifier" as it were the un-
conscious already indicates the road toward sublima-
tion. (This boy is today a successful science student, and

2/6 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Has not had any relapses into his antisocial activities,
though he still has far to go. )

The point I wanted to make is that the dream chooses
symbolic material which is explained out of certain
features of the transference, and which indicates things
to be. If a patient in a similar situation has dreams with
religious images, the reason for such a choice of symbols
might be similar. This, for example, could be observed
in the case of the promiscuous woman. In other words,
the coincidence of religious symbols is dynamically sig-
nificant (from the point of view of "sublimation" and
"transference") but it does not make the assumption
of true archetypes necessary.

This may sound as if we were trying to say that that
which is of the spiritual order were one thing and the
sickness another; or that the life of prayer and of the
sacraments play no role when it comes to mental suf-
fering. This would be a wrong impression. My purpose
is to warn against a false "spirituality" in the approach
to neurotic suffering; to show that often the vessel of
reception is sick so that which is of the supernatural
order is incapable of penetrating in a way we are used
to when we think of the spiritual life; to show how
subtle and complex the relationship between Grace and
Nature is in those cases in which the vessel is disfig-
ured; to emphasize how the structure of the neurotic
illness is intimately interwoven with profound biologi-
cal layers of the personality.

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 277

This does not mean that the life of prayer loses its
significance in that area. Wherever there is enough faith
left, it works in its own mysterious way. I do not like
to talk about the work of Alcoholics Anonymous in
terms of "sublimation/' because it is too mechanistic an
explanation. Mat Talbot was cured of alcoholism much
more effectively than any form of psychotherapy could
ever have achieved it. But this is in the nature of gratia
gratis data. The same thing can probably be said of
many persons who achieved sanctity out of a back-
ground of neurosis. Ever since the time of the Psalmist,
man has turned to God whenever he was beset by wor-
ries and conflicts. From the time of the Fathers of the
Church until now, many beautiful spiritual treatises
have been written especially designed for those who
labor and mourn. Catholic literature is probably the
richest in the world precisely for that purpose. All this
is outside the range of the present study. What we want
to discuss here are those huge dark uncharted areas in
which the needle of the spiritual compass itself seems
to deviate.

There are phases during which the spiritual life of a
person takes on a strange coloring; phases which are
marked by turmoil and upheaval; phases during which
the metaphysical chasm opens up, and the person is
threatened by primeval fear or swallowed up in ecstasy.
This happens particularly during the turning points of
life, during adolescence and during the climacteric

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

phase. It is here where the distinction between mystical
experience and clinical phenomenon, between compul-
siveness and asceticism, between elements of the "noth-
ing but" and elements of a transcendental order, is often
most difficult. Here a physician of religious convictions
particularly needs careful discernment, a respect for the
mystery of the person, and just plain clinical experience.
At times it is practically necessary to illuminate that
strange frontier area in which Neurosis and Faith meet.
In these instances the physician himself, no matter how
firm his belief is, has to use the reductive method, the
argument of "nothing but/' By and large the distinction
between morbid and healthy is not difficult. For ex-
ample, where spiritual ascetisism ends and compul-
siveness (the "scruple") begins is usually quite appar-
ent in the picture of the total personality. What we
have said about sanctity holds true also here: quite
often, the distinction between what is healthy and what
is morbid in the spiritual life comes down to the simple
rule by their fruits you shall know them.

We have seen that, in distinguishing the healthy from
the morbid, it is not the phenomenological structure
which matters. If the creative artist or the mystic hears
something which for us "is not there," he is outside the
range of the normal, but he may be supranormal rather
than abnormal. What matters is the content and above
all, to use the words of the gospel, the "fruits."

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 279

In a rationalist society, all faith is abnormal. We are
fools in Christ. To feel certainty about something we
have not seen, and which in its manifestations runs
against the ordinary laws of Nature, is madness as long
as experimental evidence is the sole criterion of truth.
Phenomenologically there is a close resemblance be-
tween faith and paranoia. Yet in content they are per-
fectly opposed to each other. Paranoia, according to
classical descriptive psychiatry (and in this connection
I am not going into the psychoanalytical interpreta-
tion), is characterized by delusional ideas which form
a logically coherent system of thought and leave the
rest of the personality intact. A paranoiac may have an
extraordinary set of ideas about the role of, let us say,
the Freemasons in his life and in the world in general.
You may meet him in a railway compartment, have a
couple of hours of pleasant conversation, and never
realize that he is a madman unless you or he happen
to touch on his subject. Even then, if he is intelligent
and a good talker, you may have the feeling after listen-
ing for a while: "Maybe he's got something there."
Paranoic patients have been known to influence juries
in court. It is, incidentally, no coincidence that I chose
the example of Freemasons. All paranoic patients (the
condition in its pure clinical form is rare), no matter
whether we encounter them in mental hospitals in Paris,
New York, or Rio, have certain pet themes, particularly
the Jews, the Freemasons, the Communists, and the

