متن انگلیسی کتاب روانشناسی و روح بخش چهارم
PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SOUL
INDIVIDUALISM AND COLLECTIVISM
Two spirits dwell at odds witJiin my breast, And each would gladly from the other part; The one seems with the single urge obsessed To keep the friendly earth within my heart; The other draws me -forth in willful quest Of visions to a finer world apart.
Goethe
The preceding chapter has brought us all the way from religious spiritual belief, through a sexual ideology of immortality, to a humanized portrayal of all these concepts in certain character types and psychological interpretations. This last stage, to which our first chapter referred as projective psychology, was a kind of concretion of spiritual phenomena whose significance had formerly been religious and sexual. Such a personification of spiritual phenomena is extremely ancient, and goes back to the religious era of gods and demons which survived in the Middle Ages as ghosts and devils. The human significance of such entities has remained unrecognized only because they have been viewed from the standpoints of introspective psychology and natural science ideology. If we bear in mind the evolution which belief in an immortal soul underwent from its inception in preanimisticmaterialism to our current natural science psychology, we find a certain parallel with the development of chemistry from alchemy, or of astronomy from astrology. But the evolution from spiritual belief to a doctrine of mind was the more radical and fateful development. From their inception, the natural sciences had been humanistic. Babylonian astrology, the metaphysics of the Ionian philosophers, and the alchemy of the black arts of the Middle Ages were all manifestations of spiritual belief: alchemy tried to create the soul artificially (homunculus ) ; and astrology, to read its fate in the stars with which it was identified. The one tried to insure personal immortality by virtue of the soul's connection with the external world soul; the other, by consciously fathoming its secrets. While the natural sciences emerging from primitive spiritual belief tended from the abstract to the concrete and from the spiritual to the practical, spiritual belief originated in a fully conscious and concrete idea of the body's shadow, with the eminently practical purpose of insuring immortality. In scientific psychology such belief became a partly mystical, partly abstract, and certainly incomprehensible concept of the soul. While the natural sciences continued in one way or another to develop the themes of their spiritual prototypes, psychology acquired an antispiritual focus because, unlike the natural sciences, it could neither sustain other forms of belief in the soul nor escape the pressure exerted by its own intellectual analysis to destroy the soul^| If we want to understand this transformation and its significance for man's development, we must begin with an earlier point of view which I have already mentioned. At first, immortality had been thought of in the purely individual sense of survival of the bodily self, but at the stage of spiritual belief it was incorporated into a system properly designated asreligious ( totemism ) which signified a collection or incorporation in the sense of the term religio. This unification implied not a mere collection of various stages of immortality belief into a religious system, but the incorporation of a number of individuals under the social dominion of a spiritual system.
We have already suggested that the synthesis of various totem souls into a generic totem signified a kind of spiritual promiscuity or spiritual communism by which all women of a clan could satisfy their spiritual needs. This first attempt to sustain totemistic belief in individual immortality culminated in the creation of the collective soul, which insured immortality but transformed the individual survival of the bodily self into collective survival of the individual
spiritual self. In other
words, under the totemistic system, belief in individual immortality was a belief in collective reincarnation based on
socio-spiritual collectivism rather than on reproductive generation. It was not yet a matter of a father who survived in an individual hereafter, comprised by his own children, but of souls of the dead incarnated in various animal and plant spirits, which passed them on to the next generation of the totem-symbolized clan. This collective soul which found concrete expression in socio-familial unity was a reciprocal guarantee of immortality which always insured the individual's survival in the next generation.
