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VI

CREATION AND GUILT

"Fate sends individuality back to its limitations and destroys it if it transcends them."

Hegel

We have traced the evolution of the will conflict in the individual from the negative externalization of will, which leads to denial and guilt consciousness to the positive creative power of will, which not only affirms the obligatory instead of denying it, but leads beyond it to a constructive "ought." This "ought" as we have pictured it in the ideal formation of the individual, if the will is able to affirm itself and its own activity on this ethical level, can finally lead to creativity that alters, reforms and builds anew the outer and inner environment as the individual wills it.

From the purely psychological act of wilUng, we have arrived at the moralistic problem of content, that is, what the individual does will or ought to will. The will projection itself, as reaction to an outer or inner counter-will, is independent of the content of the willed. It is related to the "musts" and the "won'ts" as such and accordingly, can have to do even with something that the individual himself has wanted, but does not any more when it is forced on him by a strange will or merely offered, that is, permitted. Apparently it is generally the content itself, a definite content, which the originally denying force of will transforms into a positive, constructive, and finally a creative one with which not only the content of willing in the sense of the own ethical ideal is justified, but also the individual will as such. Whence comes the content of willing and what does it contain?

Just as willing itself arises as an inner, primarily negative opposing force against a compulsion, so the content of willing arises primarily from rejection; we want what we cannot have, that which is denied us. If this first level of willing is determined more negatively from without, so the next level is equally influenced from without, but in terms of desire which already contains a definite willing.

We want at that level what others have or want, and this manifests itself as envy or competition in terms of the desire for possessions. But a truly positive willing is arrived at only when we have made this willing our own, that is, have given up comparisons ^ and no longer measure our individual willing by external obstacles or models, but by our own ethical ideal formation. In other words, the will becomes positive, constructive in the ethical justification of the ideal formation and eventually creative from the purely inner will conflict which ensues between the content of our wilUng and the self ideal of the "ought." If even in this stage the wiU remains too dependent on outer likeness and justifications in relation to other individuals, there result the feelings of inferiority or guilt which we have comprehended as the neurotic opposite for creative aflBrmation of will on the ethical level. Before we can understand this in its own terms as the proper subject of this chapter we must first review again the neurotic development. We must remember that the deeply rooted psychological turning from the affirmation of willing to the denial of the will is closely tied up with the problem of content. All external restrictions and refusals meet the individual in childhood (and also later in life) not as a universal prohibition against willing in general, but as prohibition against willing some definite thing at a certain moment, and are therefore determined in terms of content and eventually also in terms of time. The individual himself, on the contrary, very early connects these particular prohibitions with willing as such. Here it seems to me, as we have noted before, lie the roots of the most important diiTerence and the deepest misunderstanding between the grown-up and the child. In this sense one could say that the child is more ethical than the grown-up average man who is able to think in moralistic concepts only, that is, in terms of content, while for the more impulsive child every restriction, refusal, or prohibition affects the whole of willing, the will as such, and on that account, as we see, is taken so tragically.

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1 See "Will Therapy," Book I, chap. v.