280 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

Catholic Church. To the ordinary man these groups
have an air of ubiquitousness and mysteriousness, and a
paranoiac patient sees hints in the common occurrences
of everyday life. He sees "things behind things" where
we do not see them. This is the most characteristic fea-
ture in the phenomenology of paranoia. The German
General Ludendorff (who was convinced there was an
extremely involved world conspiracy which included
Jews, Freemasons, the Vatican, and the Kremlin) dis-
covered, intricately disguised, the sign of the Free-
masons in the ornamented margin of the printed invi-
tation to a banquet given in his honor; he immediately
canceled his acceptance.

The close phenomenological relationship of paranoia
and faith is evident. Faith and paranoia are more akin
to each other than they are to the world of scientific
certitude. We, the faithful, hold a basic truth which is
foolish in the eyes of the world, and out of which a
logically coherent system of thought develops. We, too,
see "things behind things.'' To us, too, the seemingly
haphazard occurrences of everyday life reveal a myste-
rious pattern. But while the climate of paranoia is dis-
trust and its fruit is hatred, the climate of faith is con-
fidence and its fruit is love. Paranoia is the mirror image
of faith in an ugly distortion. Just as the saint has no
difficulty in recognizing other persons as ambassadors
of Christ, the paranoiac patient easily sees other people
as ambassadors of the hated adversary. This is most sig-

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II

nificant for the psychology of masses; in times of politi-
cal restlessness, paranoiac personalities (blatant clinical
and milder subclinical cases) come to the front. They
have an extraordinary power to mobilize latent para-
noid tendencies in the population. Vigilance turns into
distrust. And in the end hatred becomes a strange bond
of union. In totalitarian countries that strange Gift of
Distrust, the readiness to see machinations behind
events, is systematically mobilized and channeled.

There is another difference between paranoia and
faith. The paranoiac patient has no choice between
doubt and certainty. In the classical definition, para-
noiac delusions are held with absolute certainty and
cannot be shaken. Yet it is the characteristic feature of
faith that it can be tried. The person who has faith is
aware of the fact that there exists no scientific proof.
Faith is blind. There are mystics who hold that even
the Blessed Virgin lived on faith up to the hour of the
Resurrection. She was tried. Thus faith is inextricably
interwoven with Love and Hope, not only as regards
the content of what we believe but also as regards the
nature of the inner movement.

To the spiritual life of most Catholic people, the Gospel
of Rationalism and Pragmatism constitutes no danger.
It constitutes a danger in so far as it forms part of the
fabric of the society in which they live but it is not
much of an interior danger. To many of us the true

282 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

danger lies somewhere else. It is more subtle but no less
formidable. It is characterized by what one might per-
haps best call the "communion of distrust/' Today,
while we are facing the evil of Communism, vigilance
is more necessary than at any other time. Everybody
agrees about that. But vigilance has a tendency to open,
in a subtle and imperceptible way, frontiers in the hu-
man soul which had better be forever closed. Vigilance
in the face of evil may give rise to preoccupation with
evil. And, as the Fathers of the Church taught, if we
are unduly preoccupied by evil, we become evil. There
is danger in giving more thought to the things we are
against than the things we are for. It is easier to have
distrust than to have faith. The story of the early church
shows clearly that it is the positive in faith which con-
quers the world.

An interesting story from the life of Saint Therese of
Lisieux concerns a book written by a convert, present-
ing what today would be called the "inside story" of the
Freemasons. This book was apparently a best-seller at
that time and it was enthusiastically received by the
good nuns of her community. Only Therese, in oppo-
sition to her superior and everybody else, disliked it
intensely. The author was later unmasked as a psycho-
pathic swindler. Today, when Communists and secret
Communist machinations present an objective danger,
we face a great pitfall. It is not a question of paranoia
in the clinical sense. It is an imponderable something

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 283

which happens to a Community of Faith. We have our
nose to the ground to ferret out the scent of the adver-
sary; we have our ears to the ground to hear the distant
rumbling; before we know it, something decisive has
happened to us. We are no longer upright. Our gaze is
no longer fixed on God and Man in charity.

As it is at times important to scrutinize spiritual up-
heavals purely on the psychological plane, it is equally
important to scrutinize crises of doubt and unbelief in
the same way. Lack of faith or loss of faith is at times
so obviously structured within the entire context of the
neurosis that anyone but the most prejudiced must see
the connection. In the numberless psychoanalytical
papers on religious phenomena, studies which usually
end up by reducing everything spiritual to the dynamic
formula, hardly anything has ever been said about the
neurosis of unbelief. This is not surprising, since to most
investigators faith ("the certainty of things we have
not seen") is an abnormal or at least a suspect phenome-
non.