This mutual security of all family group members in collective immortality was responsible for the powerful and rigid social units of the presexual era, in which the individual gave up his naive belief in physical immortality for an ideology of the family group. It is my opinion that this ideology offers a basis for understanding both the bitter hatreds and feuds between North American Indian tribes, arid the feuds or vendettas currently practiced in many European countries. Whether it was the theft ofwomen under exogamy, or the murder of male members of the tribe, it was always a matter of avenging serious offenses upon the spiritual economy of the community which, being robbed of one of its symbols of spiritual revenue, sought to cancel or at least avenge the shortages created in the immortality account. In contrast with the large civil groupings of the sexual era, which were themselves composed of familial elements, the small group unit such as the tribe or clan was characteristic of animistic, social collectivism. The fact that the individual members of small spiritual groups all knew one another reflects the original materialistic body-soul which became universalized and spiritualized only in Christianity's time. Christianity revived the tribally circumscribed spiritual collectivism within the more inclusive civil organizations of the sexual era in which the concept of the soul was transformed from that of the dead to that of the living (son). Social organization originally involved not a restriction of the individual, but a protection and extension of his ego through spiritual belief. Natural binding forces for society were fashioned from this communal ego interest. Tabus were not external prohibitions, but tributes which the individual willingly paid, not so much for the common good as for his self-protection which rested on that good.
Morals and law were still embodied in community interest which was in effect a collectivized self-interest. The factors inherent in the original tribal units came to serve the new ideology only through an acceptance of the individual's survival in his own children, which characterized the sexual era. By granting him the right to possess his wife and child, and by obliging him not to threaten the spiritual economy of others in the family group, society gave the individual a legal and moral assurance of the immortality embodied in his offspring. In other words, in thesexual era which culminated in familial social structure, that unity of the individual with the group, which was founded on spiritual communality and guaranteed the individual's spiritual well-being, was legalized as procreative immortality and moralized as bounden duty. However, both of these ideologies stood in direct opposition to primitive spiritual communality in which the sharing of collective immortality was a self-evident principle, and in which a struggle for individual immortality was a threat to the tribe ( tabu ) . The transformation of collective spiritual belief into individual familial organization came about gradually and under difficulties of the most diverse kind.
We have already described matriarchy as a decisive turning point, and as the first realistic and worldly social manifestation of sexual belief in procreative immortality. While all women had previously belonged to the generic totem or collective soul, and all children to the tribe, under matriarchy the child was awarded to the mother, so that the father remained officially excluded from individual immortality. The same spiritual insecurity which had produced the collective immortality structure of the totem clan prevented man of the sexual era from entirely relinquishing his collective principle for an individual one. He only came to accept his father role spiritually under a state which actually had nothing to do with his spiritual significance, and had divorced itself from religion in order to emphasize its legal and moral significance. As the Roman state amply illustrates, man had a guarantee of his procreative immortality under patriarchy, because his children, and his wife, whom he addressed as "dear soul" (dulcis anima), were his virtual slaves. Yet, while the state could protect such rights, as a collective agent it could only protect his soul legally and morally, and not religiously.
To be sure, the community itself underwent a marked change, from its original denial of a fatherhood which guaranteed collective immortality, to its legal establishment of a fatherhood which guaranteed individual immortality. From a spiritual community which was a religio in the strict sense of that word, society was transformed into a legal community with an alienated state religion. This new type of community which included both legal and moral institutions, but in which state and religion coexisted independently, still maintained the illusion of the original collective soul, while the power of the state served a procreative immortality guaranteed by the family rather than by the community. Thus man's familial immortality which had survived from matriarchy was honored only under the state's protection, because the state not only supported the laws governing marriage, but symbolized that collective immortality which had predated marriage itself. The state, which had originally been created to
protect the family, gradually undermined and ruined it, for the family had been founded on the individual principle of procreative immortality guaranteed by laws of marriage and succession, while the state and its official religion were the remnants of the immortality principle which the state legalized and religion moralized. These respective actions account for the balanced and common interest of the state and religion in the institution of marriage, which guaranteed collective immortality by religious sanction of the individual, and sexual-individual immortality by his civil sanction.