Briefly put, the momentary content has only symbolic meaning originally, but gradually because of the individual's tendencies to justification, takes on an ever more "real" meaning, while the universal impulse life, which is always the essential, is made ever more abstract. Thus the child deceives the adults about willing itself in terras of their own ideology by means of a "good" acceptable content. And equally in the same way, or much more, the adult deceives himself later about the evil of willing itself by means of a content approved by his own ideal or by that of his fellow men. As long as we must justify the evil of willing in terms of its content, so long we feel ourselves morally answerable to others and are accordingly dependent on their praise and blame all the more, the more we are slaves to this deception and self-deception. In the degree, however, that we become conscious of the will itself in its original form of counterwill, as the source of our conflicts with the external world and ourselves, to the same degree do we feel the responsibility with which our own ethical consciousness has to say "Yes" or "No" to our individual willing. And only in this sense can we understand what we now wish to handle as creation but also only in this ethical sense can we comprehend the guilt indissolubly bound up with it not as guilt feehng toward others (in the moralistic sense), also not as consciousness of guilt toward itself (in the neurotic sense), but as guilt in itself, in the ethical sense. Since we conceive of the creative urge as the expression of will by which willing itself is justified ethically and its content morally, that is, through others, the genesis of the guilt inherent in the creative is to be understood in the following way. The individual seeks to justify his willing in the manner described above, through its "good" content, hence the will branded as bad through the moralistic critique of the content attaches itself to the bad, illicit contents, which are identified from then on with the forbidden will itself. This expresses itself in the child in socalled "being bad," in the adult in the phantasies or day dreams which according to Freud form not only the preliminary step to the neurotic symptoms, but also to creative activity, with both, only insofar and because thej' represent the aforesaid acts of will which embrace various and, for the most part, forbidden contents. Whether they manifest themselves neurotically or creatively does not depend on content which can be the same in both cases, and is also not to be explained in the Freudian sense by repression, no, not even by the quality and degree of the repression, but seems to me determined only by the relation of the will to the content of willing. In other words, if the good contents of willing are shown and expressed because they imply a moral recognition of will, but the bad are hidden and kept secret because they contain moral condemnation of willing, then their final fate and that of the individual depends on the relation to the will itself, independent of all contents. If the will itself, as pointed out before, is identified with the evil contents and remains so, then these phantasies with the forbidden will content remain secret, that is, the will itself remains evil, condemned, forbidden, in a word, negative counter-will which leads then to repression, denial and rationalization. On the contrary, if the will itself is originally very strong in the individual (as counter-will) then the good contents are not sufficient for the justification of the badness of the will and the individual affirms the forbidden contents also, that is, the bad will itself which they represent. The phantasies are then released from the sphere of mental will expression into the sphere of action, that is, they are no longer kept secret as forbidden, but are transformed into deed as will expression which in this sense is creative. It is not only affirmation of the content stigmatized as evil, but of the individual will which it represents. The morally proscribed contents themselves are associated originally with the bodily functions. The child must learn to eat and to control the excretory functions, when the adults wish, not when he wishes. His counter-will in relation to this is commonly designated as "bad" and "hateful," but this means restricted and eventually punished. Very soon also the physical expressions of sexuality are drawn in and then become the most important contents of wilhng, perhaps just because these expressions are so violently put under and forbidden. With regard to the overwhelming part that the psychic plays in our love life, which we will discuss later, the moral prohibition of the physical expression of sex in childhood, has perhaps the biologically valuable effect of strengthening the physical side in its later reaction so that it can stand against the psychic in general. Possibly we have here the ground for that separation of sensuality and tenderness which Freud has described as characteristic of the neurotic, but which I would characterize rather as the attitude of the average, at all events, as more wholesome than the indissoluble union of sensuality with the spiritual which seeks in love the individual justification of sexuality. Again we see here the separation of will from content lying at the root of these phenomena. The tender expressions of love toward certain persons are permitted to the child, are good ; the purely physical element of the will is evil, bad.

We said before that the child with the evil forbidden content turns to wish, to phantasy. It seems wholly in accord with my conception that the phantasies of men (of the child as of the adult) relate not so much to the satisfaction of actually forbidden bad contents as to the carrying through of will in itself. To speak bromidically, they are overwhelmingly egoistic even when their content is on a sexual them^They show the ego of the individual putting through his own will successfully, victoriously against all obstacles^ The development into the productive, the creative, representrbnly a step further in this direction, namely the lifting out of these expressions of will, from the sphere of thought to action. The phantasies are objectified in work, and thus the forbidden content is accomplished somehow, but in the last analysis it is the will expression afforded by creativity, the putting out, the affirmation, that constitutes the satisfying, many times rewarding factor. [Herein lies the essential difference between the average man I who keeps the phantasies secret from others, the neurotic who keeps them secret from himself (represses them), and the creative1type who affirms them for himself and reveals them to the world, yes, is compelled to do just that^ This difference is explained by the different attitudes of the individual to will itself on the one side and to its contents, good or bad, on the other, and this also creates the guilt problem in its various forms. The average man who hides from others the content of the phantasies as an expression of evil will, has guilt feeling (toward the others); the individual who hides them from himself, that is represses them, tries to deny thereby not so much the evil contents as the evil will they represent, has consciousness of guilt (toward himself). Finally the individual who maintains the phantasies and therewith affirms his individual will so that he can transform it into positive action has guilt, makes himself guilty by the individual nature of his doing. Actually guilt arises toward others to whom he opposes himself through his individualization, but also there is guilt toward himself which persists in the justification of this individual will expression. The creative type must constantly make good his continuous will expression and will accomplishment and he pays for this guilt toward others and himself with work which he gives to the others and which justifies him to himself. Therefore he is productive, he accomplishes something because he has real guilt to pay for, not imaginary guilt hke the neurotic, who only behaves as if he were guilty but whose consciousness of guilt is only an expression of his will denial, not of creative accomplishment of will which makes one truly guilty. We notice here that creation and guilt in the ethical sphere present the same contrast as truth and reality in the sphere of knowledge, and that they belong together just as indissolubly. The individually created, the work, is to be generally recognized like truth, and guilt opposes itself to this inhibitingly but also stimulatingly as inner reality, which is continuously overcome by new and ever more lofty feats of will. Accordingly we have to do here with guilt-laden creation and with creative guilt, which in contrast to the more than individual guilt consciousness of the neurotic type, has something specifically personal, individual. What we have here is just the activity of the creative type, not a sublimation of sex instinct, but, on the contrary, the expression of individual will which is almost to be called antisexual. For the authentic creative force proceeds always only from the inner will conflict, as we have described it before, that is, beyond the conflict between ego and sexuality, which the will wages on that level, and with the weapons belonging to that level. It may well be the biologically basic instinct that, in the last analysis, is used as 1 have already shown in "Der Kiinstlcr," but it is used. For it creates in the service of the will to its own downfall and what it helps to create is essentially different from itself, in the ideal case, far surpasses it. This is the mighty wrestling between nature and spirit, force and will, which Freud sought to describe with the educational concept of sublimation without recognizing the fundamental difference that lies between reproduction and production, begetting and creating, tool and master, creature and creator. We recognize therefore in the creative impulse not only the highest form of the will affirmation of the individual, but also the most mighty will conquest, that of the individual will over the will of the species represented by sexuality.