In my own experience, lack of religious faith or loss
of faith has often proved to be a serious indication of a
disordered person. The most frequent mechanism I
have encountered can perhaps best be described as
follows. In order to have faith, we have to be childlike.
Now in terms of our unconsciousthat is to say, in the
Freudian archaic strata which make up the preconcep-

284 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

tual and instinctual that which is childlike is pregeni-
tal. The believer is in a state of passive receptiveness.
If we refuse to believe something, we say: "You can't
make me swallow that." Of a person who believes some-
thing readily or without difficulty, we say: "He swal-
lowed it hook, line, and sinker." A person who believes
too easily is called "gullible" or a "sucker." In German
one says about a lifelong belief: "He took it in with
his mother's milk." In the life of the unconscious, on
the purely natural plane believing is an oral mechanism.

I have seen many cases in which this is quite ap-
parent. In a great number of neurotic people, the dy-
namic constellation of childhood is such that childlike-
ness means powerlessness. In their fantasy that which
is pregenital is emasculated. If you are passive-recep-
tive, if you "swallow" things, all your power and your
potential aggressiveness disappear. This is a bizarre and
fearful fantasy. In everyday language, not only are you
made to "swallow" beliefs, you are also "taken in." I
have also noticed that neurotic unbelievers in their fan-
tasies endow the purely intellectual, nonintuitive and
nonpoetic side of human thought (the sort of thinking
which a logical positivist would claim to be the only
proper mode of human reason) with extraordinary,
limitless power.

I once treated a man in his early forties, a very suc-
cessful businessman, who had symptoms of anxiety and
a problem of overt marital maladjustment. This man

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 285

came from a very religious Protestant background. He
had known poverty in his childhood, but had become
wealthy himself. The father had been a poor man, ac-
cording to the patient, weak and passive. The mother
had apparently been quite compulsive, particularly
when it came to religious practices. There were three
brothers and four sisters; the parents had shown con-
siderable favoritism toward an older brother. (I cannot
go into all the ramifications of the story, important
though they are for the understanding of his case, but
I shall tell only what is relevant to the present argu-
ment.) Early in life our patient had discarded his reli-
gious faith. He said it was "all baloney/* In the begin-
ning of our relationship he told me that his despising
of religion might be due to the fact that he associated
it with the "smallness" of his parents* life, the poverty
of his childhood and so on. This feeling was not with-
out ambivalence. On one occasion he told me that he
still felt suddenly and strangely affected whenever he
heard a hymn or a Bible story. On the whole, however,
his outlook was belligerently rationalistic. His only faith
was a belief in technical progress, and in all the things
which were "smart" and "modern." Although very rich,
he was a great admirer of Stalin whom he saw, in terms
of international politics, as a "strong rebel." He himself
had an insatiable need for material security, and in
material success and smartness he had outdone all his
brothers. During the analytical process, he produced

286 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

fantasies which showed that he was simply terrified by
his own potential femininity, by all that was passive-
receptive. There were reasons for this which I shall not
discuss here in detail. Suffice it to say that behind his
rejection of religion there was that same fear of the
passive-receptive. To be passive and receptive was to
him a fantasy of utter annihilation. (On one occasion
this patient told of an anxiety dream in which he was a
piece of blotting paper absorbing milk. In this image,
he was a "sucker" par excellence. )

When it comes f to the neurosis of unbelief, this pat-
tern is typical and repetitive. One could say that to this
man faith was associated with the oppressive atmos-
phere of poverty or of narrowness, and leave it at that.
In our psychoanalytical experience this would not be
enough. You have to go down to the archaic level of the
"somatic cosmos," the "Freudian" level, really to under-
stand this neurosis.

The searching reason of science is a masculine, ag-
gressive principle. It pierces the reality of objects. It
proceeds according to a plan of attack. The world of
faith is just the opposite. "I shall comfort you as a
Mother comforts/' "Unless you be like unto one of
these children . . ." We have to remain open for God.
We have to wait for Him. Mankind's relationship to
God contains the relationship of the bride to the groom;
according to the Gospel, we are seed grounds. There
is also a relationship of child to mother. Just as science

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II #87

is a masculine principle, wisdom (Sophia) is in classic
imagery and in the life of the unconscious a feminine
principle. She receives and she nourishes, like nature
itself.

A man who denies these elements in himself is deeply
affected. He is denatured. So often in our work people
tell us how, during adolescence, they had an experience
of awakening, something like a conversion but away
from faith. From then on truth was limited only to that
which calipers and test-tubes taught. Here, more than
anywhere else, the neurosis of Western man and the
individual neurosis overlap. Unless Reason and Con-
templation are balanced, we are sick. Reason tackles
problems; it is associated with activity. Contemplation
beholds mysteries; it is associated with silence. Scrip-
ture tells us how the prophet Ezekiel was made to swal-
low a scroll. The modern skeptic refuses to swallow
anything. He does not want to take in for fear of being
taken in.

