متن انگلیسی کتاب روانشناسی و روح بخش دوم
RELIGION AND BELIEF IN THE SOUL
God has made the soul so like himself that there is in heaven and on earth nothing quite so like God as the human soul.
MEISTER ECKEHART
In 1914 I made a study of the psychoanalytic attempt to understand primitive spiritual belief in relation to the psychoanalytic view of primitive peoples. Starting from literary examples of the Double 1 motif, I conceived of primitive belief in a body-soul as an expression of man's deeply rooted belief in immortality. The body-soul was originally thought of as a second, purely material self like the physical self which it survived, and the fact that primitive man first localized it in his shadow or mirror-image suggests that the loss of his own individuality seemed to him almost more inconceivable than unbearable. At the earliest stage of his so-called spiritual belief in the soul, man seemed to deny rather than fear his own death, for his idea of an immortal body-soul comprised a denial of death which canceled all possible threats to his perpetuity.
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1 "The Double" (Der Doppelganger ) , Imago, Vol. Ill, 1914. Published separately in the Internationaler Psychoanalytischen Verlag, 1925.
Thus the facts of death and of the individual's denial of death brought the idea of the soul into being; and, at a time when life was beginning to acquire a spiritual character, the problems of death and of its denial through belief were imbedded in an immortal body-soul which simulated and survived the ego as its Double. The problem of death seemed to face primitive man less in the form of anxiety, which he could deny, than in the death of others, which at first he did not have to ascribe to himself. When he finally did refer this experience of others to himself he took his first step toward an intuitive psychology of understanding others. Such a psychology is obviously contrary to its logical and scientific counterpart, which invites one to use one's own experience to understand others.
Perhaps it is the application of our subjective psychology of dreams to the spiritual life of primitive man which has led so many ethnologists of our time to assume that the dream roles of the dead induced primitive man to believe in a soul independent of his body. But dreams were real to primitive man, and they presented him with the souls of other persons both living and dead rather than with his own. Dreams even "delude"2 us in the same way since they exhibit dead or absent persons far more often than our own selves. I regard primitive man's reference of such dreams to himself as a second, conflictive stage in the evolution of spiritual belief which followed an initial "narcissistic" stage; so that just as his shadow or mirror-image allowed him to believe in his own body-soul, his realistic dreams induced him to accept the survival of the souls of others.
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2 As is well known, the German word "Traum" ( dream ) has the same stem, "dreug," as "triigen" or "tauschen" (to delude). In other languages the word for "dream" is related etymologically to that for "sleep."
Thus histormenting dreams of a "spirit" of the dead compelled him to concede immortality to others, to his enemies, and particularly to victims of murder. The idea of his own soul, which materialized as a snake, a bird, or as his breath, which left the body to lead an independent and often creative life, seems more like a secondary referral of his dream of another person's soul to himself. For the dream presents itself to one's ego in an objective and not a subjective form, and it is more a spiritual phenomenon than a psychological problem. I cannot even begin to suggest what superstitions, religious ideas, and psychological views sprang from the original2 * acceptance of others' immortality and from the consequences of such acceptance. This concession more than anything else produced the psychological problem of anxiety which man's belief in his own immortality had so far masked. This anxiety appeared first as a fear not of living persons but of the spirits of dead or slain persons, and of demons whose reappearance was ascribed to a thirst for revenge rather than to a love of life. Yet because the spirit of the murder victim could torment the murderer in his dream, his immortality was really more certain than that of persons who had died natural deaths. In a certain sense, then, violent death became a source of immortality, as later superstitions and the figures of Christ and Joan of Arc illustrate. Perhaps this idea also explains why primitive and ancient cults conferred the "saccrifice" as an honor only upon certain individuals, and also why a murderer always took the trouble to destroy his victim by devouring, dismembering, or burning him, with the obvious intent of robbing him of his greater chance for immortality which his role as victim had given him.
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2a Concerning the whole theme of the dream, see the chapter "Dream and Reality" below.