A similar victory of the individual will over generic will, as I show elsewhere, is represented in the individual love claim,^ whose psychological meaning lies in the fact that the individual can and will accept his generic role only if this is possible in an individual personal way, in the love experience. This represents, as it were, the creativity of the average type who demands a definite individuality for himself and if necessary also creates it," an individuality that sanctions and so justifies and saves his individual will. The creative type on the contrary does not content himself with the creation of an individual. Instead he creates a whole world in his own image, and then needs the whole world to say "yes" to his creation, that is, to find it good and thus justify it. In this sense, to create means to make the inner into outer, spiritual truth into reality, the ego into the world. Biological creating also represents an ego extension in the child, as the love creation represents a confirmation of ego in the "other," but above all the spiritual psychic creation is a creation by itself in the work, the ego is opposed to the world and rules it thus in terms of its will. This manifestation of the ego will in the creation of the work is therefore not a substitute for sexuality and love, but rather both of them are attempts to occupy the creative drive reallv, attempts which with the creative type always result unsatisfyinglv because they always represent forms of expression of the individual creative urge limited by alien counter-wills and accordingly insufficient. Moreover, creativity is not something which happen* but once, it is the constant continuing expression of the individual will accomplishment, by means of which the individual seeks to overcome self-creatively the biological compulsion of the sexual instinct and the psychological compulsion to emotional surrender.

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1See the corresponding conclusions in Chapter V of "Will Therapy."

2 On the projective creation of the love object compare "Verlicbheit und Projektiou" in "Genctische Psychologic," Part II.

This conception of the creative will as a victory of the individual over the biological sexual instinct explains the guilt which the development and affirmation of the creative personality necessarily produces. It is this going beyond the limits set by nature as manifested in the will accomplishment to which the ego reacts with guilt. Only this guilt reaction makes completely intelligible the projection of the God idea by means of which the individual again subjects himself to a higher power. For the primitives who spiritualized the world, this was nature itself, for heroic man triumphing over nature it was the creative God made by himself, therefore his own will at once glorified, denied and justified, and finally for the man of our western culture, it is the really fateful powers of parental authority and love choice, to which he wishes to submit voluntarily, that is, ethically. This entire conflict complex we find represented on a grand scale in the myth of the fall of man, which presents the level of knowledge on which consciousness wants to control and rule sexuality, that is, to use it for its own pleasure and satisfaction. The hero Adam is not punished because he exults in his Godlike knowledge, but because he wants to use it to force the sex instinct into the service of his individual will. It is not the father complex that can give us understanding here, as little as can the contrasting Greek figure Prometheus. It is just the reverse. The utilization of the sexual instinct in the service of the individual will on the basis of knowledge of good and evil, that is, the affirmation of the evil willing, brings suffering and punishment. The punishment consists in the loss of paradisical naivete, of oneness with nature and her laws, and the recently won order among them. Adam is punished for not wanting to become a father and the punishment is the obligation to become one, that is, subordination under the compulsion of the biological sexual drive, in spite of knowledge of the moral problem which has branded the pleasure will as evil, and the attempt to overcome this morality through will affirmation. The hero becomes thus the psychological representative of the creative man whose negative opposite we see before us in the neurotic type. The hero does not disown the parents in the sense of the CEdipus complex, that is, because he wants to put himself in the father's place, but because he is the earthly representative of God, that is, of the creative will. Accordingly he has no children (which he would have to in the role of father) but expresses himself and his individual will in works, in heroic deeds. He knows no gratitude (toward parents) and no guilt feeling (toward others), but he has guilt which derives from creating. Not that the fact that he wants to become the father or to be God gives him guilt consciousness, but that he is God, that he occupies himself creatively, makes him guilty and this guilt can only be atoned for through further performance and finally through death. I believe moreover that the idea of hero formation, as explained in the material presented in the "Myth of the Birth of the Hero" was strongly influenced by the discovery of the man's share in procreation. At all events the conscious comprehension of the male process of procreation seems to signify a revolutionary turning point in the history of mankind.