It is interesting how anxiety manifests itself on the
natural level. In the mass of population as a whole it
would seem that "oral" insatiability were steadily on the
increase. From the increase of alcoholism down to the
harmless levels of oral pleasures (which have created
entire industries), anxiety appears to assume a uniform
epidemic pattern. Psychoanalytically there exists a close
relationship between oral and visual primitive libidinal
patterns, which means that the tremendous modern

288 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

appeal of moving pictures, television, and illustrated
magazines must be included in the pattern. This is
almost like an inversion of the Christian ideal of con-
templation in which the primitive instinctual forces are
harnessed and the person keeps himself "open" for the
word of God.

Thus, with many of us, the restless, searching, ana-
lytical power of the intellect which pries open the
secrets of Matter has become the only aspect of Truth.
We are no longer able to sit still, to wait, to listen. We
refuse to be receptive. We have to create a continuous
noise to drown out the stillness of the Word. This dis-
equilibrium in our mind's fundamental duality, this
strange form of maleness (in the widest sense of the
psychoanalytic meaning) refers not only to the neurosis
of the single individuals whose cases I have just men-
tioned. It has become for all of us an existential ques-
tion. We understand why Goethe, who was so wary of
the dangers of modern rationalism, had his extraordi-
nary mystic insight into the "Eternal-Feminine which
guides us on." We understand why Soloviev, only a
short time before the Russian catastrophe, had his vision
of Sophia. Above all, we understand why the Blessed
Virgin has played such an eminent role in the life of
the Church during the last century and this.

It also explains something else. In the life of modern
mystics there is a particular emphasis on simplicity, on
childlikeness. In phenomenology it is characteristic

PSYCHIATRY AND LIFE OF SPIRIT: II 289

that, but for an apparently trivial difference, that which
is morbid may be healthy in the highest meaning of
the word. The English language expresses this differ-
ence in the words "childish" and "childlike"; to be the
first is to be silly and to be the second is wise. We have
seen that all neurosis means either arrestation at, or re-
gression to, the infantile level. Apart from that primeval
schema of the child, there is another child in every one
of us. That is the child we have to keep preciously alive.
The world of neurosis is characterized by an infantile
dependence on people, on things; the world of faith is
characterized by a childlike dependence on God. The
one must diminish so that the other can be completed.

XII

Beyond Psychology

But there is the Christian Church a factor to be reck-
oned with. It may have to undergo martyrdom in the
future world-state, but, as it compelled the Roman world-
state in the end to make at any rate formal submission
to Christ, it might again, by the way of martyrdom, con-
quer the scientific rationalist world-state of the future.

Dr. Edwyn Bevan, in a letter to Arnold Toynbee

The preceding study is primarily a historical argument.
The entire question of psychiatry and religion has arisen
in our time because with certain psychological discov-
eries the Christian concept of Man appeared to be seri-
ously challenged. However, in the course of this study
another aspect of the question has presented itself: psy-
chiatry and the social sciences are invading areas in
everyday life which, in the order of Grace, cannot re-
main indifferent; this is happening at a time when man's
relationship to his work and to his co-worker has be-
come depersonalized. All this poses a very serious ques-
tion to those who look at human history from a Christo-
centric point of view. If the Comtean ideal were ever
really fulfilled, if the "third revolution" were to succeed,
if faith were entirely replaced by science, then psychol-
290

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY 2Q1

ogy and psychiatry would play a central role. What
would that role be?

Various trends in present-day psychiatry, of which
psychoanalysis is just one, have been presented in their
historical setting. However, the "historical" approach
made it necessary to look at psychoanalysis twice, as it
were. First we considered it in its entirety, not only its
scientific structure but the philosophical superstructure
on top. Then we took a second look. The superstructure
was removed and the building was investigated in its
basic features, lifted out of the general positivist stream
of our time.

In speaking of the psychoanalyst turned philosopher,
of his debunking attitude, the glee with which he de-
stroys man's spiritual "illusions' 7 we remarked that
there is nothing new in this. We said that actually all
discoveries since the end of the Middle Ages have
automatically, as it were, become theories of debunk-
ing. Freud has already observed this and given it a
remarkable interpretation. He has indicated in his fre-
quently quoted remark on the "insults" which mankind
has received since the Renaissance. At the time when
resistance to psychoanalysis was at its height he re-
marked that part of this resistance could be explained
on the basis of a deep wound to human pride. The
wound, he said, was not the first one. Until the time
of Copernicus man lived in a geocentric cosmos. The
earth, man's dwelling place, was the very center of

