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an. THN
HE UNIT
LIBRARIE
IVERSITI
*I*.XXX
E MICHA
is DERI
DOWNHO
HIGAN.
Religion and the
New Psychology
BL
For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things.
- I Cor. 2:10
Sleelat
TO
MARION NEWELL SWISHER
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . IX
I. THE NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM. I
II. THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS AND
ITS INFLUENCE ON THE RELIGIOUS LIFE. 21
III. THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE . . .
IV. DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL . . . . 74
V. MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES . . . 87
VI. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL . . . . . . 100
VII. PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES . . . 115
VIII. THE OCCULT IN MODERN RELIGIOUS
SYSTEMS . . . . . . . . . . 128
IX. CONVERSION AND ATTENDANT PHENOMENA 145
X. THE CHANGING BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF
RELIGION . . . . . . . . . . 158
XI. METHODS OF MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS.
HEALING . . . . . . . . . . 168
XII. THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION · 191
*
T
APPENDICES
I. DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS. . . 233
II. BIRTH DREAMS . . . . . . . . . 247
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . 257
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . 259
vii
FOREWORD
THERE is an increasing body of literature
which deals with the new psychology and
the psycho-analytic principle. In the brief
years which have elapsed since Freud made his
discovery of the Unconscious as a determinant of
individual psychic life and published his
Traumdeutung (Interpretation of Dreams),
this work has become a classic and has run
through several editions, both in German and
English. The reach of its final chapters is be-
yond the realm of applied psychology into that
of philosophy. Dr. Oskar Pfister of Zurich has
written a book, The Psycho-analytic Method,
which details the psycho-analytic method of
treatment for nervous ills especially as an edu-
cational measure, and reveals broad scholarship
and much painstaking research. Dr. I. H. Cor-
iat, who collaborated with Worcester and Mc-
Comb in the book, Religion and Medicine,
has brought out two small books, What is
Psycho-analysis and The Meaning of Dreams,
brief but extremely lucid and readable accounts
of psycho-analysis, its basic principles and its
method, from the viewpoint of the practicing
neurologist.
11
FOREWORD
None of the works on this subject, with the
exception of Pfister's, and that but fugitively
and briefly, deals with religious problems. This
book aims to be a comprehensive treatment of
the religious problem in its various phases, the
varied phenomena of religion, and various nor-
mal and abnormal religious types, together with
certain suggestions for a new and different kind
of education, from the viewpoint of the new
psychology. Readers of William James' “Va-
rieties of Religious Experience" will already be
familiar with mysticism, the phenomena of re-
ligious conversion, and kindred movements and
phenomena of the religious life. These things
are not new, but recent exploration of the Un-
conscious as a determinant of behavior and a
potent factor in every thought and act of daily
life, has added considerably to our knowledge
of the buried self, and thrown much new light
upon the problem of the motivation of human
life, even as the hand of the archeologist reveals
the structures of a city long-buried beneath vol-
canic ashes and lava.
There can be no doubt that there is still much
prejudice to be overcome against the Freudian
psychology. At first glance, its whole structure
seems fantastic, far-fetched, and scientifically
.unsound. Any system of thought which has to
do with the interpretation of dreams, seems to
smack of quackery, charlatanry, and the pseudo-
sciences of the Middle Ages, e. g., astrology and
FOREWORD
alchemy. It can only be pointed out that the
pragmatic test proves the Freudian psychology
sound; psycho-analysis operates successfully in
human life, and to its beneficent ministrations
is due the mental health of an increasing num-
ber of persons who all their lives long have
sought to be free of nervous troubles and, find-
ing no relief elsewhere, have found healing in
the psycho-analytic method of treatment. Prej-
udice against the Freudian psychology is natu-
ral, for civilized man is averse to having the bio-
logical origin of his emotions revealed in the harsh
white light of modern rational thought. The
very repressions due to the conflict of the primi-
tive Unconscious with the demands of the moral
code of to-day lead the individual to condemn
the new psychology. The more intellectualized
man is, the more likely he is to condemn.
That religion had a phallic origin and that our
emotional life has a sex basis, are concepts
highly offensive and even shocking to sensitive
souls. To these it must be pointed out that the
primitive in its very nature is animal and savage,
that we are in nowise to blame for carrying
along with us impedimenta that belong essen-
tially to a savage state of existence, since these
things inhere in the Unconscious and are not ac-
cessible to waking consciousness through con-
scious mental effort; that is, we are not aware of
their existence any more than a man is aware
that he has a vermiform appendix until, like an
xii
FOREWORD
inflamed appendix, they create some disturbance
and throw us off our mental balance. Again, the
fact that religion has a phallic origin need not
confound us; man himself, if we accept the theo-
ries of Darwin or Lamarck, had a Simian origin.
This does not mean that he has brought with
him into civilized life all the traits of the anthro-
poid ape. He may bear on his person relics of
his remote past: a rudimentary tail, or a Darwin
ear; the new-born child will cling with prehen-
sile grasp to the outstretched broom-stick.
But these things are merely of historical interest.
So with the phallic origin of religion; the fact
that religion had such an origin or that it re-
tains a certain amount of phallic imagery
in refined, sublimated, and symbolized form
constitutes no impugnment of religion. If re-
ligion had such an origin, so had art. Primi-
tive life in all its phases reveals a phallic origin.
But what of that? We need not blush to own
it. It is a historical fact, no more, no less. The
world progresses through an open-minded ac-
ceptance of new theories once they are tried and
proved. It may burn a Giordano Bruno, force
a Galileo to recant, cast a Columbus into prison,
exile a Copernicus in a provincial town, but
truth cannot be killed nor even long remain
hid. If a man but speak truth, the world will
in time come to his way of thinking.
Let the Freudian psychology stand or fall on
its own merits. It has naught to fear.
FOREWORD
xiii
The temptation is strong, it is well-nigh ir-
resistible, for one whose métier is dealing with
religious problems and who has the homiletic
habit somewhat firmly fixed, to enter into dis-
cussion of the genuine content, divine and abso-
lutely real, of the mystic experience; to state
ex cathedra the validity of evidence for the con-
tinuation of life after physical dissolution; to
give moral counsel and exhort the reader to live
life on a high ethical plane; in a word, to use
all the well-known methods of the pulpit, which
are hortatory rather than scientific. I believe
that in the following pages I have successfully
avoided these pitfalls. This book is not a collec-
tion of sermons, it aims at being a strictly scien-
tific examination of human motives and a pres-
entation of the new psychology as it applies to
the religious problem. There is a vast literature
which deals with the divine content of mysticism,
the relationship of the soul and its God in the
conversion experience, the proof of continuance
of life after death. There seems no need to add
one volume more.
And, after all, though the devout soul may
shrink at the harsh frankness of certain chap-
ters of the book, may question or condemn its
conclusions, and consider that the fine bloom is
rubbed from religious experience by a merciless
analysis of its phenomena, - after all, must
there not be some mechanism, some method of
functioning, by which the soul apprehends the
re
xiv
FOREWORD
ES
existence of God and feels His Presence? Sup-
pose we do dub this mechanism neurosis or hys-
teria or even psychosis? The devout soul will
be ready with an answer to all of this apparently
merciless dissection of religious experience and
the (apparent) materialism of the new psychol-
ogy. This ready answer will be: Freudian psy-
chology may explain the mechanism, it cannot
explain the matter, the divine content of the re-
ligious experience.
The question, then, of the validity of the re-
ligious experience as evidence of the immanence
of the Divine and its operations in human life,
must be left for each individual soul to answer
for himself; in this work, we must put it aside,
not as being unworthy of serious consideration,
but as lying within another field of inquiry.
No man ever writes the book he intends to
write. He plans and designs. He builds a frame-
work. He will speak thus and so, fitting all his
utterances into the frame-work he has erected.
But it does not work out as he intended. He
intends one thing and writes another. Probably,
in mid-career, the whole plan and structure of
his book change. This eccentricity of the human
intellect may puzzle some, but not the Freudian.
He knows his complexes and his resistances. He
knows why, when he arrives at a point in his
writing at which he had intended to say a certain
thing, he forgets it and goes on to say something
other than what was in his mind. He knows that
FOREWORD
XV
there is a motive in his forgetting and that the
substance of what he does say is not determined
by caprice, but by an inexorable law which de-
crees that certain thoughts shall rise into con-
sciousness; that certain others shall be repressed
into the Unconscious. He knows likewise that
every book is autobiographical and that the
trained observer can read between the lines and
search out the innermost recesses of the author's
personality. But this does not give him pause.
He goes calmly to his self-appointed task and is
not unduly depressed by anxiety for the gracious
reception of his book nor concern for not having
said the things he fully intended to say. They
are perhaps better left unsaid. In due time,
when the resistances are broken down which sup-
pressed the forgotten material, it will emerge,
and then the author will be inspired to write
again. Meanwhile, the world will at least have
been spared another book and when the author's
forgotten thoughts do appear in print, they will
have been well incubated.
I am deeply grateful to Dr. I. H. Coriat, who
has kindly reviewed the manuscript of this book
and corrected the psycho-analytic portions. He
has likewise given many helpful suggestions of
which I have been glad to take advantage.
Thanks are due to my wife, who has given many
helpful suggestions as to the book's style.
RELIGION AND THE
NEW PSYCHOLOGY
I. THE NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS
PROBLEM
D ELIGIOUS problems are manifold. Every
Il religious system, every individual life,
every age, and every people, has had its own
particular religious problems. Certain of these
are cosmic in character, certain are personal and
individual. What or who created the universe?
What was the process? What orders the uni-
verse, sustains it and preserves it in its multi-
farious activities? Does a God exist? If so,
what is His nature? Here are cosmic problems
for religion to solve. If a God exists, what is
the relationship of His life to mine? How do
His existence and His nature affect my life, de-
termine my conduct? What is the interaction
of Divine and human? Is the soul a direct
emanation from Him? Is there' soul substance,
or is the personality but tabula rasa, a blank
page, when the individual enters upon this
earthly life? Why, in a divinely ordered uni-
verse, does evil exist? These are personal, in-
dividual problems.
2 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
In spite of the apparent heterogeneity of re-
ligious problems, they may, in the last analysis,
all be resolved into one. Running between all
these apparently diversified inquiries of the hu-
man mind there is one causal thread. Whether
the speculative mind is searching the farthest
stars in order to come upon some satisfying
theory of cosmic order, or casting inquiring eyes
upon the diverse and apparently petty activities
of human life, individual and collective, the prob-
lem is in the main the same. It is the problem of
philosophy and psychology as well as of religion:
the problem of the adjustment of the ego to its
environment. The religious problem is specifi-
cally a problem of relationship. The individual,
thrown willy-nilly into a given environment, is
unhappy until he ascertains his own relations to
that environment; if there is maladjustment, he
would establish definite, effective relations with
his environment. The solution of the religious
problem is the perfect adjustment of the ego to
its environment, the immediate environment and
the cosmos.
Does a man seek to scale the highest heavens?
The object of his ambition is some satisfaction
for his personal life. Does he sound the depths
of the sea? Again, it is some personal satisfac-
tion that he seeks. Would he prove the exist-
ence of a God? It is for the sake of his own
life. If he seek the cause of evil, cosmic or hu-
man, it is because evil has impinged upon his
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM
3
own consciousness, it has fastened its fangs
upon him, and looking to "whatever gods there
be," he raises anguished eyes and mutely ques-
tions, Why?
Man would know the relationship between
his own and the cosmic life. If he fail to
find that such relationship exists, he feels that
somehow he is out of tune, he will in every case
endeavor to establish such relationship, strive
to resolve discord in harmony. This is the be-
ginning and the end of all religion.
1
INIU
1. The Problem in Primitive Religion
The man of advanced culture can scarcely
conceive of religion divorced from ethics; never-
theless it is a fact that the most primitive of re-
ligions are void of ethical content. The prim-
ordial is synonymous with the emotional; thus
the religion of the primitive is primarily emo-
tional, the volitional and the intellectual ele-
ments — upon which the ethical so largely de-
pends - seem to be entirely wanting. While
it is highly emotional, colored deeply with the
uncontrolled passions of the savage, primitive
religion has no ethical content because it man-
ifests no sense of internal, moral conflict. Be-
fore there can be a sense of sin, other and higher
forces must enter into human life than those of
which the primitive mind is aware.
From observation of the modern savage and
4 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
exploration into the Unconscious, we reach the
conclusion that the primitive life is never the
rationalized life. The primitive is conscious
only of blind desire: sex-desire, desire to kill
and eat, desire to fight and murder, to protect
personal property including wife and child. All
of these are but some form of sex-desire.
But primordial man likewise suffers fear. He
sees his fellow go down in battle, with the red
blood streaming from his wounds. He sees him
lying cold and stark who erst was pulsing with
life and energy. He views the thundering cata-
ract, the sharp lightning-stroke, the overwhelm-
ing waves of the sea that may swallow his frail
boat in an instant of time. He recognizes that
there are forces in nature stronger than his own
puny arm, mysterious forces that may deal out
death and destruction. And he fears. He spec-
ulates as to the nature of these mysterious de-
structive forces and creates a cosmology animis-
tic and anthropomorphic. He peoples woods
and hills, mountains and valleys, sea, and land,
and sky, with spirits, demons who wear human
form. These may be malignant or beneficent
as the whim seizes them. Man feels impelled to
propitiate these ruthless intelligences of which
his world is full. Hence arise the elaborate
systems of primitive religion with their fetish-
ism, taboo, propitiatory sacrifices, ceremonials,
feastings and ablutions. There is little or no
evidence in all this of a sense of sin, an inward
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM
5
Yi
conflict. No altruistic note is sounded; there is
no sense of obligation to a fellow man. In these
primitive systems there is revealed the con-
sciousness of but one desire: the desire of man
so to adjust himself to his environment as to live
in safety and security from the supernatural foes
that surround him. His religion is therefore
highly unethical.
He has indeed a sad time in this attempt at
adjustment. His gods are arbitrary to the last
degree. They may preserve or slay as they see
fit. They may accept or reject his offering ac-
cording to their mood. Jahveh accepts the sac-
rifice of Abel but rejects that of Cain for no os-
tensible reason save that he is an arbitrary and
jealous god. If the god is propitiated and is in
a kindly mood, he will assist his worshipper in
all his enterprises. He will enable him to slay
his enemy at a distance by bringing a pestilence
upon him. He will strike fear into the heart of
the enemy, so that he will run when no man
pursues. This god will protect and cherish his
own, but to the enemy he is an avenging fire.
But woe to the man or group that offends this
god. It were better for such a man that he had
never been born. The Children of Israel, a
complaining and petulant people from all ac-
counts, tire of their monotonous diet of manna.
They ask for quail; their desire is gratified, but
they have outraged an arbitrary and jealous god,
and they eat but to die. And so it happens, that
6
RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
a people will endeavor to escape the penalty of
their voluntary or inadvertent violation of the
canons of such a god. They will therefore de-
vise some means of turning his wrath away from
themselves to another creature. Hence the insti-
tution of human sacrifice in primitive religion.
They will give the god their most precious pos-
session: the first-born son, or a beautiful daugh-
ter, and his wrath will be appeased. As time
goes on, and they reach a higher state of culture,
this sacrifice will no longer be tolerable, and an
animal will be substituted. Thus the Jewish
priest lays the sins of the people upon the scape-
goat and the animal is thrust out into the
wilderness, bearing, with equanimity we trust,
the people's load of sin. I said, "sin,” but it is
noteworthy that in none of these cases is the sin
of an ethical nature. The people have inadvert-
ently and fortuitously outraged a jealous god.
They were conscious of no intentional wrong;
they were even ignorant of the cause of their
offence; nevertheless they suffer as grievously as
though they had wantonly disobeyed the divine
law. Even in the Garden of Eden, man com-
mitted no ethical wrong. He ate of the tree and
was punished, not because he had disobeyed, but
because Jahveh was jealous of his own powers
and as he declared to his peers, "Behold, the
man is become as one of us, to know good and
evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and
take also of the tree of life, and eat and live
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 7
forever, therefore Jahveh God sent him forth
from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground
from whence he was taken.” That is, Jahveh,
jealous of his own prerogatives, which man would
share, removes man from harm's way by driv-
ing him from the garden and giving him useful
employment. It is likewise noteworthy that the
serpent is the only one of the supernatural
dramatis personae who speaks the truth. His
prediction is verified: the man and woman have
eaten of the tree, they do not die as Jahveh has
threatened, but they do gain a knowledge of
good and evil and bid fair, unless thwarted, to
become even as Jahveh. There is not, then, in
this entire myth an ethical note from beginning
to end.
The myth is a primitive sex-myth. The
apple given by Eve to Adam (in some primitive
cosmologies this takes the form of a flower) is
the symbol of her virginity. The mutual eating
symbolizes the conjugal relation. In the Aztec
form of this myth, she presents him a rose, that
is, the flower of her virginity, which they smell
together. In dreams and myths, eating or smell-
ing can, by displacement, refer to the sexual act.
The gross literalness is thus idealized and ren-
dered less offensive.
1 Freud (Interpretation of Dreams, page 247): "Since bed and
board constitute marriage, the former are often put for the lat-
ter in the dream, and as far as practicable the sexual presenta-
tion complex is transposed to the eating complex.”
8 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Of especial significance is the serpent in this
myth. It is nothing more or less than the phal-
lus. Pfister says: “The phallic significance of
the serpent runs through wide stretches of re-
ligious history. Dieterich relates that in Greece
on certain feasts, a phallus or a serpent was
placed in a chest. The serpent cult of the ne-
groes of Haiti and Louisiana bears a phallic
character. . . . The mother of Augustus
dreamed that she was impregnated by Apollo
changed into the form of a serpent and has
borne since the figure of a serpent on her thigh."
(Psycho-analytic Method, pp. 286-287.)
Desire, in the form of a serpent or phallus,
disturbs the paradisiacal serenity of the Garden
of Eden. The conjugal act reveals to the primal
pair knowledge of "good and evil,” that is to
say, it awakens sex-consciousness. Eve is de-
flowered (note the obvious symbolism of the
Aztec form of the myth) through the instrumen-
tality of the phallus. Dreams of nervous pa-
tients are likely to be full of various sorts of
i Freud (loc. cit., p. 200 f.) points out the common occur-
rence of non-embarrassment dreams of nakedness. These he
interprets as the fulfilment of a wish to return to a childhood
state, they represent a regression. He remarks that children often
show exhibitional cravings, that they are elated at run-
ning about naked, rather than ashamed. He says: “This age
of childhood in which the sense of shame is lacking seems to our
later recollections a Paradise, and Paradise itself is nothing but
a composite phantasy from the childhood of the individual. It
is for this reason, too, that in Paradise human beings are naked
and are not ashamed until the moment arrives when the sense
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM
9
snakes, which are symbols of the thwarted love-
life of the patient. The repressed sex-instinct
of the individual comes to expression in this
symbolized form. Of this I shall speak further
in a later section of this book.
The common sex-origin of these primitive
myths explains their great similarity among
widely scattered peoples. Researchers vex them-
selves in vain when they strive to trace the trans-
mission of such myths from one nation to
another by some historical process: migration
of nomadic peoples, the wanderings of the chron-
icler from one nation to another, commercial
transactions between widely disseminated peo-
ples, and the like. The religion of Judaism
shows traces of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyp-
tian influences to be sure, but we need not vex
ourselves in the attempt to find a common his-
torical source for similar primitive myths and
cosmologies. They all arise from the individual
sex-life of primitive man (a view which I shall
elaborate later), and thus come into being
among remotely severed peoples quite indepen-
dently of historical transmission. The primitive
family group furnishes all the materials needed
of shame and fear are (sic) aroused; expulsion follows, and sex-
ual life and cultural development begin. Into this Paradise the
dream can take us back every night.” (Pp. 206-207.) Note
how closely the Hebrew myth follows this program: the naked-
ness without shame, the arousing of shame through the conjugal
act, the ineffectual attempt to prevent the all-seeing eye of Jah-
veh from discovering the nakedness.
10 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
for the formulation of the most elaborate of
these myths. And, as has been noted, these
myths have not much ethical import.
It is evident from examples which might be
multiplied without end, that primitive religion
originates in sex; it is a religion of externals: of
correct observance of taboo, of propitiatory sac-
rifice, and its objective is personal. So far from
being ethical or altruistic to any degree, its end
is self-satisfaction of the grosser sort and secur-
ity from evil supernatural forces.
2
2. The Problem in an Advanced State
of Culture
With the growth of a higher culture, a people
develops an ethical sense and with this sense a
definite conviction of sin. This time-worn
phrase, "conviction of sin,” signifies nothing
more nor less than a sense of inner conflict. The
basis of this conflict will be seen in this and suc-
ceeding chapters. It is unlikely that primitive
man ever feels himself a stranger in a strange
world. He may be more or less out of tune with
his environment, but he has no sense of “other-
worldliness"; he never feels that "heaven is his
home.” For him, the life to come is a world of
shadows; the real world is here. With such in-
tellectual effort as his limited powers are capa-
ble of, he may question the universe as to its
how and why, but only in relation to his own
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM II
material wants and their satisfaction. His ad-
justment to his environment is purely objective,
as we have seen. But with the growth of a finer
culture and a refinement of his wants, man be-
comes conscious of inner conflict.
The group life evolves to a higher plane, be-
comes more compact, makes increasing demands
upon the individual, and from the mass of
taboos, superstitions, myths, which constituted
primitive religion, a moral code slowly evolves
and brings pressure to bear upon him. His in-
dividual demands conflict with the demands of
the group life, a pressure effected by contiguity.
Meanwhile, man retains all of his primitive in-
stincts, but with this difference: whereas in the
savage state, instinct exists only to be satisfied,
in the more highly organized group life, for va-
rious social reasons, these instincts must be re-
pressed. Immediately a conflict ensues between
the demands of the individual and the code of
the group. Sex desire, the fighting instinct, are
not destroyed by this repression, they are sub-
merged in the Unconscious. At length they are
severed from conscious life and in the Uncon-
scious lead an autonomous life, whence they
emerge from time to time as emotional disturb-
ances.
Cut off from a man's thinking life, the primi-
tive constantly seeks expression and finds it not
through ideation but through emotion. The
more sharply repressed the primitive is, the
m
12 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
stronger the force with which it strives to emerge
from its subterranean prison. Hence arise the
various nervous ills of modern life, the psycho-
neuroses, hence the self-reproach and the "con-
viction of sin.” The very instincts upon which
his existence depends: sex-instinct that results
in promiscuity, the predatory instinct that leads
him to rob and kill his neighbor, the fear that
warns him of an enemy's approach to his arbo-
real retreat — these are inimical to the success-
ful development of the group- life. The stronger
the pressure of the group-spirit, the more severe
the conflict. A man, as Freud says, is thus fre-
quently forced to "live beyond his means," mor-
ally speaking; certain primitive instincts strive
within him for expression, but such expression
is contrary to the moral law of the society in
which he lives; this gives him a feeling of di-
vided personality, of inner stress and strain
(Sturm und Drang), he feels out of tune with
his environment and so suffers keen mental an-
guish — this is the conviction or sense of sin.
Freud has a different but interesting explana-
tion of the evolution of the sense of sin. He at-
tributes it to a survival of primitive "blood
guilt.” (Totem and Taboo, Chapter IV, and
Reflections on War and Death, page 50 f.) "If
the Son of God had to sacrifice his life to ab-
solve mankind from original sin, then, according
to the law of retaliation, the return of like for
like, this sin must have been an act of killing, a
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 13
murder. Nothing else could call for a life in
expiation. And if original sin was a sin against
God the Father, the oldest sin of mankind must
have been patricide — the killing of the primal
father of the primitive human horde, whose
memory picture later was transfigured into a
deity.”
This is interesting and ingenious, but there are
several objections which may be raised. In the
first place, although the lex talionis did demand
an "eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” in
primitive society, the death penalty was fre-
quently inflicted for crimes other than murder.
In the earliest form of the Jewish Torah, we find
that it is called for as a penalty for theft and
adultery as well as for murder. In a nomadic
state of existence, which is the earliest group-
life, there were no provisions for imprisonment;
instead of incarceration, therefore, the criminal
was killed as the most convenient method of
getting rid of him.
Again, it must be borne in mind that the prim-
itive evinces no sense of blood-guilt. To kill an
enemy is merely to rid oneself of his hated pres-
ence and quiet at a stroke all fear of his pursuing
enmity. It is doubtful whether the primitive
man was capable of a real sense of blood-guilt.
This would imply that he had a sense of inner
conflict. It is far more likely that his conflicts
were with foes without, not foes within, and that
once the enemy was slain, he thought no more
14 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
about the matter, save to take certain measures
that would effectively prevent his enemy's shade
returning to haunt him.
Ancient law is tribal, based on the preserva-
tion of the tribe, and has to do entirely with ex-
ternals. The blood of the murdered Abel is
said to have "cried from the ground.” But
Cain's wrath had invaded that most primitive
and most sacred of social groups, the family, and
he must be punished. He felt no "blood-guilt.”
The crying out of the spilled blood is to be taken
literally, for, as Frazer has demonstrated in his
Golden Bough, the primitive really believed that
the spirit of the slain dwelt in the blood and
that the blood cried out the name of the mur-
derer with a living voice. The folk-lore of all
nations has similar tales.
Freud has well pointed out that the desire to
kill our enemy persists in the Unconscious even
to-day, and cites the ill-humored jest, “Devil
take him," as proof, adding that it really means.
"Death take him,” which expresses a death-wish
of the Unconscious, grim and earnest. Of simi-
lar import is the popular soldier song:
Some day I'm going to murder the bugler,
Some day they're going to find him dead.
This is expressive of the resentment of the
Unconscious, irritated at being rudely aroused
from pleasant slumber by the notes of reveille.
From a great mass of accumulated evidence,
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 15
.
.
.
.
it is certain that the primitive survives in the Un-
conscious of the individual, and not alone the
Unconscious of the individual, for there are
many traces of it in the group life. It is well
known to modern psychology that dreams are an
upwelling of the primitive which finds expression
in more or less highly symbolized terms. It is
less well known that myths, which are the
dreams of the race, indicate the same survival
in the group life. There is the same sort of sym-
bolism, the same element of wish-fulfilment in
the myth as in the dream of the individual.
Certain myths are but the objectification or
projections of individual experience. Every one
who has analyzed the dreams of the individual
is aware of the true significance of these myths,
which bear a strong family likeness though they
may have originated among widely diversified
peoples in widely diversified times and places.
We are thus enabled to determine the inward
meaning of the universal flood myth, of which
variants are found from Babylonia to Scandi-
navia. Poetry and painting as well as literature
are full of such symbolism. That which was
literal in the life of the savage becomes symbo-
lized and refined in the life of civilized man.
Primitive religion reeks with phallic sym-
bolism. Modern religion retains the imagery and
refines the symbol. Those forms of modern re-
ligion which are richest in symbolism make the
widest appeal, because their appeal is to the
16 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
primitive. From this symbolism the Uncon-
scious obtains a sort of derived, if not perfect
and essential, satisfaction.
From the primitive desire to propitiate the
gods and thus ward off evil comes the central
dogma of Christianity, the dogma of the Atone-
ment. We have already seen how and why
modern man feels that he is "born in sin," how
his inner urge conflicts with the dicta of society,
which has erected a moral code for the perpetu-
ation of the race with racial experience as its
foundation. It therefore follows that as the
demands of society increase, man's difficulties
increase, until in a highly organized state of so-
ciety man will feel that the weight of his sins is
so great that only the sacrifice of a god can ex-
piate them.
Man does not attain to a high degree of cul-
ture without travail. The primitive man, the
“old Adam," constantly rises up to overwhelm
him. Primitive instinct will somehow find an
outlet. Thus the primitive instinct to propitiate
the gods becomes refined and symbolized in the
dogma of the Atonement.
This is not peculiar to the Christian religion.
The god Osiris of the Egyptians is slain and
forced to spend a part of the time in the under-
world; Dionysos is slain and his blood is infused
into the purple grape; Adonis dies and comes to
life in a flower; the god of Mithraism dies,
rises again and thus the sins of his followers are
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 17
expiated; Judaism had its sacrificial lamb,
whence comes the imagery of the Christian
dogma of the Atonement. The Jewish mind was
so overwhelmed with the sense of sin that the
Jewish founders of Christianity could conceive
of no sacrifice worthy to expiate their sin ex-
cept the sacrifice of God's First-born, the only
begotten son! Here indeed is a subversion of
the lex talionis, which demanded tooth for tooth
and eye for eye. A world has gone astray
through the first man's sin (which we saw in the
first chapter had no ethical significance what-
ever) and a god must die. Here, then, is the
origin of the Atonement in man's insatiable
craving to be right with his gods, to be adjusted
to the universe in which he lives.
Since the sex-instinct is the strongest of all
instincts, the one upon which the perpetuation
of the race depends, it is to be expected that re-
ligion should be full of idealized sex emotion.
The origins of modern religion are so far back
that their exploration would carry us into the
most remote reaches of antiquity and among
strange, primordial peoples. It is extremely
likely that all religion has a phallic origin.
Phallic symbols would naturally be the most
comprehensible symbols to the savage mind, and
symbols of creation, like creation myths, would
naturally take a phallic form. The rites of
1 Coriat: "All creation myths are really symbolizations of an
individual birth-process applied to cosmic birth-processes: e.g.,
the water is really the amnotic liquor." See page 148.
18 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
primitive religion are full of an obvious sex sym-
bolism. The law upon which Jesus founded his
gospel: love of God and fellowman, appears late
in man's religious development, and then as the
obvious and logical outgrowth of primitive sex
love. Though this feeling is refined and sub-
limated in the sophisticated life of civilized man,
there is no uncertainty as to its origin, and the
fact that the feeling is refined and sublimated
does not in the least invalidate the Freudian
claim for its sex origin.