In this conflict between family and state, which was essentially a conflict between the individual immortality provided by the child and the collective immortality guaranteed by societyor between the religious and sexual eras the Jews havebeen the most effectively evasive of all peoples. With their unusual adaptability they have accommodated themselves best to a sexual ideology, sacrificed state for family, and, by "multiplying like the sands of the sea," maintained themselves while other peoples suffered from hypertrophy of statehood. The state has given only partial protection to familial immortality, since in other respects it has remained the representative of the older, collective immortality. And the state has even become a less true representative in this latter sense, because it has always demanded that the individual sacrifice for its maintenance. In contrast, the Jewish state was represented by a religion oriented entirely to worldly affairs, which had no traffic with the hereafter, and placed familial immortality above everything else.1 It was quite logical, then, for Christianity to mark the Jew as an individualist perpetually damned to a worldly existence ("the eternal Jew"). For Christianity represented an attempt of a different kind, to use religion to preserve the socio-spiritual community of the clan, which the aspiritual kings of the constitutional state had undermined. While Judaism held fast to the reality of world tribal organization, and perpetuated it sexually through the family, Christianity concerned itself with the immortal soul, which it could sustain only in a future state free of humanized qualities. In this sense Judaism and Christianity cannot be compared cither historically or religiously.
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1In his History of Israel ( Geschichte Israels ) , Renan has brought the anomalous position of the Jews into relation to their attitudes toward the present, and to thHr lack of un ideology of the hereafter.
They are simply extreme developments of present- and futureoriented aspects of spiritual belief, which are anchored in social organization and are inseparably united in totemism by the ideology of collective rebirth of the soul. Israel probably grew torpid and lost its statehood under a religious and familial ideology of sexual immortality mediated by the family, while Christianity began with a spiritual ideology of immortality in a future state and became at one time a farflung, realistic world sovereignty to which all nominal rulers of the people voluntarily submitted. Let us now turn from this spiritual basis of human socialization and its civil and religious forms, to the individual by and for whom all these ideologies and institutions were created.The spiritual collectivism embodied in totemism passed over into a collective socialism rather like that depicted in Plato's ideal state.
Women and children represented the collective soul comprised by the clan and its totem. The rise of the sexual era, and its acceptance of the individual's procreative immortality, destroyed this worldly communism which had mirrored spiritual communism. Under matriarchy it was even more definitely an incarnate collective soul which found expression in the role of the mother deity, or Mother Earth, who nourishes and gives life to all, and finally became victorious in the fatherhood and patriarchy of temporal individualism. However, this development required a double guarantee of immortality from the state and civil community: first, a spiritual-collective guarantee through the social phenomena of society and religion; and secondly, an individualsexual guarantee concretely expressed through such institutions as marriage, the family, and succession by inheritance. This social father-individualism, which tried to relate itself both to the temporal world and to an already uncertain belief in the hereafter, was completely overthrown by Christianity. In its place the son (the individual) and not the father, became the real heir. The role of spiritual bearer of the soul passed from mother to son, whom the sexual era had elevated to themost important position of all, since it was the son who received his father's soul from his mother and passed on his soul to his own son. This accounts for the crucial importance of the son ever since the rise of Christianity, which comprised the transition from the sexual era to that of the child, under whose psychological sign we still find ourselves. Although the principle of the individual, or son, strongly resisted domination by the father principle at the height of the sexual era, it remained for Christianity to support this principle and to make it completely victorious. For in making the son a bearer of the soul instead of a mere extension of his father's life, Christianity made it possible for him to cease resisting and to accept his role as son. In the heroic myths of antiquity the son had to carry out certain tasks in order to vindicate his earthly existence, but Christianity could now grant him immortality without imposing such tasks. The soul had found collective and social symbolizations in matriarchy and the father concept; the Christian concept of the son gave it its first individual incarnation. At the same time, Christianity encompassed both of the other spiritual concepts in its synthesis of the Trinity and lifted totemistic belief in transmigration beyond the stage of paternal, procreative immortality into an individual, spiritual role of the son. Thus the collective spiritual role of woman as