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

things, and everything else turned around it. With Co-
pernicus the earth was demoted to a mere speck some-
where in the Galaxy. What a blow to Man's pride! This
was, as Freud called it, the cosmic insult. After that
there was at least the illusion left that man was the king
of living creatures, the center of creation on this earth.
But with Darwin and the biological evolutionists even
this illusion seemed destroyed. Man as a creature was
dethroned. He suddenly appeared as the sort of chance
product of a seemingly blind biological process, just a
loose link at the end of a chain. This was, in Freud's
words, the biological insult. Now something similar
happened with the advent of psychoanalysis and its dis-
covery of the unconscious. Human Reason, royal and
autonomous, became a mere surface ripple over an
ocean of dark mysterious currents which seem to be
guided by blind, irrational forces. This was the psycho-
logical insult. The entire resistance against psychoanal-
ysis looked like a patient's last-ditch fight to preserve
at least a remnant of narcissism (an infantile fantasy
of the self).

Actually, there have been other insults. For instance,
Marx's dialectical materialism works on the assumption
that all of mankind's proud achievements in the cul-
tural field, the arts and sciences, in fact the entire drama
of human history, can be explained on the basis of eco-
nomic data, by the tension between economic factors
to put it plainly, by the history of greed. According to

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY

the writings of Marx and Lenin, the entire spiritual
history of mankind is determined by and can be ex-
plained on the basis of a rather vulgar process. This
sounds primitive and seems to be an insult to our intel-
ligence. But when one reads the classical Marxist writ-
ings it is not at all as stupid as it sounds. Given a purely
material concept of man, believing, as most of us do,
that there is nothing but Nature to go on, it makes
more sense than a good many philosophies which are
being handed out to us today. The very thought of such
a concept of history makes most of us wince. Another
wound! One could call this the cultural insult.

Look at what has happened to the Christian within
four centuries. First he is evicted from a geocentric cos-
mos. Then he is told that his higher achievements are
accidental by-products of the fight for food. Then he
is demoted to the position of a cousin in the monkey
family. And finally his reason is declared to be a pre-
cariously fragile something determined by forces the
very nature of which are obscure to him.

Let us assume, as we have done in this book, that
we are witnessing here something like a revolution
(centered around the psychological sciences in the
widest sense of the word), a revolution which may lead
to similarly profound consequences what does this
mean from the Christian point of view of history? To
begin with, we see that man is trying to tackle his prob-
lems on the natural plane. Nothing exists which tran-

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

scends the conclusions derived from material data.
However, something like a descending scale can be
observed: first, it was the social and economic aspect
of the human animal which promised the solution (in
dialectical materialism). Then it was the biological and
racial aspect (in Nazism). Finally it is the psychologi-
cal aspect. However, this descending scale cannot be a
coincidence: it looks almost as if a materialist philoso-
phy of man were worming its way gradually from a
place somewhere "outside" toward the inmost core of
the human person.

In the course of these revolutions, the image of man
as presented to us in the Gospel has become increas-
ingly distorted. One might argue that a materialist
theory of economic justice is, comparatively speaking,
more innocuous than a materialist theory of the human
person. However, the effect turns out to be quite dif-
ferent from what was expected. The materialist, finally
confronted with the psyche, comes up against some-
thing which destroys his original premises. To use
Hegelian terms, materialism creates its own antithesis
and finally negates itself. From this a new synthesis
ought to arise.

As a matter of fact, it does. The first impression is
quite deceptive; all we can see is the most extraordi-
nary state of spiritual pride in which we find ourselves.
In that sense, the process of "reducing" man has not
been successful. Man who thought of himself as an

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY 95

image of God, with a very elevated position in the Uni-
verse, gets up from the couch after four centuries of
very convincing insights further than ever removed
from humility! This is the greatest paradox of all. Men
used to bow when they prayed to a God who "estab-
lished the nature of man in wondrous dignity and even
more wondrously renewed it." Now that they have
been diminished to points of reference shifting within
an estranged universe, they seem more cocksure than
ever.* As Pascal has pointed out, to live in a universe
without Christ at its center induces tremendous anxi-
ety. To live as an individual with a psyche without
Christ at the center should induce even more anxiety,
and I strongly suspect that our cocksureness is some-
thing like whistling in the dark.

The second impression of this revolution is altogether
different When we regard psychoanalysis in its funda-
mental features, freed from its nineteenth-century ac-
cretions, something startling emerges. It suddenly
moves into a historical context quite opposite to the
one in which we saw it first. When we look at the entire
preceding study (of which psychoanalysis forms only
a part) we can observe two trends. One trend in the
history of modern psychiatry is characterized by the
fact that psychic data are treated as objects the way in
which the zoologist looks at butterflies, the geologist at

* After writing these lines, I found the same thought expressed
by Gabriel Marcel in his book, Eire et Avoir.