A number of examples at once present them-
selves. The serpent of brass raised up by
Moses in the wilderness, the pillar before the
temple gate at Jerusalem, certain early Chris-
tian symbols: the fish, the Egyptian sign of life
transformed into the cross — all bespeak a phal-
lic origin. And just because they are of phallic
origin and so represent in symbolized form the
satisfaction of primitive desire, such symbols
have universal acceptance and are universally
efficacious in modern religious life.
The Christian may indignantly deny the phal-
lic origin of religion. He is conscious of no such
element in his own religion. Let him, however,
open-mindedly face the facts. Nothing is gained
by closing our minds to obvious truths; on the
other hand, nothing is lost to religion through a
resolute facing of well-authenticated facts.
i See page 8.
NATURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM 19
Even though religion have a primitive sex origin,
that is not necessarily all of religion.
If we but saw life in its true light, we should
realize that the things of sex are quite as whole-
some, quite as beautiful, as any other aspect of
life. It is the prurient mind that sees evil every-
where and it is a very pernicious kind of educa-
tion, the result of pruriency, which makes us
want to repress and ignore sex-instincts, hide
them from the light and deny their existence
and their influence upon life. It might be added
that if the Unconscious gets a derived satis-
faction from the ministrations of religion, at
least the individual is saved from falling into
the temptations of gross animalism.
Religion is primarily emotional and there-
fore is, in the broadest sense, of sex origin.
There is the rationalistic side of religion, but this
makes no appeal to people in general. This
aspect of religion is well left to the philosopher
and the theologian. The validity of religion for
the regeneration of human life lies not in its
power to convince, not in the cold blooded and
logical statement of dogma in which the in-
quirer is urged to believe; it does not lie at all in
the field of rationalized belief, but in the great
emotional upheavals of conversion and the rev-
erence for the Divine engendered through the
use of the universal symbol. Its good inheres
in man's emotional life through which it works
profound changes in his character and may, if
AD
20 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
intelligently applied, free him from his inner
conflicts and put him in tune with life. When
these conflicts are resolved, then the ethical na-
ture of religion appears, for then, and not until
then, is a man prepared to take his place in the
world as an efficient worker, a good neighbor,
and a good citizen in the society in which he
lives. Whatever happens, he must be freed
from his sense of sin.
The specific means by which this is consum-
mated will be left for ampler discussion in suc-
ceeding chapters.
II. THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE
RELIGIOUS LIFE
1. The Nature of the Unconscious
M AN walks through this life his footsteps
IV ever attended by an unseen companion.
This comrade of his waking and his sleeping
hours, like the Daemon of Socrates or the fa-
miliar of Mohammed which sat perched upon
his shoulder in the form of a dove, is forever
whispering momentous messages in his ear. It
is the Unconscious.
It has long been known to psychology that an
active psychic life goes on "subliminally," or be-
low the threshold of consciousness. Until very
recently, however, the true nature and function
of the Unconscious were little known. Certain
evidences of its activities in waking life were
all that we had. Every one has had the ex-
perience of having to make a momentous de-
cision or solve a difficult problem, and “sleep-
ing on it,” when, after some eight or nine hours
of sleep, the decision almost makes itself, or the
problem seems to solve itself. Some activity
has been at work which needed only the diver-
21
22 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
sion of our attention or rather a state of inatten-
tion (which sleep is said to be by modern psy-
chology), a state of passivity, in order to func-
tion and bring order out of chaos. We are
vaguely conscious that some inner force has been
at work. Again, we are conscious of vague
emotional disturbances that nothing in our out-
ward life, no external stimulus, seems to war-
rant. It is the Unconscious.
Within the last few years, by a variety of
technical procedures, the earliest of which is
hypnosis, the latest and most efficacious psycho-
analysis, the content of the Unconscious, has
been brought to light and its varied functions de-
termined. Other methods of tapping the Un-
conscious are by the use of ouija, planchette,
crystal-gazing, and automatic writing. These
have been successful to some degree, but the re-
sult has never been entirely satisfactory, for the
element of suggestion is likely to be too strong
and the resistance of the subject too great for
these methods to penetrate into the deeper re-
cess of the Unconscious.
The Unconscious is a repository of memories
and percepts, that is of experiences of the past,
with all their attendant emotions. It is a ver-
itable store-house of primitive emotions. In
the first chapter we saw how fear is perhaps the
first of man's emotions, since he feels himself
surrounded by enemies natural and supernatu-
ral. This primitive fear, which doubtless serves
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 23
a useful, protective purpose in primordial life,
persists in the Unconscious of civilized man,
where it seems to serve no purpose whatever.
Certain racial memories as well as the collective
experience of the individual are preserved in the
Unconscious. It never manifests itself to waking
consciousness as concept or idea except as it is
brought to light through some of the technical
means mentioned above. It does manifest itself
emotionally with tremendous and even over-
whelming force in our conscious life, and sym-
bolically in dreams, visions, reveries, and
hallucinations. "It is the realm of repressed
desires and wishes often carried over from early
childhood or even infancy. ... (Its) only
function is wishing or desiring.” (Coriat.).
This strange alter ego is responsible for our
desires, our prejudices, our loves, our hates. Who
has not had the experience of meeting a total
stranger and feeling a slight wave of repugnance
sweep over him? The feeling is unaccountable
so far as our conscious mental processes are con-
cerned. But, as a matter of fact, some uncon-
scious memory stored in the Unconscious, a
memory of a person or a circumstance unpleas-
ant to recall, is stirred, hence the faint wave of
dislike. Being deep-rooted in the Unconscious,
this familiar feeling has given rise to the tradi-
tion that first impressions are trustworthy. The
Unconscious has spoken and declared that we
are going to dislike this person. Every act,
24 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
thought, or mannerism of such a person is there-
fore likely to offend us, no matter how innocent
it may be, for these keep stirring the recollection
of the original person or event that made us un-
happy. Thus we fulfill the prophecy of our own
Unconscious.
The Unconscious is indolent and insatiable.
It has an aversion to the needful work we must
do, it would sleep and eat, it is Appetite, and
constantly demands that we cease from useful
work to appease it.
Nevertheless, it performs certain useful func-
tions. It determines the nature of our person-
ality, it is the foundation of character, it is the
subterranean part of the house of life, of which
conscious life is the super-structure. From per-
sonal experience, and the testimony of creative
artists: writers, musicians, painters, it would
seem that one of its functions is to absorb psy-
chic material, re-assemble it, and give it forth
in ordered, artistic form. The so-called “incu-
bation period” of a nuclear idea in which it
comes to full development is the period during
which the Unconscious is at work upon it. All
inspiration, so-called, rises from the Uncon-
scious.
It is of far greater extent, if one may speak
of it spatially, than waking consciousness. It
is unlikely that any memory of a lifetime, in-
cluding the earliest years, ever escapes it.
Janet and Charcot in France, Freud in Vienna,
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 25
William James, Morton Prince, and Joseph
Jastrow in America, have been pioneers in this
vast and interesting field. It was as long ago as
1881 that Freud and his associate, Breuer, dis-
covered that a hysterical patient obtained no
relief from her malady through the customary
methods of psycho-therapy until certain facts of
her case, which had not been related because
they were not accessible to her waking conscious-
ness, were brought to light by a method which
afterward was elaborated into the modern psy-
cho-analytic treatment. Janet and Charcot
made the same discovery through hypnotic
methods. Morton Prince, in his treatment of
disassociated personalities, explored the field of
the Unconscious and has contributed some valu-
able information on the subject. Joseph Jas-
trow's book, The Subconscious, while it is not
strictly up-to-date, is interesting reading and
throws light on the nature and function of the
Unconscious.
It is therefore well established that such a
psychic life exists in both normal and abnormal
individuals. James went so far as to claim that
the Unconscious of every individual is a bay or
inlet from a vast sea of consciousness, which
embraces the subliminal psychic life of all in-
dividuals, and from the waters of which we
draw at pleasure. The psychic series of waking
life, he claimed, are like the crests of waves of
the sea, apparently disconnected on the surface,
26 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
but connected in one logical sequence beneath
the surface. This would bear out Emerson's
and Browning's contention that the seeming dis-
continuity of life is due to our lack of grasp of
the whole. Prince (The Unconscious, page 21)
speaks of a patient who in a hypnotic state
claimed to be in a mental world wherein is to
be found "not only everything that has ever
happened or will happen, but all thoughts,
dreams, imaginations.” Patients as they go
under the influence of an anaesthetic report a
feeling of an enlarged field of consciousness, as
if their consciousness widened until it grasped
the universe. This, of course, is due to a dis-
persion of attention, to a loss of focus, compa-
rable to that of a day-dream; the patient actu-
ally has less grasp of reality, rather than more,
his attention is not increased but diffused, and
his faculties are soon entirely dispersed in a deep
sleep, far deeper than normal. This theory of
James therefore remains to be proved. The
Unconscious is fantastic enough in its varied
manifestations without recourse to metaphysics.
In the Unconscious inheres what Freud calls
the "complex.” The term would naturally de-
note a combination of things. It is used by
Freud to signify "an idea around which emo-
tions are grouped and in which they center.”
It might be compared to a snow-ball rolling
down hill. It not only gathers momentum as it
rolls, but it catches up more snow, pebbles, twigs,
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
27
as it rolls, until, if only the slope be long enough,
it will become an avalanche, catching up trees,
houses, villages, and hurling them to destruc-
tion. The complex has its beginning in very
early life, so early that its beginning escapes
conscious memory. It may start from some
event of an unpleasant nature; it is mostly due
to fixations which are never broken up. It is not
always evil. All psychic life develops through
some complex. The avaricious person has a
“money complex.” Freud speaks of a "pro-
fession complex,” which makes a man jealous
for his own success in his profession. There are
so-called "habit complexes,” by which a man
learns to sink the technique of, let us say, the
machinist or the pianist, into the mechanical,
leaving his mind free for the more delicate de-
tails of his work, or the interpretative side of
music. A complex is really what may be termed
a constellation; it is like stars that group them-
selves together; in this constellation we group
ideas and give them an emotional tinge. As we
shall see later, a complex will gather to itself
any new ideas which come into consciousness
and give them its own emotional tinge. The
shade of emotion which any new idea takes on
is due to some complex. Life, as we shall see
in the chapter on the “Motivation of Human
Life," is complex-ruled.
Now there are in our psychic life what have
been called “fixations.” The child fixes its love
28 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
upon its mother, but in the earliest years only
as a means of gratifying its appetite. It derives
nourishment from her; she tends it, puts it to
bed, feeds it. She is its first love. Thus the
earliest object of its love is its mother. This is
perfectly normal in the child; but when it
reaches the age of puberty, its love should be
turned away from the mother to the world with-
out. So long as its love is fixed entirely upon
the mother, it is selfish, egocentric.
From such a fixation of love upon one or the
other parent which persists beyond the earliest
childhood, proceeds the most vicious complex
which the new psychology has so far discovered.
That is the Edipus-complex. The neuroses, or
nervous ills, are due to some vicious complex.
The most fruitful in this respect is the Edipus-
complex, founded upon the Edipus-myth.
dipus was the son of Laius, king of Thebes,
and Jocasta. An oracle informed his father that
his son, still unborn, would be his murderer.
Thereupon the father planned his destruction.
He was, however, rescued and was brought up at
a foreign court as the king's son. Being in doubt
as to his origin, he consulted an oracle, and was
told to avoid his native place, for he was des-
tined to become the murderer of his father and
the husband of his mother. He met King Laius,
his father, on the road leading away from his
supposed home and killed him in a sudden quar-
rel. He came to the gates of Thebes, where he
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
29
solved the riddle of the Sphinx and was elected
king by the Thebans and given the hand of Jo-
casta, his mother, as a reward. All seemed to
go well for some years, until finally a plague
broke out. Again the oracle was consulted and
it answered that when the murderer of Laius was
discovered and driven from the country, the
plague would cease. It transpired that Edipus
was the murderer and that he was the son of the
murdered man, therefore the son of Jocasta, by
whom he had had two sons and two daughters.
Thus the oracle was fulfilled: he was the mur-
derer of his father and had become the husband
of his mother by whom he had children. (Edi-
pus then put out his own eyes and wandered
forth from his native place, for the oracle had
been fulfilled. Sophocles wrought this legend
into one of the most moving tragedies ever
written.
When the fixation of infantile love upon the
mother, a perfectly normal thing in early child-
hood, persists into youth and maturity, it be-
comes a vicious complex. The complex is
normal in infancy, abnormal afterward. This
Freud has called the “Edipus-complex.” If
the fixation persists, the individual is inhibited
in his normal love-life, and is almost certain to
develop some neurosis in the struggle that en-
sues between the demands of society and the
inner urge of his bad complex. When the fixa-
tion of the male child is reversed, and we have a
30 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
fixation of the female child upon the father, we
have the so-called Electra-complex which is just
a reversal of the Edipus-complex. Freud goes
so far as to claim that all neuroses in the male
are due to some form of the Edipus-complex.
There is nothing essentially abnormal about
such a complex in itself. The abnormality con-
sists in the retention of it beyond early child-
hood. The normal individual breaks away from
his infantile fixations and fixes his love
upon some individual of the opposite sex in the
outer world. But the victim of the Edipus-
complex cannot love normally. He becomes
"introverted,” his love-life is directed to his
mother or to her image in his mind, and he is
prevented from loving any other. This often
results in auto-eroticism, self-love, a very vicious
thing. The fixation, then, results in a repression
of the normal sex-craving. At first glance, this
might not seem so disastrous, inasmuch as the
sex-feeling is over-developed in some individu-
als, and in others it can never come to expression
all their life long. However, the worst aspect
of it is that the instinct is not in such cases
destroyed or atrophied, it is merely repressed
into the Unconscious by stern and unremitting
effort, whence it forces its way to expression
along some path other than normal. From this
repression and the consequent explosions arise
the neuroses, the hysterias, homoeroticism' and
1 Homoeroticism (homosexuality), or love for the same sex,
will be explained in a later chapter.
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
31
certain of the psychoses. Great unhappiness,
deep despair, is the result.
Moreover, and this seems one of the saddest
phases of the whole problem, when the energy
generated by sex-instinct is violently repressed,
all other energy is repressed, and the individual,
incapable, enervated, listless, depressed he
knows not why, lives far below his normal level
of energy and usefulness. He is unfitted for
society, unfitted to do his life-work and fight
his life's battles. This is because his energy is
dissipated by a needless and futile unconscious
inner conflict. How he may resolve this conflict
must be left for discussion in a later chapter.
How widespread traces of neurotic taint are,
no one can realize until his eyes are opened. It
is safe to say that nine persons out of ten are not
living up to the level of their full capacity nor
directing all their available energy toward social
ends, that not one in ten tastes life's beaker
brimming full. Some inner conflict inhibits the
full use of their powers.
What an interesting side-light is thrown upon
religion by our knowledge of the Unconscious!
Religion, as I have said, is primarily emotional
rather than intellectual or volitional. Inasmuch
as our emotional life inheres in the Unconscious,
it is readily seen that the Unconscious must play
an important rôle in the formation of religious
ideals, the development of religious thought, the
construction of religious systems. It has been
32 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
cynically remarked that the German Reforma-
tion was started because the monk Luther fell
in love with a nun. This of course is but ill-
humored jest, nevertheless these emotions which
are the very basis of human life have played a
large part in the determination of the world's
thought in Religion.
2. The Influence of the Unconscious on
Religious Ideals
The neurologist is well aware that the object
of every neurosis is a flight from reality. The
neurotic finds reality too harsh to bear, and
actually takes refuge in a serious nervous ill-
ness in which he creates a world to suit his own
fancy. A patient suffering from a heavy neuro-
sis remarked to me, "The whole world seems un-
real to me, it is a dream-world, a world of shad-
ows. Reality is in the world to come.” This
shut-in tendency is characteristic of the neu-
roses, certain of the psychoses, and a like trend
of thought is to be observed in religious systems.
When this "other-worldliness" permeates a so-
cial group, it gives rise to a new religious move-
ment. The more harsh and stern the real world
in which the religious devotee dwells, the
brighter and more perfect the heavenly kingdom,
the world of his fancy.
The Christian religion had its rise under hard
i Called by the new psychology "introversion.”
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 33
conditions in a nation which had long lost its
autonomy. The little nation of Israel had,
in the time of Jesus, become but an insignificant
part of the great Graeco-Roman world, a small
Roman province with a Roman governor. Its
people suffered from violent repression of all
national ambition and ideals. All was lost save
their sense of nationality, their pride of race. To
be sure, there was a religio-political body which
had nominal authority, the Sanhedrim, entirely
Jewish in its constituency. But the trial of
Jesus, with its tragic conclusion under Pontius
Pilate, illustrates the futility of the Sanhedrim's
attempts to exercise political authority. That
such a body had any real power was merely a
convention, a convenient fiction by which an
oppressed and miserable people could be kept
tolerably contented and satisfied.
Here, then, was this oppressed people, help-
less, defeated in their national ambitions and
purposes, powerless to realize their national
ideals, with little hope in the present. For many
years prior to the life of Jesus they had been
looking for adventitious aid. Some time in the
future, God would set up a heavenly kingdom,
a New Jerusalem upon earth, with a Messiah as
its priest-king. (This, of course, was an earthly
Paradise which was merely a projection of their
own wishes.) The temple service would be re-
stored in all its traditional magnificence and
splendor; peace and prosperity would supersede
34 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
misery and want. The chosen people, the Jews,
would dwell in this heavenly city, feasting and
rejoicing, under the beneficent rule of their Mes-
siah, bathed in a light that never shone on sea or
land.
Here we have a group-wish exactly analogous
to the individual's neurotic desire to escape from
the objective world into a self-created kingdom.
The dream of an individual is a wish-fulfilment;
the New Jerusalem of Jewish apocalyptic litera-
ture is the dream, the wish-fulfilment of a whole
people.
We are here taken into the region of myth,
which, as Freud and Abraham (Dreams and
Myths) have clearly demonstrated, represents
the dream-life of the race, with all the charac-
teristics of heightened existence, idealized con-
ditions, and the element of wish-fulfilment
strongly emphasized.
Such was the condition, such were the dreams
of the Jewish people when Christianity was
born. Jesus, except for certain Masochistic or
self-abasement tendencies, seems to have been
free from neurosis. He advocated the setting
free of the love-life which the religion of
Judaism had repressed. He advocated the
ethical application of the Gospel of love in man's
every-day life. His Gospel was one of expres-
sion, not repression.
Hardly was this Gospel proclaimed, when its
stream was mingled with the apocalyptic
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 35
idealism of the Jewish race. Hardly was Jesus
dead, when the new-born Christian movement
became a little, provincial Jewish sect in Jeru-
salem with James, his brother, as its leader,
which insisted upon circumcision as a condition
of membership! All the old repressions were
again in force.
And now a new figure appears upon the scene
and his appearance is portentous. It is Paul, the
Jewish tent-maker, trained in Rabbinical schools
and the philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world.
Like so many theologians, past and present, Paul
is the victim of a heavy neurosis. It is his “thorn
in the flesh.” His own love-life is violently re-
pressed. He is embittered with life because he
cannot fulfill the law of the flesh; he seeks to
compensate by strict observance of the Jewish
ecclesiastical law; he is seeking outlet for vio-
lently repressed emotion. He is sadistic, derives
pleasure from the suffering of others. On no
other theory can the personality of Paul be
understood. Paul becomes the protagonist of
orthodox Judaism which is assailed by this new
sect of Christians; he looks on with lustful
pleasure while the youthful Stephen is stoned.
“As a Jew,” says Oskar Pfister (pages 462–
463, the Psycho-analytic Method), “(Paul)
suffers from an anxiety-neurosis because he can-
not fulfill the 'law of the flesh' or the ‘law in the
members' according to the law of the spirit. So
much the more fanatically does he hold to the
36 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
‘Law of Moses' (obsessional neurotic displace-
ment). He hates Christ because the latter re-
places the law by the free demands of love, and
therewith disturbs the complex-need, the cere-
monialism and orthodoxy."
Paul is the victim of hysterical hallucinations.
He has been termed an epileptic; he exhibits
much more clearly the symptoms of an anxiety-
hysteria. As he proceeds upon the road to Dam-
ascus with authority from the high-priest to
persecute the hated Christians, he suffers an in-
tense anxiety-attack: there is a sudden welling-
up of repressed emotion, there is a vision, a
bright light and a voice (visual and auditory
hallucinations). This is coincident with a “fall-
ing” and is immediately followed by hysterical
blindness. He has refused to see the truth of
the Gospel of Jesus, therefore, his Unconscious
declares, he shall see nothing. Henceforth, by
1 In Acts 9:1f. we read: “But Saul yet breathing threatening
and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord, went unto the
high-priest and asked of him letters to Damascus,” etc. It is
evident that Paul came almost immediately from the stoning of
the young Stephen, where he had been an interested, if horrified,
onlooker. All his sadistic passions were doubtless roused by the
sight. But doubtless, likewise, he was horrified at this cruel,
bloody death. He wanted to see no more. When, therefore, there
was the great uprush of hysterical emotion as he proceeded
along the Damascus road, there was a great revulsion of feeling.
Paul desired to shut out from consciousness the sight of the
dying Stephen, "falling asleep” with words of forgiveness upon
his lips. Doubtless he thought, “Would that I had never seen the
sight!" He violently repressed the memory; he refused to see
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
37
the principle of ambivalence, the law of op-
posites, by which an emotion is turned into one
of opposing character, Paul is masochistic
whereas before he was strongly sadistic. Hence-
forth he will transfer to his own person the
cruelties which before he inflicted upon others.
Only thus can we understand the endurance of
his later life.
Pfister considers that in the emotional ca-
tharsis of the significant event on the Damascus
road, Paul “abreacted” (a term used by Freud
for getting rid of painful emotional matter by
bringing it into consciousness and re-living it)
and freed himself from the repression caused by
his complex (undoubtedly the Edipus-com-
plex), and that thereafter Paul was a free man.
This is improbable in view of his later teachings.
To the end of his life he is opposed to the normal
love-life, advises that his followers refrain from
marriage, since marriage means yielding to the
"lusts of the flesh,” evinces an abnormal attitude
it. By the well-known mechanism that causes hysterical blind-
ness, his wish was fulfilled. He not only ceased to see the painful
spectacle in which he had taken so active a part, but he ceased
to see anything. Coriat says (Abnormal Psychology, Second
Edition, page 308): "Hysterical blindness may also occur, usu-
ally appearing and disappearing suddenly. In all these hysterical
disturbances of sight the optic nerve is found to be absolutely
normal. ..." Pfister reports in his Psycho-analytic Method
cases of greatly dimmed vision. Wilfrid Lay (Man's Uncon-
scious Conflict, page 222) reports the case of a man who hated
his wife and suffered from hysterical blindness, a kind of re-
fusal to see her which became a general refusal to see anything.
2
38 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
toward woman, in that he advises her to be in
subjection to man, to keep silent in the churches
and to appear with head (that is, face) covered
in Christian assemblage.
It was the Gospel of Paul, not the Gospel of
Jesus, which finally conquered the Mediter-
ranean world. Upon this Gospel and the
Johannine ideal modern Christianity is founded,
with all of its Puritanical ideals, its ignoring of
sex, its “subduing of the flesh," the repression
of natural instinct, the attention diverted from
the world of present-day reality to the unknown
future when the saints shall inherit houses not
made with hands.
This Gospel spread rapidly through the sub-
merged classes of the Mediterranean world; it
was a "slaves' religion” which held out hopes to
a class who had no hope in the present, of better
things to come in the life beyond death. By fo-
cussing their attention upon the Heavenly King-
dom, it made them content to endure their
dreary earthly life with toleration and some
equanimity, if not with satisfaction.
The neurotic symptoms of Paul are to be
noted in the collective ideals and life of early
Christendom. There is, for instance, a strong
masochistic element which has survived even to
this day. The Roman Christians were not only
willing and ready for martyrdom for the sake of
their belief, they actually courted it, partly, at
least, for the masochistic pleasure they derived
lasa
NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
39
from suffering, and partly as a means of quick
deliverance from the intolerable present into a
glowing land of the future where they were to
receive their reward.
Christianity has ignored the sex question ex-
cept in so far as it condemns the satisfaction of
natural instinct -- this is Christianity's legiti-
mate inheritance from the neurotic Paul. To
the extent that it has followed his teaching, it
has upheld an emasculate, ascetic ideal, an ideal
of unsexed sainthood rather than an ideal of
social usefulness. The resulting repression, as
we have seen, has militated against the highest
social efficiency, for it impairs human energy.
Until recently, at least (see chapter on "The
Changing Basis of Religion” for the other side
of the picture), withdrawal from a harsh and
cruel world which slew its saints and prophets
and despitefully used those whose feet were set
in the Way was the set purpose and most con-
vincing evidence of perfect, though persecuted,
sainthood. Those Christians who have been
condemned by circumstances to be in the world,
have always taken a certain Pharisaic pride in
the fact that they are not of the world. Again,
the heritage of Paul.
The further we look into the matter, the more
we see the prominent rôle that the Unconscious,
especially in certain abnormal activities, has
played in religion and especially the Christian
religion. Here is the sequence: first, a Jesus
40 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
1
seeking to free men from the evil restrictions
and vicious repressions of Pharisaic, formalistic
religion; then a Paul, with heavy neurotic taint,
restoring the Pharisaic mode of life and impos-
ing new restrictions even while he sought to
preach the freedom of the Christian Gospel;
then, a whole people with face averted from the
present where their work and their life-interests
lay, and turned toward the Heavenly City
through whose portals they hoped soon to pass;
finally, this neurotic, unnatural, morbid ideal
pursuing generation after generation even down
to the present day.
In succeeding chapters we shall trace the
course of neuroses and hysterias in certain re-
ligious movements and certain religious types.
As preparation for such discussion, however, it
is well to look into the unconscious motivation
of human life.
III. THE MOTIVATION OF
HUMAN LIFE
ATO man ever acts or can act from entirely
IV unmixed and disinterested motives. Our
altruistic feelings and selfless deeds are bound
in the very nature of things to have some ele-
ment of the purely personal and individual; the
lofty thoughts of the generous lover of man-
kind, the deeds of greatest heroism, are subject
in some measure to the "pleasure-pain reac-
tion”; they are determined to some degree by
their effect upon our own lives. Were a man to
rise entirely above this plane he would be more
than human; even Jesus cried out in a moment
of agony, “My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me?” We must give the Hedonistic
philosophers a qualified approval; they are
partly right; their fault lies in their extrava-
gance, in their inordinate claims that all men
act always from none but selfish motives.
We may indignantly deny that all our deeds
have some admixture of selfish motive, espe-
cially if we are socially minded. This is not
surprising, for the selfish element in unselfish
acts lies not in the Conscious, but in the Uncon-
scious, which is a veritable vortex of selfish
impulse.
41
42 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Let us see how this unconscious motivation
works out in human life, how it is manifested in
symptomatic acts of every-day and in dreams
at night. When a subject is hypnotized and told
that at a certain hour, it may be as late as the
following day, when he has regained his waking
consciousness, he will perform a given act, but
will forget the suggestion of the hypnotist, it
invariably happens that he carries out the sug-
gestion; when asked why he did this, he will not
reply that he was told to do it and is carrying
out the suggestion of another, but will give some
ratior al pretext. A teacher was told during
hypnotic trance that at a certain hour she would
remove a wooden cone from her desk and place
it upon the flat top of the school-room stove.
She did so, but when asked her reason for this
somewhat unusual act, replied that the cone was
in her way and that she needed her desk cleared
for certain papers which she wished to examine.
It is quite likely that all of our acts are thus
unconsciously as well as consciously motivated.
The Unconscious assists us in all our decisions
from the slight and apparently petty acts of
every-day to those momentous decisions that
decide a life-career. Thus, many a man has
gone on the stage or into some similar profession
where he will be in the limelight because there
remains in his Unconscious a remnant of that
childish “exhibitionism” which every individual
manifests at some time in his early life, this in-
1
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 43
fantile desire to show himself before the public.
Every one has had dreams of being unclothed
in public, and the significant aspect of the
matter is that he felt no concern, often it is
rather a feeling of elation. The Arabian Nights
has a folk-tale of a prince who was caught up
by a genie and set down before the gate of a
distant city in his night attire. The little symp-
tomatic acts of every-day life are full of such
unconscious motivation. One morning I was
thinking of some acquaintances who were os-
tentatious, empty-headed, and purse-proud.
Soon afterward a bit of music began singing
itself through my consciousness. At first I was
at a loss to identify it; then I recognized it as
the final movement of Sir Edward Elgar's
march, "Pomp and Circumstance," a composi-
tion which the composer admitted to be some-
what empty and pretentious, and which had not
come to mind in some years. Afterward, when
I endeavored consciously to recall this bit, it
eluded me and does to this day.
Giving a logical pretext for the unconsciously
motivated act is called "rationalization.” To
satisfy its craving for the limelight, the Uncon-
scious will go to great extremes. However, the
real unconscious motive for acts that reveal a
desire for esteem could not be divulged to our
fellows, it would appear too puerile; hence we
must furnish some altruistic or at least rational
reason for our acts. A man may not even be
44 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
conscious that he desires to be considered su-
perior to his fellows or even desires to feel that
way, but in his Unconscious this is one of his
strongest cravings. Let us state it conversely:
no one is so unhappy as he who is consistently
and completely ignored by his fellow men. The
adolescent girl, just waking to the meaning of
life, just beginning to grow socially minded,
craving companionship and affectionate notice,
is, on account of some personal defect - phys-
ical plainness or lack of personal charm -- rele-
gated to the background. Perhaps a more
attractive sister claims the attention of youthful
admirers. At once the young girl is desperately
unhappy. Her Unconscious is thwarted in its
deepest desire. So with men in business or in
politics; some men will go to any lengths to be
"in the public eye,” so strong and insatiable is
this craving. In greater or less degree, we all
long for attention and admiration. A certain
amount is necessary for our well-being and hap-
piness. It furnishes a stimulus for activity. To
withdraw utterly from the world and live in se-
clusion is one of the greatest hardships man can
endure, compensated for only by the fact that
he is thus enabled to do some useful work in
seclusion or that it gives him opportunity to
build up an autistic world of his own.