In any event, the whole complex of ideas of a final and an immortalizing death led to the primal tabu against murder. The source of this prohibition was not external but lay within the individual himself, for tabu did not emerge from a growing consciousness of law, but from an inner threat to the self and its immortality. A dead person found no release until he had come after his murderer, killed him, and robbed him of his collective immortality, It is obvious, then, that our current legal consciousness, which is maintained by legalized prohibitions and regulations, sprang originally from an inner spiritual threat rather than from an external psychological one. This is indicated by the primitive belief which "causally" explained a murderer's natural death as the vengeance of a demon. Yet, like most causal explanations, this psychological one was based on spiritual belief. The jus talionis, or "eye for an eye," from which our criminal law has grown, probably rested on the animistic premise that the murderer had to die anyway since his act had invited a demon's vengeance. In killing the other person the murderer always killed his immortal soul, which even a belief in a Double had fully protected. Thus all tabus, persisting as custom, morals, or law, came to preserve man's immortality rather than his life, so that primitive man attempted to reconcile evil spirits in order to preserve this immortality. The first "legal" or mutual pact not to kill is found in totemism which, in contrast to criminal law, guaranteed immortality and not life alone. Totemism also offered the first compromise between an enhanced awareness of the real meaning of death and a tenacious belief in immortality. In order to prove this latter point we must consider the other, creative side of immortality belief, which made up the real content of totemistic systems.
At its inception, totemism was a primitive belief in the soul. 3
The spirits of one's ancestors were then sacred and tabu not only because they were to be feared, but because immortality belief gave them the power to perpetuate mankind, and hence the individual. According to primitive Australian belief, the animal, plant, or stone totem entered and impregnated woman, and underwent rebirth in the process of animating the embryo. The physical father had nothing 4 to do with this process, for only the spirit of the dead could give the child a soul, and the living person needed his soul for himself. This principle, rather than any realistic motive, accounts for the totemistic marital restrictions which are found both in the strict exogamous regulations of primitive man and in surviving marital customs which leave the impregnation of a bride to the functioning deity. The basic idea that the father can beget but not animate also appeared in defloration ceremonies practiced by priests of ancient cults and in the attendant jus primae noctis, or "right of the first night." In the sexual abstinence practiced during the so5 called "Tobias night" a husband wanted to insure his soul and his immortality, because such abstinence made it possible for the dead to give up their homeless, unused souls, and it enabled the living husband ultimately to obtain sexual gratification without being responsible for conception. Animation of the unborn child by the dead or their spirits was an esoteric attempt to reconcile these spirits because the husband imposed sexual abstinence on himself not only to let them animate the child but also to convert the menace of their inevitable return into a guarantee of his own existence and perpetuation. Instead of letting them return with evil purpose, he made their return a benevolent one and kept his own soul from entering the new human being.
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3 J. Winthuis stresses this point, particularly in llermaphroditiam among Central Australian and Other Peoples. An Attempt to Solve the Central Problem of Ethnology on the Basis of Primitive Thought. (Das Zweigeschlechterwesen bei den Zentralaustralicrn und andern Volker. Losungsversuch der ethnologischen Hauptprobleme auf Grund primitiven Denkens), Leipzig, 1918.
4 See my Socio-psychological Parallels to Children's Theories of Sexuality. (Volkerpsychologische Parallelen zur den infantilen Sexualtheorien.) The incompleteness of these parallels, as far as the difference between child and primitive is concerned, is considered elsewhere.
5 According to the Book of Tobit, the husband normally dies during the bridal night because, instead of abstaining so as to save his soul, he loses it in the act of reproduction. This is also the esoteric meaning of the virginity tabu.
Hence the first sexual restrictions encountered in primitive exogamy and in all subsequent marital restraints of civilized peoples were not the results of external authority and regulation, but as shown earlier in relation to law, they were voluntary, spontaneous, and individual acts of self-protection. In animating the embryo, the dead person proved as serviceable as the living one, who was then left free to preserve his own soul. With the exception of psychoanalysts, who regard aversion to incest as a defense against an unconscious incest-wish, those authorities who explain exogamy in terms of such an aversion fail to account for incest itself.