THE THIRD REVOLUTION

minerals, and the chemist at molecules. When the
clinician of the nineteenth century classified "entities'*
of mental diseases he treated these diseases as species,
comparable to classifiable objects; when the Pavlovian
physiologist studies the behavior of man under the
aspect of interacting reflexes, he studies an object of
mechanics; when the behaviorist studies the "social
reflex" by using the "discrimination cage" and arrives
at the formulation of behavior laws, he treats social
phenomena as if they were the object of a special kind
of physics; when the cybernetics man speaks of mental
breakdowns in terms of cell circuits he also treats
psychic phenomena like objects of physics; when the
"communications" man investigates the living together
of groups of people on the basis of the "communication
model" he treats social phenomena as if they were the
object of a kind of engineering; whenever the psycholo-
gist evolves a test which yields graphs and percentages
he translates, as it were, something which has once been
a psychic element and studies it as if it were an object;
and so on.

The second trend which we have indicated through-
out this book is characterized by the absence of an
object in the sense of the natural sciences. "Absence
of an object" appears paradoxical. In the relationship
between psychoanalyst and patient there exists, to bor-
row terms which modern philosophers * have used in a

* Particularly Max Scheler and Gabriel Marcel.

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY

somewhat different connection, not a relationship of I
and it, or / and they there exists only "I and Thou."
If one removes from psychoanalysis all secondary elabo-
rations (the terminology which makes things appear
mechanical and the philosophy which makes them ap-
pear determinist and materialist), then it is first and
foremost the psychology of I and Thou.

The relationship of I and Thou is mysterious. In the
world of the natural sciences no two objects can be in
the same place at the same time. In the relationship of
I and Thou there is an interpenetration of being. This
is the reason why we dwelt at such length on empathy
and connaturality. Contrary to the "I and it" or "I and
they" the relationship of "I and Thou' is, on the natural
plane, related to love either positively or negatively.
It cannot be neutral Objects in mathematical space are
not only separate; they are also opaque. The "I and
Thou 9 is an illuminating insight. Here the light of rea-
son and the light of charity belong together. The "I
and Thou 9 contains an implicitly metaphysical quality.
Now we understand much better why materialistic
thinkers, either of the positivist or the Marxist variety,
usually view the entire business of psychoanalysis with
suspicion.

After these distinctions we are in a better position to
answer the question we asked in the beginning of this
chapter. Let us suppose one set out to establish a de-

298 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

humanized society, a society of the beehive, something
comparable to a smoothly running machine for one's
official psychology there would be no choice. It would
have to be a psychology of I and it, I and they, Pav-
lovian mechanic sets, cybernetics or communication
models, discrimination cages, graphs and formulas,
personality tests, group dynamics and so on. That is the
only kind of psychology which enables us to run people.
The psychology of I and it, or I and they, is the psy-
chology of the manager. Descartes, one of the great
inaugurators of modern scientific thought, made a dis-
tinction between the things of our inner experience (res
cogita) and things of the world of material objects (res
extensa). If we want to manage human affairs we have
to treat psychic data as if they were part of some huge
res extensa. The result is not pleasant. It does not make
any difference whether you look at man as a reflex
mechanism as the Soviet psychiatrists do, or as a set of
chromosomes as the Nazi psychiatrists did, or from the
point of view of some Comtean sociological ideal. The
outcome is always the same. It always goes strictly
against the dignity of the human person.

When science replaces faith, then we are in a posi-
tion of playing God. And when we play God, the things
we do are usually not nice. I strongly suspect an inner
connection between the Pavlovian reflex machine and
the technique of obtaining confessions in the Soviet
Union. If the connection is not one of method, it is cer-

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY

tainly one of philosophy. There certainly was a connec-
tion between the chromosome sets and that ghastly
Sterilization Board in Nazi Germany. I hate to think
what the results of our laboratories for group dynamics
might be in a managerial society.

The psychiatrist whose ideas about the communica-
tion model we have outlined said that we must get away
from Aristotelian concepts. Our thinking must become
"non-Aristotelian" and "field-theoretical." This means,
in plain language, that in order to see human society as
a communication machine, man has to stop being man.
Aristotle, and a few others after him, were quite wrong
in assuming that human beings have eternal qualities
which set them apart from all other things in the uni-
verse and remain immutable under all conditions. In
other words, for the psychology of the it and the they,
we have to forget about the human person as a person
in the sense in which Aristotle or Saint Thomas mean it.
We have to see him as an object or, at best, as an indi-
vidual.*

Sometime during the war a colleague of mine who
had just returned from a meeting of psychiatrists of the
Armed Forces told me quite enthusiastically, obviously
without realizing what he was saying: "They have tried
out some interesting rapid personality tests for screen-
ing personnel. One fellow reported a test which takes

* The term "individual" (unit) as opposed to "person" is here used
in the sense of Thomist philosophy.