There is no particular harm in this mixed
motivation in human life except where it leads
men to trample upon other lives in order to suc-
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 45
ceed. The esteem in which a man is held who
has made a definite and valuable contribution
to human knowledge, or has striven in any social
activity to make the world better, is the just
meed of his struggle and privation. But it is
well for men to be conscious of this mixed
motivation; it is well for them to face facts
rather than to live in a world of convenient self-
deception. A short auto-analysis will often re-
veal to a man the origin of his motives.
As an example of the self-deception practiced
from unconscious motives, we might cite the in-
dividual who "enjoys ill health.” He thinks he
suffers, and no doubt he does, but day and night
he is dinning in the ears of unwilling listeners
the story of his sufferings. He takes keen pleas-
ure in this recital, oft-repeated, for it lends him
a certain distinction. He has a rare disease,
chronic and incurable; ten eminent physicians
have worked on his case without result; he has
spent thousands of dollars and obtained no re-
lief. He is thus set apart from his fellows, he
is a rara avis and by this means gains a distinc-
tion he would otherwise lack. He does not
realize that he derives pleasure from his own
unhappiness and suffering. This trivial ex-
ample illustrates a common trait, namely, "com-
pensation.”
We have a proverb, "to make a virtue of
necessity.” The Unconscious, wherever there
is physical weakness or psychic disability, will
46 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
ON-
strive to compensate for it in another direction,
or even to enthrone that very weakness as a
virtue. The conversation of children aptly il-
lustrates this sort of compensation. One boy is
stronger than another and comes off victorious
in a hand-to-hand struggle. “Never mind,"
says the defeated boy, "my father can whip
your father," or, "My father is richer than your
father,” or, "My father knows everything."
This trait is most clearly seen in children; in
adult life it is covered with a decent cloak of
social tact.
Nevertheless, the trait persists; the Uncon-
scious will not tolerate a feeling of inferiority;
in every life there is a strong tendency to com-
pensate for any sort of weakness. Napoleon
Buonaparte was a man of short stature with
some neurotic or epileptic weakness. He com-
pensated for this weakness by laying plans to
conquer the world. Julius Caesar was a slight
man, "with a weak voice," also subject to some
physical or psychic disability. He, too, became
a conqueror. We have already noted Paul's
neurosis and his endeavors at compensation.
The man who through physical weakness can-
not excell in physical contests, hies him to his
books and seeks to excell in scholarship. A man
who lacks commanding personality will strive to
become wealthy or famous to impress his fellows
and satisfy his unconscious craving for whole-
ness or normality.
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 47
The individual thus succeeds through com-
pensation for his weaker qualities; not merely
in spite of them, but actually because of them.
They become a goad that continually spurs him
on to fresh effort. They arouse his latent
courage, put him on his mettle, drive him to
accomplishment.
Dr. Alfred Adler of Vienna has developed
this theory interestingly and convincingly. Ac-
cording to him, the neurosis invariably arises
not from repression, but from a feeling of or-
ganic inferiority. Organs of sight, or hearing,
sex-organs, digestive apparatus, all play a part
in the origin and development of the neurosis,
if they have some inherent weakness. The neu-
rosis represents the attempt of the patient to
reach some goal which he has (unconsciously) in
mind. He observes himself, and comes to a re-
alization that he is not up to normal standards
in some (physical) respect. And he is driven by
this consciousness to become a whole man. As
Adler says, “The case of the neurotic might be
represented by some such formula as this, 'I am
not a man' (i.e., a whole, normal man), but
I will be a man.'” In cases of homo-eroticism,
the patient says to himself, "I have a feminine
figure; I have feminine desires, nevertheless I
must become a man." The neurosis is the
struggle to attain full-fledged manhood. The
patient sets up for himself a "fictitious” or un-
real goal, toward which he purposes to work
48 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
until it is attained. This goal is often ridiculous;
nevertheless he is driven to attain it. It is often
futile enough. If he worked toward a real goal,
something that would be of social usefulness, it
would not be so bad, but his goal is an impos-
sible, vague, and useless thing. If attained, it
would benefit no one. Here we have the reason
for the over-weening ambition and cruel egotism
of the neurotic. He must attain his impossible
goal at all costs. “The whole (clinical) picture
of the sexual-neurosis,” says Adler, “is an al-
legory in which is reflected the distance of the
patient from his fictitious masculine end-motive,
and demonstrates how he seeks to overcome this
distance." (Ueber den Nervösen Charakter,
page 5.) “The character traits, especially the
neurotic ones, serve as psychic means and forms
of expression for bringing about the guidance of
the life opinions, acquiring a place, gaining a
fixed point in the fluctuations of existence, in
order to attain the final goal, the feeling of su-
periority.” (Ibid p. 8.) With Pfister, I am
inclined to think that Adler attributes too much
significance to this feeling of inferiority and its
influence on the neurosis. It is doubtless a con-
tributing cause of many neuroses and often a
weighty influence. His theories are to be re-
garded as elaborating rather than contradicting
those of Freud, and for the practical psycho-
analyst may be utilized in conjunction with
those of Freud. Neuroses may originate from
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 49
many and varied causes of which organic in-
feriority is doubtless one and an important one,
but there are many neuroses which do not seem
at all to root in such inferiority. We shall cling
to the idea that fixation and repression are the
fundamental cause. Of greater value for the
physician, I believe, are Adler's deductions from
internal secretions, which play so large a part in
metabolism. The study of these and their effect
upon physical and psychic life is still in its in-
fancy. A discussion of this matter of course
belongs to the realm of medicine and therefore
we cannot discuss it here.
Let us turn to a consideration of the mechan-
ism by which human life is motivated. How
does the Unconscious accomplish the results we
have noted? Through the complex. We have
previously seen how human life is complex-
ruled. The human personality is an elusive
thing, difficult to comprehend, difficult to ap-
praise in another, because we have not the same
complex as he. The complex determines our
lives and our outlook upon life. Every man,
unless his philosophical training leads him to
take a contrary view, believes that he sees life
as it is, that he apprehends Reality immediately
and completely, that he sees truth clear and
whole. He cannot be convinced of the contrary.
Yet every human being has in reality his own
individual point of view, he sees life refracted
through the prism of his own personality, his
50 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
own volitions, his own emotions, in a word life
is colored by his complexes, therefore by the
Unconscious. A certain emotion has been
aroused in his earliest childhood by a certain
act or idea, a certain experience, and in this
other ideas and emotions become "constel-
lated”; this, with its accretions, forms a complex
which, unless it be broken up by a peculiar train
of circumstances, an emotional upheaval, or
some psycho-therapeutic method, will rule his
thought and his acts all his life long.
We are as much at the mercy of these com-
plexes as the negro slave was at the mercy of
his white master in the South of ante-bellum
days. Some writers consider the complex a
symptom of an abnormal psychic state; others,
while they admit it as a factor in the normal in-
dividual's psychic life, hold that it is always suf-
fused with unpleasant emotion. Wilfrid Lay, in
his book, Man's Unconscious Conflict, states
that "Complex is the name given by psycho-
analysis to an idea or group of ideas with which
is associated a tone of unpleasant feeling which
keeps or tends to keep the complex out of Con-
sciousness.” (Page 112.) I am not in agree-
ment with this, for the complex may be associ-
ated with pleasant feeling, and unpleasant
feelings may be aroused only when the complex
is touched in a sensitive spot. Thus, Freud
speaks of a "profession complex,” which tends
to make men a little jealous of colleagues who
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 51
outstrip them in their profession. There is a
feeling of pride and approval associated with the
"profession complex” unless something occurs
to arouse resentment. The complex-feelings
may be exceedingly pleasant but abnormal; they
may be both pleasant and normal. Dr. I. H.
Coriat (Abnormal Psychology, page 36) states,
"All complexes are not abnormal . . . for the
formation of normal complexes forms the basis
of all our educational processes. Habits and
highly skilled movements are complexes which
are the result of frequent repetition.”
These complexes, then, affect and determine
a man's philosophy of life, his conduct, and his
religious views. Our interest in the complex for
the moment lies in its influence upon the reli-
gious life. The Edipus-complex, which I have
described at some length in a previous chapter,
and which the reader may study at his leisure
in any of the Freudian literature (Freud's In-
terpretation of Dreams, page 222; Coriat:
What is Psycho-analysis? page 43; Adler: The
Edipus Complex in the Psychoneuroses; Lay:
Man's Unconscious Conflict, pages 18—37), is
the most common of all complexes and must
bear the blame for most of the neuroses. For
one reason or another, hatred and fear of the
father are aroused in the plastic child-mind.
This hatred becomes an obsession, to speak in
popular terms, but is repressed into the Uncon-
scious where it is the nucleus of a vicious com-
52 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
plex. As God is the universal Father of man-
kind, this hatred of the human father, or of the
father-image as certain later disciples of Freud
prefer to term it, is transferred to the Deity, and
religious doubt, agnosticism, or even atheism is
engendered in the sufferer's mind. A deeply
religious man who suffered from the Edipus-
complex never addressed the Deity in his
prayers in terms of fatherhood, nor could he
bear to think of God in that capacity. He ad-
dressed Him as “Great spirit, in whom our lives
inhere," "Creator of all things,” “Thou who
dost rule the universe," and like expressions.
Not until his complex was broken up through
psycho-analytic treatment could he bring him-
self without repugnance to address the Deity
as "Our Heavenly Father,” the term most fre-
quently used in prayer and most satisfying to
the majority of persons. His complex had en-
gendered strong doubts as to the existence of a
Deity, the universal Father of mankind. He
felt that some evil force must rule the universe.
These doubts were happily resolved after the
power of the complex was destroyed.
A woman whose life had been made unhappy
through the actions of a dissolute father, and
who thus became the victim of an inverted
dipus-complex, which caused her to hate the
name of her father and recall him after his death
only with tears and anguish, was the victim of
the "border land state” in which she saw all the
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 53
world as a world of shadows. Her father had
taken her as a very young child into a desolate
place, and there, in the gathering twilight, made
believe that he had deserted her, hence the bor-
der land state in which she relived the little trag-
edy. She not only hated her father, but the
whole world seemed unreal, and she not only
questioned its reality, but also the goodness of
the God who created such a world. She doubted
whether such a God did indeed exist. She re-
iterated again and again the question, “If a
good God rules the universe, why does He allow
evil to exist? Why do the good suffer and the
evil prosper?” The tendency here was of course
to give moral counsel. This was my method of
dealing with such a case before learning of the
psycho-analytic procedure. This was of course
of no avail, as she suffered from a heavy neu-
rosis. It was pointed out to her that the ques-
tions she asked are as old as Job and are
aroused invariably by the same train of cir-
cumstances: circumstances that make the vic-
tim feel reality is too harsh to bear. From this
reality the poor victim flees to the shelter of a
neurosis. It is as if the psyche said: "Here is
this mundane world; all is awry in it; the good
suffer and the evil prosper; it must be unreal;
there can be no good God who has created it;
it must be but the figment of imagination.”
Hence the “border land state.” The individual
refuses to see the world as real. Moreover, he
54 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
objectifies and magnifies his own pain. What
his Unconscious really means by such a diatribe
is not that he sees a universe full of pain, but
that he suffers in his own life. He expresses his
own anguish in conventional, altruistic terms,
but he really is referring to his own anguish; a
useful hint for the religious counsellor. But of
methods of treatment for such cases we shall
speak later. Just now we are interested in the
cause of the condition.
Most people would consider that the origin of
these doubts of the beneficence of the force that
rules the universe, these eternal questionings,
these despondencies, is to be found in present
troubles and afflictions, that the burden of sor-
row is too great for the mind to bear. This is
not at all correct. In all my experience as a
clergyman — familiar with all the emotions
aroused by death and separation, loss of friends,
poverty, fatal disease, and death in its most
awful forms - I have never found a normal
person who was driven to religious doubt by
present difficulties nor to despair and longing
for death. The normal mind does not react in
that way; it recognizes that these things are a
part of the natural order and that we must bear
them with equanimity.
Why, then, do others despair and throw down
the burden of life? The explanation is as fol-
lows: They are the victims of some vicious com-
plex. A complex is deeply submerged in the
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 55
Unconscious. If of an unpleasant nature, it is
the more deeply submerged. The unpleasant
memories that gather about it are not destroyed;
they are repressed, submerged, and emerge into
consciousness, as we have seen previously, only
as painful emotions. Such a complex depresses
the whole tone of life, it represses the victim's
energy and depresses him emotionally. It
matters not what his outward circumstances
may be, they may be good or bad, happy or un-
happy, he is constantly conscious of a "dull
ache,” a hidden anguish, that colors all of life.
This complex creates a great body of “free,
floating anxiety.” That is to say, its original
cause is forgotten, but the anxiety remains.
The cause of this anxiety is not evident to
waking consciousness, for it is deeply sub-
merged in the hidden recesses of the personality.
It makes its presence known in dreams, phobias
(which are anxiety states), reveries or senseless
“worries," and a general depression of the per-
sonality which may even result in real physical,
functional disturbance. To every little pin-
prick of fortune, every slight to the personality,
every affliction be it light or heavy, every phys-
ical ailment be it great or small, this free float-
ing anxiety attaches itself. The real trouble may
depress the individual, but it is never unbear-
able; add to this the free floating anxiety of the
complex, the depression due to his inner conflict,
and he has a load greater than he can bear.
56 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
To the neurotic every mole-hill is a mountain;
every friend may be an enemy in disguise, for he
will bear some feature that resembles the hated
object of the neurotic's complex; every altru-
istic motive is to be questioned. It is as if a
man, like the minister in Hawthorne's tale, were
to assume a dark veil. Every little gray tinge
of life, viewed through this disfiguring veil,
would become deepest black; every gray cloud
that covered the sun would bring night. No sun
shines, no birds sing, there is no joy nor beauty
anywhere for the victim of such a complex.
Life is indeed not worth living, and the unfor-
tunate longs for death. If we search for the
efficient cause of such a state, we find it to be
some infantile fixation.
Byron was the victim of such a neurosis, due
doubtless to his club-foot and his hatred of his
mother, which seems to have been more or less
justified. For his physical disability he compen-
sated in the development of poetic craftsman-
ship; for the evil complex he sought to compen-
sate in Don Juanism. He was constantly, as is
the way of neurotics, exhibiting his broken
heart to the world at large. As Matthew Ar-
nold unfeelingly said, "He dragged the pageant
of his broken heart across half Europe.” Heine
concealed his wretchedness (at the same time
compensating for it) by bitter satire, the sting
of which is felt in all his prose and verse. Some
authors have made capital of their neuroses.
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 57
Poe has described anxiety states "due to neu-
roses” in his romantic tales. (See Poe's Pit
and Pendulum, Fall of the House of Usher, and
Premature Burial, a vivid tale of claustropho-
bia.)
A neurosis often leads to an intense longing
for death, which does not mean annihilation for
the neurotic, since the Unconscious cannot con-
ceive of itself as annihilated, but a longing for
the peace and quiet of the grave. (This longing
may even be a disguised rebirth-wish. Jung
states that the interpretation of symbols in
dream analysis depends upon the age of the
dreamer: if young, it may be a rebirth-wish, if
old, a death-wish.) For the despondent neu-
rotic, all mental paths lead to the one end:
death. One of the most interesting illustrations
of the constant recurrence of the death-wish is
found in that ancient philosophic poem, the
Book of Job. Job constantly cries out that he
longs for death. To be sure he has just cause
in that his troubles are greater than he can bear,
but his emotions are not to be attributed to Job,
but to the neurotic author of the document. The
Prologue in heaven, represents in reality not a
dialogue between an anthropomorphic God and
a personal Devil, but the conflict of a neurotic
suffering from repression. The afflictions of
Job serve to bring out his neurotic conflict, they
are the instigators. The three friends, who give
him such worldly-wise counsel are really the
58 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
voices of his own consciousness, or rather the
voices in the soul of the author. “Wherefore,'
cries Job, "is light given to him that is in misery,
and life to the bitter in soul: which long for
death, but it cometh not; and dig for it more
than for hid treasures; which rejoice exceed-
ingly and are glad when they can find the
grave?" (3:20–22). Eliphaz the Temanite, the
first of the three false comforters is the voice of
self-reproach, which is the basis of the "convic-
tion of sin.” He seeks to prove by citing an hal-
lucination of his own (4:12—21) how suffering
is invariably the result of personal wrong-doing;
Job must have been guilty of some mortal sin,
else he would not suffer. He is the voice of
negation. “Call now; is there any that will
answer thee?” Job, that is the voice of con-
scious rectitude, replies that he knows of no such
wrong-doing. But he is willing to be shown
wherein he has erred. “Cause me to understand
wherein I have erred.” Bildad the Shuhite now
reinforces the counsel of Eliphaz and reiterates
that "God will not cast away the perfect man."
Both of these would strengthen Job's self-re-
proach and increase his suffering. But Job
makes the logical answer that no one can be ac-
counted just in the sight of God — why does he
suffer more than others? At any rate he is
willing to rest his case with God, although it
seems to him that God does not invariably re-
ward well-doing with prosperity and evil with
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 59
misery. His better self, his consciousness, tells
him that he has done no wrong more than other
men who prosper. Why should he yield to these
self-reproaches? He protests against God's
severity and wishes that he had never been born.
Then speaks Zophar the Naamathite and re-
proaches Job for his arrogance and impiety.
And thus the dialogue proceeds; first the voice
of self-reproach telling Job that he has sinned;
then the voice of his better self which replies
that he has not sinned. Then speaks the youth-
ful Elihu, who has heretofore held his peace,
and upholds his friends' views. Then Jahveh
himself speaks and reproves Job's importunity.
Before the divine voice, Job is silenced. He is
conscious of his ignorance of creation and the
ways of God. Then he is restored to health and
prosperity. That is to say, he yields, after the
struggle and the upheaval of emotions, to the
voice of his better self, telling him that all is
well. The conflict is resolved by the abreaction
or giving up of painful emotions. Job gives up
his secret anguish; he has poured it out with its
affect or emotional content, he has transferred
the burden to God on whom he has rested his
case. And he is restored to mental health.
Without doing violence to the poem, we may
state this conclusion. Job is a neurotic sufferer,
tossed this way and that by his internal con-
flict; he is pulled now this way, now that.
Finally, he throws off the painful emotion that
60 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
is blasting his life, lays his insufferable burden
upon Tahveh, his dissociated personality is co-
ordinated, and he is a whole man. This is doubt-
less the mechanism by which the author of the
book, through writing his doubts and expressing
his suffering in cosmic terms, abreacted his own
painful emotions, transferred them to the Deity,
and so found peace. The book is an allegory of
the mental sufferings of every neurotic individ-
ual. It really represents a sort of psycho-an-
alytic treatment.
In the Book of Ecclesiastes, whose author
announces himself simply as "Koheleth,” or
"the Preacher," if we eliminate the emendations
of a later hand, we have the expression of a
neurotic who is not healed of his mental dis-
order. He is obviously suffering from a violent
repression. As is the way with neurotics, he
objectifies his neurosis and the consequent re-
pression, projects it upon the Cosmos, makes it
cosmic rather than personal. He has a feeling
of inferiority, of incapacity, that his efforts ac-
complish nothing and his plaint is, “What is the
use of striving? One arrives nowhere." He
states the conclusions to which his observation
and experience have brought him in two sen-
tences: “All is vanity. What profit hath a man
of all his labour wherein he laboureth under the
sun?" After considering all the fields of human
activity and experiencing all life's varied pleas-
ures; after a consideration of the seasons for
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 61
every activity and deciding that man cannot be
sure that he finds the right season for such ac-
tivity; he decides that it is all of no use. When
we come to the passage where he declares that
woman is one of the chief foes to human happi-
ness - "whoso pleaseth God shall escape from
her; but the sinner shall be taken by her”
(7:23–29) - we begin to get light on the sub-
ject. He is obviously suffering from the Edi-
pus-complex. When he goes further and in-
culcates prudent demeanor towards kings and
others in authority (8:5-8) we are confirmed
in our surmise, for we see that in kings and other
persons in authority he finds substitutes for the
father whom he hates and fears. He is homo-
erotic; he projects the father-image upon per-
sons in authority; he is a sufferer from the com-
mon Edipus-complex. Canon Driver (Litera-
ture of the Old Testament) states that the book
is without religious enthusiasm. "He recounts,
and as he recounts, he generalizes, the disap-
pointments which had been his own lot in life.
He surveys the life of other men; but he can
discover no enthusiasm, no energy, no faculty
of grave and serious endeavor.” Was ever
clearer picture given of a serious neurosis that
colored all of life? In succeeding chapters we
shall review cases in real life which exactly
parallel the incapacity, the listlessness, the pes-
simism, the misogyny, the deep depression of
Koheleth.
62 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
We have seen how these two authors (Job
and Ecclesiastes) plainly disclose their own
complexes in their neurotic questionings of life.
In Job's interviews with his friends is sufficiently
demonstrated the futility of wise moral counsel
in the treatment of such disorders.
Religious counsels may for a brief space quiet
the throbbing fears and raise the fallen hopes of
the neurotic. But the good is only temporary
when applied in the wrong way and at the wrong
season. Religion may, and often does, in its
proper and intelligent application relieve or even
cure such cases, but it must be applied with in-
telligent care and full knowledge of the nature
of the psychic illness. Pfister declares that in
his early applications of the psycho-analytic
treatment he sometimes failed because he began
giving religious counsel too early. Hypnosis,
and other methods of suggestive treatment, as
a rule give but temporary relief as they do not
reach the seat of the trouble and add but an-
other resistance to a disordered mind that al-
ready suffers from too many. Far from resolv-
ing the conflict, they oppose external conflict to
internal conflict and the last state of that man
may be worse than the first. At most, sugges-
tive treatment gives but a temporary peace of
mind.
This chapter is, however, not specifically on
methods of cure, but is an inquiry into the mo-
tivation of human life. We have seen in Chap-
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 63
ter II how the Unconscious determines our re-
actions to external stimuli, how the complex
rules human life, and how our whole philo-
sophical and religious outlook as well as the lines
of our every-day conduct is determined by op-
erations of the Unconscious. It remains to see
how dreams indicate the complex and reveal
motives.
The Dream as Indicator of Motivation
The world of dreams seems to be a world of
strange, disordered fancies, a region of phan-
tasmagoria, of fantastic imagery, which gro-
tesquely imitates the world of waking life but to
distort it and confound the mind. Weird figures,
neither human nor animal, perform unintel-
ligible acts; strange landscapes meet the eye;
we ourselves are transformed into unnatural
beings with supernatural powers. We fly
hither and yon without effort; we are indoors,
out-of-doors and know not how we arrived. In
a twinkling, “the cloud-capp'd towers, the gor-
geous palaces . .. dissolve," leaving not a
rack behind,” and we emerge into the conscious-
ness of the waking world, where we slowly
gather our faculties together and become our
normal selves.
It is not at all strange that the primitive mind
attributes the dream to some supernatural
agency; nor is it a matter for surprise that the
0
64 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
normal mind attaches no value to the dream and
regards it merely as a series of disjointed fancies
without meaning. In these matter-of-fact times,
we have learned to distrust him who claims to
interpret dreams, classing him with the witch-
doctor and the astrologer who for a considera-
tion will cast your horoscope and foretell your
future.
Nevertheless, the dream is a product of some
mental process; it must have some mechanism
behind it; it must therefore in some sense or
other have a meaning for us, inasmuch as it
indicates psychic activity of some nature.
Many persons will declare that the dream is
merely the remnant of the day's psychic activ-
ities expressed in fragmentary fashion, it is but
the left-over images of the day's thinking un-
controlled by waking intelligence.
The dream is in reality far more significant
than that. Freud has proved definitely that
every dream has significance for the individual's
psychic life. A certain type of dream indicates
a certain state of mind. The dream is a wish-
fulfilment, either in literal or symbolized form.
Children, in whom the Conscious is not clearly
differentiated from the Unconscious, will dream
the literal fulfilment of their desires. The for-
bidden excursion, or the forbidden viand, will
make its appearance in childish dreams. With
the adult, these take on a symbolized form, so
highly symbolized that they are difficult or even
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 65
impossible to interpret. By an elaborate mech-
anism, which involves displacement, ambiva-
lence, and other distortions and elaborations of
the dream-work, the dream arrives at its goal,
which is the satisfaction of desire.
A friend who was forced to leave his abode
and hunt another relates the following dream:
He found himself in a large building, standing
on the edge of a high platform, Some one said
that the elevator would be down soon. From
somewhere up above a small car descended,
shaped like a small house, painted white and
suspended by a cable which seemed to be com-
posed of strands of gold. It swung out some
distance from the platform on which he stood.
He put out one foot tentatively to step into the
car but drew back as the distance was too great.
A stout, fashionably dressed man appeared,
pushed him aside, entered the car and descended,
leaving the dreamer there isolated.
Now it happened that the wife of the dreamer
had been house-hunting on the day previous to
the night of the dream, and had come home and
reported that she had found a small house,
painted white, in a fashionable section of the
town, some distance away. My friend had
thought: “We cannot afford a house in that
section with our limited income; its upkeep
would cost a great deal, the rent would be high;
besides, it is too far from my place of business.
Some more opulent person had better take it."
66 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Note how aptly the dream illustrates this
frame of mind. The car in the dream, in the
form of a "little, white house," is suspended by
a gold cable by which it is "kept up.” The car
appears from above; the rent is "too high" for
the man's means. The house is difficult of ac-
cess, being at some distance from the center of
the town; the car in the dream is "hard to
reach," so hard that the dreamer gives up the
attempt, as he would like to give up the house.
“Some more opulent person had better take it.”
The stout man appears, pushes the dreamer aside
and steps into the white car. He goes down,
which probably means that the dreamer wishes
the disagreeable opulent person who pushes him
aside and takes the house may “go down” finan-
cially.
Many slurs have been cast upon the Freud-
ian psychology, and its detractors, who for the
most part have never disinterestedly examined
it, declare that the dream-interpretations are
fantastic, absurd, and arbitrary, that a highly
suggestible neurotic may be led to confess any-
thing that the analyst suggests, and that the
symbolism of the dream is so manipulated and
distorted in the interpretation that the analyst
makes it mean whatever he will. To take a
single instance, the statement that towers in
the landscapes of dreams are often phallic sym-
bols has been ridiculed. What, then, will the
sceptic do with the following brief poem, “The
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 67
Maiden's Dream," an old Greek folk-song,
translated by Rose Kerr, and reprinted in the
Literary Digest, July 5, 1919:
“Last night there came to me asleep
A breath from the land of dreams:
Within a garden walled and deep
I saw two flowing streams
And a tower of gold and ivory,
Mother, canst read my dreams?"
“Thou art the garden, daughter mine;
The tower is thy grave;
The streams of water flowing free
Are the tears that I shall shed for thee,
For love is vain to save."
i
“O Mother mine, nay, do not weep;
Not skilled art thou in dreams.
Our dwelling is the garden deep,
My children the two streams,
And the fair tower is the husband strong
In whose arms I shall dream no dreams."
Every person who is familiar with Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams will recognize this as
a characteristic dream of a young girl in love,
also the true and characteristic interpretation
of the dream given by the young girl; he will
likewise see the significance of the last line, "In
whose arms I shall dream no dreams."
We have excellent proof that the dream oc-
cupies an incredibly short time. The images
and events of the dream follow one another with
extraordinary swiftness, like the changing views
of the cinematograph when the operator speeds
68 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
M
the machine. The dream may be said to be a
series of swift impressions, usually visual, for
sounds are rarely heard in dreams. Some
dreams have auditory impressions, due to some
external stimulus. Thus I dreamed that the
telephone rang, that I rose, dressed, break-
fasted, took the train into the city, went through
the day's work, returned, supped, and again
heard the telephone bell. At that point I woke,
found that it was morning and that my alarm
clock was ringing. I rose, stopped the alarm,
and wound it. To my surprise, that part of
the clock's mechanism was not perceptibly
run down. This could only mean that the
dream had occurred within the barest fraction
of a minute, perhaps but a second or two. The
dream illustrates the incredible swiftness of
changing impressions of which only dreams are
capable; and the wish-fulfilment, for by dream-
ing that the day's duties were done, I was
enabled to snatch a few moments more of sleep.
Apparently consciousness moves at a swifter
tempo in dreams than in waking life. At first
glance, it seems that although bodily functions,
breathing, the pulse, digestion, and the like,
slow down during sleep, consciousness proceeds
at a swifter pace. It is possible that judgment,
the necessity for ordered thinking, inhibits the
swift flow of impressions during waking hours
and that these impressions, freed from such
inhibiting influence, crowd faster during sleep;
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 69
that during sleep we no longer accommodate our
mental pace to the exigencies of ordered se-
quence; and that the effect of longer duration in
the dream is due to this increased tempo. It
seems far more likely, however, that this swifter
pace is only apparent, not real; that during
waking life the stream of impressions flows quite
as swiftly, if left to itself, as in the dream, and
that these impressions are quite as inchoate and
disjointed, but we thrust those aside which have
nothing to do with the trend of thought we are
at the moment pursuing; and that we con-
sciously and voluntarily confine our attention
to certain impressions by a selective process
which disregards all impressions save those that
bear upon that given trend of thought, and
consciously thrust aside those which have naught
to do with that particular sequence. Never-
theless, though they may seem to have no
effect upon our waking life, these disregarded
impressions doubtless do impinge upon the mar-
gin of consciousness, whence they find their way
into the Unconscious to lie buried there until
the proper stimulus brings them to light. When
for any reason the censor which guards our
waking life is off duty, these impressions come
thronging in a whirling, kaleidoscopic proces-
sion, they rise up and possess us. In dreams
and delirium, there is nothing to inhibit the
swift flow of images, and an impression of longer
duration is the immediate result.