A whole area of will and guilt psychology as the present day neurotic still shows, seems to me to be grounded in the fact that man on the one hand could feel himself as a creator who creates human beings (Prometheus), on the other hand could control this biological procreative act consciously and thus utilize sexuality for mere pleasure gain (Adam's knowledge?). Moreover, the discovery of this connection gave the first real basis for the social and psychological father concept, against whose recognition the individual defends himself even in the myth of the hero with the denial of the father and the emphasis on the maternal role. Here is to be found perhaps a powerful motive for the fact that God representing the individual ego-will took on fatherly features at a certain period. The autonomous heroic individual could not endure and use the biological dependence on an earthly progenitor and ascribed it all the more readily to the already installed creator God who received in this way paternal features, which give psychological expression to the hero's self creation. Moreover the first intimation of the individual love problem betravs itself here in the creation of the woman from the man and in his own image. Here the woman is a product of the creative man, who ascribes to himself this divine creative power and divine knowledge— like the Greek Prometheus. We recognize therein the first faint beginnings of that magnificent process of rivaling the Gods which we have understood psychologically as the gradual aclcnowledgment of the conscious individual will in the human being. It appears in a glorious fashion in Greek culture with the heroes rebelHng against the Gods, and reaches the peak of its development in Christianity with the humanizing of God and the deifying of man. If man had first to manifest his own creative will in the formation of God, but at the same time had to justify it, so in the heroic period, at the other extreme, he fell into the deification of himself, of his own individual will in order finally to deify and worship in the individual love experience, the other individual who represents the creation and redemption of his own individual will. Christianity as the religion of love and guilt unites all the conflicting elements of this willguilt problem in itself. It shows us in the humanizing of God, the continuation of "heaven" on earth. It is still in the form of universal brotherhood as it also led away from individualism, for it created a mass hero of such great sweep that every man could feel himself redeemed in and through him. Our whole spiritual development is thus represented by the three levels, the Jewish, the Greek and the Christian, which represent not only historical phases, but also psychological types, ways of reacting and attitudes even of modern men. They correspond to the difi'erent attempts to solve the will-guilt problem, the real, the ideal and the spiritual. The biblical Jews were a rough, warlike nation of herdsmen who needed and created a strong willed, confident god of battle as an ego ideal. If one understands "Jahwe" as the personification of the hard and tenacious individual will of the wild herdsman constantly fighting against enemies, then one recognizes in the Bible the first noble attempt of a victorious people arrived at stability and prosperity to dethrone their old god of war and to perceive themselves in his strong will. But after that, all that is accomplished and attained is ascribed to a creative God who earlier had only been a destructive one, and to whom the chosen people which feels itself as completely heroic, voluntarily submits. Thus the warlike Jewish people first sought their leader, embodied in the hero Moses, in a strong willed God, as later they sought in him the justification for all the horrors and conquests of war. Also the Greeks originally had to fight hard for their existence and the few fertile spots open to them as the Iliad shows. Their reaction to final victory and prosperity was no late justification through the creation of an individual God, but an increase in the affirmation of individual self-feehng as we understand it in the myths of the heroes. No longer do the gods cause and guide war and the battles of heroes, but world happenings are influenced by the super-human passions, the strong wills of the heroes, who perish through their own passions, therefore of their own will. Only much later there enters here as reaction to this creative arrogance the hybrid, the creeping poison of consciousness of guilt, which we see the tragic poets transfer to the heroes themselves instead of ascribing it to the gods. In this sense Greek civilization actually ppresen^ the birth of indiyidualityjn^jmipan history. Man himSStftakes the place of GodTnThe form of "THe"selPruling creative hero, a God whose first twilight appears here in his passive role of spectator. Accordingly also we have the excessive guilt feeling of the Greeks as it manifests itself particularly in tragedy as a reaction to the heroic phase. In the Greek tragic poet the hero, as it were, makes himself fully responsible for himself and pays, atones, with death. Here hes their difference from the Jewish nation, which could keep and preserve the fruits of victory because they put the responsibihty for it back on God. The Greek who recognized and acknowledged deed and guilt equally as an expression of his individual will came to grief in the tragic recognition of the will problem and self responsibility while the Jew converted the evil, destroying, recognition "therapeutically" into the moral compulsion of good and evil and made it concrete in a meaningful will prohibition, the decalogue, which protected him from stepping over the boundaries set for the individual will. Christianity, as an immediate reaction to Roman tyranny, representing paternal authority, presents in the symbolism of the rebelhous son, the passive hero, who conquers, not by means of will assertion but by means of will submission, conquers spiritually even though corporeally, physically, he fails. Therewith the struggle is hfted from the sphere of the real to the unreal, while Greek culture had lifted it from the moral to the ethical. At the same time, in Christianity God is brought from the unreal sphere to the real, just as with the Greek heroes, only still further humanized, as it were, made into a universal hero. In this sense Christianity is a reaction to and attempt at healing from the danger of individualism, as it had cuhninated in terms of will in the Roman autocratic sj'stem of father rule. If, therefore, the creative God was the strongest expression of the individual ego will, so the mild, forgiving God of the Christian faith is the strongest expression of the self depreciatory ego which presents itself in terms of the Roman ideology as son, that is, as creature and not as creator. Therewith at the same time, it tries to reprimand the father as creator and lifts the mother principle to a spiritual significance which it had not had formerly. Here the realization of the will principle as we see it in the Roman father rule begins to oppose the realization of the maternal love principle, which reaches its height in the individual love claim and love creation of the modern irreligious man. Thus the hero formation emphasizes the divine in man, affirms, glorifies the individual creative power of will while religion formation seeks to deny it and shows man again as the creature who humbly subjects himself to the higher racial will. In this sense the Jews represent the religious ; the Greeks the heroic ; and Christianity the human solution of the will-guilt problem. The first is moraUstic, the second ethical, the third spiritual. This is associated with the transformation of the guilt problem which again is dependent on the level of consciousness. With the Jews, God represents the will and the individual the guilt ; with the Greeks the individual hero represents will and guilt; in Christianity God represents guilt and the individual subjects his will to the God conquered and overcome by himself. In the same degree that we see the will in the individual develop and then break, we can substantiate an analogous displacement and