300 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

exactly ten minutes." The essence of that test was that
the man to be investigated had to appear naked with
his serial number written across his chest. This could
easily be arranged because the subject had probably
just finished his physical examination. They had experi-
mentally established, my friend told me, that a man
who is completely undressed is less apt to tell lies about
himself. The psychiatrist of the examining board would
furtively look up the serial number in a list. He then
would address the candidate by his first name. It had
been established that a man who appears naked before
an examiner and is unexpectedly addressed by his first
name will, during a brief conversation, reveal essential
traits of his personality and things which otherwise
might come out only in many hours of history-taking.
It is irrelevant that the test in that specific form has
apparently never been adopted. Moreover, the story has
not been told here in order to question the importance
or validity of screening. There are situations in which
people have to be tested before they are given certain
jobs. The story is told because of its symbolic implica-
tions, as a striking example of a managerial psychology.
Just try to conjure up a society in which such a rapid
testing of the personality would be a typical scene.
Think for a moment how the word "personality" is be-
ing used here in contrast to the meaning of "personality"
in Catholic philosophy. And quite a few Catholics who
are scandalized by what they know about psychoanaly-

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY 301

sis would not be at all shocked by that scene, We are all
so impregnated by the Cartesian fallacy, which is the
very air we breathe, that we fail to see anything wrong
with it. Yet, if a poet wanted to write something like
an eschatological play about our time-what material!
The naked man, with his serial number across his chest,
addressed by his Christian name, having his personality
assessed: it would not take much to make it look like a
mock scene of Judgment.

The psychoanalytic procedure is essentially different
from all this. As we have shown, this is not immedi-
ately obvious. From the beginning the poetic-intuitive
nature of the method was camouflaged by the terminol-
ogy. Freud had to form easily communicable concepts.
Therefore he presented his findings in words which
make us think of diagrams and models. Moreover, he
remained, one might almost say, anxiously determinis-
tic. Any decent scientist with laboratory training had
to keep away from ideas of finality, to say nothing of
the idea of ultimate finality. Moreover, psychoanalysis
eagerly welcomed any confirmation which came from
animal experiments and brain physiology. There is
nothing wrong with all this but it meant that extraor-
dinary body of human intuitive understanding became
more and more assimilated to and embedded in a scien-
tific world which is that of the animal and the machine.

Take all this away and there remains a core the
drama of I and Thou, the human dialogue. The Com-

302 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

munists saw quite clearly that this is incompatible with
the I and they. They are much more logical than we.
The I and Thou has no place in the beehive. In the psy-
choanalytic situation there always remains a chink
through which love and freedom may come in. It is
impossible to baptize reflex man, or the cybernetics
model or the communication set, whether it be com-
posed of groups of people or groups of cells. But the
method of / and Thou asks bluntly, as it were, to be
Christianized.

To illustrate this let us once more go back to the
story of the old immigrant which was told in the sec-
ond chapter. The psychiatrist who treated him, who
recognized the hidden symbolic disguises in his symp-
toms, and who finally produced the old consul general
and who enacted the scenes which brought about the
solution of the conflict, was personally not a believing
Christian. In fact he did not believe in anything, as far
as I know. He did only what he thought was scientifi-
cally correct. Yet the solution of the problem, the de-
nouement of our story, appeared similar to a solution
dictated by wisdom and charity. The story of the old
consul, the scene of forgiveness, the catharsis following
a seemingly inescapable nightmare of guilt and punish-
ment, was a human solution.

Now with this we come to a remarkable paradox. If a
physician had kept away from psychoanalytic teaching
because it might be incompatible with Christian doc-

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY 303

bine he might have approached our patient with all
these psychiatric methods which are doctrinally "safe."
He might have clung anxiously to concepts of classical
descriptive psychiatry. In that case he might have la-
beled our patient with a clinical term and given him
some physical form of treatment, such as electro-shock
("There is nothing wrong with it"). I have seen many
examples of this. In doing so he would actually have
acted in a less Christian way than the psychoanalyst
who professed no religious belief. In remaining on the
strictly physiological level (the electric treatment does
have an effect on the cellular mechanisms of certain dis-
orders of the affects), he would have kept a safe Carte-
sian double-ledger.* We are so often guilty of that.