70 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
We say that we "reduce” our thoughts to an
ordered sequence, and the term "reduce" seems
here more apt than we know, since it is mani-
festly by reduction and selection that we attain
ordered thought and make intellectual effort
effectual. Bergson has pointed this out in his
Time and Free Will. Barrett Wendell states
that in planning a piece of intellectual work, we
arrive at coherence and unity by such a process
of elimination.
Doubtless, our time-sense, instead of being
something a priori, as Kant claims, is the result
of education and experience, and time itself but
a convenience for the ordered life. Could the
movement of consciousness be sufficiently
speeded up, we might live a lifetime in a mo-
ment. (Drowning persons have this impres-
sion.) It is thus that "fifty years of Europe”
are worth a "cycle in Cathay.” It is the quick-
ened consciousness of highly civilized life. The
complex will invariably quicken the speed of
impressions which in any way touch it. Thus,
for the trained musician, there is no perceptible
lapse of time between his reading of the notes,
noting key and rhythm meanwhile, the trans-
mission of this impression to consciousness, the
transmission to trained fingers, and the motility
which results in the execution of the composi-
tion. This is due to his habit-complex.
Reverse this quickening process, and as Berg-
son states (Time and Free Will, page 194 f.),
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 71
we might "take in the whole path of a heavenly
body in a single perception." In one of Long-
fellow's Tales of a Wayside Inn, a good monk
ponders the words, “a thousand years are but
as a day in thy sight.” He is suddenly trans-
lated to the celestial world, where he seems to
remain for but an instant; when he returns to
earth, he finds that the world has progressed
through a hundred years of time.
The dream is, then, a manifestation of our
psychic life worthy of serious study, since, like
symptomatic actions of every-day, it reveals our
hidden motives, and reveals them even more
clearly. The hidden anguish that we success-
fully repress during waking hours now breaks
forth, our inner life is revealed, and, when we
come to analyze the dream, we find that it
states in no uncertain terms what we should like
to say in waking life, were the desires of the
Unconscious not sharply repressed. Could we
interpret all our dreams correctly, we should
know our own innermost thoughts, desires, ap-
petites, aptitudes, and capabilities. We should
then go astray in our judgments far less fre-
quently than we do when we disregard the point-
ing finger of these psychic guide-posts.
Suppose we do disregard these indicators of
our motives, and mold our lives, as so many do,
on the judgments of others, choosing our careers
because some friend or relative advises us, sink-
ing our own personality in that of some one
72 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
else -- in that case, we shall inevitably go astray,
miss our destiny, awake to our mistake too late,
and reap lasting unhappiness. Many a man
or woman chooses a mate because of a re-
semblance or fancied resemblance to some rela-
tive. The individual who so chooses will look
for qualities in the chosen mate similar to those
of the beloved relative and be disappointed if
these qualities do not appear. A man suffering
from the Edipus-complex will choose for his
wife a woman who resembles his mother and will
look for maternal qualities in his wife. This
is of course wrong, and leads to unhappiness.
If a man marries a wife a great deal older than
he, it is almost invariably because he desires
a mother-substitute. The secretary of an or-
ganization which acts as an employment bureau
for returned soldiers and sailors tells me that
when a man comes to him and reports that he
has made a hasty marriage that has turned out
unhappily, he always asks the man if his wife
is older than he. With sickening uniformity,
these men reply that such is the case.
Or if a man marries for money or because of
friendly (?) advice from another, he will be
unhappy. Fortunately, the mandates of the in-
ner self in the normal man are likely to be too
strong to be repressed and, as Bergson says,
after all the advice of friends has been duly
weighed and considered, the self suddenly
bursts forth, breaks all fetters, and makes its
THE MOTIVATION OF HUMAN LIFE 73
own judgments in opposition to all the collec-
tive wisdom of which it has been the beneficiary.
This course is much more likely to result in last-
ing happiness."
1 See Appendix for full discussion of dreams and dream
mechanisms.
IV. DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL
A TO more bitter warfare has been waged
over any philosophical issue than that
waged over determinism versus free-will. Mod-
ern man likes to feel that he can make free
choice of action, that it lies within himself to
choose his course and determine his own future.
He desires to feel that his destiny is self-deter-
mined. Primitive peoples, on the contrary,
ignorant of the processes of natural law, observ-
ant of natural phenomena which they are unable
to explicate, bound by ignorance and supersti-
tion, feel themselves at the mercy of mysterious
supernatural forces, hence they incline to be
fatalistic. Moderns of limited mental power, es-
pecially if they are badly environed and feel
unable to control or rise above their environ-
ment, echo the fatalism of the primitive. A feel-
ing of "What is the use of effort, since every-
thing is predetermined?” pervades primitive
thought. "It lies on the knees of the gods,” said
the ancients. “Kismet!” says the Arab, "all is
ordered, let us bow to the will of Allah.” The
Arabs have an expression, which we may trans-
literate “mecktoub,” which means that a thing
is so ordered by higher powers than we and
DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL
75
cannot be changed by human effort. Since it
plays so large a part in the determination of a
man's life-course, this burning question of
whether all is pre-determined by forces outside
ourselves or whether it is determined by our
own volitions has been the paramount interest
of religious and philosophic thought from re-
motest antiquity down to the present.
Archdeacon Paley claimed to make out a good
case for determinism when he declared that the
Almighty had created the universe according
to a well-conceived plan, designed and made it
in the beginning, as the watch-maker designs
and makes the watch; that He set its many
wheels in motion and they have run ever since
according to the primal plan. Leibnitz stood
out for the pre-determined harmony of the uni-
verse. These views still find wide acceptance.
These easy solutions of the problem miss the
practical side of the matter (they are, in reality,
matters of dialectic rather than of human ac-
tion) since they fail to show that man must at
all events act as if he were free, since other-
wise the world would cease to progress and lapse
back into chaos. A good deal of the philosophic
pronouncement on the subject is pure dialectic,
the product of the study, not the garnered ex-
perience of real life and actual contact. Berg-
son, in his Creative Evolution, shows how our
view of the world as designed order or chaotic
discord, is a matter of intellectual concept.
76 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
From observation, we gain certain intellectual
concepts of the universe. These concepts we
analyze and classify. What we classify is not
objective reality, but a subjective thing, these
self-evolved intellectual concepts. We create
categories, analyze our concepts of the universe
under these categories, then proceed to synthe-
size what we have already created and analyzed.
As an intellectual exercise this may be good, but
we must recognize it for what it is. From this
point of view, there is no evidence of conscious
design in natural processes, says Bergson, but
there is evidence of a life-force, an élan vital,
which pushes out in all directions. Thwarted
in certain directions by insuperable obstacles,
it pushes through those channels which are left
open to it, and thus types are created and evolu-
tion proceeds.
William James (Varieties, page 438, note)
states: “When one views the world with no defi-
nite theological bias one way or the other, one
sees that order and disorder, as we now recog-
nize them, are purely human inventions. We
are interested in certain types of arrangement,
useful, aesthetic, or moral — so interested that
whenever we find them realized, the fact em-
phatically rivets our attention. The result is
that we work over the contents of the world
selectively. ... Our dealings with Nature
are just like this. ... We count and name
whatever lies upon the special lines we trace,
DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 77
whilst the other things and the untraced lines
are neither named nor counted.”
The devout mind may be repelled by such
ratiocination, for to question that the universe
is controlled through pre-determined design may
smack to some of atheism, it may seem to ques-
tion God's over-ruling providence. But is this
necessarily so? May it not be possible that the
Almighty works not by means of fundamental
plans but through evolutionary methods, or that
a fundamental plan is being worked out through
evolutionary methods? If philosophy fails to
find evidence of First Cause, that does not neces-
sarily imply that we are ruled by blind force..
The Creator may work by other methods and
through other means.
It is evident that we suffer from over-intel-
lectualization. We are perhaps too sophisti-
cated; we are over-anxious to find a causal
thread running through all things; we divide,
classify, analyze, and synthesize arbitrarily for
our own self-satisfaction, in order that life may
seem to be a nicely-rounded whole; we seek
to smooth life up like a well-made bed, we en-
close its phenomena in a well-rounded covering
like the crust of the apple-dumpling and then,
like a certain English king, we express wonder
as to how the apples got inside! Through a
singular blindness, we refuse to accept life's
discontinuities or think of it as fragmentary.
Listen to the popular lecturer who addresses
78 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
an audience on some historical movement; note
how he treats of this phase and that phase, this
character and that, then, finally, draws his
threads together, establishes definite relation-
ships and makes false continuities where none
really exist. By such false dialectics we may
relate anything in the universe to anything else,
past, present, or to come, and we often do. The
truth is, the mind loves ordered sequence, con-
tinuity of thought, must have it in fact, though
the sequence be false, for it is through this
ordered sequence, this continuity, this classifi-
cation, this analysis and synthesis, this cate-
gorizing, that we build our intellectual struc-
tures. We seek unity and design and we insist
upon having them at any cost. We formulate
a theory (and the Freudians are by no means
free from this fault) then we refer all the events
and phenomena of life to that theory; it be-
comes a Procrustian bed which all things must
fit. What we have to learn is that this unity
and design are modes of thought, not objective
realities, and that they depend wholly upon a
point of view. Were we to realize this, we
should spare ourselves much pains and futile
struggle trying to reconcile irreconcilable differ-
ences perceived in the external world, also much
useless argument, pro and contra.
If we accepted this view of all life as ordered
sequence, we should be driven to extreme de-
terminism. Recognized as a matter of dialec-
DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL
79
tic, we may discard this view and regard free-
will as operative in human life. The unbiased
mind, for instance, can see no causal thread
running through history in the sense in which
Hegel saw it, with his artificial thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis. In view of the late war, we
can scarcely claim that the human race moves
forward according to the primal plan of some
celestial being, nor again as if pushed forward
by some blind force. What we witness is the
race moving onward through a series of cyclic
changes in which it takes on something new
here and there, experiments, selects, rejects, and
progresses by a determinism which is the re-
sult of experience and is therefore self-determi-
nation. We may say, then, that there is a sort
of determinism in human life, there is a series of
events which the superficial observer might
judge to spring from primal design, but which is
really the result of racial experimentation, the
attempt at self-determination.
Let us bring the matter down to concrete
cases and the acts of everyday life and see just
how our lives are determined. As we have seen
in the chapter on the "Motivation of Human
Life,” no human action, choice, or judgment
is from caprice. It is determined by the action
of the Unconscious when it is not consciously
willed. Even in that case, the Unconscious
plays a large part in the choice or judgment.
Take the matter of forgetting, for instance.
80 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
It always has a motive. Who has not had the
experience of forgetting a proper name? This
is due, says Coriat, to a dissociation which leads
to the forgetting of the name because it has
painful associations. There is thus an uncon-
scious but purposeful motive in the forgetting.
He cites the case of an individual (Abnormal
Psychology, Second Edition, p. 23) who could
not recall the name of the Swiss neurologist
Veraguth for some hours. By the free-associa-
tion method (that is, obtaining from the sub-
ject all the free associations with the word) the
following sequence was obtained: “Veraguth-
Verabad-Bad (the German for bath) — Bath -
water -- mineral water.” The story came out
that the previous summer "the subject was sud-
denly taken ill while in Switzerland with a dis-
order which required the use of a certain mineral
water and thus was unable to travel as had been
planned. The association of the disagreeable
experience in Switzerland was the inhibiting
force which prevented the recall of the name.”
These little errors of everyday life are de-
termined by complexes which inhere in the Un-
conscious and determine our course of action.
In this category come the forgetting of names,
mistakes in speech (see the story of Roosevelt
related in the Appendix, page 238), mis-
takes in reading, as when we see a familiar
word in place of the unfamiliar one really
printed, mistakes in writing (as when a cotton-
1
DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL
81
planter attributed his mental troubles to worry
over the outcome of his crop and said his trouble
was due to a "frigid wife," whereas he meant
to write a "frigid wave,” the former term being
the correct one), forgetting of impressions and
resolutions (such as to write a letter to a person
whom one dislikes, or to post it when written,
or to enclose a check in a letter), erroneously
carried-out actions as the well-known tendency
of a lover who, on his way to business in an
abstracted state, will go a long distance out of
his way to pass his beloved's house.
The so-called “Déjà vu," or feeling of hav-
ing seen a certain place or person or having been
in an actual situation before one really has been
there, is due to a similar mechanism of the Un-
conscious. It is like Pfister's formula, “Now
the situation is as it was before when such and
such a thing happened.” Thus a nurse, upon
coming into a hospital for the first time, felt
that she had been there before. It turned out
upon examination that this feeling was due to
a train of circumstances which had occurred in
another hospital and she was reminded of these
upon coming into the unfamiliar one. The new
experience stirs an unconscious memory, hence
the “Déjà vu.” Freud, in his Psychology of
Everyday Life, page 320 ff., has explained the
"Déjà vu” at great length.
Our choice of religious beliefs is similarly de-
1 Freud: Psychopathology of Everyday Life, page 129.
82 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
(Wesh symp-
igious Schapter on
termined. We shall see in the chapter on "Mys-
ticism," how men have been driven into the se-
clusion of monasteries by severe neuroses and
there have had certain experiences that we call
mystic. Unconscious motives have driven men
from one sect to another, in accordance with the
repressed desires of the Unconscious. Pfister
(Psychoanalytic Method, page 326 f.) speaks
of the desires of neurotics to take refuge in
strange and bizarre forms of religion, a symp-
tom of unhealthy-mindedness. (We shall see
more of this in the chapter on "The Occult in
Modern Religious Systems.") When the neu-
rosis is cured, the subject will give up the bizarre
system and return to normal.
In our discussion of this subject, we must
take account of the fact that something of our
remotest ancestors survives in each one of us;
in both the group-life and the individual, the
antiquity of the race is preserved in the Un-
conscious. Those impulses and desires which
were conscious in our savage forbears and are
still conscious in young children, are submerged
in the Unconscious in adult life, whence they
reach out to influence our lives. This, while
it may seem to be a sort of determinism, is in
the strictest sense a kind of freedom of will;
it signifies that the race by a definite choice of
certain courses of action from time to time defi-
nitely determines what sort of race it shall be;
this is self-determination, therefore it is racial
DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL
83
free-will. It is not, then, a matter of dialectic
or speculation, but of direct human experience,
immediate human contacts.
When we consider how a percept-sequence
results in motility, or, in plain words, how
thought and feeling result finally in action, we
see that every individual life is to a great degree
self-determined. With the motivation that pro-
ceeds from his own Unconscious in which in-
heres much material bequeathed him by his
primitive forbears, each individual sets out to
erect the structure of his life and follow his own
destiny. Were there no Unconscious to pre-
serve memories and act as a repository of per-
cepts until these percepts can result in motility,
man's life would be a discontinuity, for each
new state of consciousness would be sharply set
off and differentiated from every preceding
state; in that case, man would not be a person-
ality, he would be a succession of discontinu-
ous, independent states of consciousness, without
memory; and having no accumulated experi-
ence upon which to draw, he could make no
progress. In that sense, his life may be said
to be predetermined. But it is pure sophistry
to call this "determinism.” He still has the
right of free choice. If we grow at all, it must
be because of our reactions upon collective ex-
periences and collective memories. How should
we grow otherwise? And we grow even in our
unconscious states. James stated that we learn
to swim in winter and to skate in summer.”
84 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Freud has made it clear in the final chap-
ters of his Interpretation of Dreams, how the
"most complex mental operations are possible
without the co-operation of consciousness." He
declares that “unconscious wishes always re-
main active. ... They represent paths which
are passable whenever a sum of excitement
makes use of them.” He demonstrates by the
use of diagrams the mechanism by which a
series of percepts finally results in motility. It
is a complex mechanism and the process itself
is complicated, but the gist of the matter is that
percepts are acted upon by certain memory
systems of the psychic apparatus, these memo-
ries in turn modify the percepts in the Un-
conscious, finally, the modified percepts emerge
through the Foreconscious, which lies "between
the realm of the Unconscious and that of con-
sciousness and which contains the material of
recent experience” (Coriat) — and finally these
transformed percepts enter the Conscious as
ideas and issue in action. This is an incuba-
tion process which may take a long time; it may
be years; hence, our decisions may be deter-
mined by complexes which had their beginning
in earliest childhood.
All our ideas are, as we have previously seen,
tinged with the Unconscious. Every human
act is determined by the action of the Uncon-
scious upon percepts. Every object of the ex-
ternal world, every thought brought to us from
DETERMINISM AND FREE-WILL 85
other minds, thus becomes assimilated and col-
ored by our own personality. Thus we form
what James terms the "value judgment.” We
evaluate and decide upon the utility of the ob-
ject or the thought in the development of our
own lives. We are like the good housewife
who looks over a pile of garments and places
certain of them in one pile for the rag-man,
others in a pile to be mended and worn again.
Thus, in a sense we make free choice of action,
in a sense our actions are pre-determined, since
they take on the color of the collective memories
of the Unconscious and the Foreconscious.
And thus no human act, however capricious
it may seem, is without definite cause. We are
incapable of caprice, in the strict sense of the
word. We weigh values, though we may do
it unconsciously, and we decide to seize upon
that object, carry out that purpose, pursue that
course of action, which will best serve our ends.
The neurotic, victim of obsessions, phobias,
compulsive thinking and action, cannot conceive
of the world as being ordered otherwise than
by some malign force or evil genius. He is
not the master of his forces. His phobias force
him to avoid certain places and certain persons.
His malign complexes tend to color more and
more the objects, the places, the people, and all
the life about him, until his whole existence
becomes darkened and he is incapable of volun-
tary thought or action. Acts which are per-
86 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
fectly easy for normal persons and which his
friends know he can perfectly well perform, are
made impossible by these evil complexes. If
he keeps moving in this direction, his whole ex-
istence will become determined thus, he will
become incapable of any action, and will be-
come an introverted or shut-in personality,
Fortunately, most neuroses are not severe
enough to result in such a catastrophe and
modern psycho-therapeutics can break them up
before they reach this final stage. (The Apos-
tle Paul expresses his own aboulia in the words,
"For the good that I would I do not; but the
evil I would not, that I do.") Thus may be
explained the apparent contrariety of neurotics.
They do not do the simple, social thing, because
they feel that they cannot. They must first
be freed from the evil spell that binds them.
The idle turning from one task to another as
a relief from ennui, the feeling of "never-get-
done,” which obsesses some persons, may be
regarded as such neurotic symptoms. The neu-
rotic life is pre-determined by the sinister forces
that rule that life; but the life of the individual
freed from neurotic obsessions is indeed a life
of free will and free choice.
V. MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC
STATES
ROM time to time in the world's history
T there have appeared persons who, in some
chamber hidden away from the world, the clois-
tered peace of some monastery, or some lonely
mountain cavern, have had an immediate aware-
ness of the presence of God. They have had
this experience not through some logical process
or intellectual method, though they have gone
through a course of what might be termed spir-
itual calisthenics, but through an emotional up-
heaval. They have left the world behind to
follow after righteousness, and the mystic ex-
perience, so-called, is their reward. Those who
have had such an experience have been called
"mystics." We shall determine from the wit-
ness of their own lips just what the conditions
of this experience are; what the real content
is, may well be left for the philosopher and the
theologian. We are concerned with the mech-
anism which produces the mystic experience.
One word will express the condition of having
such an experience; it is the word "repression.”
As we have seen, it is doubtful whether the
normal person ever seeks voluntarily to escape
88 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
from reality and take refuge in a cloistered se-
clusion or a fanciful world created by his imagi-
nation. He may seek to change an uncongenial
environment for one better suited to his nature
and his needs; he may go apart from the world
for a space to meditate upon some truth which
occupies his mind, to co-ordinate his faculties
and get a perspective upon life, to perform some
piece of work, as the writing of a book or the
invention of scientific apparatus, but his interest
in the main will be in the great populous world
of men, his temporary absence from that world
will be for social ends, and he will return to it
with gladness when his work is finished, even
as a traveller returns from some distant shore -
happy to be once more at home and among
friends. So deep is the human need of friends
and social contacts, that the normal man will
give up life rather than face solitary confine-
ment. The feeling that he is one with the group-
life strengthens his arm and enables him to per-
form heroic deeds of which by himself he is in-
capable; his social contacts develop him and
enrich his life. The deepest grief will therefore
not suffice to drive the normal person from the
world, nor the keenest disappointment shut him
up within the phantasmal world of a diseased
fancy.
There must, then, be some neurotic taint as
a condition of mysticism; some abnormal trait
that drives the individual from the world. He
1TY
MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 89
has suffered the "slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune," but we must add to these a definite
proclivity for the solitary life. His afflictions
are not the efficient cause of his flight into se-
clusion, they are but the instigating cause. He
suffers from repression.
Now it by no means follows that such reli-
gious experiences are the result of perverted
sexuality, though there may be abnormal sex
features present. James states with good
reason (Varieties, page II, note) that religion
cannot be adequately interpreted as perverted
sexuality. There is implication here that some
one has advanced the theory that religion is
based on sex-perversion. This theory, he says,
"snuffs out Saint Theresa as an hysteric, Saint
Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate."
It may be that some one has stated that religion
is sex perversion; but it is certainly no one of the
Freudian school. In the first place, it must be
noted that Freud uses the term "sex" in a much
wider sense than is usual. It by no means im-
plies "sensual” to say "sexual.” But it is true
that all our psychic life is in the broadest sense
based on sex; our whole attitude toward life, our
philosophy, our religious views are, as we have
already seen, dependent in the last analysis upon
sex. The man will not see the world with the
same eyes as the woman, nor the child with the
same eyes as the adult; there are profound
psychic differences in their natures, due to char-
IA
90 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
acteristics which we may well call "secondary
sex characteristics.” So far as I am aware, no
one would attempt to interpret all the phenom-
ena of religious life as instances of sex-perver-
sion, nor would any modern psychologist at-
tribute Carlyle's “organ-tones of misery” (I
quote once more from James) to a "gastro-
duodenal catarrh.” Such argument is puerile
and biased in the extreme; it would seem to indi-
cate that the man who argues thus is himself
the victim of obsession. Nevertheless, religious
types cannot be understood without reference to
sex.
Whereas no one in our day is inclined to at-
tribute genius, religious, literary, or artistic, to
degeneracy, we have explored the deeper re-
cesses of human personality in a way and to an
extent never before accomplished; we are there-
fore safe in saying, in the light of such expe-
rience, that many religious phenomena are
directly attributable to neuroses, and that
repressed sex-instinct does play a prominent
rôle in certain types of religious phenomena.
Carlyle's "duodenal catarrh” may not suffice to
explain his genius, but it does explain his pessi-
mistic outlook on life, it gives his ideas color and
very somber color at that. The genius of Poe
is not attributable to the fact that he was neu-
rotic; but his neurosis colors all his output.
Tschaikowsky would doubtless have been as
great a composer had his psychic life been nor-
MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 91
mal, but it is doubtful whether he would have
written the Symphonie Pathetique. So it must
be with our inquiries in the religious field; we
can interpret religious types and religious phe-
nomena only through a correct interpretation
and comprehension of their psychic background.
Therefore, while the neurotic taint may not suf-
fice to explain the entire content of religious
experience, a neurosis will frequently be found
to give direction to religious thought and de-
termine the mode of religious life.
It must be suspected in the case of every in-
dividual who has been driven to the cloisters by
the afflictions and difficulties that beset this life.
From a thorough examination of mysticism and
the lives of mystics, I am convinced that none is
free from neurotic taint.
The mystic, the ascetic, the religious recluse,
is driven by his neurosis forth from the haunts
of men, to live in his cell in some remote cloister,
or his cave on some lonely mountain-side. The
family history of the saint often reveals the na-
ture of the neurosis. The Edipus-complex may
be cited in the case of many saints as the cause
of their withdrawal from useful social life, to
live the life of meditation and prayer and com-
mune alone with the Deity. Other complexes
have been quite as active in determining the
nature of the individual's religious life, and have
sent him away from social contacts to the life
of the recluse.
92 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
We have defined the mystic state as a state of
immediate awareness of God. The mystic goes
into seclusion, he meditates, fasts, and prays;
finally, he arrives at a state of complete pas-
sivity and receptivity, earth's harsh noises are all
shut away, even voluntary thought is finally
shut out, and into the receptive soul (in the
language of mysticism) God pours his ineffable
love, the whole being is illumined as though by
a divine light, and the mystic is caught up into
the heavens where he swoons in rapturous bliss
at the very throne of God. The imagery is at
times exceedingly anthropomorphic; the mystic
is caught up in divine arms, as a child is caught
up by its mother, and laid in blisful repose upon
the bosom of God Himself.
Hear the evidence of Jan Ruysbroek, a Do-
minican mystic who takes his name from the
small village on the Seine in which he was born
about 1290:
Then first, when we withdrew into the simplicitas of our
heart, do we behold the immeasurable glory of God, and our
intellect is as clear from all consideration of distinction and
figurative apprehensions, as though we had never seen or heard
of such things. Then the riches of God are open to us. Our
spirit becomes desireless, as though there were nothing on earth
or in heaven of which we stood in need. Then we are alone with
God, God and we -- nothing else. Then we rise above all mul-
tiplicity and distinction into the simple nakedness of our essence,
and in it become conscious of the infinite wisdom of the Divine
Essence, whose inexhaustible depths are as a vast waste, into
which no corporeal and no spiritual image can intrude....
Lost in the abyss of our eternal blessedness, we perceive no dis-
tinction between ourselves and God.
MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 93
Let us turn to the Swabian mystic, Henry
Suso, another of the Dominicans, who belongs to
the same period:
feast in a lovely Swise
terhose Wis demande comby osit tiesu in my
I looked and behold the body about my heart was clear as
crystal, and I saw the Eternal Wisdom calmly sitting in my
heart in lovely wise: and, close by that form of beauty, my
soul, leaning on God, embraced by His arms, pressed to His
heart, full of heavenly longing, transported, intoxicated with
love.
The Eternal Wisdom speaks, and these are her
words:
I am the throne of joy, I am the crown of bliss. Mine eyes
are so bright, my mouth so tender, my cheeks so rosy-red, and
all my form so winning fair, that were a man to abide in a
glowing furnace till the Last Day, it would be a little price for
a moment's vision of my beauty.
We need quote no further. The utterances of
other mystics, Tauler, St. Catherine of Sienna,
St. Theresa, parallel these sayings with even
more erotic imagery and extravagance of
language.
It will be interesting to note the analogies
between the visions of mysticism and the hallu-
cinations of the neurotic. In the first place, the
condition of the mystic experience is seclusion
from the world, the abstracted state. The re-
tirement of the mystic is in some respects sim-
ilar to the "shut-in” personality that is sympto-
matic of a severe neurosis.
In the second place, the character of the vi-
sions of the mystic is strikingly similar to certain
94 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
neurotic and hysterical symptoms. We must
feel that the mystic experience is definitely hys-
terical in origin. Compare with the rhapsodic
utterances of the mystics, this utterance of a
woman who suffered from an anxiety-hysteria.
“Suddenly, as I reclined in an easy chair by the
window, looking out toward the setting sun, the
very heavens opened; I could see the golden
towers of the Eternal City, steps appeared and
angels ascended and descended with palm
branches in their hands.” (Compare Jacob's
dream, Genesis 28, which the subject had read.)
“There was a blinding light and God Himself
came forth out of the pearly gates and a bright
ray of light entered my heart. My whole being
was transfixed and transfused with Divine Love.
I thrilled from head to foot, I could not move."
This woman had suffered from repression of
the normal sex instinct. Repressed in her natu-
ral instincts, she was subject to these hysterical
outbursts but ceased to have them when the hys-
teria which caused them was cured. Seclusion
and repression are the conditions of the mystic
experience.
We might compare the mystic experience to
the effective abreaction of emotion in the psycho-
analytic treatment. The individual is in a state
of quiescence, receptivity. As the patient is
placed in a reclining position in a semi-darkened
room and told to relax, in order that in an ab-
stracted state, he may view his own psychic proc-
MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 95
esses, so the mystic "withdraws into the sim-
plicitas of the heart.”
Then, when he is in this abstracted, receptive
condition, all the memories, the imagery, the
experience, the anguish of his inward conflict,
which have been stored up in the Unconscious
and violently repressed, issue forth with such
strength that he is overwhelmed and speechless.
His visions are colored by his thought and pre-
vious reading, as the dream is colored by the
experiences of the previous day. We cannot
quite say that these celestial visions are the “de-
lusions of grandeur" of the paranoiac, but they
have at least a similar mechanism back of them:
they are hallucinations due to the long repres-
sion of sex-instinct of the ascetic, the nature of
the mystic's preparatory fasting, meditation,
and mode of thought, and to the receptive ab-
stracted condition in which he places himself.
“Our spirit becomes desireless, as though there
were nothing on earth or in heaven of which
we stood in need,” says Ruysbroek. Certainly,
for desire is gratified in the erotically-motivated
heavenly vision, even as desire is gratified in
highly symbolized dreams. "Lost in the abyss
of our eternal blessedness, we perceive no dis-
tinction between ourselves and God.” In other
words, the sea of the Unconscious, so much
vaster in extent than the field of waking con-
sciousness, rises up and engulfs the devotee.
This abyss of which all mystics speak, "an abyss
96 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
of undifferentiated being," in which all their
being seems submerged, can be nothing more nor
less than just this sea of the Unconscious; they
have the feeling of being engulfed in it because
all definite, directed thought is erased from the
mind for the time, and consciousness seems to
spread and diffuse itself through the universe.
Patients going under the influence of an anaes-
thetic have a similar feeling. With the mystic,
of course, there is the strong influence of auto-
suggestion to strengthen the impression, and
affective thought to give it definite direction.
That there is strong erotic feeling, not always
sublimated or refined, beneath the symbolism of
the mystic is evident from the rhapsodies of St.
Theresa, St. Catherine, and the quotation from
Suso which I have cited above.