mother and the sexual individualism of the father were harmonized in an individual spiritual role of the son. On the other hand, as he matured into fatherhood, the son became the seat of conflict and, to his own children, the giver of those recently contending spiritual and sexual ideologies which he represented. Thus, with the support of Christianity, the spiritual individualism of the son precipitated new trends, ideologies, and conflicts, which the individual was obliged somehow toresolve. He now had to create what society could no longer offer him because he was no longer a mere member of society, but an independent entity, or microcosm, who opposed society and the world. Before we pursue the interesting expression of spiritual individualism in scientific psychology as a doctrine of the soul, let us epitomize this entire development in another literary symbol. Just as we found sexual individualism in Don Juan, and psychological neurotic individualism in Shakespeare's Hamlet, we may now discover spiritual individualism in Goethe's Faust. Faust initially tried to win immortality with the help of alchemy and astrology, the secret "black art" sciences of his era, and with the legitimate sciences of Goethe's era; but he became a captive of the Devil, to whom he had already paid his own life. This pact with the Devil symbolized the individual's attempt to insure the mastery of his own soul by renouncing collective, spiritual community for the sake of his immediate pleasure. Here are the "two souls in the human breast," the mortal and the immortal, the individual and the collective, the one exemplified in the totemistic North American Indians' physical vitality for earthly living (mana), and the other by the immortal guardian spirit incarnate or the noble soul. 1a
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1a Just as Plato dealt with two conflicting halves of the soul, the doctrine of Mani (300 A.D. ) was concerned with two perpetually conflicting souls which poets had mentioned prior to Goethe's time (Racine, Wieland).
The Devil was the guardian spirit, or collective, immortal soul, transformed into an incarnation of the individual, temporal, or mortal soul, so that it was only logical for him to have promised long life in return for the immortal soul, and sensual satisfaction for sexual immortality. The idealized image of Helen represented the immortal soul of the sexual era personified in woman whom Faust pursued like a will-o'-the-wisp. In the end, and in a way typical of the era of the son, Faust achieved immortality in his own acts and works, and so rededicated himself to humanity.
We can now begin to understand man's role as an individual creator of culture, in which he was obliged both to overcome spiritual collective immortality and sexual procreative immortality, and to discover new symbols, forms, and means of expression for the many different manifestations of his own individuality and of individualism in general. True to her original role of bearer of the collective soul, woman remained a symbol of the principle of conservation, while man assumed the role of the transitory, mortal soul which could survive only in ever-changing symbols. This spiritual inferiority of man relative to woman might appear to be a product of the sexual era whose spiritual and social groundwork had been prepared by matriarchy, but it was essentially a biological and social inferiority in the sense of procreative immortality. To console his ego, man looked upon this inferiority as though it were only psychological, and tried to dissociate himself from it as much as he could. While such dissociation was to his advantage under an animistic belief in individual immortality, it was a liability under collectivistic spiritual belief, so that he suffered inferiority again under the sexual ideology of procreative immortality. In contrast, woman rose from a mere agent of spiritual fructification and rebirth to become the creative bearer of the soul and the agent of mortality and immortality. And although man's original ideology of immortality rested on a complete denial of woman, he became completely bound to her in order to proclaim his individual independence through the self-immortalization inherent in his works. All these tendencies culminate in Romanticism, which concerns a unique attitude toward the soul and its individualized forms. Two aspects of Romanticism significant for the development of psychology are romantic love which reevaluated woman spiritually in relation to individualism, and romantic science which did homage to such collectivistic productions as ballads, epics, myths, and fairy tales, and revived the concept of the cosmic nature-soul. Romantic love led to sexual psychology, 2 while romantic science led to natural philosophy and anthropological psychology. In combination with poetic 3 characterology, sense physiology, and experimental psychology, both of these developments led to our present psychological era; but they are understandable only in relation to the spiritual significance of Romanticism, which brought the ancient concept of the soul to the fore under the ideology of the individualistic era of the son. This was the concept embodied in the collective soul of the animistic era, and in the mother-soul of the sexual era. In Romanticism, woman as an individual represented the immortal soul principle in man, which she had represented collectively under the matriarchy of the spiritual era, and imaginatively in the mythical traditions of the sexual era (Helen, Psyche, and fairy tales).