* It is at times shocking to see how insensitive some Catholics in
America have become to what one might call the technocratic heresy.
I have come across departments of psychology in Catholic universities
in which numerous "personality problems" were studied with the aid
of apparatuses, graphic symbols, statistics, questionnaires, tape re-
cordings, and so on, in other words with the aid of the gadget, not
only in the sense of concrete machinery but in the sense of an entire
methodological atmosphere. Now in such an atmosphere you are
bound to slide into an area in which science becomes a depersonaliz-
ing force. Instead of moving toward the human person you move
away from it. The transition is often subtle and imperceptible. Before
you know it the machine has gotten the better of you. Some years
ago a priest who does a lot of marital counseling told me that he
uses, I have forgotten whether for teaching or for research, the tape
recorder. Something very serious has gone wrong here. It is not a
question of the ethics of secrecy. Many conversations like this could
be tape-recorded in such a way that personal secrecy is delicately
maintained. The danger lies somewhere else. Counseling is the pro-
totype of the human dialogue. In a sense, all human dialogue is unique

304 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

But the inner drama of our patient's life would not
have been touched. Empathic knowledge is, as we saw,
on the natural level akin to charity. And, as we have
shown, in enlarging the frontiers of empathy we gain
more and more ground for charity.

When our patient, after many years of unconsciously
imposed penance wanted to inflict on himself the capi-
tal punishment, and when (with the aid and the under-
standing of the psychoanalyst) that scene of reconcilia-
tion was enacted, the scene of the forgiving father
we saw, as it were, the raw material for a Christian
solution. But the material remains material. There is
to the faithful Christian an aspect of guilt and atone-
ment which has not been touched. The therapy
was effective. But we know that guilt and redemption
have a supernatural aspect. That aspect has not been
approached during the entire procedure. What the

and irretrievable. It is sacred whether it occurs in the sacramental
setting or not. When you fix it in order to be able to "play it back"
you make a decisive step. My first contact with all this was a young
priest whom I met many years ago and who told me that one of his
subjects at the seminary was psychology. I asked what he had studied
and he said he had so far had only a course in statistics. This means
that this young man who would later be a director of souls was first
initiated into the field of psychology by something which once and
for all pkced it in the "strictly scientific category" something hope-
lessly removed from, say, the psychology of a Saint Francis of Sales.
It is hard to understand why we should be so little sensitive to that
technocratic fallacy. Perhaps it springs from a human weakness to live
up to the scientific Joneses. Or it may be that the objective psychol-
ogy of the laboratory is a shield against anxiety.

BEYOND PSYCHOLOGY 305

therapist has achieved at best is a primitive foreshadow-
ing of something which lies beyond the psychological
plane. Grace builds on Nature. From that point of view
the therapist has worked in the right direction. He has
prepared the patient for something. To the Christian
there is something most essential to our patient's life
which the therapeutic process cannot solve.

Let us suppose that there were thousands of psycho-
analysts who with infinite patience and kindness, and
with an ingenious degree of empathy were able to fol-
low neurotic suffering to its last ramification and led
their patients up to a final denouement similar to the
one in the case of our old immigrant. If we were then
made to believe that the mystery of guilt and suffering
had been solved in these cases we would reach a most
extraordinary state of affairs. This would actually con-
stitute a state of the most subtle and therefore most
deadly pride. That drama which goes on only between
the soul of a man and the heart of Christ would be con-
jured away. It would mean that man ends where psy-
chology ends. The human person would be without that
element of Above and Below. The human dialogue
would resolve all mysteries. There would be nothing
beyond it.

Thus we see that, while the psychology of I and they
is the psychology of collectivism, the pitfall of psycho-
analysis is individualism. If one gave (in some Orwel-
lian story) a monistic significance to the psychology of

306 THE THIRD REVOLUTION

/ and they, if one evolved it into a technique of living,
into something which expands into the vacuum left by
secularism the psychologist would be a demiurge, a
re-enactment of God the Creator. If psychoanalysis as-
sumed such a position, the psychologist would be a re-
enactment of God the Redeemer.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that psychoanalysis
contains, perhaps contrary to the intention of most of
its adherents, a movement toward personalism. To dis-
regard this would be more than an academic error; it
would be quite disastrous. When the psychoanalytic
movement is presented in its fundamentals, with all the
philosophical embellishment scraped off, it marks a
turning point in the history of psychology and perhaps
of science altogether. We rediscover something old the
unity of the human person. Moreover all that which is
of the psychic order is experienced concretely not
through abstracts, not through apparatuses, graphs, and
numbers, but with the stark immediacy of poetic in-
sight. Out of the senses Ultimate Sense arises. Out of the
dimness of the flesh (caro] charity (cantos) emerges.
This is a pre-eminently human image of the psyche. In
the middle of it we find, with overwhelming concrete-
ness, the polarity of love and hate. The human dialogue
itself contains a healing principle. And for us who have
followed this development, there remains one thing to
be added the world of Grace.

Nihil obstat: Delphis Rollin, ptre.

Ottawa, le 12 mars 1954

Imprimatur: fi& M. J. Lemieux, o.p.

Archbishop of Ottawa
Ottawa, le 15 mars 1954

CD

103180

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