The desire-element with its fulfilment is so
strongly evidenced in all recorded mystic ex-
periences as to need no comment and no further
proof. The mystic desires above all things to
see God, to experience God, to be one with Him,
and this very desire, working with tremendous
potency upon unconscious elements in his per-
sonality, brings at length the fulfilment he seeks.
We have here a cumulative effect, a constant
accretion, a cumulative surging up of desire
within the Unconscious, accompanied by strong
repression of the Conscious, until at length the
welling flood bursts all bonds and breaks forth
with violence in an hysterical outburst.
MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 97
Let us consider the life of the mystic a little
more specifically. The mediæval monk, desirous
of becoming one with God, deliberately cut him-
self off from his fellows to live a definitely aso-
cial life. It was a rude world in which he lived;
fighting was a man's work in that world and
the sensitive soul found little peace except in
the monastery. So the monk retires to his clois-
ter; he fasts, reducing his food to the very mini-
mum that will sustain life; he rises from his rude
bed at all hours to pray upon the cold flag-
stones of his cell; he flagellates himself until
he faints from loss of blood; he wears a hair-
shirt or even iron spikes beneath his habit; he
undergoes all sorts of penance for sins real and
imaginary. He thinks by this means to destroy
all natural instinct, which is of the devil. But
these instincts are not destroyed, they lead an
unconscious autonomous life. This creates the
ideal condition for the hysterical outburst. It
inevitably comes; the floods dammed up for a
long period break forth with violence. What
wonder that the mystic feels an unwonted free-
dom, an infinite happiness after this powerful
affective abreaction, or that the feeling of exul-
tation is succeeded by a feeling of perfect re-
laxation, perfect peace.
The mystic may feel that he has good reason
violently to repress all desire and memory of
his former life. He may have been like St.
Francis of Assisi, a worldling immersed in the
98 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
vanities of the world; or like St. Augustine, a
rake whose life had been dissolute. In that case,
repression will be all the stronger; he will seek
to forget his evil life; his penance will be re-
doubled, for there will be the element of remorse
to contend with; and the uprushing flood of emo-
tion will be all the stronger. We may say that
there has been in his life a dissociation, his life
has been divided against itself. But with the up-
welling floods of emotion the dissociated ele-
ments become one with conscious elements,
the dissociated personality is once more
whole, and the mystic feels the sensation of
mental and moral soundness. The uprush of
emotion has acted as a mental catharsis, the
mystic is once more in tune with God and the
universe.
Given the right conditions, it is likely that
any one could have the “mystic experience.”
There needs but the long-continued repression,
the raising of powerful resistances, the conflict
with its gathering strength, and there will in-
evitably come the outburst of pent-up emotion.
The form this outburst will take depends, as we
have seen, upon individual predilection.
Whether the mystic actually comes into con-
tact with something Divine, I am not prepared
to say. This is outside the field of psychology
and we are here concerned with the mechanism,
not the content of the mystic experience. A full
discussion of this phase of the subject would take
MYSTICISM AND NEUROTIC STATES 99
us far afield into the realms of philosophy upon
its most metaphysical side as well as theology
upon its rationalistic side; it would involve dis-
cussion of the nature of the Divine as evidenced
in things external to ourselves. Psychology
may deal with the Divine in the human as evi-
denced in human behavior; but there its in-
quiries must stop.
VI. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
A T the beginning of our first chapter we
7 stated that one of the burning questions
of human life is "Why does evil exist in a
universe which, we suppose, is divinely ordered?”
From Job to Omar Khayyam the bitter cry has
gone up, “Why is evil existent, why does a good
God allow evil to crush out the very soul of
man?” And the response of the human soul is
as varied as human temperament. It ranges
from the meek acquiescence of Job, who cries
out in the midst of his sore affliction, “All the
days of my appointed time will I wait until my
release come,” to the proudly cynical and bitter
taunt of Omar,
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh and then impute my fall to sin.
A good deal of this anxious questioning arises
from confusion in the popular mind as to the
nature of evil. There are two kinds of evil: cos-
mic evil, which is nothing more or less than the
operation of natural and immutable law which
man has either advertently or inadvertently vio-
lated; and the personal evil operative in human
life, which has its origin in human impulse and
100
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
101
human conduct, the cure of which is to be sought
and found in man himself. Much of cosmic evil
is doubtless due to the evolution of the universe.
The scientist tells us that volcanic action and
earthquakes, which have so devastated the
world, are necessary to the maintenance of land-
life; that were volcanic action to cease, the
surging oceans would soon eat away the land.
A world in which volcanic action has ceased
is a dead world.
However, cosmic evil (if the term be not a
misnomer) need not concern us here as it is not
under our control. What concerns us is the evil
manifested in human life and human relations.
Much of this is due to the Unconscious, which,
being a repository of individual and racial mem-
ories, emotional in its nature, and capable of but
one emotion, desire, is therefore non-moral. It
is not consciously immoral; it has nothing to do
with the ethical at all. It is a giant whose
one feeling is appetite; it is a savage, incapable
of appreciation of the difference between good
and evil.
We saw in our first chapter how primitive re-
ligion lacks the ethical note, and how a definite
moral code is the product of racial experience
acting over a long period. Retaining as we do
the primitive emotional element in the Uncon-
scious, we are at times defeated in our conflict
with this Titan, elemental impulses get the bet-
ter of us, and some harm to a fellow man is
IO2 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
wrought. The efforts of this chained giant to
emerge from his lair and overwhelm judgment
and logic are sometimes attended with success.
A tremendous struggle ensues when he tugs at
his bonds, and if we go down before him, his vol-
canic outburst will wreck everything that comes
in his way. This we call evil, and it is for the
most part, unconsciously motivated. The Un-
conscious blazes a path to a given end and recks
little of what may stand in its way.
It is, on the whole, likely that we exaggerate
the power of evil to harm. We have seen that no
extraneous evil in human life is too grievous to
bear if the individual be armed with the defen-
sive weapons of the normal person; that it is
only as the personality is weakened by some neu-
rotic inner conflict that the individual is so
weakened as to be unfit to bear the troubles that
afflict him in the ordinary course of human
events.
The evils hardest to bear are those self-
created, the bugaboos of the Unconscious. They
are Protean in form and give rise to a variety of
nameless fears: fear of disease, which we call
hypochondria; fear of death with an ambivalent
longing for it; fear of incapacity for a task of
which the individual is entirely capable; fear of
insanity; fear of moral disintegration. Under
this head come all the phobias: claustrophobia,
a fear of closed places; agoraphobia, fear of
open spaces, and a thousand others. These
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
103
make the patient miserable, his life a burden,
and not the least of his troubles is the unsym-
pathetic attitude of healthy acquaintances who
strive to laugh him out of his fears and thereby
aggravate them.
It is probable that the greatest evil of human
life is fear, that potent destroyer of human hap-
piness. To-day we know the genesis of most of
these fears. Phobias and anxiety-states are due
to unconscious repression of the natural in-
stincts, inhibition of the normal functional ac-
tivity of the psyche. And we have definite proof
that a repression of normal emotion through
some vicious complex, a stopping of the natural
outlet of human feeling, metamorphoses the re-
pressed emotion into a feeling of fear and
anxiety. John uttered a profound truth when he
said, “Perfect love casteth out fear.”
Let us not strive to minimize these evils be-
cause they seem to have so slight a basis.
Grasset (The Semi-Insane and the Semi-Respon-
sible) says, “In such cases fear is paralyzing and
agonizing. Instead of being the starting-point
of wise measures of defence, the unconscious
reactions to this fear are inhibitive and frantic.
This fear makes the subject perspire, presses on
his chest, makes his limbs shake or give way, or
if it makes him fly from danger, he will fly fool-
ishly and in the wrong direction. It is in this
respect that such fear is distinctly diseased."
(Page 106.) "Doubtless,” he continues, "these
104 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
fears were defence reactions in the long ago, but
they have long outlived their usefulness."
For the neurotic who is obsessed by these pho-
bias, life is a waking nightmare; every turn in
the path is beset with foes; if he walk abroad,
an enemy lurks behind every corner; if he remain
at home dark shadows and forebodings oppress
him, his life is a burden to himself and to others.
He is sure to feel that he is persecuted;
passers-by give him dark looks; voices utter vile
epithets: he will exhibit many if not all of the
symptoms of a definite psychosis and yet be but
the victim of an anxiety-hysteria. Small wonder
that those so obsessed question God's providence
and contend in season and out that whatever or
whoever rules the universe, it must be some evil
force. Pfister tells of a young dentist, who was
so obsessed by these fears and hallucinations
that he no longer went abroad. And of course, al-
though the neurotic is not aware of it, the enemy
is to be looked for not without, but within.
Dostoievsky, the Russian novelist, seems to
have been aware of the subjective nature of
these mysterious fears. “There was a frightful
fear of something which I cannot define, of some-
thing which I cannot conceive, which does not
exist, but which rises before me as a horrible,
distorted, inexorable, and irrefutable fact.”
Moussorgsky, the gifted Russian composer of
"Boris Goudounov," has given in his study of
the obsessed Czar, Boris, a picture of the haunt-
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
105
ing fears of his own life. Boris has instigated
the murder of the Czarevitch, Dmitri, and the
shade of the murdered lad haunts him in his last
years. He essays peace of mind in religion, but
it is of no avail. Everywhere he is pursued by
this phantom, and his agonized cry, “Va, va,
fanciul!” rings out through the barbaric strains
of Moussorgsky's music until at length he drops
dead in an hysterical fit. While the composer
pictures the fear of Boris as due to an objective
cause, there is no doubt that the opera is a page
of his own autobiography. It is probably more
than coincidence that the first dramatic music
Moussorgsky composed was a chorus from the
play of Edipus, which had just been translated
into Russian.
An educator, X, was obsessed by feelings
of nameless fear during the day, and hysterical
symptoms at night. If he happened to be in a
train that was going through a tunnel, he suf-
fered from claustrophobia; if the train had a
sudden access of speed, he feared it would be
wrecked; in either case, he felt that the train
would never reach the terminal. If he had to
remain for any length of time in a wide public
square he felt that some unknown enemy might
creep upon him from behind (agoraphobia); he
went constantly in fear of fainting and sudden
death. When he rose to address an audience,
he felt as though he were about to lose his voice
or drop fainting on the platform. At night, he
, he f the to
Ther
106 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
was wakened from a sleep apparently sound and
dreamless by palpitation of the heart, and a
dyspnoea, with an intense feeling of suffocation.
His work became daily more difficult of execu-
tion; life was a burden, even while he feared
death. He lost faith in God and his aboulia
made the ordinary acts of every-day life increas-
ingly difficult.
It was found that he was suffering from an
anxiety-hysteria, due to an infantile fixation,
added to which was a faulty sex-education that
induced intense repression of instinct during
adolescent years. It is true, he had had a real
physical disturbance; some ten years previous
to the onset of these attacks, he had suffered
from a functional heart disorder. This had been
completely cured, but the free floating anxiety
aroused by his vicious complex and bad educa-
tion had attached itself to this later functional
disorder, so that to his other fears was added
that of his heart's failing at any moment. An
unwise physician had increased the severity of
the anxiety attacks by telling him that he might
drop dead in one of them! He was entirely
cured of this morbid condition, but the discussion
of the method of cure belongs to another
chapter.
Authorities are agreed that these victims are
deserving of even more of our sympathy than the
physically diseased; for the latter have at least
a fund of mental and moral strength upon which
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
107
2C
to draw, while the former are robbed even of
this support.
Formerly, the neurotic was looked upon as a
hopeless hypochondriac who had no real ail-
ment, or as the unlucky victim of incurable
mental disease due to hereditary taint, according
as the observer was an ignorant and materialistic
layman, or a wise and sympathetic alienist. To-
day we are discovering how closely the neuroses
may imitate the psychoses, and we find that
even certain of the latter will yield to psycho-
analytic treatment.
There is no doubt that a vicious theology and
ill-advised religious training are to be held re-
sponsible for many of these disturbances. The
threat is used as a weapon. The child is threat-
ened from its earliest years that unless it does
thus and so and refrains from doing this and
that, it is in danger of divine punishment. "God
wants you to do so and so; God will punish you
if you do so and so,” says the unwise mother.
This is to inculcate the law of fear — primitive
and savage - instead of the law of love, and
can have nothing but a pernicious influence upon
the child's sensitive plastic nature. He comes
to believe that whatever is natural is sinful. We
forget that normally the child is not governed
by the same standards that rule adult life. For
instance, following the lead of prehistoric an-
cestors, he is a predatory animal, unconscious
of meum and tuum. Unconcernedly he appro-
108 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
priates the property of another. He is not con-
scious of sin. But he is at once made to feel
that his sin is almost unpardonable. We ought
to remember that the child does not inherently
have a high sense of honor; he must learn this
through long experience and training; but we
attribute to him the same high standards of
honor that we ourselves have after a lifetime of
training. The child does not stop to think be-
fore it acts — like its primitive ancestors it acts
on impulse, not after mature thought and reflec-
tion on consequences, but from the urge of im-
mediate desire. We are short-sighted when we
pounce upon it and make it believe that there
is no punishment too severe for the crime it has
committed. Many a time one sees a child weep
bitterly when thus wantonly and cruelly at-
tacked by an elder who should have known
better. The child may be gently led to act from
higher motives; he cannot be driven. To drive
the child is to harden his nature, kill his spon-
taneity, make him a small prig, a little hypo-
crite, who acts not from inner springs but be-
cause some older person has imposed his own
standards upon him, has forced the idea upon
him that he must act thus and so without fur-
nishing reasons. The child is made a hypocrite
because, from his viewpoint, this is not the
proper spring of action, it is forced upon him
from without, and worst of all a conflict ensues
between his own developing nature and the
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 109
impossible ideals forced upon him. This is the
frequent beginning of a neurosis which will fol-
low him all his life long.
Again, our lack of proper sex education gives
rise to many mental and nervous troubles. The
sex education of the child is, as a rule, utterly
neglected by parent and teacher. The growing
child knows nothing of sex except as his inquir-
ing mind reaches out for any bit of information
that may surreptitiously be had. Sex matters
are surrounded by an alluring mystery; they
are not nice,” and this is sufficient to attract
his eager mind, anxious to know everything in
the world about him. Information is forth-
coming in the form of obscene stories and expres-
sions that he hears from children a little older
than himself. When the storms incident to the
beginning of adolescence suddenly assail him,
they find him totally unprepared for the on-
slaught. Tremendous changes suddenly begin
to take place in his physical and mental being;
new emotions sweep over him. His world tot-
ters and crashes about him; his ideals, the false
and prudish ideals inculcated by unwise teachers,
crash down in ruin, as he finds that the very
things which had been presented to his youthful
mind as unclean are the basic things of human
life. He discovers that his own parents have
been guilty of the act which all his teaching has
led him to believe an unspeakable and carnal sin.
He is completely at sea, and only the long years
IIO RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
that follow will re-educate him, give him a true
perspective of his sex-life and sex-life in general.
But meanwhile? Meanwhile the seeds of a neu-
rosis are sown in fertile soil; it is likely as not,
more likely than not, that he will suffer from
some sex-perversion or from sexual anæsthesia,
for his early training has repressed his normal
sexual feeling. His whole life may be embittered
and his mind obsessed by the nameless fears that
grow out of such repression.
In the third place, materialistic physicians,
who hold that the entire practice of medicine
consists in the diagnosis of physical ills and
medication, are to blame for many of the mental
and nervous ills from which mankind suffers.
The physician of the old school had no sym-
pathy for the nervous sufferer. He hated to see
the hypochrondriac approaching, for he knew
that he would hear a long recital of what he
termed imaginary ills, that is, ills which are not
of a physical nature and are not at all what the
patient thinks they are. With such a patient, he
would take one of two courses. He would either
argue with him, reiterating over and over the
statement that there was nothing wrong with
him, thereby setting up resistances in the mind
of one already suffering from too many; or else,
without argument, he would administer some
drug, perhaps strychnia, which is always a safe
guess in nervous cases, since it gives a patient a
sense of well-being temporarily, because it has a
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
III
stimulating effect upon the nervous system; or,
thirdly, he might give him a bolus of pills com-
posed solely of sugar of milk. The patient
would get no better, hence he would finally leave
the doctor with feelings of mental anguish mixed
with hatred for the well-meaning but ignorant
physician. Perhaps he would try physician after
physician, spend all his substance, but gain no
relief. Such a patient knows that he suffers
from a real affliction, whatever the diagnostician
may say. He suffers from all sorts of obsessions
and anxieties; he cannot sleep, or his sleep is
broken and rendered hideous by nightmares and
sudden wakings with terrifying symptoms which
he thinks predict his doom. Sometimes the
patient is suffering from some physical ill in
addition to his neurosis or hysteria. Then an
ignorant and cruel physician has been known to
terrify him by telling him that he may drop dead
at any moment, or that unless he does thus and
so, he is condemned to a life of confirmed and
hopeless invalidism. An eminent physician diag-
nosed a case as aneurism of the thoracic aorta.
He told the patient immediately to go home, go
to bed; that though it was exceedingly doubtful,
his life might thus be saved. Imagine the state
of mind of this patient! He died soon after, his
end probably hastened by fright as well as his
serious ailment. There was also the case of the
educator, X, whom I have already mentioned,
whom an eminent diagnostician told that he
112 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
might fall dead in one of his hysterical attacks,
thereby increasing the intensity and frequency
of the attacks. An intelligent man of forty
rushed, white and breathless, into the office of a
friend of mine. Two physicians had just told
him, independently of each other, that he had
a blood-pressure of 200! Here was just cause
for alarm. My friend took his blood-pressure,
which was 143, that is, normal. The patient
was still in doubt, so my friend sent for a col-
league, who took the man's blood-pressure, and
found that his instrument read 143 (thus cor-
roborating my friend's finding). It was a long
time before he could allay the patient's justly-
aroused fears. What must one think of the other
two physicians?
We see from the above recital, how many and
varied are the elements that cause ungrounded
fear in the minds of both the normal and the
abnormal; how the element of evil in human
life is not only aggravated by bad methods of
education, but how fears are created in the mind
by such wrong procedures, fears that have no
basis in reality; and how, in general, a false
view of life as a whole is engendered through
such misinformation and such pernicious
methods.
It must be quite clear to us, then, that the
worst evils of human life do not exist at all in
the world without; they are created in the inner,
psychic world. For we not only bear those ills
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
113
we have, but we fly to others that we have not
known until some pernicious force or some well-
meaning person plants them in our minds.
Finally, let me here reiterate that to the nor-
mal person life seems good. Wherever a man or
a woman is to be found who takes misanthropo-
morphic, pessimistic, cynical views of the world
and its Creator, it may usually be concluded
that that person is suffering from a vicious com-
plex with its accompanying neurosis or hysteria.
In this connection we must mention the psy-
choses or so-called insanities, especially of the
melancholic or manic-depressive type, which ex-
hibit all the symptoms of the hysterias, which,
if they are not caused by false religious teaching,
at least show a bad religious outlook, with all the
fear of death and the Hereafter, or of having
committed the "unpardonable sin" (whatever
that may be), and which give the patient a bad
outlook on life. These have been considered
extremely difficult or impossible to cure. It is
likely, it may be said for the encouragement of
the nervous patient, that these are of far less
frequent occurrence than was formerly sup-
posed, since the more frequent neuroses and hys-
terias have many of the same symptoms. Even
for the psychoses, the outlook is more favorable
1 This is the field for the alienist, not for the lay writer. This
paragraph must therefore be considered with due caution, as the
observation of the layman is naturally too limited to allow of
dogmatic statement.
114 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
than formerly, since in their incipient stages
they are amenable to psycho-analytic treatment.
As for the neuroses and the hysterias (it is
difficult to draw the line between them), I think
that I am safe in saying that they are never con-
genital, that they have their origin some time in
the life, usually the very early life, of the patient,
that they are in a majority of cases curable by
modern psycho-therapeutic methods, and that
with their cure the individual who saw all of life
as unmixed evil becomes sane, normal, and opti-
mistic, and that, as he is drawn out of himself
and his inner conflicts are resolved, his mental
and moral equilibrium is restored and he sees
that life is on the whole good. Rid of his neuro-
sis and its anxieties, he will cease vexing himself
with the futile questions whether a good God has
created and orders the universe, why if He is
good he allows evil in the world, and whether in
such a world any effort is worth while, for he will
realize that these metaphysical doubts were the
objectification of his own inner conflict, now
ended forever. Instead of these futile question-
ings and introspection which leads no whither,
he will turn his gaze outward, utilize his energy
for social ends, and strive to make the world bet-
ter by his effort rather than waste his energies
in repining
VII. PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES
W E saw in a former chapter how certain
VV religious states are the direct outcome of
neurotic tendencies, and how certain complexes
may drive the devotee to the repressed state
where the mystic experience is possible.
We have seen how the complex-driven in-
dividual may seek refuge from reality in oneness
with God. On the other hand, he may be driven
entirely away from religion, into religious doubt,
agnosticism, or atheism. In this connection we
have noted how the Edipus-complex, which in-
volves hatred of the father or the father-image,
may direct the individual's hatred to God as the
Father of mankind. We have likewise seen
something of the so-called metaphysical neu-
rotic type, who cannot let a day pass without
questioning the beneficence of the Creator and
whose world-view (Weltanschauung) is a reflec-
tion of his own vicious complex.
The complex may appear in other types than
the mystic or the religious doubter. There is
the Sadistic type, who derives great enjoyment
from pain inflicted upon others. The term is
derived from the novels of the Comte de Sade,
which exploit the cruelty of man to woman. Re-
115
116 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
ligious fanatics have frequently evinced such a
disposition in relation to their fellow-men. To
comprehend this trait, we must understand the
psychic history of the individual.
Every child normally lives through a Sadistic
period, when his keenest pleasure is from pain
inflicted upon others. The small boy, apparently
from wanton cruelty, loves to torture a poor toad
or vivisect a harmless frog. I have seen small
boys drag water-snakes from the brook and,
grasping them by the tail, snap their heads
off. "How horrible!” some one may say. Yes,
but the child must live through the history of the
human race; this Sadistic period is the period of
savagery which he is living through. It is the
period during which he loves to bully younger
and smaller children; it probably gives him a
feeling of superior strength and courage. Pfister
(Psycho-analytic Method, page 77) speaks of a
sixteen-year-old boy who "sees a charming kit-
ten sitting in the sun. At once there awakens
in him the burning desire to maltreat it. A fear-
ful unrest seized him until he procured a stick
and struck the sleeping animal on the nose with
all his strength. The young cat was half dead
from pain and fright but the boy had a strong
feeling of pleasure."
The youth was of course abnormal. In nor-
mal individuals, the Sadistic period is quickly
outgrown, and the growing youth becomes in-
creasingly conscious of kindly, altruistic im-
PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS .
TYPES 117
pulses, his attention is focused on the world
without and its varied demands, he prepares for
his life-work, and this involves the consideration
of others. But there are individuals in whom
this tendency is never broken up, who are Sadis-
tic all their lives long. These, in the political
world are the Neroes. They fiddle while Rome
burns; they love to see writhing victims boiled
in oil or serving as human torches to light a fes-
tal night. It stirs some dead impulse in them to
renewed life, they doubtless have a keen sense
of well-being while the torturing process is going
on. Sardou gives us a grimly realistic, if revolt-
ing, picture in his play Tosca, in which he de-
picts the abnormal elderly roué Scarpia making
amorous advances to the singer, Floria Tosca,
while the groans of her tortured lover are heard
and the reflection of the torture-fire is seen, from
an adjoining room.
The Sadistic type is frequently found in the
religious life. Tertullian, one of the Church
Fathers, described as an "expert controversial-
ist,” is said to have declared that one of the chief
pleasures of the saint in heaven is to gaze over
the battlements at sinners suffering in the flames
of hell below. Torquemada, father of the Span-
ish Inquisition, first Grand Inquisitor under Fer-
dinand and Isabella, was strongly Sadistic.
Under his jurisdiction, the dungeons of the Do-
minican monastery at Seville became too small
to hold the numerous prisoners incarcerated for
118 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
some heresy, and more than two thousand were
burned within a year or two. Horrible beyond
belief are the engines of his cruelty: the rack,
the thumb-screw, the iron virgin lined with
spikes, the Procrustian bed to fit which the
prisoner's limbs were drawn out until the bones
cracked, or were lopped off as the case neces-
sitated. The inquisitors were inflamed with a
blood-lust which only increasingly terrible tor-
tures would satisfy. It was all done to "the
glory of God,” that is, to satisfy the demands of
the Edipus-complex."
We shrink with horror from contemplation of
these scenes, and well we may, for we know that
these inquisitors were abnormal, that they were
the victims of some neurosis. What we fail to
realize is that Sadism in modified and less cruel
form prevails in religion even to the present day.
The days when Catholic persecuted Protestant,
as in the Huguenot massacre on St. Barthol-
omew's Eve in France, when Protestant perse-
cuted Catholic, as in the days of Henry VIII in
England or the Calvinistic régime in Geneva,
when the stern-visaged Puritans drove the Qua-
1 Salomé, who had demanded the head of John the Baptist as a
reward for her dancing, is a type of Sadism. As portrayed in
Oscar Wilde's play of that name, she has fallen wildly in love
with John, who resists her advances. Her craving is gratified by
the beheading of John; she takes the severed head in her arms
and lavishes fondest caresses upon it; a disgusting spectacle and
one which could have been conceived by no normal man. Dr.
Coriat has made a masterly analysis of the play.
PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 119
kers from their midst -- these days seem remote.
Yet, so long as individuals suffer from some vi-
cious complex which arises from an infantile fix-
ation, Sadism in religion will persist. We are all
familiar with individuals who subject their
wives to extreme cruelty which runs the gamut
from dragging a woman about by the hair of her
head to subjecting her to bitter invective, humili-
ating her in public, making life a burden to her
in numerous cruel, if petty ways. These types
are pathological; their Unconcious is, so to
speak, still in a state of infancy. They suffer
from arrested development, not intellectual, but
emotional. Their minds may be keen, their
brains alert, they may seem to be mature, but
emotionally they are still cruel monsters of
young boys. They need psychic re-education.
It may seem strange, but churches are full of
this type; long-faced saints who would deprive
the young of all innocent amusement, and who
see evil in the most harmless of youthful diver-
sions. Suffering as they do from repression of
their own sex instinct, they read evil meanings
into all associations of the sexes. They see evil
in all things because they delight to see evil, non-
plussed though they would be at the discovery
of their inner motives! It is their pleasure to
deprive others of everything which might make
them happy. How utterly selfish their philos-
ophy of life is they cannot realize, for they are
pathological individuals who, from no fault of
!
120 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
their own, have been made to see life in somber
hues; they are the misogynists, the pessimists,
the cynics. Let us look upon them with charity,
for they are not to blame for their condition and
their lives are desperately unhappy.
Apparently opposed in character to the Sadist,
yet vastly similar, is the Masochist, who derives
pleasure from pain inflicted upon himself. Mas-
ochism takes its name from an Austrian novelist,
Sacher-Masoch, who depicted this form of
cruelty in his novels. The Masochist, as we have
seen in the chapter on “Mysticism,” gains the
greatest pleasure from pain which he inflicts
upon himself or induces others to inflict upon
him. While this seems the opposite of Sadism,
it is in reality a derivative or reaction therefrom.
We have seen how, by the principle of ambiva-
lence or change of values, an emotion can change
into its precise opposite; we often see strong
love transformed into equally strong hate.
It may also happen that the Masochist has in-
flicted pain upon others until it no longer arouses
his jaded appetites, and accidentally finds that
pain inflicted upon himself will still act as a
stimulus. Sometimes, this tendency may be
caused by love of violent contrast. Paul is a
good example of this ambivalent tendency.
St. Francis, who was reared in great luxury,
albeit under the domination of a harsh father,
when he finally turned to the ascetic life, re-
moved the very garments he was wearing and
PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 12 I
offered them to his father at the altar, an act
which can be interpreted only as Masochistic.
It was the extreme and superfluous symbolic re-
nunciation of his former life. The Indian fakir
exhibits this trait when he holds one arm out-
stretched until it becomes shrivelled and atro-
phied, or walks barefoot over hot coals. The
religious recluse who betakes him to the desert
places to endure extreme privation, and the pillar
saint who, like St. Simon Stylites, spends his life
on the top of a tall pillar, where he gains in grace
what he loses in comfort and thus becomes the
admired of the ignorant multitude, think, like
those of old who offered rich sacrifices, to pro-
pitiate the gods by the richest gifts in their power
to bestow, and are examples of the Masochistic
tendency in religion. Origen, a great and good
man, mistaking the sense of Matthew xix 12,
actually practiced self-mutilation, in order to
win the Kingdom of Heaven.
The self-deprecatory, saintly, meek type which
formerly we met so frequently in our churches,
is decidedly Masochistic. There can be no
doubt that the Christian woman who bears
meekly the abuses of a Sadistic husband, derives
a Masochistic pleasure from the pain and fright.
As we saw in a previous chapter, the Christian
martyrs had developed a strong Masochistic
strain in their religion, so that they went to tor-
ture and death with songs upon their lips.
We have seen in the chapter on the “Motiva-
whl.
122 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
tion of Human Life," that all our decisions are in
reality "value judgments,” that there is always
in human life a balancing of one good against
another, and that the ego chooses that thing
which promises the greatest happiness. For
some men this is immediate pleasure without re-
gard to consequences; for others, the greater
reward is some far-off good, for which they will
forsake present pleasure. Normal, abnormal,
Sadistic, Masochistic — all are making impor-
tant decisions from day to day through this very
mechanism which I have described at such
length in these chapters. If our complexes are
such that we can see only present good, we will
reach out and grasp it at all costs; if our com-
plexes point to the future, we will eschew pres-
ent good for future reward. Hence, our lack of
comprehension of one another. Completely to
understand one another, we should have to know
our varied life histories and the complexes which
motivate human life. We needs must have a
background of the new psychology ere we can
get a grasp on the motivation of life, or the
peculiar characteristics of religious types.