Psychoanalysis only raises the new problem of the incestwish which seems to be less pronounced in primitive man than psychoanalysis finds in modern children, 6who often enough view their whole world through the eyes of their elders. The primitive idea of incest was different from, and broader than, that implicit in our current legal and social family structure. The tribe or clan was divided into two or more groups whose male and female constituents were completely related by blood because they belonged to the same totem or spiritual reservoir. Although Winthuis ingeniously envisioned the totem as bisexual, it seems rather to have been asexual or non-sexual in character, because it was not responsible for procreation or birth, but only for spiritual animation. Prohibition of marriage within such a group appears to have had the esoteric significance both of guaranteeing fecundation of the wife by the spirits of the dead, which gradually became united into a single generic totem, and of excluding or exempting males from the process of fecundation. The man who was obliged to take a wife from a clan of a different totem received some guarantee that she would not be endangered or impregnated by intercourse with her "foreign" husband, and that he could experience sexual relations with her without running the risk of losing his own soul during the animation of the embryo. In effect, he was saved from the threat of having to assume the animating role of the totem, which would rob him of his soul and his immortality. The related concepts of incest and exogamy show again how external prohibitions which end in custom and law originated as purely inner, spontaneous, voluntary actions which were related not to real facts but to spiritual relationships. Moreover, our view would explain another, yet unsolved puzzle of group psychology. Even today one frequently refers to the ignorance of certain primitive groups regarding the relationship between sexual intercourse and conception 7without being able to explain correctly how such realistically oriented primitives could have gone so long without having observed such a fundamental fact.
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6 See my book: The Incest Motif in Poetry and Saga (Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage). Second, enlarged edition, 1926, especially with reference to group marriage, 408 ff
7 Fr. Reitzenstein: "The Causal Connection between Sexual Intercourse and Conception, in the Beliefs and Customs of Primitives and Civilized Peoples/' (Der Kausalzusammenhang zwischen Geschlechtsverkehr und Empfangnis in Glaube und Brauch der Natur und Kulturvolker) Zcitschr. f. Ethnologie, 1909, vol. 41, pp. 644-83. See also Malinowski's recent observations on the Trobriand Islanders, among whom so-called matriarchy exists (see below).
Although it may seem plausible that the long interval between intercourse and conception, and primitive man's inadequate powers of observation could have delayed recognition of this fact, we still have a problem which is soluble in relation to its esoteric foundations alone and not to.reality. There was a motive.for denying the existence of this relation even after it was noticed. Tf the foregoing explanation of totemistic systems is correct, it becomes no great task to explain primitive man's unusual attitude toward this relationship, for by denying the implications of his increasing knowledge and insight into the relation between intercourse and conception, primitive man could preserve his original spiritual belief which totemism manifested as a closed system. If it were primitive man himself who gave life to the child, the whole structure of his spiritual belief and of his religious and social systems which rested on it would go to pieces, and this would be particularly true of spiritual belief whose perpetuation primitive man had insured in totemism, in which he allowed the dead to animate the child in order to preserve his own soul. Hence denial and not ignorance of the relationship between intercourse and conception was the basic premise of totemistic spiritual belief, just as denial and not ignorance supported belief in a primitive body-soul. The preservation of spiritual belief in totemism, which was to decline with increasing recognition of the nature of reproduction, was of vital importance to primitive man, and, as we shall see, not to him alone, for we shall encounter such things time and again in the unbelievably persistent attempts which man has madeover the course of his development both to defend his belief in the immortality of his soul against the combined testimony of his senses, his reason, and his knowledge, and to preserve this belief in religious, social, and scientific institutions. As suggested before, the last of these possible attempts is psychology itself.
We should like to determine how far back in the history of man's spiritual life this point of view may be applied. It seems to me that matriarchy, which was totemism's immediate successor, was a further attempt on man's part to harmonize his progressively more meaningful sexual relationships with his belief in totemistic metempsychosis. The appearance of animals as agents of spiritual fecundation in totemism seems to indicate that primitive man was aware of natural sexual processes, or that, like our children, he at least believed they applied to animals. 8 Spirits used animals to exercise their impregnating function even under Christianity. Years ago I was able to use the materials of ancient myth to show that legends about heroic births9 generally depicted animals as the protecting and nurturing mother, and rarely as the begetting father. It was actually not a simple matter of the totem animal reducing spiritual fecundation to completely realistic and naturalistic terms, for the totem animal did not provide a rational explanation of fertilization.