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2Sec especially Wilhelm von Huniboldt: Sexual Differences (Ueber den Geschlechtsunterschied ) , 1795, new edition by Giese, Langensalza, 1917. More recent studies: F. Giese: The Romantic Character. I. The Evolution of the Problem of Androgyny in Early Romanticism.( Der Roinantische Charakter. I. Die Entwicklung der Androgynenproblems in der Fnihromantik ) , Langensalza, 1919. Also Klucksohn: The Romantic Concept of Love (Die Auffassung der Liebe in der Romantik), Halle, 1922.
3 See Karl Joel: Origin of Natural Philosophy in the Spirit of Mysticism (Der Ursprung der Naturphilosophie aus dem Geiste der Mystik), Jena, 1906.
4 Plato mentions the "beautiful soul" in his Symposium, whose romantic conception by Wieland had its precursors in Shaftesbury, the English moralphilosopher, and in the poet Richardson, who gave the concept a moral coloring. Compare also Schiller's definition, which involves a complete agreement between moral sense and sensory affect: Grace and Virtue (Anmut und Wiirde), 1793.
In romantic love, she was man's better, eternal, and "beautiful soul"1 to which his transitory and creative individual5 ego was opposed. Woman's idealization was a reaction against her moralization by Christian ideology, which had identified her with sexuality and damned her as a witch, and against the resultant psychologizing (Shakespeare) which characterized her as "evil." Romanticism lifted these moral and psychological evaluations into a sphere of feeling in which the individual ego lost its identity, just as the individual had once been part of a generic world-soul which romantic science now transformed into a "Nature soul." In this partly poetic, partly philosophical tendency of the romantic ego to immortalize itself, feelings became objects of psychology. As such they were not mere ego expressions, but still bore that pervasive meaning given them by Goethe, who asserted that "Feeling is everything." This development engendered the romantic interest in folk psychology and in the creations of entire peoples which the collective soul used to counteract romantic individualism. The romantic problem of the true origins of such collective and anonymous works as myths, fables, epics, and ballads seems to me to be just a psychologizing attitude in the face of the fact that such works treated of peoples and of their destinies.
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5 See Hugo Horwitz: The Ego Problem of Romanticism. The Position of Friedrich von Schlegel in Modern Cultural History (Das Ich-Problem der Romantik. Die hist. Stcllung Fr. Schlegels innerhalb der modernen Geistesgeschichte), Mimchen, 1916.
This last fact is important, whether the treatment was direct, as in the historical epic which depicted a people's ephemerality and immortalized its accomplishments in man's memory; or whether it was indirect, as in the spiritual myth of a hero who symbolized the people, or of gods who were immortalizations ofthe hero. In the psychological question whether these spiritual creations about heroes, peoples, and gods were the work of individuals or peoples, we encounter the old problem of the relation of the individual to the group, as it is expressed in the related problems of Christ's historical authenticity and the soul's existence. Thus folk psychology again tried to involve the concept of the collective soul,6 while the characterological psychology of the poets who followed Shakespeare individualized spiritual symbols which portrayed the good immortal soul and bad mortal soul (angel and devil) as good and bad characters instead of as gods and heroes. Thus, up to the nineteenth century when it emerged as a natural science, psychology really represented the soul and belief. Knowledge of the soul, various aspects of spiritual which religious dogma had regarded as unattainable by man, was definitely not of psychological concern. The existence of the soul, which involves the question of belief in immortality, was either assumed or denied, the one or the other alternative being as undemonstrable as the existence or nonexistence of God. The real threat to the soul lay not with the atheistic natural scientists, but with the individualistic soulseekers who felt that they had to win their immortality independently of collectivistic spiritual ideology and beyond procreative sexual ideology, and whose need for personal immortality could be satisfied neither by the family or religion, nor by the state or people, which stood for both. The real danger lay in the psychology of the individual, which had grown out of an increasing knowledge of conscious processes and the self, and had first appeared in Greece in opposition to Plato, the soul's great advocate. Because ofhis natural science orientation, Plato's pupil and successor, Aristotle, was the first to reclaim the soul as an object of research by methods outlined in his Organon. 7 Aristotle's psychology, or soul doctrine, belonged methodologically to physics. He subsumed spiritual materials under an ethics based on free will and under a metaphysics concerned with the concept of an impalpable God. Therefore, in preserving the soul ethically in terms of freedom of will and metaphysically in terms of God, he achieved the first natural scientific psychology. After a pervasive Christian theology had disclosed this first scientific attempt to concretize the soul, philosophers of the Middle Ages and of more recent times were lured into the same detour. In the first chapter of the present volume we have already outlined the history of psychology, which became a science only by the nineteenth century.7a We should like then to consider the role which individual self-awareness played in the evolution of psychology from the spiritual era to the professedly exact science of psychoanalysis.