There seems but little purpose in any lengthy
discussion of the psychoses in this place. From
our present knowledge of the subject, we are
reasonably safe in saying that religion per se,
in any of its phases or with any of its dogmas,
has never really driven man or woman mad. A
psychosis will very often, however, take on re-
PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 123
SY
ligious coloring, or will prove the instigating
cause that drives the individual into religious
seclusion, bad religious teaching may help to
develop the psychosis, or the self-reproaches in-
cident to the advance of the psychosis will cause
him to seek peace and consolation at the foot of
the altar. A youthful sufferer from dementia-
praecox whom Pfister treated, was in the habit
of drawing pictures of chapels surrounded by
cypress trees in front of which a river ran with
floating corpses. The same youth would go and
sit for hours opposite an insane asylum, longing
to be insane so that he might have the seclusion
and isolation in which to dream his erotic dreams
and develop his erotic fancies unmolested. Had
a monastery been as conveniently situated as
the asylum, it is quite likely that the youth
would have longed for the cloistered peace of a
religious institution rather than the cell of an
insane asylum. Environment often furnishes
convenient molds into which neurotic fancies
may be poured, and though the content will be
the same, the form will vary as the environment
predisposes. Patients with "delusions of gran-
deur” will build up their visions in the form of
magnificent palaces and great cities, which may
vary from some heathen Elysium or Walhalla, to
castles in Spain, or the New Jerusalem, accord-
ing as their early training, environment, or read-
ing predispose them.
It would seem, therefore, that religion per se
124 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
has never driven a normal person into a psy-
choneurosis; it cannot be called a definite, effi-
cient cause of such a malady. We know defi-
nitely, however, that an over-ascetic early train-
ing, harshness of over-religious parents or
teachers, have helped to develop neuroses, espe-
cially those arising from the Edipus-complex,
There is no doubt whatever that harsh and over-
strict religious training plays a prominent rôle
in the development of neurotic fancies. A con-
spiracy of evil events and conditions, together
with too exacting religious and moral demands,
has often seemed to drive an individual into a
definite psychoneurosis, chronic and incurable; it
is doubtful, however, whether these were more
than chance instigators of the neurosis or the
precipitating cause, the real, fundamental cause
lying elsewhere. It is also likely that the psy-
chology which deals with this province has suf-
fered from a too ardent desire upon the part of
the alienist to classify and categorize. The many
classes of "religious mania” are probably noth-
ing but different aspects of the same sort of
neurosis; one is appalled at the elaborate and
artificial classifications of the older psychology,
every individual development of neurosis, or
hysteria, bringing out a new classification. More-
over, many ailments, which involve personal
eccentricities, vagaries, oddities, or even more
serious nervous difficulties, and which were for-
merly included among the psychoses, are now
PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 125
seen to be curable neuroses, not congenital, but
acquired, and therefore curable. When the neu-
rosis is cured, the morbid religious emotion of
the patient disappears.
Thus, the religious hallucinations which are
hysterical phenomena due to repressions, disap-
pear when the sex-craving is released from the
long repression and the patient becomes normal.
The woman who had visions of Christ coming
and bearing her away in his arms to heaven, who
saw angels ascending and descending a celestial
stair, with purple clouds of glory, ceased to be-
hold these visions when her nervous difficulty,
which was caused by sexual trauma, was cured.
It sometimes occurs that certain of the split-
off personalities of a dissociated personality will
be highly religious, while others will be irreli-
gious, profane, and even blasphemous to the last
degree. One of the personalities of Miss Beau-
champ, whom Dr. Prince cured of her dissocia-
tion, was sober, subdued, and very religious and
devout, whereas the “Sally" personality was
harum-scarum and unprincipled, delighting to
inflict pain (Sadistic-Masochistic complex)
upon the more sober personality. At one period
of the treatment, Miss Beauchamp was horrified
to behold in a gazing-crystal a vision of herself
smoking a cigarette, the work of the mischievous
Sally.
The value of a religion which drives the in-
dividual away from the living, pulsing world of
126 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
men and things is questionable, even if it be not
due to a definite neurosis, hysteria, or psychosis.
If religion does not help man to adapt himself
to his environment, nor fit him to play a definite,
decisive, active rôle as an integral part of the
social organism, it has little value either for him-
self or for others. The picture of the mild-eyed
ascetic living a secluded other-worldly life is not
attractive to the modern mind, for it seems to
this age abnormal. To normal persons, it seems
a woeful waste of energy, a life futile and unpro-
ductive, therefore unhappy. It is indeed a living
death.
Lest the reader think I have been unfair to re-
ligion, allow me to say that many most suc-
cessful sublimations have come about through
its beneficent agency. Christianity has done
wonders in the way of inducing a healthy, liber-
ating piety. No danger to religion is to be feared
from psycho-analysis. Pfister (Psych. An.
Method, p. 414) says: “While psycho-analysis
may disclose the emptiness of religious errors, it
is helpful to a healthy piety which increases
moral strength. To me, it is a mystery how
anxious souls can fear damage to religion and
morality from psycho-analysis. How closely the
results of the latter stand to the commands of
the Gospel, is easily demonstrated.” Likewise
Coriat (“The Future of Psycho-analysis," Psy-
choanalytic Review, October, 1917): “As a type
of emotional sublimation, religion, using the
PATHOLOGICAL RELIGIOUS TYPES 127
term in its broadest sense without any reference
to any particular dogma, offers one of the most
effective and satisfactory roots for the subli-
mating process.” I trust that this will be made
sufficiently clear in the chapter on "Conversion."
VIII. THE OCCULT IN MODERN
RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS
TN all religious systems, from the most primi-
1 tive down to the most modern, the belief
has been inculcated that when the physical body
dies, the personality survives. The Greeks and
the Romans believed that beyond the River Styx
lay the abode of the dead, a sort of dream-world,
where the shades of the departed wandered in
dim meadows, wan shadows of their former
selves. Dante has transferred much of this
classic mythology to his Divina Commedia, add-
ing certain mediæval imagery and demonology.
The American Indian believed that the departed
warrior would survive in the Happy Hunting
Ground, and survivors sent along with the dead,
food and beasts of burden for the long journey.
Norse mythology has its Walhalla to whose hal-
lowed heights warriors fallen in battle are borne
aloft by Walkyrs, where they sit forever feast-
ing and on occasion tilting in celestial jousts
whence they emerge unwounded to feast again.
Mohammedanism has its Paradise where dark-
eyed houris wait upon him who has died true to
the faith.
128
THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 129
Christianity no less has its heaven and its hell.
They are a mixture of ancient Judaism, classic
mythology, mediæval imagery, and modern
thought. The golden streets and pearly gates
are Apocalyptic in character; the flames of hell
are classic and mediæval.
Of late, due no doubt to the incalculable loss
of life in the late war, there has been a wide-
spread revival of spiritualism, or spiritism as
the more scientific incline to call it. The So-
cieties for Psychical Research, British and
American, have been concerned for many years
with a scientific investigation of the question of
conscious survival after bodily death, and have
much remarkable evidence to present. Circum-
stantial data have been given through veracious
(that is, honest and sincere) mediums of the
character of the life of the hereafter.
Whether a real, objective reality lies behind
this evidence, I am not prepared to say; let us
leave that to specialists in the field like Dr. Hys-
lop and other psychic researchers. I am con-
cerned with viewing the whole matter from the
psycho-analytic points of view, and pointing out
how easily we may be misled by tricks of the
Unconscious in our researches in this field.
Let us first ask whence arises this universal
demand for a continuation of conscious life after
physical disintegration? It seems to me that
Freud's explanation is correct. The Unconscious,
he states, cannot conceive of itself as annihil-
LU
130 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
ated. The world is not even conceivable as
having real existence without human conscious-
ness to witness it. These trees that we behold
with their stately branches waving in the breeze,
the birds flitting from bough to bough, the ten-
der grass on which we lean; all these are objects
external to us, but the thing we know is not these
externals themselves, but our perceptions of
them, not our physical environment, but our
reactions to that environment, our conceptions
of it tinged by the emotional color which our
complexes give it. We cannot conceive of a tree
falling in the remotest forest without conceiving
TYT
1 Reflections on War and Death, page 40: "Our attitude
(toward death) has not been a sincere one. To listen to us we
were, of course, prepared to maintain that death is the necessary
termination of life, that everyone of us owes nature his death
and must be prepared to pay his debt; in short, that death was
natural, undeniable, and inevitable. In practice we were ac-
customed to act as if matters were quite different. We have
shown an unmistakable tendency to put death aside, to eliminate
it from life. We attempted to hush it up, in fact, we have the
proverb: to think of something as death. Of course we meant
our own death. We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death;
whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as
spectators. The school of psycho-analysis could thus assert that
at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to
saying: in the Unconscious every one of us is convinced of his
immortality.” Page 62 (ibid): "Our Unconscious does not be-
lieve in its own death; it acts as though it were immortal.
What we call our Unconscious, those deepest layers in our psyche
which consist of impulses, recognizes no negative or any form
of denial and resolves all contradictions, so that it does not
acknowledge its own death, to which we can give only a
negative content."
THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 131
TYY
0
at the same time that there is a witness to hear
the sound and see the falling tree. So bound up
are events of the external world with our inner
consciousness. When we think of the external
world at all, we must think of ourselves as view-
ing it. Between the occasions when we view
and react to familiar scenes, we can scarcely
conceive of them as existent.
“What?" we query, when a childhood scene
is revisited after long years of absence, "are
these trees still the same, does the grass still
grow, do those cottages still stand, do those even-
ing shadows still slant across the meadow as of
old?” So hard it is to conceive of any reality
apart from our own personality.
So poignant is the feeling, so deep the an-
guish, that the world may go on as before with
its many activities and innumerable objects, its
myriad relationships, when we are no longer here,
that the Unconscious refuses to grasp or accept
such a concept, the heart will not harbor nor
tolerate such a feeling. As it is with so many
beliefs, the wish is father to the thought, deep-
seated desire, basic, primitive, inherent, creates
a belief in the thing it seeks. Hence, the Uncon-
scious refuses to accept the death-sentence. "I
know," says the devout person, “that there
must be life after death, because I feel it in my
heart.” Just so.
From this deep-seated, racial longing for life
eternal, men have built up elaborate and com-
132 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
plex religious systems, full of occult ideas. Thus
the systems of spiritism and theosophy have
been built upon certain Oriental philosophies,
certain classic myths, a great deal of primitive
imagery and thought, certain metaphysical con-
cepts of the Middle Ages, which varied strands
have been woven into elaborate modern systems.
It is the process by which all religious systems
grow, that is, by absorption of ancient and con-
temporary ideas, and elaborating them into a re-
ligious philosophy.
In modern spiritistic systems, the evidence is
gathered either through professional or amateur
mediums, or through such devices as ouija, plan-
chette, automatic writing, or the like. There
can be no doubt that the phenomena thus pro-
duced well up directly from the Unconscious.
The Unconscious, as has been proved again and
again, is a tricksy sprite; it loves to assume va-
ried and motley rôles, play little dramas, take
some suggestion and work it out in some fan-
tastic manner; it loves any situation that brings
it into the limelight. I do not claim that all
spiritistic evidence is merely some phenomenon
produced by the Unconscious, but I do say that
we must be constantly on our guard against its
tricks. This much is assured: that whereas the
evidence for survival after bodily death may
come from some region beyond the Unconscious,
at all events it all comes through the Uncon-
scious. It is more than likely that most of the
The OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 133
so-called evidence gathered at amateur sittings
is the direct work of the Unconscious, striving
for recognition, playing its characteristic pranks.
Many of the phenomena of a spiritistic séance
can be produced by almost any group of people
who will go through the necessary procedure, sit
with patience and await developments. Many
persons have experimented with table-tipping,
planchette, ouija, and automatic writing, with-
out the slightest notion of attributing any sig-
nificance to the phenomena thus obtained be-
yond the natural and the every-day. I have sat
with a group around a small table, with finger-
tips touching; after a time a tingling is felt in
the fingers and up and down the arm (doubtless
due to motor stimuli of some sort), and soon
after the table will begin to move about the
room, apparently of its own volition. This group
was not in the least interested in summoning
spirits from the vasty deep nor gathering evi-
dence of life after death; the table-tipping was
merely a diversion, undertaken to convince my
sceptic mind that it could be done, and was
attributed to some unknown magnetic or electric
force generated by the human body. I was
ready to aver that the movement was not due to
muscular action, but to-day I am not so sure on
that point. Had we asked questions of the
moving table, doubtless we should have had
replies.
Ouija has furnished interesting and diverting
134 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
moments. I have had messages from ouija
which purported to come from departed friends.
In every case they were puerile and untrust-
worthy. While working with ouija one evening
with a friend, a message which it was spelling
out in reply to some question was rudely inter-
rupted, the little tripod was violently wrested
from our hands (or so it seemed) and the sen-
tence, “This is Lonnie,” was spelled. To the
query, "Who is Lonnie?” the board replied,
“Lonnie, otherwise Lawrence Ungar.” It then
proceeded to give a lengthy and circumstantial
account of the life of one Lawrence Ungar, who
claimed to have been a chaplain in the Federal
Army during the Civil War. He was buried, so
it was claimed, in a certain small town in South
Carolina. For some time, on every occasion
when we experimented with ouija, this Lonnie
would break in and insist upon communicating.
Here was a strange state of affairs. I finally
wrote to the postmaster of the town in which
Lonnie was alleged to be buried. I received a
reply stating that no man of that name had ever
lived there and certainly was not buried there.
The whole thing, it appeared, was a hoax of the
Unconscious. He who has read Freud's Inter-
pretation of Dreams, will readily understand
the mechanism by which the Unconscious had
built up the scenes of the little drama and played
it to our amazement, not to say amusement.
In the first place, I had been thinking of an
THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 135
old school friend named "Lawrence,” nicknamed
''Lonnie,” just prior to "Lonnie's” first appear-
ance. The friend who helped operate the board
had been reading an article on Hungary, hence
the name "Ungar.” On the day previous to our
experiment with the board, I had visited the
grave of my grandfather, who had fought in the
Civil War and who was known as a very devout
man, with some pretension to gifts of preaching
and exhorting. I myself was a student for the
ministry and my mind was naturally preoccupied
with the responsibilities of my chosen vocation.
The mother of the friend who operated the
board with me was staying at a resort in South
Carolina not far from the small town which Lon-
nie claimed as his native place. Here, then, was
all the material for the little drama, a sort of
dream condensation. The little play itself was
evidently the joint product of unconscious proc-
esses in the two minds. Conan Doyle relates
a somewhat similar experience; after which he
wrote to an address given him in similar fashion,
but, appropriately enough, as he says, the letter
was returned to him from the Dead Letter
Office!
While I should not wish to go on record as
attributing all such phenomena to some similar
mechanism, I am fully persuaded that much of
the so-called evidence for survival after death
can be readily explained on the same basis.
1 See Appendix for “dream condensation."
136 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
There is, for instance, planchette, which is oper-
ated through the use of a small pencil attached
to a triangular board with wheels, which moves
over the paper and writes. As it is operated by
only one person as a rule, it seems likely that
it is a variant on automatic writing. As a rule
the replies obtained from planchette are trivial
in the extreme; they are such that it seems a
waste of time to bother with it at all. The wife
of an engineer of my acquaintance, who had two
small boys, put this question to planchette,
“What will my boys do when they are grown?”
and the reply was written, "J. will be an engi-
neer, W. will be a sport.”
In most automatic writing are revealed traces
of dissociated personality. While it has been
used as a method of tapping the Unconscious or
bringing to light the psychic processes of the
split-off personality, it has, in some cases at least,
tended to aggravate the symptoms and increase
the malady. The procedure is thus: The indi-
vidual sits down with pencil and paper, he en-
gages in irrelevant conversation or reads a book.
While his attention is thus consciously diverted,
his hand and arm begin to work automatically
and he writes, although until he reads what he
has written he is not aware of its content. Some
part of consciousness which has an independent
existence is operative here; it is similar to the
little drama which we played with the aid of
ouija. Certain suggestions have been brought to
THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 137
the Unconscious; independently of conscious
mental effort or processes, these suggestions have
been elaborated into a psychic series which has
the appearance of continuity and consecutive-
ness. Like hysterical symptoms (in certain cases
automatic writing is an hysterical symptom),
automatic writing is the effort of unconscious,
repressed forces to break through into conscious-
ness and find an outlet in motility. They show
the same process of symbolism, elaboration, con-
densation and displacement as the "dream-
work” (see Freud's Interpretation of Dreams,
Chapter VI, for a full discussion of the dream-
work), and bear the same relation to the pa-
tient's life.
A subject was given to automatic writing.
The paper would be headed with certain roughly-
drawn symbols. A circle within a triangle was
the favorite, with small crosses dotted about.
Then would follow a prophecy in a stilted, Latin-
ized style, that the end of the dominance of the
white races had come and the yellow and black
races would now have their turn at world-domin-
ion, or a similar message, couched in vague and
general terms. During a psycho-analytic treat-
ment which had been unduly prolonged, but
which I hesitated to interrupt since abreaction
was unusually successful, the subject suddenly
saw a purple light, like a cloud of translucent va-
por, near the twilit window toward which she was
gazing, and she lifted up her voice in prophetic
138 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
strain, declaring that President Wilson would
lose much of his prestige and popularity in
days to come from political opposition. I saw
at once that she was in a semi-hypnotic state,
and proceeded to bring her out of it, by stating
almost rudely that any person who read the
daily papers could safely make such a prediction
(it was at the time when there was general dis-
cussion over the President's first published draft
of the Peace Treaty) and that "it needs no ghost
come from the grave to tell us that.” This sub-
ject, who was of a philosophical and speculative
turn of mind, had been reading a good deal of
theosophical literature which dealt with reincar-
nation, the lost Atlantis, and the like; she was
an interested reader of current events, and in her
own environment there was little opportunity
for expression of her views. Her Unconscious
had elaborated the suggestions brought to it,
and worked out these Cassandra-like prophecies
and given expression to them in her automatic
writing and speech when in a semi-hypnotic
state. When she was cured of her neurosis, the
writing ceased, since she found her satisfactions
in real life.
It will thus be seen how readily those anxious
for communications from the dead may be de-
ceived by manifestations and phenomena which
purport to be supernatural. - The Unconscious
of normal persons will at times play strange
pranks, and in the case of neurotics these will
THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 139
take on the hue of the supernatural. We have
therefore to be on our guard when dealing with
such phenomena.
The more mystic and occult forms of religion
attract the neurotic inasmuch as they enable him
to fly from reality. Thousands of neurotics have
turned to spiritism and theosophy as a refuge
from their too-harsh environment. This is not
an arraignment of these systems, as thousands
have likewise flown to the protection of more
conventional religious systems for the same
reason. With the neurotic who seeks refuge in
these systems, the occultism, the element of the
supernatural, appeal to his neurotic love of new
sensations, the phenomena serve to stimulate
jaded mental appetites; these neurotics are like
drug-addicts, going from medium to medium,
spending large sums of money, and living on the
sensations derived from the highly-seasoned
mental food purveyed. The primitive Uncon-
scious is strong in all neurotics, and just as the
witch-doctor makes the savage marvel with his
prophecies and manifestations, so the commer-
cial medium makes the neurotic marvel.
I think it likely that in the case of neurotics,
table-tipping, use of ouija, planchette, and auto-
matic writing serve to fix and aggravate the neu-
rosis and produce further mental dissociation.
In some such cases, the whole mental and moral
life has been given over to the primitive im-
pulses of the Unconscious. Whereas in the nor-
1
140 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
mal individual, intellectual effort rears a struc-
ture of thought which serves to control and di-
rect the Unconscious, through the practices of
spiritism the neurotic gives the Unconscious more
and more dominance of his life, until complete
mental and moral breakdown may ensue. As
spiritists themselves say, "When you open the
door to departed spirits, all sorts of entities may
enter in.” To this they attribute all the so-
called "spirit obsessions,” and the vagaries fre-
quently to be noted in the lives of mediums. In
some cases, a severe psycho-neurosis may de-
velop. Here let me say once more that I do not
believe any form of religion drives a normal man
or woman into a neurosis; the neurotic symp-
toms assume such form as environment enables
them to assume. The point is not that these
systems are in a way abnormal, but that ab-
normal persons are drawn to them and certain
religious practices may fix and develop abnormal
tendencies.' Psychic research, to say the least,
1 The reader may object that my statement that "no normal
person is driven into a neurosis by religion, that this is an
accessory or instigating causc,” must depend largely upon my
definition of normality; that, in fact, I make the spirit in which
an individual takes the troubles of this life a test of normality.
This is true; I believe it is the one, valid, real test of normality:
how the individual takes his afflictions, how successfully he faces
his life-problem and bears his burdens. If he faces reality and
overcomes or, if that be impossible, bears his troubles manfully, he
is normal. If he is driven into a neurosis, he is abnormal, the
seed of his disorder must have been sown long before in his
infantile life.
THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 141
is a field of inquiry into which we must enter
with the greatest caution and where we must
constantly be on guard against self-deception
and the charlantanry of the baser sort of com-
mercial professional medium.
Let us close this chapter with a discussion of
certain larger aspects of the question of the
relation of the Unconscious to life after death.
A number of writers (Hudson being the first, I
believe, in his Law of Psychic Phenomena, and
James and Maeterlinck holding to the same be-
lief in variant form) have advanced the theory
that subliminally, all consciousness is one, that
in the Unconscious all psychic life is united in
one vast whole. Hudson deduces from this
(which he himself terms a "working hypothe-
sis”) that the Unconscious is thus the immortal
part of personality and the sea of consciousness
which it taps is the sea of eternity. He endeav-
ors to explain all psychic phenomena on this
basis, referring all evidence for life after death,
or indeed any transference of thought over a
distance between the living or the living and the
dead, to the well-known "telepathic hypothe-
sis.” He claims that, inasmuch as the conscious-
ness of both living and departed persons is a
part of this vast sea, all individuals are thus en
rapport with one another and that if one sounds
(to carry out the figure) in the proper portion
of this vast sea, any information that any person
has ever had in his grasp may be brought to light.
142 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Hudson thought that we are storing up memories
and images in the Unconscious for utilization in
the life to come. James held to a modified form
of this belief (see his essay on Immortality),
although he did not stretch the telepathic hy-
pothesis so far.
Let it be said right here that the deepest re-
cesses of the Unconscious have been tapped by
modern psycho-analytic methods, but nothing
has as yet been brought to light that supports
this view. When the Unconscious is tapped by
psycho-analytic methods, the matter brought to
light is that connected with the subject's own
past experience, his childhood memories, appar-
ently forgotten events and persons of his past -
circumstances important from the viewpoint of
psycho-therapeutics, but nothing beyond these.
It seems extremely unlikely that the very un-
scientific views mentioned above will bear the
light of investigation, and it is probable that the
more thoroughly the Unconscious is examined,
the less tenable these fantastic theories will be
found to be.
Maeterlinck, in a comparatively recent book,
instances a young girl who was hypnotized and
whose memory was forced back to earliest child-
hood, then to infancy, then to a pre-natal state.
Suddenly the timbre of the girl's voice changed
and became that of an old woman who claimed
that she had lived at a certain period prior to
the girl's birth. Again the method of regres-
· THE OCCULT IN RELIGIOUS SYSTEMS 143
1
sion was used and the timbre of the voice
changed once more and became that of an old
man, who claimed to have been a soldier of the
Guarde of the first Napoleon. Some persons
have taken this as proof of the theory of rein-
carnation. It seems more than likely that it
was nothing more than a characteristic trick of
the Unconscious, utilizing bits of information
which the girl had gathered during her waking
life, which had impinged upon the margin of
consciousness, were quickly repressed, and were
elaborated into this little drama. To one who
has read Prince's Dissociation of a Personality,
and has learned of the metamorphoses which
a dissociated personality can undergo, every
separate one of the multiple personalities mani-
festing a highly individualized character, this
explanation will be the most acceptable. Com-
pare Coleridge's famous case of the German girl
ill of a fever, who spoke in Latin, Greek and
Hebrew (James: Psychology I, page 681, quoted
in Lay's Man's Unconscious Conflict), although
in her waking life she knew nothing of these
languages. It transpired that at the age of nine
she had been taken into the home of a Protes-
tant pastor, a great Hebrew scholar, and that it
had been the good man's custom to walk up and
down a passage leading into the kitchen and read
to himself aloud from his books. “The books
were ransacked and among them were found sev-
eral of the Greek and Latin Fathers, together
144 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
with a collection of Rabbinical writings. In
these works so many of the passages taken down
at the young woman's bedside were identified,
that there could be no reasonable doubt as to
their source."
It is evident, is it not, that in the examination
of psychic phenomena, the element of the super-
natural must rigorously be excluded wherever
there can be found a natural explanation. It is
only by such means that we shall at length
arrive at the truth.
IX. CONVERSION AND ATTENDANT
PHENOMENA
L
WONVERSION may be considered the cli-
I mactic event of the religious life, for which
conviction of sin, repentance, and the search
for God are preparatory measures. When the
sinner is at length “converted," "regenerated,"
"attains salvation," "has been redeemed," as the
phrases variously run, it is held that he launches
on a new and regenerated life. Whereas for-
merly he was at odds with life, now he is pre-
sumably one with God, living not under the
Law but under Grace, in tune with all that is
good and beautiful and worthy in the universe.
Old temptations no longer have power to lure
him from his new love, old fetters of sin have
been broken leaving him in a new-found and
glorious freedom; he is no longer the "old
Adam,” conceived in sin and eternally lost, he
is the God-man, walking according to the per-
fect law of God.
Such is the ideal of conversion. Let us ex-
amine its origin and its mechanism. What
really happens when the individual is converted?
Ere we answer this fundamental question, we
must seek to ascertain what conditions lead him
145
146 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
to seek conversion, what sort of man this is
who seeks conversion, and why he seeks it.
This leads us to a consideration of re-birth.
1. The Re-birth
The first fact to be made clear is that not all
individuals feel the need of regeneration, not all
have a "conviction of sin," some never have it,
and have no clear conception of it. These are
the individuals free from neurotic taint, who
have been reared in an atmosphere of love and
kindliness, and have never felt internal con-
flict. William James quotes Emerson (Vari-
eties, page 167, note) as saying, “Our
young people are diseased with the theolog-
ical problems of original sin, origin of
evil, predestination, and the like. These
never presented a practical difficulty to
any man -- never darkened across any man's
road, who did not go out of his way to seek them.
They are the soul's mumps and measles, and
whooping-coughs."
There seems to be here a fundamental mis-
apprehension of the problem. We have pre-
viously seen that the conviction of sin” is due
to man's internal conflicts, that it arises when the
inner primitive urge comes in conflict with
outer, moral mandates, that it is a feeling of be-
ing "out of tune" with life, especially immediate
environment. The morbid introspection, the
CONVERSION
147
exggerated feeling of guilt of the neurotic are
well-known. Such souls have been well termed
"sick souls." These feelings are the product of
neurotic disturbance. It is therefore not true
that the theological problems of which Emerson
speaks "never presented a practical difficulty to
any man.”
On the other hand, James fails to sense that
those who must "be born again to be happy”
are nervously ill individuals. He speaks of the
"divided self” which attains unity through sal-
vation. What he seems not to realize is that
this divided self” is the sick self, that such feel-
ing is always and everywhere indicative of a
neurosis; that the “divided self” is never the
normal self, indicating as it does a discordant,
neurotic personality, and that conversion may or
may not synthesize such a self into perfect
unity. Conversion is an emotional experience
and it may, like the "mystic experience,” which
it closely approximates, work a cure. The
"divided self” may on the other hand require
the good offices of modern psycho-therapeutics
rather than, or in addition to, the offices of the
clergyman.
We saw in Chapter I how every great reli-
gious system has its dogma of atonement and its
dogma of the expiating death of the god. What
was not at that time made clear is what gave
rise to the belief that in the resurrection of the
god the individual was “born again."
148 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
The idea of re-birth is as old as the human
race, and it has its inception in a definite,
individual, unconscious biological wish. When
Freud began to examine the Unconscious of
certain of his patients, he discovered to his
amazement that these neurotics, in their in-
tense unconscious desire to escape from the
world, actually longed to be back in the mother's
womb, thence to issue forth in new and normal
form. He approached this field with great
caution; indeed, such a wish hardly seemed
credible to him, until he had corroborated his
first conclusions by analysis of a large number of
persons, both by the hypnotic method and by
psycho-analysis. The patient in hypnotic trance
revealed the wish; the patient who symbolized
the wish in well-known dream symbols, revealed
the wish when this unconscious material was
brought up into consciousness.
This fantasy appears in the earliest myths,
slightly disguised in folk-tales, and in more or
less symbolized form in dreams. Every prim-
itive cosmology has its "Urmutter,” its primitive
mother, from whom creation sprang. In Baby-
lonian conceptions of the beginning of things,
the primitive mother is Tiamat, from whose
body creation springs. In Judaism we have
Tehom, the deep, which is also feminine and
shows traces of a similar cosmology. Greek
and Roman mythology have a primitive
mother of all things, Ops or Rhea. For
CONVERSION
149
the primitive, the process of creation would
naturally be similar to the biological process of
birth in man. There is much evidence also of a
re-birth wish in primitive myths.
There is strong evidence for this wish in
dreams. Pfister tells of a highly neurotic woman
who dreamed that she passed through a slimy
canal in a boat, and that there was a slippery,
slimy wall, up which she climbed by the aid of
her pastor. This was discovered to be a re-
birth fantasy, the canal symbolizing the amnio-
tic liquor, the climbing out the issuance of the
infant in the act of birth, and so on. Dr. Coriat
speaks of cases where a patient dreams of a long,
slimy tunnel through which he passes and thence
issues into the light. This seems so fantastic
and incredible, not to say distasteful to most
minds, that no one can be blamed for doubting
the interpretation of such dreams, but this fact
must be faced: these are not the arbitrary
interpretations put upon fantastic dreams by the
analyst, they are revealed by the patient him-
self and accepted by him as the correct interpre-
tation!? Where both the psycho-analytic
method and hypnosis have been used with the
same patient, this fact is even more strongly
corroborated. Let us remember in this connec-
tion the little Greek folk-song quoted on page
67 as a self-interpreted phallic dream.