denial in the sphere of consciousness ; with the Jews recognition of the moralistic solution as the saving of the individual ; with the Greeks recognition of the ethical problem as the fall of the individual; in Christianity the recognition of the human problem as the abrogation of the individual, as release from the compulsion of the will and the torment of the conscious responsibility as creator. Accordingly Christianity puts the emotional experience of love in the center and brings the female principle again into a position of honor, in its symbolic meaning; the Greek puts the creative principle first, which leads to guilt, and therewith brings forward the individual artist, while the Jews represent the will principle and therewith paternal compulsion. Accordingly, force, freedom and love represent different reactions (by Jews, Greeks and Christians) to the will-guilt problem. Thus each of these culture groups represents a certain level of development of the will-guilt problem as it manifests itself in the individual also ; the Jew, the conscious recognition of the paternal compulsion principle of morality ; tion of the heroic principle of freedom the Greek, the creative recognithe Christian, the recog; nition of suffering, of the maternal love principle. With this advance from divine projection to human justification of the individual will, the part of consciousness, especially in the developing recognition of self consciousness, is of decisive importance. The first level, the projection of deity, presents as yet no conscious creating, rather an attempt to transfer the will expression represented in the wish phantasy in a magic form and way, to a personified ego whose will and counter-will correspond to the own will. In the active hero, who converts his conscious will into the deed, we glimpse the first recognition of the individual forming and reforming reality in accordance with his personal desires, who, however, like CEdipus, is destroyed as soon as he perceives his little human truth. Through increasing self consciousness, therefore, the whole mechanism of will projection with simultaneous denial of willing, like will expression with simultaneous denial of knowledge, is dethroned, humanized, removed from God to man, from heaven to earth. It continues, however, on the earth, and in truth, in the love experience, and in the love relation, which again in the last analysis only represents an attempt to put the responsibility for our will and counter-will upon another, whom we make into a divinity and against whose will we revolt at the same time if it does not resemble our own and bow to it. Here, in the love relationship, in the recreation of the other after our own image, we again come up against the real counter-will of the other which we have evaded in such a cunning fashion in the creation of a God, for the divine will represented our own will and at the same time justified it. Only in our occidental culture has God become creative, notmerely conserving like the ancient Godheads who were themselves creatures, like their creators of that period, the ancients. This creative God, as the occidental systems of religion have evolved him, is not any longer mere projection but is himself a creative expression of the individual will, not just a father who does not create but only begets. This creative, omnipotent, omniscient God is the first great manifestation of the individual will, at the same time its denial and justification in the supra-individual world will, nature. The creation of God ensues cosmically, not in imitation of the dependence on parents which corresponds to a much later interpretation on a certain level of family organization. On the other hand, the primitive God who existed before the creative one was dangerous and destroying, a manifestation of the evil counter-will which, in the later systems, was ascribed to a negative deity, as we know it from Ahriman to the Christian "devil." Against this original, destructive, hostile God, who is still preserved in the creator Jahwe, were gradually called upon for help, protective deities, who bore the maternal character, as for example, the Egyptian and even Athena in the Homeric world picture. The image of the creative God, as the highest developmental level of this ethical process, proceeds then from an overcoming of the evil counter-will to its affirmation in creative wiUing, but carries in addition the maternal conservative characteristics of preserving and protecting that which he creates. Only later and under the influence of our present and still persistent family and social organization and in the service of its maintenance does God take on strong paternal characteristics, which correspond more to the external counter-will of the stronger than to the individual creative will. In this father God, who actually corresponds to a reduced, degenerate God of will, the individual grown equally proud in the spheres of will and consciousness, sets upon earth a strong real counter-will, which shall again keep within bounds the individual who demands for himself the divine power of will. Perhaps the predominance of the father principle itself whose culmination in the Roman state was broken by Christianity, is to be understood psychologically just from the fact that the "father" represents the strong willed man who dares to ascribe to himself the divine prerogative and whose domination is accepted not only on the basis of force, but equally from the necessity of placing other earthly bounds to the all powerful will of the ego which is always being put further back into the individual. It would be the psychological opposite of our conception of love as a humanizing of the self deifying tendency, since the father principle in its proper and psychological manifestations would correspond to a humanization of the negative side of will, of the counter-will. Be that as it may, at all events, for us the opposition of the mother and father principle as it has come to expression recently in the contrast of Bachhofen's world view to that of Haller ^ and in the various psychoanalytic interpretations, corresponds to the opposition between natural right and forced right, in other words between love and force, or psychologically speaking, between the positive will (mother) and counter-will (father). In other words, the father represents, as I have said before, only a symbol of the own actually inhibited will, but not the creative power of will as it is presented in the occidental God, creator of heaven and earth. Freud takes part in this denying rationalizing attempt of guilt conscious humanity in his theory, where, as it were, the individual will hides itself behind the father principle ; hides in a double sense, quite as in the creation of God, for the father symbolizes the own will but the individual hA-pocritically denies his own will which he ascribes to the father in order to be able to subordinate himself to it. In this humble subordination of the weak helpless creature to the parental will, psychoanalysis is religious, in its actual domination of consciousness it is presumptuously heroic. That means that the analyst must pay for his likeness to God in knowledge and in creation (re-creation) of men, since he must represent the individual as such, including himself, as an unfree, powerless creature who, a pawn of his unconscious wishes and evil impulses, has lapsed into guilt. This is not intended to be an attempt to present a psychoanalysis of Freud as, for example, Michaelis has recently undertaken, but it is a psvchology of the creative man who must always be denj-ing his godlike power of will in order to unburden himself of the creative guilt. Again we see how the special and the individual can only be understood on the grounds of the universal not the reverse. Just as the father concept in the social sense only represents the earthly personification of the own consciousness of will, so also the CEdipus complex is only a special instance of cosmic fate in which man wants to free himself from dependence on natural forces,^and yet cannot deny his littleness and helplessness in the face of the universel But the ffidipus complex is also a special case in another sense.