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6 See Friedrich Schlegel: The Soul (Von der Seele), 1823 (with an introduction by Giinthcr Miiller), Augsburg, 1927.
7 See Aristotle's Minor Natural Science Writings ( Parva Naturalia ) ( Kleine naturwissensch. Schriften), edited by von Rolfes, Leipzig, 1924 (Philos. Bibl., vol. 6). Also: Werner Jiiger's Aristotle. Introduction to a History of his Development (Aristoteles. Grundlegung einer Geschichte seiner Entwicklung), Berlin, 1923.
7a See Friedrich Seifert's excellent presentation in his Handbuch der Philosophie: "Psychology, metaphysics of the soul" (Psychologic, Metaphysik der Seele), Miinchen, 1928.
In this connection it must be said that Christianity, which had survived all inner doubts and had triumphed over all attempts to alienate it from ancient spiritual belief, finally found an externalized opponent in science. But knowledge of philosophy and natural science could find as little with which to incriminate spiritual belief in immortality as knowledge of natural life processes had found to oppose man's naive beliefin immortality. As is well known, science owed its greatest advances to the thinkers and investigators who were believers in a deep, spiritual sense of the word. Belief and knowledge are interdependent, and not mutually exclusive; it is rather self-awareness that inevitably leads to doubt. Knowledge of death had been unable to shake belief in individual immortality. Yet the intellectual curiosity to understand and to conceptualize, to see a thing as completely as possible, to explain, to comprehend, and to demonstrate, all produced the greatest doubt in the individual, particularly regarding the existence of his soul.
Just as the conflict between temporal and external beliefs and values ruled the Middle Ages, that between religion and science characterizes modern times. Until now the Church has been the victor in all these struggles because it offered the individual something which science both denied and lacked. All these bitter conflicts are really centered on one question: Is the individual immortal, and, therefore, is there a soul?
Fleeting, worldly existence was less at stake than was the eternal bliss that religion promised, science denied, and psychological knowledge doubted. It is from this doubt that we suffer, and not from knowledge against which one can set belief, for belief cannot prevail against doubt. So man has tried to set up a new God to combat the Devil, a deity born of ancient spiritual belief but fathered by scientific intellectualism. This new god was Truth. Since progressive self-awareness had undermined belief in the soul, self-knowledge, which was the unwonted by-product of the growth of individualism, became all important, so that the necessity of tormenting self-awareness became the virtue of therapeutic self-knowledge, whose results were esteemedas "truth." However, since our intellectual processes are tied in with our wishes and passions and are determined by them, truth became a subjective or intellectualized individual religion which could be used to sustain man's ancient spiritual beliefs. And, in place of knowledge under collective belief (what everyone believes constitutes truth), individualism says, "What / believe is true." Religion's "I believe, therefore I am" (immortal) developed from philosophy's "I doubt, therefore I am" (aware of myself and therefore mortal) into Cartesian psychology's "I think, therefore I am." With the help of psychology the ego tried thereafter to define its own truth. This was a final intellectual attempt to rescue the soul, but one which actually concealed the soul so cleverly behind an abstract concept of truth that it took all the forces of symbolism to incorporate the old spiritual belief into a cult of truth. Truth, which one cannot gaze upon and live, is the soul. Oddly enough, both entities are often symbolized by a naked woman. Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old struggle over the existence and immortality of the soul. The spiritual belief that was almost annihilated by psychological self-knowledge was reborn as truth, the supreme idol of psychology. In fact, spiritual belief became a kind of criterion of truth, because only general and therefore everlasting truth could be used to prove belief in immortality.