It is definitely established, then, by modern
i See Appendix II, page 249.
150 RELIGION AND THE 21
NEW PSYCHOLOGY
experimental psychology that the neurotic does
desire this re-birth in the gross, biological sense.
He desires it as a resolution of his inner conflict.
The followers of Jesus were familiar with this
wish, and one of his enemies goes so far as to
ask whether a man can be born again in the
biological sense. Jesus refines upon this primi-
tive idea, he makes it the symbol of the life re-
generated, spiritualized, refined of selfishness,
even while he recognizes the prevalence and the
neurotic, biological character of the wish in its
original form. “Unless ye be born again,” is
his reiterated condition of entrance into the
Kingdom of Heaven; man must undergo some
process of psychic transformation ere he can
enter into this Kingdom; what this is we shall
strive to ascertain.
2. The Method of Conversion
The means of attaining to the spiritual re-
birth are similar to those which precede the
"mystic experience,” which it closely parallels,
the main difference being that conversion is sup-
posed to have a permanent effect upon the
individual's life whereas the “mystic experience”
is for a brief instant. There is the same novi-
tiate, or period of spiritual preparation preced-
ing the actual experience. There is a period of
prayer and struggle, of "wrestling with God”
(compare the wrestling of Jacob and the angel,
CONVERSION
151
Genesis xxxii, 24-32), a period of deepest
anguish when the spirit seems cut off from God;
then follows a period of temptation to resume
the old life, finally, the spirit emerges into a state
of exaltation, then into a state of peace and
tranquillity. This psychic process is not peculiar
to Christianity. It may even be better studied,
since we may study it without bias, in ethnic
religions. The Buddhist calls this experience
"attaining enlightenment."
In his "Light of Asia," Edwin Arnold tells how
Siddartha, the Buddha, attained enlightenment.
First of all, he renounced his princely station
with all its trappings (he had been awakened to
the pain and misery of life by the sight of
poverty and disease) and wandered about as a
mendicant seeking, as the neurotic seeks, the
meaning of evil. He went and sat him down at
the mouth of a cave,
Subduing that fair body born for bliss
With fast and frequent watch and search intense
Of silent meditation.
When he was finally prepared, he took his
place under the sacred Bodhi-tree and there
came to tempt him all evil powers,
The fiends who war with Wisdom and the Light,
Arati, Trishna, Raga, and their crew
Of passions, horrors, ignorances, lusts,
The brood of gloom and dread.
Then came the ten chief Sins: the Sin of Self,
152 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Doubt, False Faith or Deceit, Lust, Hate, Lust
of Fame, Lust of Days, Pride, Self-Righteous-
ness, Ignorance. But as the dawn broke, these
all fled, having spent their force in vain, and
the Buddha attained enlightenment, or freedom
from desire. He attained that exalted state in
which henceforth, according to legend, his fol-
lowers knew him, and nothing could shake him
from this state nor bring the return of his old
self.
In the same way is told the familiar story of
Jesus, how he went fasting in the wilderness
forty days and forty nights, and then came the
Tempter and offered him the kingdoms of the
world, but he would not, and finally, came peace
and tranquillity and ministering angels sent from
heaven restored his worn body to health.
How may we account for the striking similar-
ity of two stories of such widely different origin?
How, except that this represents a not uncom-
mon experience in human life? These stories
are, in fact, highly symbolized versions of the
struggle that goes on in the breast of the
neurotic, only the struggle is within and not
without. The sequence corresponds exactly:
First something occurs to depress the normal
psychic life — corresponding to the period of
fasting and penance --- and while the individual
is thus depressed, he is beset by temptation —
that is to say, his appetites, which are kept under
control during normal periods because of the
CONVERSION
153
pressure brought to bear by the society in which
he lives, but which still exist repressed in the
Unconscious, emerge from their subterranean
lair and assail him, so that the poor wretch
knows not where to look for relief or release
from these enemies. In his weakened state, the
Unconscious gets the upper hand in the struggle
- corresponding to the temptations of the
Buddha and of Jesus — and assails him with its
desires. Finally, through the sharp struggle,
the individual abreacts his painful emotions -
he drives the rampant demons of desire away -
he re-lives his painful past with suitable affect,
rids himself of vicious complexes, and emerges
into a state of peace -- the ministering angels
of a mind at peace restore his mental health.
Sometimes he represses his evil demons still more
and thus obtains a temporary peace, but at
frightful cost.
These profound psychic changes are attended
by a violent emotional upheaval. At a camp
meeting, I have seen the men obsessed with “con-
viction of sin” writhing on the ground, grimac-
ing, and apparently suffering horribly. At the
same meeting I saw a new-made convert, who
had doubtless abreacted his painful emotions
and found release from his obsessing demons and
was now, in the excess of exultant emotion, run-
ning around in circles shouting at the top of his
voice that he had found salvation. These are
no doubt crude types; nevertheless, this is the
154 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
sort of emotional upheaval that characterizes
conversion. Of its reality, that is, of the reality
of some profound psychic change, there can be
no doubt.
I have said that all conversion experiences
eventuate in a changed life. In the cases where
conversion is most beneficial, the individual
"sublimates," that is, brings the repressed
craving up into consciousness and turns the
energy thus released to social uses. He then
becomes the practical, normal Christian. But
in other cases, abreaction is not complete, the
triumph over obsessing fears and anguish is
but temporary, and when the initial impetus
given the individual by his conversion experience
is spent, he "back-slides,” in which case he may
be in even worse state than before.
The conversion experience does not always
have religious color. A new-found love, the
death of a hated relative, an access of good for-
tune, a thousand other influences, may bring
about the longed-for re-birth or sublimation:
any influence which breaks up the infantile fix-
ation of which the individual was victim, de-
stroys the vicious complex, unifies his person-
ality, and makes him a whole man in tune with
his God and his universe. This is the solution
of the religious problem.
James (Varieties, pp. 110-III) speaks of
"salvation by relaxation" as the surest means of
attaining salvation and inward peace. "Cast
CONVERSION
155
thy burden upon the Lord,” is the counsel given
to the convert. Modern psycho-therapeutics
offers similar counsel. “Give up the struggle,"
says the new psychology; "you gain nothing
thereby, you are but adding resistance to re-
sistance, using valuable energy and getting no-
whither." (Coriat points out that this "casting
the burden upon the Lord" corresponds to the
transference of the mental anguish from the sub-
ject to the physician in psycho-analysis, who
may thus temporarily become a father-sub-
stitute, and ultimately a bridge over which the
subject passes into the world of reality and to
mental health. Thus the “Heavenly Father” in
conversion represents the father-complex.)
The advice to give up the struggle is wholesome,
for it is true that the individual gains nothing
by prolonging the inner conflict. His shadowy
yet potent enemy is elusive, like the Boyg in
Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and cannot be overcome by
such tactics. It is unquestionably true that in
cases where conversion has been effective, it is
where the individual whose consciousness is a
battle-ground of opposing forces gives up the
struggle. We saw the same phenomenon in the
mystic experience. The exact moment or point
in his experience when he gives up the struggle
seems inconsequential. The essential is that he
give it up. Just as the subject gives up his con-
flict and transfers the painful emotions to the
analyst, so in true conversion the convert gives
156 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
up his burden of sin or self-reproach and “casts
it upon the Lord." The fiercer the struggle,
the greater the abreaction, the stronger the
transference, and the more complete the relief
and inner peace. It is likely that the one good
end of the despairing struggle of the convert
with his sins is to demonstrate beyond per-
adventure the utter futility of the struggle, the
uselessness of prolonging the inner conflict.
If, then, the "struggle not availeth," shall the
individual yield himself a victim to his baser
appetites, go down in defeat before them, and
live his life on a level with the beast of the field?
Not at all; this is not the result of “conversion
by relaxation” nor of the psycho-analytic treat-
ment. This is the result that enemies of Freud
have claimed for his methods, but facts do not
bear out the truth of their contentions. Freud
has strongly animadverted upon what he calls
"wild analysis,” that is, the analysis which ad-
vocates and encourages sexual indulgence. The
successful modern analyst advises that patients
do not indulge in promiscuous sexual indul-
gence; his aim is to make the subject a whole,
normal, healthy man. He really raises the Un-
conscious to a higher cultural level by his treat-
ment, enables the subject to sublimate or turn
the released energy to social uses, and so brings
his life to a higher level. The moral effect of
promiscuous sexual indulgence is always bad,
for the subject will thus become a victim of
a the subjeocial uses moral effe
re
CONVERSION
157
remorse, add more resistances and eventually
increase his moral conflict; thus his state will
be worse in the end than in the beginning.
The aim of both religious conversion and the
psycho-analytic treatment is to raise the subject
or convert to a higher moral level, resolve his
inner conflicts whereby he wastes much time and
valuable energy, bring him out of himself, elim-
inate his morbid introspection, and thus make
him a useful, social citizen, one who faces his
life-problem and solves it not in vain imaginings
but in reality.
1 See final paragraph of Chapter VII on religious sublimation
page 126.
X. THE CHANGING BASIS AND OBJEC-
TIVE OF RELIGION
T WENTY-FIVE years ago, if a member of
one of our Christian sects were asked to de-
fine the main objective and purpose of religion,
he would doubtless have replied, "The salvation
of the individual soul, the getting right with God,
through the great Atonement of His only-be-
gotten Son, Jesus Christ.” Similarly, the Egyp-
tian might have replied to the same question,
"The propitiation of the gods through the death
and resurrection of the god Osiris." The fol-
lower of the Dionysus Cult would have said,
"The propitiation of the gods through the death
and resurrection of the god Dionysus.” The
Parsee would say, "The approach to Ahura-
Mazda through the wisdom and sacrifice
of the sage Zarathustra." The followers of
the Mithra Cult would have said, “The propi-
tiation of the gods through the sacrifice of the
Mithraic bull.” The Buddhist would say, “The
attainment of enlightenment by following the
path which Siddartha trod.”
While such comparisons may seem invidious,
the fact is that until the last years of the nine-
teenth century, the main objective and purpose
158
BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION
159
of religion seem scarcely to have changed since
the most primitive times. The aim of the most
enlightened of modern religious systems — the
salvation of the individual through the expiating
sacrifice of some being more worthy than himself
to bear his load of sin — is strikingly similar to
the aim of primitive religion -- the propitiation
of "whatever gods there be" through sacrifice
and vicarious atonement.
Until some time near the close of the last
century, religion, which was highly individualis-
tic, was still in a primitive stage. But the
changes in social life wrought by many forces:
the invention and increasing use of machinery,
the widespread use of the printing press, which
sent the news of the day flying over the globe,
telegraph, telephone, improved methods of man-
ufacture and transportation, the advance of
science, which brought forth the theory of evolu-
tion, a wider spread of learning through educa-
tional institutions, an increased specialization
of labor, which made men more interdepen-
dent while it brought them into closer social
contact -- all of these forces, working for the
socialization of humanity, wrought a concomi-
tant change in religious life, changed its purpose
and objective.
In the days of the handicrafts, life had been
more individualistic, each man being his own
capitalist and his own laborer; communities were
separated by lack of facilities for communication
160 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
and transportation (until the invention of the
steam railroads, transportation had not been im-
proved upon since the days of Caesar); each
community led an autonomous life. Each com-
munity boasted but one church in Colonial days;
it embraced the entire community, and the
parish was limited only by the confines of the
community. A Calvinistic form of Congrega-
tionalism marked the early New England
churches. By accident of birth, the individual
was a member of the parish; but to become a
member of the church, he must be born again.
He must undergo the long preparation, the trials,
the temptations, the conviction, the probationary
period — in a word, all the struggles and tribu-
lations which have been discussed in the chapter
on "Conversion," ere he could emerge a full-
panoplied Christian knight, with his weapons of
offence and defence against the Evil One bright
and shining.
Latterly the whole purpose and objective of
religion have changed. In our highly socialized
life, men no longer seek individual salvation of
this sort. This is the day of what may be
termed "applied religion,” religion adapted and
applied to social uses and social uplift. Men
are still conscious of inner conflict - they are
even more acutely conscious of it as society
makes increasing demands upon them -- but
they are no longer inclined to attribute this con-
flict to their having been “conceived in sin."
BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 161
,
+
'.
.
.
-
- -
-
.
-
.
.
:
They recognize that it springs from conflict of
the inner, primitive--urge with the mandates of
society, that it is maladjustment to their en-
vironment. As they become enlightened, they
come more and more to recognize the true psy-
chic basis of this inner conflict, hence they seek
more and more to sublimate not by-the mystic
process of conversion, so uncertain in its results,
not through attainment of salvation through
prayer and penance, but rather through the
socialization of the self. The old selfish stand-
ards will no longer avail; the Shibboleth of
modern religion is not “God and the Self in the
solitude,” but “God, my neighbor, and myself
in the rush and turmoil of the world, the world
made better through the unselfish Christ spirit.”
No longer is the Christian one set apart, who,
like the Priest and the Levite of the parable,
gathers up the skirts of his robe as he passes
along the dusty highway of life lest haply he be
defiled. He is one who, in the thick of the fight,
finds strength and respite through looking to the
spirit that inspires all good and great deeds, by
whatever name he may call it.
Since these new standards have been raised
(and this is a sad commentary on systematized
religion), men no longer look to the Church with
its outworn dogmas for their inspiration. The
older doctrines of personal salvation and vicari-
ous atonement do not appeal, neither do they
interest the modern man. They seem to him re-
162 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
mote, alien to his life and his life-interests. The
workingman goes so far as to suspect that the
Church is the tool of capital and that promises
of future bliss are held out to him as a sop to
divert his attention from his own immediate and
pressing social and economic needs.
Let us face the issue: the great proletariat and
that large class of thinking people who cast their
thought in modern moulds, and who feel cribbed,
cabined, and confined by the old dogmas,
are definitely alienated from our evangelical
churches. They will not give nor profess alle-
giance to a religion that expresses itself in terms
remote from modern life, and requires that every
adherent shall first have had some mystic experi-
ence ere he join the company of the elect.
From fifty to sixty per cent of the American
people are unchurched and will have naught to
do with churches. What does this imply? The
decline of religion? The death of idealism?
Not at all. Men have turned their idealism in
other directions; they have found other outlets
for religious aspiration and the application of
religious principles to social life. Note with
what avidity men, who are instinctively gregari-
ous, join together in fraternal organizations
which have a definite idealistic code as the basis
of organization and what might almost be termed
a "creed” to which their members subscribe. Al-
most without exception, these orders require
belief in a Supreme Being; they endeavor to
BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 163
inculcate altruistic ideals. “God and my neigh-
bor” might be the slogan of these orders. They
have a ritual rich in symbolism, which, in cer-
tain cases like that of the Masons, has been
handed down from early times. The members
of these fraternal orders are open-minded and
open-hearted; their purse-strings are loosed in
behalf of every good cause. That all of their
members do not live up to the high ethical stand-
ards of these orders is no valid argument against
the efficacy of those standards, for neither do
church members. The point is, these "get-to-
gether societies” satisfy man's social needs, they
present certain high standards of living, they
gratify his desire for a rich symbolism, they mul-
tiply his strength through coöperative effort,
they give him an outlet for his altruistic im-
pulses — thus they minister to his essential '.
needs.
A thousand organizations have taken over the
work which was once that of the Church: Civic
Leagues, social settlements, the Red Cross, as-
sociated charities, community service of various
sorts. The fact is, the Congregationalism of the
Puritan signed its own death-warrant by defi-
nitely narrowing its vision, limiting its activities,
and attempting to eliminate that rich symbol-
ism which is the very foundation of religion. It'
was a sporadic growth, the outcome and expres-
sion of peculiar conditions, the flowering (if such
a tough, hard growth may be said to flower) of
164 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
a peculiar type of mind. It could not last; it
was too foreign to all the natural, vital impulses
of the human race. It sought to repress
instinct. Bare of ritual, it sought to kill man's
social needs, repress his strongest instincts: the
desire for love, amusement, art, literature.
It sought to still the music of life. It began
as a definite reaction against the pomp and
circumstance of Anglicanism. Seeking to re-
press natural and wholesome instincts, it was un-
natural, it could not live.
Behold, then, how time has vindicated the
older, more highly symbolized types of religion.
The sons and grandsons of men of Puritan stock
are flocking to the Episcopal Church, where
their inherent need of symbolism, rich and beau-
tiful, is satisfied. In the same way the Catholic
Churches, Greek and Roman, satisfy this need.
But do these churches not lose their adherents?
Yes, because the enlightened man of the twenti-
eth century has discovered that his inner con-
flict, his “sense of sin,” is not necessarily of reli-
gious origin, at least not in the accepted sense of
that term. He holds that this conflict is not due
to his alienation from God, but that it is failure
to adapt himself to his environment, due to some
fundamental nervous trouble that requires the
offices of the neurologist rather than the clergy-
man. As we have already noted, while religion
may be of assistance in stilling the unconscious
inner conflict, religious doubt, alienation from
BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION 165
God, are not the fundamental cause. They are
rather symptoms of some deep-rooted nervous
ailment. Again, this conflict is in reality inci-
dent to our evolution, and arises, partly at least,
from the conflict of the primitive Unconscious
with the moral code which the human race has
built up in its efforts to put off the primitive and
assume the ethical.
In the light of modern research, we may con-
clude that this ethical code is not a product of
revelation but of evolution. If certain prac-
tices are conducive to the preservation and per-
petuation of the race, those practices are moral;
if they are conducive to its destruction, they are
immoral. No table of laws has been given on
any Sinai to a waiting Moses. The only Torah
we know is the Torah wrought out of human ex-
perience with blood and tears. In the light of
modern knowledge, the old mandates are not
compelling; there has indeed been a "new dis-
pensation,” and the pronouncements from a
thousand pulpits, in so far as they are built upon
old dogmas, outworn theories of life no longer
tenable, have not the old prophetic authority.
While we retain the rich symbolism of older
religions, much of the myth that clung about
religious dogma until recent times has gone by
the board. Modern science has given the lie to
the primitive creation story of Judaism, the
story of a universal flood, and similar myths and
primitive cosmology. They have been relegated
166 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
to the primeval abyss whence they rose: the
abyss of primitive sex-life. Interesting as folk-
lore, valuable as halting-places on our way to a
higher plane of being, they have served their
purpose and can no longer exert compelling force
in the regulation and conduct of human life.
Not in wonders and signs, not in revelations
made at some far-distant day to specially fa-
vored prophets and handed down to succeeding
generations as a body of truth valid for all times,
nor in the morbid and sickly doctrines of pro-
fessional theologians (themselves the victims of
vicious complexes), breathing miasmatic vapors
-- not in these revelations and doctrines does the
modern man find true religion. He finds it
rather in the heart that goes out to other hearts
in human sympathy, in the strong, sturdy,
healthy spirit that finds good everywhere and
where it finds evil, stays not to repine or ex-
coriate, but puts forth honest determined effort
to eliminate the evil and conserve and increase
the good.
Finally, how may the Church save itself? If
there is any truth in my preceding remarks, we
have already been pointed the way.
It must first of all recognize the true nature
and mechanism of conversion. It must recog-
nize that the conviction of sin is due not to a
primal fall, but to man's unconscious motivation
and his unconscious inner conflicts. Once it has
recognized the nature of these conflicts, it must
BASIS AND OBJECTIVE OF RELIGION
167
make the conversion a complete, scientific,
psychic process of regeneration, leaving no stone
unturned in the endeavor to penetrate to the
roots of the psychic disturbance. It must cease
to preach a gospel of repression or inculcate false
ideas of sex and its functions; it must be more
like the gospel of Jesus, a gospel of expression
and freedom, rather than the gospel of Paul, a
gospel of severe repression. And it must recog-
nize that man is normally a social being and
that he cannot become an ascetic religious saint
without suffering severe psychic trauma. The
Church must get more in touch with the world
and its varied social problems, must face present
issues, come directly into contact with contem-
porary life and seek to solve contemporary prob-
lems. Thus it may regain its ancient place of
esteem in the world.
Some religious sects to-day, by way of getting
in touch with contemporary life and the allevia-
tion of its ills, have turned to the healing art as
a means of contact and a method of regenera-
tion. We shall discuss these in a succeeding
chapter.
XI. METHODS OF MENTAL AND
RELIGIOUS HEALING
THERE is scarcely a functional disturbance
1 or organic disorder known to medical
science which is not successfully simulated by
some hysteria. "In hysteria,” says Dr. I. H.
Coriat (Abnormal Psychology, 2d Ed., page
299), "we are dealing with a world in itself.
It is the most protean of all nervous diseases, its
symptoms are multitudinous and it can simulate
many functional and indeed some organic dis-
eases.” Hallucinations, abnormal motor activi-
ties such as compulsive movements of the limbs,
twitchings, tics, and a long list of ailments too
numerous to mention have been diagnosed as
hysterical affections. As Pfister says, the phy-
sician gives himself needless trouble in classify-
ing hysterical symptoms, as a given train of
symptoms may have a variety of causes. From a
perusal of the literature extant upon the subject,
we must conclude that "hysteria” is a convenient
term for a great variety of nervous ailments
manifested in hallucinatory activities, abnormal
motor activities, or functional disturbances.
A woman patient was apparently suffering
from a tumor; the swelling could be felt, it was
168
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 169
indeed pronounced and the pain severe. She
was anæsthetized preparatory to operating
when, behold! as the ether took effect, the swell-
ing disappeared and the tumor vanished! What
was the explanation? It was an hysterical
tumor. She had heard or read of a tumor,
or perhaps had been intimately associated with
some one who had a tumor, and she was
imitating it. She was, in a word, playing a
little unconscious drama. Her fears had been
aroused, fear created a condition of the Un-
conscious that caused her fears to be realized
without organic basis, and the phantom tumor
was the result.
It is a standing joke that a medical student in
his first year will suffer from all the symptoms
he reads about.
Recently a case of phantom pregnancy was
brought to my attention by an obstetric special-
ist. The patient had long desired to bear a
child. Day and night this desire was the focus
of her attention and her desire. After a time,
symptoms of pregnancy began to appear.
When at length she was taken to the hospital
for her delivery, she had all the symptoms of
advanced pregnancy, but there was no child!
It was well-nigh impossible to convince the
patient that she was not parturient, so strong
was her conviction.
Hysteria will simulate all known cardiac diffi-
culties, from slight palpitation to angina pec-
170 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
toris; it will ape disease of the respiratory tract
from a simple dyspnoea to asthma. There are
forms without number of hysterical blindness,
hysterical paralysis, deafness, aphasia, amnesia,
hyperästhesia, anæsthesia, and the like, which
is simply to say that no one ever can predict
what form a hysteria will take. These hysteri-
cal disturbances are far more frequent than the
real functional or organic troubles which they
imitate. If it were not for the etiology of these
cases, they might easily be mistaken by the most
skilled physician for the disorders they simu-
late.
It will readily be seen what a fruitful field the
hysterias present for the unscrupulous medical
practitioner, the quack with his nostrums of
burnt sugar and water, and likewise to mental
healers of all shades of intelligence and all de-
grees of efficiency. In the field of mental heal-
ing, which aims to heal all disease, but which
affects only the hysterias we find: mind healing,
faith healing, mental science so-called, spiritual
healing, the laying on of hands, New Thought,
Christian Science, Divine Science, in short, all
those forms of healing which operate through
suggestion. That they accomplish much good is
beyond question. For the most part these heal-
ers are not aware of the mechanism and technic
of their healing, hence their results are uneven
and uncertain.
Mind healing, mental science, or whatever
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 171
system attempts to heal without aid of the Di-
vine, seeks to cure physical ills by the superior
action of mind over matter. All bodily ills, so
these healers claim, will yield to the paramount
power of mind, which is able to control diseased
matter and bring it to a state of health. Faith
healing and the laying on of hands aim to heal
by the same process by which Jesus and his
disciples are said to have performed miracles of
healing, that is through the omnipotent power of
God to heal all diseases. The patient is ex-
horted to have faith in the power of the Divine
to cure all ills. Spiritualist healers do not, on
the other hand, so far as I know, claim to cure
all ills. There are certain ills due as they say
to "obsession,” this term being used not in the
scientific, psychologcial sense of an obsessing
idea, but in the sense of demon or evil spirit
possession. These spirits, mischievous "ele-
mentals,” evil spirits, or even the spirits of de-
parted good men strive to get back into the phy-
sical world for the sake of renewed physical en-
joyments by inhabiting the bodies of the living.
This belief has a counterpart in the horrid
superstition which pervades the lower Danube
region that there are "vampires" or "un-dead,"
who seek to inhabit living bodies or remain “un-
dead" by sucking human blood. Cases of
"spirit obsession” are cured by exorcism. Chris-
tian Science and New Thought are closely
allied. Christian Science, a pantheistic, ideal-
172 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
istic (in the philosophical sense) system of
thought, ignores the reality of matter. It de-
clares all mortal ills as unreal, they are “errors,"
they are null and void, they are manifestations
of the Old Adam in man, or mortal mind. If
they are pronounced unreal with sufficient em-
phasis, they disappear into the limbo whence
they emanated. New Thought declares that all
is good, that man is essentially one with God
(compare Mysticism), and therefore evil has no
real part in his existence.
Every one is familiar with methods of
healing through the precious relics of saints.
Lourdes, so realistically described by Zola in his
novel of that name, has long been famous for its
faith cures. Pilgrims journey to Assisi, to leave
their crutches and their physical ills near the
shrine of the good St. Francis. St. Anne de
Beaupré in Quebec is another famous shrine.
The so-called laying-on of hands has had a
marked recrudescence in our day. A British
Churchman has been going the rounds healing
disease by this method.
I am frequently asked whether I consider that
such methods of healing are effective; and I
reply, "Yes, tremendously effective!” But
how do they perform miracles of healing?
Whatever form these methods may take, they all
depend upon one thing for their efficacy: the
power of suggestion. The hysteric is notably
suggestible, suggestion being at the root of his
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 173
disease. He is peculiarly amenable to these
methods of treatment. When, as we have seen,
his illness apes a functional or organic physical
disturbance, the power of suggestion, if strong
enough and applied with sufficient force over an
extended period, may be sufficient to cure it.
We hear of people, bed-ridden for years, with
apparent organic disease of the spinal cord who,
in case of fire, have sprung from their beds and
walked out of the house. These cases must
undoubtedly be hysterics, for if there is real
disintegration of the motor nerves, locomotion
is impossible. In the same way the great crowds
who flock to Lourdes, St. Anne de Beaupré, and
Assisi are full of hysterics; these are the cases
which are cured and are the ones of which we
hear. The failures do not go on record. A
great many cases can not be reached at all by
psychic methods of healing.
Although certain of the practitioners men-
tioned, notably the Christian Scientist, declare
that faith is not necessary in order to effect a
cure; it is likely inasmuch as these methods
work through the power of suggestion, that faith
is requisite. They claim to heal by the same
power by which Jesus healed, and it is related of
him that he could perform no miracles of healing
in his own province because they had no faith.
Many of these cures, while they are genuine
cures, are not permanent. When the patient's
faith ſails, or through any means the power of
174 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
suggestion is weakened, the patient may relapse
into his old condition and be as bad as before.
It may be averred of most of these methods that
they add another mental resistance to the mind
of a patient already suffering from too much
resistance (these resistances are the mechanism
by which his hysterical trouble is caused). They
may seem to still old conflicts, but in many cases
they induce new ones, hence their effect is likely
to be temporary
The question is often asked whether methods
of suggestive treatment alleviate or cure real
physical illness, and the reply is “Yes, in some
cases.” The physician tells us that we have
a certain power of resistance to disease when in a
good physical state (the term "resistance" is
here used not in the psycho-analytic sense, but in
a physical sense), that constitutionally we can
resist the onslaught of certain diseases but have
low powers of resistance against certain others.
Worry, anxiety, a bad mental state, emotional
disturbance, lower our powers of resistance. If
the patient's mind can be put at ease, his power
of physical resistance is increased, and his
chances for recovery are greater. We are all
aware that when we suffer intense pain, a bad
toothache or headache for instance, if our atten-
tion is distracted, we may forget the pain for
a time. Methods of mental healing help to dis-
tract the patient's attention from his disabilities
and pains, they give him peace of mind by con-
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 175
vincing him that he will recover, and they are
thus of real benefit. They help to divorce his
consciousness, which has been dwelling upon his
pain, from that pain and thus minimize it. A
war correspondent, writing from Salonika, states
that he saw an Indian soldier with his leg shot
off, calmly smoking a cigarette by the wayside
and seeming to suffer no pain. This may have
been due to the natural anæsthesia which often
follows in such cases, or it may be, as the cor-
respondent suggests, that these Orientals have
some means by which they can shut off pain
from consciousness. This would seem to be
very like the mechanism of hysteria which makes
the patient "forget” an arm or a leg and causes
local anæsthesia and paralysis, except that in
the soldier's case the forgetting was voluntary
and intentional, whereas with the hysteric it is
involuntary and unconscious forgetting.
I must, however, append this statement: pain
is the distress signal of disease and it may be
a dangerous practice to ignore it in this fashion,
for the physical disintegration may go on until
it is too late for proper medical or surgical at-
tention to have effect. The war correspondent
mentioned above, when he returned after some
hours, reports that he found the Indian soldier
dead.
If mind or faith healer fail to cure cases of
hysteria, is there no hope for the sufferer?
There are modern methods of psychotherapy
176 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
which diagnose the case scientifically, follow a
scientific procedure, and relieve and in many
cases completely cure these troubles. They
make no claim to employ supernatural aid in
their methods, nor to perform miraculous cures.
Nevertheless their record of cures is little short
of marvelous.