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1 Bachhofen : Selbstbiographie und Antrittsrede iiber das Naturrecht. Edited and introduced by Alfred Baumler, Halle 1927.

For the child of our modern social organization, probably the parents represent the first will forces, as it were, his world, his cosmos, and this remains the incontestable psychological meaning of the parent relation. Very soon, however, the child grows beyond these family symbols of the will conflict to the perception of his own inner will conflict which soon goes beyond the external one in intensity and meaning. For the primitive man, on the other hand, nature itself which we now rule with our wills to a large extent, was the threatening external will power against which he found himself helpless and which he learned to fight and to rule with his will. Here is the place to seek the origin of all threatening and terrifying Gods and spirits who show their evil influence even deep within the Greek heroic world and against which they called upon maternal protective deities for aid. These, however, had a far more cosmic than feminine significance, that is, they called to their aid the conserving and preserving powers of nature against the evil destructive natural forces. For regardless of what one calls the cosmic preserving principle, the biologically dependent child of man understands it through the image of the mother while the father as symbol of will power not only emerges much later, but also belongs to a wholly difi"erent psychological plane, namely the sphere of conscious will. Accordingly the evolution of the God concept moves from the personification of natural forces threatening the helpless and defenseless individual to the conserving maternal principle, under whose protection the individual first arrives at the strengthening and unfolding of his own will. The self representation of the same we see in the creative God, who represents the omnipotence of conscious will much more than the domination of the father whose biological procreative rule and whose social ascendancy lie as far from childish thinking as from primitive. The next and psychologically most interesting developmental level is characterized by the guilt concept attached to the creative God idea, which was lacking on the earlier level, because fear was then the driving force. The creative God corresponds to one side of the self representation of the conscious will power of the indiN-idual, but is at the same time an attempt at its denial and the throwing off of responsibility, and leads accordingly to creative guilt, which belongs to the will expression as such, manifested in the creation of God himself. We get here, from the understanding of the creation of the creative God, a glimpse into the psychology of a creator, of the occidental individual and his guilt problem ensuing from the individual will. This understanding continues into the further development of the modern individual and his relation to the God concept, which concerns chiefly the guilt problem from which we suffer, henceforth individually with a growing conscious knowledge of this whole connection, so that no general salvation but only the individual happiness of each separate person seems the solution. The psychic process of dissolution in which we now find ourselves and as the extensive neurotic type represents it, concerns not only the knowledge of the God creation as a projection and justification of the individual will, but extends to the real representatives of this will conflict, the moralistic parent authorities in the social sphere and the releasing love objects in the sexual.