We encounter this phenomenon even in the case of psychoanalysis, whose effect upon man stems from the animistic attitude shown in its respect for dreams, the unconscious, and the mystery of sex, and not from the individualistic aspects of its knowledge of the self and the soul. Psychoanalysis is psychological knowledge only to a minor degree; it is principally an interpretation of old animistic spiritualvalues into the scientific language of the sexual era. Even under this sexuo-psychological interpretation, spiritual values are just as comforting or "therapeutic" for us as a naive belief in immortality was for primitive man. However, Freud consistently8 renounced this deeper, esoteric content of psychoanalysis in favor of a natural science ideology that regarded the individual statically, and not as an entity which continuously develops through self-creation. Yet these spiritual values which psychoanalysis renounced in the interest of an ideology of truth are effective in their own right, for they have not only advanced man's knowledge of the soul, but have strengthened his belief in it. One can understand why psychoanalysis is praised by poets as antimaterialistic, condemned by philosophers as hyperrationalistic, and damned by religious authorities as materialistic. Psychoanalysis offers no new world view. It is only an attempt to reinterpret an old one, and a confused system which needs psychological analysis in order to make it meaningful. I believe that, in the sense of my explanation, psychoanalysis accounts for the tendency to interpret spiritual phenomena psychologically under a sexual ideology.
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8 See: Human Problems in Freudian Psychoanalysis. Original and Mask. A Study of Modern Mental Science. (Die Menschheitsproblematik der Freudschen Psychoanalyse. Urbild und Maske. Eine grundsatzliche Untersuchung zur neueren Seelenforschung ) by E. Michaelis, Leipzig, 1925.
The character of psychoanalysis as a psychological savior of the soul is best depicted by its two quite different offshoots: Jung's collective psychology and Adler's individual psychology. Each of these theories develops unilaterally only one of the otherwise integrated aspects of psychoanalytic doctrine, and neglects Freud's characteristic natural science ideology of sex. For Adler, with whom the rational methodsof psychoanalytic interpretation became hypertrophied, there remains absolutely no unconscious or soul. Jung's collective unconscious stands much closer to the soul than did Freud's individualistically conceived unconscious, which remained individualistic even when formulated as the "Id." If Adler's individual psychology was too rational in the sense of conscious interpretation of the ego, Jung's collective psychology was too irrational. The former was too psychological; the latter, too religious, as Freud's doctrine was too biological. Freud made collectivity rational because he sexualized it by interpreting it in terms of procreative sexual ideology. Jung, again, explained individual psychological matters collectively by using the ancient concept of the soul as a basis for psychological explanation, but he merely portrayed a spiritual phenomenon. Adler, who rationalized everything spiritual according to individual psychology, found collectivity in society, just as Jung found it in religion, and Freud, in biology. While Freud treated sexual facts ideologically, Jung made a psychological fact out of collective spiritual ideology, and Adler derived an individualistic ideology from social fact.