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8 Malinowski's contradictory report on the Trobriand Islanders (The Father in Primitive Psychology, 1927) evidences a somewhat too realistic attitude on the part of the observer. There is no reason to doubt that this is the belief of primitives, or that it precludes their having knowledge different from their belief. Even our own mental life juxtaposes unrelated and irreconcilable knowledge and beliefs.
9 The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden), Vienna and Leipzig, F. Deuticke, 1908. Second, enlarged edition, 1922.
In many instances, of which the Heavenly Serpent is one example, it was rather a matter of a primal spirit animal, which was originally symbolized esoterically as bisexual, now appearing exoterically as a realistic representative of monosexuality. There now seem to be a number of indications that at a certain stage this primal, spiritual connotation of animals was a purely maternal one like that evidenced later at a social level in matriarchy. The basic proof of this point, which I have already drawn from primitive thought, lies in the fact that animals which embodied the soul in totemistic systems appeared later on in a maternal role more appropriate to a mammal. To be sure, this was scarcely the first incarnation of the soul which employed small animals such as snakes, toads, mice, or even birds as overt symbols. The pre-totemtstic belief of the Semang tribe (Malay Peninsula interior ) and other groups used birds as primal spirit animals. At this stage the animal was killed in order that the spirit dwelling within it could be freed to fertilize the embryo (Winthuis, p. 175), while at a later stage the animal was not killed, because it was basically identified with man himself and represented his immortal part. At the sexual stage of man's development the esoteric meaning of birds as spirit animals was carried by an exoteric, phallic symbol, while more recent totem animals such as the Australian kangaroo were more maternal in form. In contrast with the maternal significance of mammals, small animals symbolic of that which "creeps and flies" seem to have first symbolized the animating principle of spiritual (not paternal) reproduction which entered the mother so readily. In later superstitions these small animals represented the soul which escaped from the dreamer's mouth as he slept,and returned by the same path before he awakened. At first they were incarnations of the soul itself, then of the child as bearer of the soul,10 and then of the phallus only after the father was recognized as the fertilizing agent. This development apparently followed a course typical for all such symbols, from an originally spiritual connotation of the soul, through a "bisexually" symbolic one, to one that was finally monosexual and realistic. In order to understand the full meaning of these spirit and totem animals, we must consider woman's role in this animistic but scarcely primitive age. Up to this point we have said nothing of woman who stood apart from the wholly masculine evolution of primitive spiritual belief, just as though she had no soul. The fact that the child grows in the uterus and emerges from it did not disturb primitive irrealism. Even had primitive man been concerned only with observing and not with drawing conclusions from what he observed, it would scarcely have occurred to him to wonder how the embryo might have entered the mother in the first place, since, assuming his ignorance of natural processes of conception, there was no fact to imply that something had to enter a woman in order to explain the child's ultimate appearance. Indeed, the child could grow inside the mother just as a fruit or blossom grows on a tree.
We find such an idea in every myth and legend, from the Garden of Eden to contemporary German superstitution; Homer used it in his penetrating human simile; and it declined only in our allegory of the "family tree." 11
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10 See my opinion regarding "small animals" in The Trauma of Birth (Das Trauma der Geburt), 1924, in which even the toad is dignified as uterine symbol.
11 See the section on the family tree (Stammbaum), in Part I of my Technique of Psychoanalysis (Technik der Psychoanalyse), 1926.
Is it the logical conclusionfrom the child back to his invading precursor, or is it the dull memory of our own prenatal period, which we might still prove psychologically to be an instinctive longing to return to the womb?12 Perhaps there is no need for such an assumption if we suppose instead that animistic man knew about reproductive processes but had to deny them in order to sustain his belief in immortality. In any event, the whole totemistic spiritual belief, which was created to preserve a purely narcissistic spiritual belief based on the Double, was now impossible unless man assumed that something entered the uterus in order to effect fertilization.