We see here again how progress in knowledge hinders experiencing, in other words, how self consciousness inhibits will projection, for the creation of the creative God was not only a manifestation and an expression of the creative individual will, but made possible to the individual at the same time in its justification tendency, creative action on earth. In truth it all happened in the service of religion, to the glory of God, but at least it did happen. AU the creative powers of the individual, both of an artistic and productive kind could unfold under the justif}'ing symbol of the creative God. This holds for the culture of the middle ages through the church more than for the ancients, where the hero was still the representative of divine will power on earth. With the general humanizing of God, as Christianity initiated it, the hero, the creative man, becomes as it were a universal type, whose development culminates in the modern individualized man, when actually each separate person is iiimself a God, a personality stamped with a strong wiU. Now, instead of its leading to heightened creative will activitv, as one might expect, we see this strong individualistic will in the neurotic type directed as counter-will against itself and the fellow man and thus denying in itself both itself and its own creative power. The basis for this is easy to see in the hght of what we have just said. With the knowledge and the perception of the divine power of creation as his own individual power of will, the individual must also take over the responsibihty for it himself, and this leads necessarily to the ethical guilt concept, which relates to willing itself and not like the moralistic guilt feeUng, to any particular content of will. The conscious knowledge of divine creativity leads therefore beyond an heroic phase in which the individual voluntarily takes upon himself and afBrms will and responsibility, to a new erection of the rule of God on earth, as we recognized it in the love principle on the one side and in the father principle on the other. Both correspond to current attempts to solve the will conflict in reality, after its magnificent unreal solution in the God concept had been destroyed by the knowing power of consciousness and the disintegrating force of self consciousness. But this twilight of the God^ now approaching its end is accompanied by a still more fatal and tragic process, which one might designate as the disenthroning of the individual himself, the result of which we have before us in the neurotic type with its guilt and inferiority feehngs. For the earthly attempts at justification of the individual will also are shattered by the power of the counter-will only to end finally in a kind of psychological "twilight of the ego," with a tormenting hopelessness of the individual thrown upon his own resources. The basis for this, as has already been pointed out, is that something is lacking in all real attempts at solution of this will conflict which the unreal God creation, whose very faults actually made solution possible, did not have. It is this, the fact that the earthly representatives of the individual ego themselves have an own will and a counter-will against which our own constantly strike. The father or the parental authority represents not only a symbol of the child's own will, but also—and probably equally early and strongly — a strange counter-will, which disturbs and restrains its own. In the love relation, which, as already noted, represents entirely individual creative activity, yes exactly the creative activity of the individual as such, he runs against the same counter-will which wants to occupy itself creatively on him. This makes the conflicts of the modern man so difScult and deep because the inner will conflict cannot become released really through an external agent, but apparently is only to be temporarily and partially unburdened in the more suitable manner of unreal projection. The neurotic human type of our time has therefore not only exploded the God illusion itself, but perceives the real substitute for it as we have recognized it in the parental authority and love objects to be unsatisfying for solving or even lessening the inner will conflict heightened through knowledge and intensified by self consciousness. Knowledge, which we have understood as an intellectual will experience in terms of spiritual truth, leads therefore to taking the Gods from heaven and to the humanizing of the omnipotent creative will. The tormenting self consciousness which again leads to the denial of the individual will thus affirmed, comes into the picture first when the will conflict is thrown back from the real personifications of it as we recognized them in the parent authorities and love objects, through the counter-will, upon the individual himself and this leads to the recognition of his own inner conflicts. However, this throwing back does not ensue as we consciously strive for it in the therapeutic experience, in a constructive fashion so that the individual can accept himself as conflicted, instead the actual conflict only shows the individual that he cannot find salvation from the evil will in the "other" either. The therapeutic value of the analytic situation as such lies in the fact that it affords the individual an unreal solution of his will conflict corresponding to the creation of God from the own will, but at the same time lets him experience in the actual emotional relation to the analyst and understand in this connection the real earthly parallel. The therapeutic experience is thus only to be understood from the creative experience because it is itself a creative experience and in truth a very special form of it which we describe more fully and make intelhgible elsewhere.^

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1 See the chapter "Love and Force" in Book I of "Will Therapy."