One cannot deny that each of these authors covers all sides of the total problem to a certain extent, but, in his ambition to find the psychological explanation of phenomena, each fails to study the varying and peculiar values involved, including that of explanation itself, which is only an interpretation of phenomena. Facts are no more explained by reevaluating them ideologically than ideologies are explained by labeling them as psychological facts. The materials of psychology are not facts, but ideologies, such as spiritual beliefs, which again are not simply facts related to a definite reality, but ideologies related to a definite mentality. Such concrete manifestations of these ideologies as society or the family must be understood for what they are and not as mere psychological facts. The soul, which is itself an ideology derived from belief in immortality, continually creates new ideologies which belief. However, in making serve only to sustain spiritual these ideologies the object of introspective awareness, psychology destroys them, because it replaces them with others which lose their value as individualistic self-awareness expands. Yet, as is evidenced by the increasing socialization of phenomena that were once spiritual in the collective sense, these ideologies tend toward greater concreteness in an effort to protect themselves from the impact of introspective consciousness. And, on the other hand, we witness the emotionalization of such collectively spiritual phenomena as morality, which becomes expressed not only as a social fear of punishment but as a subjective feeling of guilt. Just as society first symbolized the salvation and the guarantee of an individual's spiritual immortality, the moral feelings of all of us echo this spiritual communality which inwardly resists our individual struggle for immortality, be such immortality a primitive perpetuation of our personal selves in works, or a sensual sexuality wholly devoid of procreative character. The conflict between morality and sexuality, which is not something imposed on the individual from without but arises from within to protect his integrity, corresponds again to the conflict between individualism and collectivism. For the individual wish for immortality is basically egoistic and antisexual; and, as an expression of collective belief in immortality, the sexual morality in which this wish is inwardly manifested is just as strong as, if not stronger than, the procreative immortality which the sexdrive makes possible. In his moral reactions of fear and guilt, man preserves the individuality inherent in his spiras society had helped him keep itual self-survival, just his individuality and his soul by granting him collective immortality. This conception of morality as a social salvation of the individual and as a representative of the collective soul explains the punishing role which society must assume against the criminal. Murder is a crime against society, which it robs of a soul by destroying an individual who contributes a soul to it. The original jus talionis, or "soul for a soul," was transmitted from generation to generation even before society charged the next male descendant with the responsibility for blood vengeance. Society opposed murder as the theft of a soul because it regarded the killing of any soulbearer as a crime against itself. This created the strictly legal paradox that society punishes a murderer by committing his own crime against him, and actually expiates the theft of a soul by blood vengeance upon the substitute soul (talion). Thus group psychology actually concerns only the soul which is composed of the separate souls of individuals, while individual psychology now tries again both to demonstrate the reality of man's individual soul scientifically and to rescue it from collective ideology with the help of an individual mortality.
A concretion and emotionalization, such as the collective soul experienced in social and moral settings, finally brought the individual soul of the sexual era to the experience of love, in which the immortal spiritual part of the individual became personified in another person, the beloved. Late Christian Romanticism only actualized this ideology, since the pre-Christian, sexual era had already introduced thespiritualization of sexuality which the Church tabued. Romantic love was a significant compromise between individual and collective spiritual demands, because it represented a "collectivity of two." But after a time even this attempted solution proved untenable, and it collapsed before the resurgence of individualism which resisted such an extreme absorption of one individual by another. A person no longer wanted to be used as another's soul even with its attendant compensations. The trouble was that it also menaced one's individuality and restricted one's personal development and desires. The reaction to this conflict inherent in romantic love is expressed by the modern overemphasis on the bodily self and purely sensual matters, and by the current despiritualization of love.
We have now surveyed the stages of spiritual development, from physical individualism of the shadow-soul, through spiritual collectivism of the divine soul and the physical collectivism of sexual procreation, to the spiritual individualism of love which strives for the harmonious unification of all factors. The neurotic is an individual incapable of love because he has lost spiritual ( religious ) and physical (sexual) collectivity in his attempt to regress from an individual spiritual belief provided by love to a primitive belief in himself, without the help of the naivete necessary to such self-acceptance. The neurotic loses every kind of collective spirituality, and makes a heroic gesture of placing himself entirely within the immortality of his own ego, as the observations and cosmic fantasies of psychotics so clearly show.
The content of such fantasies is mythical and religious because it represents essentially an attempt to salvage belief in the soul with the help of religious and sexual ideologies. As such, it is just like the individual's attempt to transcendthese ideologies. Neuroses not only portray this conflict between individual and collective immortality, but depict the ego's attempt to resolve both of these counterparts of the mortal and immortal aspects of spirituality in animistic, social, or sexual terms. One final characteristic of neurotics is of paramount importance. They not only strive for an individual religion (immortality), but they also represent par excellence that type of individual whose agonizing selfawareness destroys his own apotheosis, and who gains for his efforts toward creative, spiritual self-realization only a destructive interpretation of his soul.