We know from later myths and folklore that souls of the dead were thought to "dwell on" in certain places which we may certainly regard as uterine symbols. Still other legends show unequivocally that man returned to the place whence he came, which was obviously the womb. According to later belief, spirit-souls actually came from the place to which the souls of the dead had returned. 13 Even in totemistic spiritual doctrine we find the dead and their yet unborn souls associated with definite places which later superstition made so numerous that spirits could be found in every animal, spring, and tree. The esoteric meaning of matriarchal institutions seems to me to lie in the fact that woman first appeared there as bearer of the soul, or as a noble vessel which sheltered the soul and passed it on to the child. Woman then represented the first human concretion of the soul or generic totem, who received the dead and animated her children with their spirit. An explanation for the importance of this humanized,totemistic role of woman seems to lie in matriarchal social structure and in its derived religious cults of the mother-god. For in the totemistic sense of identification of each individual with the totem, woman underwent gradual promotion from her role of soul-bearer to one of such identification. Thus, man's prohibition against killing the totem animal was his protection against the loss of his soul and his guarantee of immortality. For originally the totem animal was killed to obtain its soul for the new organism, as the pre-totemistic spirit-bird of the Semang people exemplified, so that the spirit bird became a bird of death which carried the soul to heaven. This role also appeared in the fable of the stork, whose nursery vulgarization apparently seeks to give a child this deeply rooted belief that souls come from the land of the dead.14
In matriarchal ideology woman herself became this spirit animal in whom the souls of the dead lay dormant until she gave them life again. By this time woman as wife and mother became as sacred as the totem or the soul had been, and immortal by virtue of her immunity to injury and death. While she had once been only its medium, she now came to represent the soul itself and to be identified with it. This is the meaning of the myth of Psyche, who was an overt representation of the soul from a feminine point of view. The idea of woman as representative of the soul not only affected subsequent folk tales about fairies, which women supposedly created, but also perhaps explains the ecclesiastical sacrament of the indissolubility of marriage, according to which husband and wife become one in spirit as well as flesh.
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12 See The Trauma of Birth (Das Trauma der Geburt), 1924.
13 I have assembled the corresponding material in The Myth of the Birth of the Hero (Mythus von der Geburt des Helden), 1908, and in The Lohengrin Saga (Lohengrinsage), 1911.
14 See my volume The Lohengrin Saga (Lohengrinsage, 1911), and its underlying spiritual myth of the Knight and the Swan (Ritter mit dem Schwan), who came from the land of the spirits and returned to the land of the dead.
This new spiritual doctrine of the mother, who not only brings a child into the world but gives it its soul without losing her own, was expressed in the social divisions characteristic of matrilineal family law, under which the mother's brother supplanted the father, whose children then belonged to their mother. It seems to me that our narrow concept of incest, which implies only a prohibition of sexual relations with one's mother, first appeared in such a matrilineal system. This prohibition had an animistic basis which allowed the mother to become an invulnerable bearer of the soul, and a bulwark of the father's immortality rather than his chattel. Group marriage coeval with matriarchy held no offense against more than one brother marrying one and the same woman even though she were their blood sister, because as in totemism it was a matter of spiritual heritage rather than blood relationship. 15 Thus matriarchy, which was to be supplanted later by a family structure oriented around the father, was the third, humanized stage in the development of spiritual belief, which was precipitated by an expanding knowledge and recognition of natural life processes. Yet the basic problem of primitive man was not the future but the present, and not the riddle of birth but that of death. The naive, narcissistic belief in a body-soul which perpetuated man's own bodily self beyond sleep and death, is obviously related to this latter problem. The second, totemistic stage could only support a belief in an immortal soul because it had to give up this naive narcissism in order to assure man a form of soul transmigration like that of natural reproduction. The third, or matriarchal, stage finally accepted humansexual processes for what they were, because current spiritual belief was concretized in the wife or mother. Woman owed her original social esteem to her totemistic role of soulbearer. But since primitive man allowed the spirit of his ancestor to enter the embryo in order to save his own soul, he traded a part of his belief in individual immortality for one in collective immortality. Just as death had created belief in an immortal soul, sexuality was used to preserve this spiritual belief from knowledge of natural life processes, because with its help one could achieve a realistic if not an individual immortality in one's descendants. In this fashion the original ego-psychology, or doctrine of the soul, became a collective sexual psychology which was only a renewed attempt to negate death with the help of the same biological reality that spiritual belief had previously denied.