Just as for the individual neurotic the therapeutic experience represents the last deliverance from the two-fold conflict of the negative denial of will and destructive self consciousness, so the creative type as such is the last salvation of human kind from the same inevitable neurotic conflict which we all work against. The creative man saves himself first of all from the neurotic chaos of will denial and self consciousness since he affirms himself and his own creative wiU, which at once protects him in the growing advance of consciousness from falling into the inhibiting self consciousness. He keeps for himself the capacity to manifest himself and his individual will creatively instead of denying and reacting to it with guilt consciousness. He expresses himself instead of knowing himself consciously, wills instead of knowing or knows that he wills and what he wills and lives it. His guilt consists in the fact of his release from common pressure, whether it be biological or moral, in his isolation, which however he can afiBrm creatively instead of having to deny it neurotically. His creativity cancels his guilt while the neurotic willing makes the individual guilt-conscious with its denial. Since he transforms the neurotic self consciousness arising from the hypertrophied compulsive thinking into creative living again, that is, into individual will aflBrmation, he does isolate himself it is true, as an individual from his contemporaries who suffer from consciousness, but unites them again with positive natural forces, thus reveahng at once the grandeur and strength of man. Qie creative man is thus first of all his own therapisyas which ^fc.

I have already conceived him in "Der Kunstler,"[but at the same *^ time a therapist for other sufferers] Only he solves his individual will conflict in a universal form which does not satisfy the hyperindividualized tjrpe of our time. This type needs and desires no " lojlgeta common savior, but an individual one ; he coines to the therapist^ however, as so'ClT'HS^nd because he has broken down in the individual therapy which the love experience affords. In analysis he tries again the unreal and real methods of salvation which no longer work for him because for his heightened and hypertrophied self consciousness there is only one savior—and that is himself! In this sense the therapeutic experience, as I pointed out before, is to be understood only from the creative. For in the first place the therapist is a creator, and in truth almost a creative God, and not made so first by the patient. For he creates men in the Promethean sense, men who like himself have the creative will, but must deny it instead of being able to affirm it.

And this is the second reason why the therapeutic experience is only to be understood from the creative. For the patient is also a creator, but a miscarried negative one and his powerful identification with the therapist arises from this, that at bottom he is the same and would like to possess creative power positively also. This therapeutic creation of men, which the patient on that account presents as a rebirth experience, cannot ensue on the basis of a general norm or a common ideal for which the neurotic type is just as unsuited as is the creative, and he cannot be educated to it either. The only therapeutic possibility with our modern individual neurotic type is to permit him to develop and accept his own individuality, in other words, to allow the individual to mold himself into that which he is, that is, to affirm his own will and therewith his individuality. This can happen, however, only in an individual personal experience of therapy, where again we meet the guilt bound up with creation, the release of which presents the greatest difficulty for this individual type of therapy. Since we are keeping these problems for presentation in "Will Therapy," we turn in conclusion to one more universal viewpoint which is important not only for individual therapy, but also for the universal therapy of the creative type.

We spoke of different phases and levels of the formation of religion and the creation of God, which certainly have a history, whose interesting evolution and many aspects we have no intention of giving here. These historical allusions are only a convenient help in the presentation of these complicated processes in the individual and serve merely to illustrate the point of view, which seems to me essential to the understanding of the individual structure and its reactions.

We spoke of a period of evil deities, of protective gods, of will gods, of father gods, of the deifying of love and finally of self deification in the heroic man as well as of his negative, the self condemnation of the hyperconscious neurotic hemmed in by guilt feeling. All these and yet other phases, developmental levels and reactions we find to vary in the single individual himself at different periods of his development. I do not believe, however, that we are able to understand the historical development in the past through projecting backwards or drawing conclusions a posteriori from the individual. Rather it would perhaps be possible that the past, if we should understand it from its own time, might light up many an individual of the present who seems to be going through similar phases, not only in terms of an ontogenetic repetition of the phylogenetic as it lies at the basis of the Jungian concept of the "collective" unconscious, but from his own will conflict, which, in contact with the outer reality of his fellow men and with the inner reality of his own consciousness and development manifests itself in similar fashion.

We are concerned therefore with parallel phenomena as the ancient world picture conceived it in the opposition of microcosm and macrocosm, not with causal connections as they underlie the concept of phylogenesis, whether one undertakes to explain the past from the individual or vice versa wants to understand the individual from the past. For the guilt is no accumulated guilt, neither historical nor individual and all attempts thus to explain it represent a misuse of the natural science principle of causality in the service of will justification. Guilt arises in and from the individual and must continue to produce evil if the individual uses it for the justification of his evil will, when it appears as neurotic guilt consciousness and not as creative guilt which can be atoned for through new creation.