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15 As pacts with the Devil betray, blood was regarded as the seat of the soul only at a later stage. Apparently all these ideas, which later custom and law established so firmly, originated not from realistic demands but from spiritual motives which in many instances were opposed to reality.
Thus, totemism no longer involved an individual spirit of spirit embodied in a generic totem, which the dead, but a passed from the dead to the newborn child and, at the death of the latter, into the next generation. In contrast to the strict social regulation of sex characteristic of exogamy, primitive man created within his totemistic ideology a kind of nonmaterialistic promiscuity, because he comprehended all souls in a generic totem which animated all children in the way the mother was to do in her own era of worldly power. Within this generic totem we can easily discern the god of the next developmental stage, who not only retained his nonmaterial character, but also became even more perfect in the face of all attempts of ancient civilized peoples to concretize him until Christian myth finally reinstated all of his ancient spiritual meaning. From the esoteric connotation of totemism and matriarchy there is a direct path to Christianity which, of course, formulated the animistic characteristicsof totemism into a religious dogma. As a psychological interpretation of totemism, Christianity not only proves that totemism was a spiritual belief, but also shows with what tenacity man adhered to the immortality of his soul. And it demonstrates again that we cannot fully understand spiritual phenomena unless we can incorporate later developmental forms into some synthetic and genetic comparison; the new not only preserves something of the old, but also represents a clearer version of it consciously produced by the pressure of growing psychological knowledge. We can now appreciate more fully the development of Christianity from the substrata of Roman patriarchy and Jewish racial perpetuation. Christianity's overemphasis of the paternal role goes back to fecundation by the spirit, because this process guarantees immortality of the soul instead of just the race or people. Jesus himself was begotten by the Holy Ghost whose symbol, the dove, was an esoteric version of the ancient spirit bird. However, naturally conceived children carry the sins of the world, and they gain a soul only by baptism, which symbolizes the spiritual conception without which immortality is impossible. A deeper basis for Christianity's attitude toward sexuality lies in this resurgence of esoteric spiritual belief. The Church had to extend primitive sexual restrictions into complete prohibition, for, under the assumptions of spiritual belief, sexual intercourse was not essential to reproduction, and was therefore sinful lust. Yet the seed not the sperm or the egg, but the soul which generates immortality as well as life, is just as effective for reproduction under totemism as under Christianity. In representing the generic soul of totemism, Christ personified the immortal soul, which role accounts for his thoroughly nonhuman traits. As soul he not only could die and be resurrected, but his death and resurrection were the essential features of the soul, just as the immortal Double had copied the mortal bodily self. This esoteric spiritual meaning explains not only Christ's accidental traits but also the content of the Christian belief which is symbolized in the legend of Christ, and formulated in dogma and exegesis. This meaning is expressed in its dependence on eternal life, and in life's being but a preparation for a death which introduces immortality and underlies it in a completely animistic sense. Yet more important than this and other parallels is another difference characteristic of this developmental stage. Although there is a direct path from totemistic belief to Christianity, we should not overlook the changes undergone by social institutions of various peoples from totemism to Roman civilization. The transition from post-totemistic matriarchy to patriarchy of the Roman state was completely revolutionary in nature, so that with its exaltation of the mother, its debasement of the father, and its spiritualization of the son, Christianity represents a quite new adaptation of old ideas to the changed shape of things. In its doctrine of the Trinity, which symbolized the identity of the Holy Ghost with the Father and Son, Christianity attempted a new synthesis which transcended totemism, mother-divinity, and patriarchy. For the first time, the son received the spiritual role which the mother had held under matriarchy and the father had held under the family-state. This final stage made possible the emergence of the individual, whom our modern democratic commonwealth recognizes as the product of matriarchy and paternal rule. This is the irreligious era of the rule of the child, which we shall discuss elsewhere.
However, speaking genetically, we detect in Christiandogma a new and powerful attempt to save belief in the soul both from the materialism of the Roman father-state and from its concretion in the Jewish patriarchal family. Christian dogma states simply that one must believe, because on belief alone depend both the soul and the individual immortality which the Romans had traded for rule of the people, and the Jews had sold for the mess of pottage they honored as limitless reproduction and preservation of the family. When man puts his faith in his family or his state, and no longer believes in his individual soul or in the personal immortality symbolized by myth, cult, and dogma, he loses his higher values. All the bitter intra- and extra-mural strife of the Church has been nothing but humanity's inevitable attempt to preserve its ancient belief in the soul, which immortality esoterically symbolizes. In the course of such strife, the hostile powers of materialism and intellectuality became personified in the Devil, who represented the damned and departed soul, just as Christ who opposed him symbolized man's immortal soul. Only Christianity now symbolized the soul by the son, or, according to legalistic family organization, by an ever-recurring and realistic Double of the father. Thus the father made good his spiritual claim on the child only under a fully developed patriarchal family organization generated in post-exile Judaism and culminating in Roman law, because his son had now become his real Double for whom he would willingly sacrifice everything as long as his own name, rank, and office could be perpetuated. Christianity's new version of religious belief in the soul inheres in the fact that, in man's undying struggle to save his own soul, Christian belief saved all our souls from annihilation and from the loss of their esoteric meaning which had been threatened by the intensified efforts of legal andsocial institutions to make the soul materialistic and concrete. The success of such efforts would have meant the loss of belief in immortality, without which life would have had no purpose and value; otherwise man would not have fought and sacrificed for this belief as he has done now for centuries. Yet the soul is always in just as great danger from the inflated, introspective knowledge of self which modern psychology has established as a science of understanding the "causal" motives of thinking, feeling, and action. As our first chapter contends, this knowledge is not a mere "natural science," but an eminently psychological, introspective, and interpretative knowledge. This psychological knowledge threatens purely spiritual values from within, just as the concretions of spiritual belief represented by family, state, and society threaten them from without. Psychology is the soul's worst enemy, because in creating its own consolation for death it becomes compelled by the self-knowledge it creates to prove that the soul does not exist. Thus it becomes both a scientific "psychology without a soul" and a kind of overburdening of the inner spiritual self which, with no support from an inherent belief in immortality, goes to pieces in a way the neuroses show so well. In a materialistic age which suffered from self-awareness and threatened to forfeit its belief not only in immortality but also in religion, as the exoteric representative of such belief, psychoanalysis signified a new attempt to save the spiritual in man. The most remarkable feature of this attempt was the fact of its occurrence within the mentality of our time, for it not only provided an exoteric symbolization and social concretion for the soul concept of earlier epochs, but it also tried to establish this concept in the manner of a natural science. Yet this kind of realistic psychology couldonly mean the death of the soul, whose origin, being, and worth inhered necessarily in the abstract, the ineffable, and the esoteric. The initial appeal of psychoanalysis to man may be explained by its attempt to prove that his lost soul existed again; but man's final resistance to it is explained by its attempt to develop such proof by a scientific method. This kind of proof had to fail, because all it could do was to show that it could no more prove the existence of the soul scientifically than it could similarly prove the existence of God, with whom the soul is identified. In all scientific attempts to prove its existence, the soul has evaporated just like the noble metals in the alchemist's retort, which finally held not the substance hoped for, but only the residues of baser elements. Even in psychoanalysis man has tried to hold fast to that which he really needed and wanted, for he has looked to this "psychology without a soul" for a doctrine of salvation which it could never provide, even though its therapy echoed the idea of salvation. After all, therapy works only as long as it can sustain man's ancient illusory belief in the soul, and only when it can offer him a soul without psychology.