Among these methods is hypnosis. It has
been used with great success. The Emmanuel
Movement in Boston used to employ it exten-
sively in medical practice. Nevertheless, its re-
sults, like those of all suggestive methods, are
uncertain. Undoubtedly its healing powers
have been exaggerated by those who employ it
professionally. Dr. Worcester (Religion and
Medicine, page 41) states that "Charcot (the
eminent French hypnotist) and his disciples con-
tented themselves with hypnotizing a dozen or
fifteen hysterical young women, and from these
limited observations they have drawn their
limited conclusions. According to their view
only hysterical patients can be hypnotized." He
goes on to say that between ninety and ninety-
five per cent of all peoples on whom the experi-
ment has been tried can be influenced hypnoti-
cally. The hypnotic treatment is open to the
same objection as other suggestive treatments:
it adds another resistance but does not reach
the fundamental unconscious cause of the
trouble; its effects are therefore often only tem-
porary. It is significant that the Emmanuel
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 177
Movement has definitely given up hypnosis in
favor of a psycho-analytic procedure and re-
educational methods' with signal success. An
eminent neurologist of wide experience tells me
that some of his patients who had been treated
hypnotically by himself or other practitioners
have come to him since for psycho-analytic treat-
ment, when the cure, which was but temporary
before, becomes permanent.
Before discussing in detail this method, it is
necessary to understand Freud's theory of hys-
1 The Emmanuel Movement was begun in 1906, in Emmanuel
Church, Boston, after it was definitely ascertained that such a
project would meet with the approval of neurologists. Its aim
was to treat nervous ills by modern methods of psycho-thera-
peutics. Dr. James J. Putnam of Harvard gave the first ad-
dress. The aim was not to treat physical disorders by
psycho-therapeutic methods, but, in co-operation with physi-
cians, to treat various functional nervous disorders. Dr.
Worcester says in his Introduction to Religion and Medicine,
"In the treatment of functional nervous disorders we make free
use of moral and psychical agencies, but we do not believe in
overtaxing these valuable aids by expecting the mind to attain
results which can be effected more easily through physical in-
strumentalities.” The movement has had signal success in the
treatment of hysterias and neuroses, alcoholism (which is a
neurosis), and other functional nervous disorders. Hypnosis was
at first used, the healers using the methods of Charcot. Of late
years, however, Freud has pointed the way to new methods of
psycho-therapy and hypnosis has been abandoned. “God cures
by many means," says Dr. Worcester; this movement is there-
fore not to be confounded with mind or faith healing methods;
as the procedure in the Emmanuel Movement is soundly scien-
tific. Dr. I. H. Coriat, the eminent neurologist of Boston, was
associated with the movement for some time and wrote certain
chapters of Religion and Medicine.
178 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
In
teria. Authorities are in general agreement
to-day that hysteria is really a species of forget-
ting. The hysteric forgets certain painful inci-
dents, or how normally to use an arm or a leg.
Even in the case of normal persons, the memory
of painful incidents is rapidly pushed out of con-
sciousness. It seems likely, from what we know
of the subject, that all forgetting in both normal
and abnormal individuals is intentional. Who
has, in his advanced years, looked back upon
his childhood with aught but pleasurable remem-
brances? The disagreeable incidents are for-
gotten: the fright in the dark cellar, the thwart-
ing of infantile desire, the quarrel that ended
in some playmate's depriving one of a beloved
possession, the separation from father or mother
for awhile that resulted in intense homesickness.
When we look back upon our youthful past, the
pleasures loom large, the troubles dwindle. We
know that the names of beloved places and per-
sons are readily remembered because they are
lovingly reviewed from time to time, while
memories of unpleasant places and disagreeable
persons are rapidly pushed out of consciousness.
They are, however, not really forgotten, they are
merely submerged in the Unconscious, whence
they emerge, as we have previously seen, not as
concepts but as painful emotions. They create
bad complexes. Since the instigators of these
emotionally toned complexes are forgotten, these
1 See Pierre Loti's Romance of a Child.
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 179
complexes may carry on an autonomous exist-
ence and act in a pathological manner. For-
merly, hysterias were traced to psychic trau-
mata, or injuries, but the complex may be built
on a whole train of incidents, it may be caused
by an infantile fixation, where no history of defi-
nite psychic trauma may be discovered. At any
rate when conditions are right and there is the
proper stimulus, the emotions that constellate in
the bad complex, emerge and play a little
psychic tragedy of their own. Hysterical
phenomena are in reality little dramas which the
Unconscious plays over and over. The individ-
ual is not aware of the origin of the drama, for
its motivation is hidden deep within the Uncon-
scious.
As Pfister points out, the hysteric symptoms
will appear whenever circumstances similar to
those which gave rise to the hysteria recur.
Then the Unconscious says in effect, “Now it is
as it was at such and such a time, when the
unpleasant incident occurred.” Thus a youth
is afraid to go near a grave-yard at night be-
cause once in his childhood he had been fright-
ened in such a place. The memory of the
fright and the attendant circumstances is
submerged in the Unconscious, but the emotion
persists. (It has been suggested that many of
our instinctive dislikes go back to racial memo-
ries which have survived in the Unconscious
from earliest times. Thus our instinctive ab-
180 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
horrence of snakes may be a survival from the
time when our arboreal ancestors were safe in
their leafy retreats from all enemies except the
great tree-climbing snakes that still exist in
tropical forests. On the other hand, our abhor-
rence of snakes may have quite another origin.
See Pfister, Psycho-analytic Method, pp. 286-
292.)
It was discovered by Freud and his associates
that when the hysteric was placed in a state of
abstraction in which he could observe his psy-
chic processes and the hysterical symptoms were
strongly brought to attention, these submerged
memories could be made to emerge into con-
sciousness, that the patient would relive that
part of his life when painful incidents occurred
leading to the hysteria, with all the “affect,” or
emotional reaction that attended these incidents,
and that once this was done, the hysterical symp-
toms disappeared. Hypnosis was at first util-
ized to tap the Unconscious, but later this was
abandoned, as it was discovered that the patient
in an abstracted state could, through a train of
associations, bring these memories into con-
sciousness without its aid. The element of sug-
gestion, which is never absent from hypnosis,
was thus almost entirely eliminated, and the pa-
tient “abreacted,” or threw off the painful emo-
tions after he had learned their cause. There
were certain "resistances” which had to be
broken down before these memories could
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 181
emerge. When this was accomplished, the pain-
ful emotions were transferred” to the analyst,
At first Freud and his associates attributed the
cure solely to the abreaction (it was then called
the "cathartic method” of cure), but he decided
later that the essential things were breaking
down the resistances which kept the painful
memories repressed, and transferring the emo-
tions to the analyst.
It has been found that certain hysterical symp-
toms will arise from a physically morbid condi-
tion, that the physical disablity has been entirely
cured, but the hysterical symptoms persist as
automata, or independent psychic manifesta-
tions which, cut off from consciousness, go on
from nervous habit living an emotional life of
their own. I have already cited the subject who
suffered from a functional cardiac disorder of
which he was entirely cured, so that no diagnos-
tician could discover the faintest trace of func-
tional or organic cardiac disorder. Nevertheless,
he suffered all the palpitation, dyspnoea, and
nervous fatigue incident to the original difficulty.
Christian Science treatments were of no avail,
probably because he had no faith in them. As
we have seen, psycho-analysis wrought a per-
manent cure.
The psycho-analytic method, which I have
just described, seems from extended observation
to be the only certain and permanent method of
cure for hysterical disorders. With other meth-
182 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
ods of healing, the symptoms are almost sure
to return, as the fundamental thing, namely
the unconscious origin of the difficulty, has
not been approached. It is still there, ready
to break forth in some moment of physical or
psychic depression, in all its original violence.
The psycho-analytic method, however, by re-
moving the fundamental cause, works a perma-
nent cure. It lays claim to no supernatural aid,
it surrounds itself with no mystic paraphernalia;
it is a definite, technical, scientific procedure for
the alleviation and cure of psychic ills, based
upon long observation and keen appraisal of
human nature, and elaborated by a keen intelli-
gence that is unwilling to pronounce a verdict
until there is an overwhelming amount of ac-
cumulated evidence. Freud was many years
elaborating the delicate and difficult technique
of psycho-analysis. It is not entirely new, nor
does it claim to be. The knowledge gained
through the more classic systems of psychology
has been utilized as a foundation for the new
psychology. Freud gives full credit to the work
of his predecessors. Most sober-minded people
fight hard against accepting Freud's theories, but
it is significant that his sharpest critics have
never put those theories to the test. Some of
his strongest opponents have been won over after
a trial of his methods. I myself have been con-
vinced of the correctness of his theories and
procedure only after minute observations of their
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 183
results in rendering human life healthier and
happier and after a thorough practical test.
The contributions of the more intelligent mind
and faith healers to our present knowledge of
this subject are by no means slight. They have
helped to prepare the way, and we gratefully ac-
knowledge our debt to them. Psycho-analysis
itself is still in its infancy and its methods will
doubtless be improved as time goes on.
Logically, this chapter should end at this point.
There are, however, certain nervous ills so de-
structive and devastating to human happiness
and usefulness, that I wish to discuss these a
little more at length, more especially because the
readers of this book may be themselves the vic-
tims of these ills. Among the worst of the neu-
roses are those which result in perverted sexual-
ity or sexual anæsthesia. The former renders
the individual desperately unhappy and makes
him a social outcast if his disability be dis-
covered; the latter is the basis of so-called “in-
compatibility” and the cause of many divorces.
(See Dr. Coriat's Abnormal Psychology, Second
Edition, page 414f.) Methods of faith and
mind-healing do not always reach these dis-
abilities, from the simple fact that the individual,
believing himself thoroughly abnormal, consider-
ing himself the victim of an incurable congenital
malady, and looking upon himself as a moral and
social outcast, seldom reveals the true state of
affairs to the healer nor to any other person
184 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
whose respect he would gain and keep. The
resistance against giving up his secret is enor-
mous; it imposes almost insuperable obstacles
in the way of cure. It is well known to neurol-
ogists who have employed hypnosis in such
cases that the homo-eroticist is almost impossible
to hypnotize and that at best hypnosis gives but
temporary relief. Like faith and mind healing,
it does not reach the fundamental trouble.
These cases are most successfully treated by
psycho-analysis and the individual, freed from
the repression of his evil complex (in this case
the Edipus-complex), becomes normal. The
anxiety and deep depression which invariably
accompany such disorders disappear and he goes
about his work a free man, psychically and mor-
ally, and able to look the world in the face.
Again, there are the ills called "nervous break-
down" or "nervous prostration,” both of them
convenient loose terms to cover a multitude of
ills little understood until very recently. Nearly
all nervous ills, from the slight neurosis which
merely lessens the individual's efficiency, to the
severe psychoneurosis, are classified under one
of these two categories. Thus the term "ner-
vous breakdown" is a euphemism, fast becoming
transparent to every one, for men dread the term
"insanity” as they dread "consumption” or
"tuberculosis," preferring to say "nervous break-
down" and "lung trouble.”
Ordinarily, "nervous breakdown" means a
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 185
profound nervous depression which incapacitates
the individual for useful work. It is attributed
to a variety of causes: overwork, nervous strain,
brain fatigue, and the like. Clergymen, social
workers, and all others, including physicians,
whose work brings them in contact with people
in abnormal emotional, mental, or physical
states, are peculiarly liable to it. The clergy-
man, like the physician, enters the home where
fatal disease has set its seal upon the brow of
a father or mother, or where a dearly-loved mem-
ber of the family has just passed away. He
gives generously of his sympathy and his
friendly counsel. Ere he is aware, he finds his
energies evaporating, his nervous tone lowered,
as he thinks, by the constant drain upon his
sympathies. His nights begin to be sleepless, he
loses interest in his work. Finally, he has what
is termed a "nervous breakdown,” and is sent
away to a rest-cure, the worst possible procedure
in such cases! Men in responsible positions in
business and professional life have these "ner-
vous breakdowns.” And always the rest-cure has
been prescribed.
Now these “breakdowns" are not at all what
they seem. They are not primarily due to over-
work or fatigue or a drain upon human sympa-
thies. They arise from the individual's inability
to face reality, to face issues and work out his
life-problem. Whence comes this inability?
From the individual's own mental conflicts,
186 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
which in turn date from childhood when for
some reason there was an injurious repression
of the sexual instinct. The sudden demand
made upon the individual's nervous energy is but
the exciting cause, the efficient cause is to be
looked for in the injurious complex. Clergymen
are peculiarly liable to such breakdowns on ac-
count of the severe repression which is a part
of their education. In fact, such repressions
have often driven men into the ministry. De-
tractors have called the clergy the "third sex,”
implying a sexlessness among them. This in the
past may have had some justification, for the
older type of cleric took only too well to heart
the lessons of the neurotic Paul and fought the
flesh as he fought the devil. We have already
noted how repression of the sex-instinct results
in a general depression of physical and nervous
energy. We have seen how these repressions
with their evil effects are caused by the conflict
of the inner urge with the moral laws laid down
by society. We, the people, are therefore
largely to blame if the clergyman has so re-
pressed all his normal instincts that he virtually
becomes a sexless being; we are largely to blame
if he is the victim of consequent neuroses, and
suffers nervous breakdown. For we have set up
for him an impossible standard of sexlessness,
and required that he live up to it; though he
himself has assisted in the evil work by striving
to pattern his life on that of the neurotic Paul.
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 187
Let us remember that even of Jesus it was said,
"He was a man of like passions with ourselves."
If the clergyman is to do effective work in
religious and social fields, he must be above all
things a normal man. A man suffering from
repression is invariably a man physically and
mentally below par; he can not be an energetic
worker for religious and social causes. Let us
rather require that the clergyman be a virile
man, with sane and normal instincts, held under
the control of his will, or sublimated, not the vic-
tim of evil repressions which make his Uncon-
scious a battle-field of erotic desire.
Whether the celibacy of the Catholic and the
High Anglican clergy is on the whole injurious,
I am not in a position to state. I have known
some cases where it was obviously so, many
others where the good man had obviously sub-
limated (that is, turned the energy of the crav-
ing to social uses) and was entirely free from
evil repression. There are thousands of men
who live in a state of bachelorhood in secular
life without any evil effects; sexual indulgence
is not at all necessary to health or happiness;
why should the clergy suffer from an odium from
which the secular man is free? In every case,
it would seem to depend upon the particular
background of the individual: his heredity, his
early family life, his relation to his parents and
other members of his family, his early educa-
tion, and the consequent attitude he takes
toward life in general.
188 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Of this I am assured, the Catholic confessional
is of inestimable benefit in the assistance it
gives the individual to abreact his painful emo-
tions and sublimate. The effect of confession,
when intelligently handled, is very like that of
the cathartic method which was the beginning
of psycho-analysis. A sympathetic priest can
draw out the innermost thoughts of the confess-
ant and assist him to rid his mind of oppressing
troubles. I know of at least one case where the
soil was fertile for the development of a homo-
erotic neurosis (Ferenczi prefers the term
"homo-erotic” to the term "homo-sexual,” since
the latter implies a congenital defect, whereas it
is really an acquired neurosis), but where
through the good offices of the confessional, the
individual was restored to normality. This was
a youth, an only son, petted and spoiled by an
indulgent mother, as an only child is so likely
to be. His mother was young enough to have
preserved much of her youthful charm and
beauty and was the son's inseparable companion,
in fact these two seemed to need no other
companionship. His father, an alcoholic, a
periodic drinker, who would stay sober for
a time then go on a long debauch, was the
object of the youth's well-merited hatred since
he had done much to devastate the home
and the happiness of his family. At the age
of sixteen, the boy showed decided homo-
erotic tendencies, with other well-known symp-
MENTAL AND RELIGIOUS HEALING 189
toms such as anxiety states, an introverted
personality, and the like, but as he approached
manhood he outgrew these tendencies, fell in
love with a beautiful girl of about his own age,
married and lived a happy married life. A fine
boy came to bless their union. I cannot defi-
nitely prove that it was the confessional that
freed this boy from his bad complex, as it is a
well-ascertained fact that many individuals go
through a homo-erotic period (see Romaine
Rolland's Jean Christophe,) and finally break
away from the infantile fixation that causes the
trouble and become entirely normal without ad-
ventitious aid. From what I know of such fixa-
tions, however, I think it far more likely that
when they persist through the adolescent period
they are likely to become permanent and then
only some psycho-therapeutic method will re-
lieve or cure the case. In the above case, I
attribute the cure to the catharsis furnished by
the confessional, since the youth was a devout
Catholic and went frequently to confession, from
which he would return with care-free step and
happy smile. It would be well worth the while
of the good fathers who have youth in charge
to look into the causes and mechanism of the
neuroses, inasmuch as it would give them deeper
insight into the characteristic struggles of youth
during the storm and stress of adolescence and
would enable them to confer untold benefits in
the intimacy of the confessional through sympa-
190 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
thetic understanding. To gain this, the confes-
sor himself would of course have to be free from
introversion.
In closing, let me say that we must give all
those psychotherapeutic methods which come
under the head of faith or mind cure, their due,
and recognize that in many cases they help the
neurotic to sublimate and thus turn his libido
to social ends.
XII. THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN
EDUCATION
VITE have seen in the preceding chapters
VV how the religious problem in its varied
aspects is as old as the human race; how in prim-
itive times it involved the propitiation of adverse
forces which the individual felt might rise up and
destroy him; how in a more advanced state of cul-
ture the problem became one of the resolution of
inner conflicts; and that in either case it is a
problem of the individual's perfect adjustment
to his environment. In the review of this many-
sided problem, we have seen the important rôle
which the Unconscious plays in its solution.
We have seen something of the motivation of
human life, with its mixed egotistic and altruis-
tic motives and have noted that there is free-
will in human life, but that individual decisions
are governed largely by the Unconscious. In
our discussion of the nature and effect of
the Unconscious, we have noted how it affects
the problem of evil, which is really the
problem of the individual's attitude toward
life and the effective use of his life forces.
We have discussed certain normal and patho-
logical religious types: Sadistic, Masochistic,
Mystic, and the Neurotic type that seeks in
191
192 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
TY
fantastic systems satisfactions and stimuli for
a jaded emotional appetite. We have noted the
psychological basis of conversion. But we have
seen that there is a changing basis of religion
which involves something wider than individual
satisfactions or adjustment, that the focal points
are shifting in this twentieth century, and that
while much of the content and many of the
phenomena of older systems may be considered
morbid, unwholesome, and abnormal, involving
as they do a view of the natural life as totally
depraved, we are getting to a highly socialized
type of religon which exemplifies in the broadest
sense love for our neighbor. Finally, we con-
sidered how many modern religious systems have
turned to the healing of physical and psychic
ills as a practical application of religion to mod-
ern life and have noted what success has at-
tended their efforts in this direction.
The various discussions may seem to have
carried us far afield, nevertheless these various
questions are but ramifications of the religious
problem and all have had to do with that per-
fect adjustment to environment without which
no one can be said to be living a happy and
useful life. We have definitely turned aside
from the philosophical and metaphysical aspects
of the problem, otherwise we should have been
carried beyond the scope of this book. More-
over, these have been ably and exhaustively dis-
cussed by many modern thinkers.
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 193
The final goal of religion is social unity. Even
those writers who oppose the view that ethics
and religion represent the struggle of the human
race toward social unity and declare that religion
has uses aside from, or beyond, social ends, are
compelled to give weight to the social influences
that determine the course of human life through
the pressure of public opinion and give definite
direction to the individual life. Thus, Rudolf
Eucken (Main Currents of Modern Thought, p.
369) declares: “A system of human culture
founded upon the mere individual and his
subjective condition (is) unsatisfactory. ...
Heredity, environment, and education not only
determine him in innumerable ways, but seem to
be entirely responsible for him; they spin such
a fine web around him that neither cunning nor
force can break through. It is certain that this
determination reaches into that inner soul which
individualism holds to be completely free of
outward influences. . . . For let the individ-
ualist assert himself against the world as much
as he likes and seem completely to separate him-
self from it, he still remains overshadowed and
overpoweringly influenced by the world and sub-
ject to its limitations."
There is therefore no cogent reason why we
should withdraw from our original position nor
find just cause to restate the religious problem
in other than social terms; especially, as we
have given due weight to individual urge as a
194 RELIGION AND THE NEW - PSYCHOLOGY
potent unconscious factor in molding human life
and have recognized that social pressure, al-
though the conflicts it raises with the Uncon-
scious in the imposition of its laws may create
grave psychic disturbance, is the potent force
which progressively raises the human spirit to
higher moral and religious levels. By these two
forces the individual is molded, and while the
conflict between them makes his life a fierce
battle-ground in which he may acknowledge de-
feat by flight from reality into a neurosis, they
likewise force him to sublimation by which his
energy is turned to social ends and finds ex-
pression in art, music, literature, and scientific
pursuits. Thwarted in one direction, his energy
finds outlet in another, sometimes the fantastic
and futile imagery of hysteria, but quite as often
by sublimation in some valuable social work
which helps the progress of mankind.
To tell how the individual may be saved from
a deadening and soul-destroying neurosis in the
progress of this struggle and sublimate and de-
vote his life to social altruistic ends, is the object
of the present chapter.
1. The Method and Effect of Psycho-analysis
Psycho-analysis, as its name implies, is an
"analysis of the psyche,” or personality. It is
a definite therapeutic means of tapping the Un-
conscious and bringing unconscious mental pro-
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 195
cesses (complexes) up into the light of conscious-
ness and thus destroying their power to harm
We have noted the nature and characteristics of
the complex. Pyscho-analysis, as we have like-
wise noted, breaks up the vicious complex, and
remolds it for social ends.
Freud's original procedure in beginning an
analysis was to place the subject in a reclining
position on a couch, where he could be in a state
of perfect physical relaxation that enabled his
mind to get into that abstracted, passive condi-
tion where he could observe his psychic processes
unhindered by external stimuli. Pfister and oth-
ers regard this as not altogether good, since it in-
duces a feeling of helplessness in the subject and
may give rise to erotic fantasies. Pfister places
the subject in an easy chair in a semi-recumbent
position and is himself in perfect view of the
subject throughout the analysis. I regard this
as the better way, since the subject's curiosity
is aroused as to what the analyst is about if he
is not in full view. Needless to add, the analyst
must be so schooled as to betray no surprise or
discomfiture at anything the subject may reveal
in the course of the analysis, however grossly
erotic, vindictive, vulgar, or even blasphemous
these revelations may be. The analyst is the
good physician, his attitude is impersonal as that
of a skilled surgeon in the midst of a difficult
operation; indeed, he is a kind of surgeon and
it is his object to cut away morbid growths from
196 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
the subject's psychic life. To accomplish this
good end, all the evils which have been festering
in the Unconscious must be brought to light to-
gether with the deep anguish which they have
caused, and the subject must abreact these fully.
In a serious neurosis, there is a good deal of this
sort of matter, and the success of the analysis in
working a cure depends upon the thoroughness
with which this matter is brought up into con-
sciousness.
The analyst may begin with conscious
memories which cling to the painful complex, as
the conscious material or rather the fore-con-
scious material is most readily and quickly
brought to light. In a few treatments, this
material will be exhausted; then he will begin
to penetrate more deeply into the recesses of the
personality and bring forth unconscious ma-
terial.
As Pfister remarks, frequently, the first
remark of a patient as the analysis begins re-
veals the nature of the complex. He cites the
case of a younger man suffering from the Edi-
pus-complex who, as he came into the room for
his first interview, cried out excitedly, "Promise
that you will reveal nothing of what I tell you
to my father.” A subject, when asked to give
her earliest childhood memory immediately burst
into tears and said, "My father — it is a very
painful memory," and went on to relate how her
father had taken her as a very young child into
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 197
usly
a desolate spot and pretended to leave her there
alone in the gathering twilight. She thus re-
vealed the bad father-complex at once. After
the first treatment she was assured that she
would go home and sleep well that night, al-
though the inexperienced analyst was aware that
this suggestion was not according to the best
analytic method. It turned out as she had been
told; she slept better the first night after this
violent abreaction than she had for two years
previously.
The analyst from the beginning of the treat-
ment analyzes the subject's dreams. Often
the first dream after beginning treatment is
tremendously significant, as it usually reveals
the subject's attitude toward analysis and
analyst. Beginning with a dream or a dream
fragment as a starting-point, by tactful ques-
tioning and the reiteration of some soothing,
stereotyped phrase, such as, "Yes, and then?”
or "What next comes to mind?” the subject is
induced to bring up from the vast sea of his Un-
conscious all the painful matter which has been
festering and wounding, together with the
"affect," the accompanying agony and anguish
which mark the complex from which he suffers.
The greater the affect, or emotional reaction, the
more successful the treatment. The analyst will
feel at such times that he is cruel, but he con-
soles himself with the thought that he wounds
only to heal.
198 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
The subject describes his dreams circumstan-
tially; if there is some obscure point in the
dream, he is induced to relate it again and fre-
quently the obscure and hazy parts of the dream
will reveal the very thing that the analyst most
wishes to know. For it is owing to certain
resistances (caused by the complex) which must
be broken down that parts of the dream are sup-
pressed and "forgotten.” Sometimes a mere
dream fragment is more significant than a more
elaborate dream which makes a great impression
on the patient's mind, since elaborate dreams are
frequently mere covers or disguises to hide im-
portant unconscious motives.
Deeper and deeper, as the analysis proceeds,
goes the probe into the Unconscious. From re-
mote recesses matter is brought forth that the
subject supposed to be long forgotten (it is just
this severance of mental processes from con-
sciousness that gives the complex its power to
harm) and of whose very existence he was not
consciously aware.
After a time, the character of his unconscious
life, manifested in symptomatic actions of a hys-
terical nature, dreams, mental depressions and
anxieties, undergoes a profound psychic change,
As his resistances are broken down one by one,
1 The “latent” content reveals the true Unconscious, rather
than the disguised manifest content or the dream as remembered.
See Appendix I for full explanation of "latent” and “manifest"
contents of dreams.
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 199
he abreacts all his painful emotions, the grossly
erotic character of his dreams changes and be-
comes normal, and he himself becomes a well
man, capable of taking a useful part in the
social organism. He has transferred his pain-
ful emotions to the analyst; finally, the analyst
breaks off this transference and thus becomes a
bridge over which the subject passes into reality.
(Let no one attempt psycho-analysis in amateur
fashion. The analyst must first of all be an-
alyzed himself so that he knows his own re-
sistances, this is the sine qua non. He must
know most of the Freudian literature and learn
the delicate technique necessary to conduct a
successful analysis. He must likewise be ac-
quainted with the mechanism of dreams, in itself
a special science. Finally, he must know how
to treat the strong positive transference of
a successful analysis. Many an otherwise
successful analysis has come to grief at this
point. Many of the adverse criticisms
of psycho-analytic methods have been based
on these very dangers, an indirect compli-
ment to the efficacy and power of the Freudian
treatment. Both opponents and advocates
warn against misuse of psycho-analysis for the
same reason.)
The first effect of psycho-analytic treatment
is to free the sex-instinct or craving from its
unnatural repression. It is likely for a time to
well up from this strong repression with great
200 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
force and power. This seems to be the basis
of most of the adverse criticism of this method.
But is the effect pernicious? Enemies of Freud
have declared that the Unconscious is released
in all its primordial force and that, the inhibi-
tions due to the restraining force of society being
broken down, the individual is driven to a life
of license. This is not true. Whereas the Un-
conscious is freed from the repressive influences
of the long inner conflict, it is likewise raised
to a higher cultural level by the treatment. If
the individual is beset by strong primitive forces,
he has also new strength to meet them. Even
if there were truth in the statement, it is better
to bring these forces up into the light where they
may be fought face to face than to fight shadowy
foes who lurk in darkest ambush and surprise
the individual when he is off his guard; more-
over, these forces in their repressed state are
very active, causing festering wounds from which
the individual suffers no end of pain. At any
rate, these primitive forces were not quiescent,
they were there, and even if repressed they lived
an independent existence and forced their way
into consciousness in abnormal fashion.
In any case, this state does not last long. The
uprush of emotions soon spends itself as the
analysis proceeds, and the craving sinks to a nor-
mal level. When the onslaught of primitive
emotions has ceased, the subject is conscious of
an altogether new and delightful sense of power
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 201
and energy. He finds that he can accomplish
prodigies of work without undue sense of fatigue.
He is capable of prolonged attention on some
piece of intellectual work which would have tired
him in a short time in his old state. His mental
forces are coördinated, they work for him not
against him, his fragmentary mental images have
body of thought. His judgments are less biased,
for decisions and appraisals no longer rouse a
train of unpleasant emotions. He has been
freed from his old conflicts, he no longer utilizes
his energy in the futile struggle with shadowy
foes who in his former state invariably defeated
him in his highest purposes and finest efforts.
The tone of his physical life is improved.
The functional disturbances, the palpitation and
phobias which made life a burden, have dis-
appeared. His sleep is sound and unbroken, he
is no longer waked by terrifying nightmares or
hysterical symptoms. He is a new man, physi-
cally and mentally.
The analysis has more than likely resolved
his religious doubts. He no longer through ob-
jectification of his own difficulties views the
ills in the social organism, but with his broadened
vision and faculties unclouded by secret an-
guished thoughts, his reaction is no longer,
"How terrible these ills; some implacable evil
202 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
power must be the cause against which it is futile
to struggle!” It is rather, “Here is this world
of mixed good and evil, on the whole good, in
which certain ills inhere; what can I do about
it?” That is, his reactions are no longer those
of a static, helpless, repressed personality;
they are dynamic, they call to action, he is anx-
ious to do. It may be, as certain writers claim,
that the neuroses have given birth to much that
is very beautiful in music and art and literature;
we have seen something of this in previous chap-
ters. But the neurotic wastes an unconscion-
able amount of time and energy in idle day-
dreams in which he sees himself a hero or a poet,
writing symphonies, leading armies to victory,
or addressing assembled multitudes. But he
never gets to the point of action that will make
his visions real. His energies are spent in futile
revery. Some writers have gone so far as to
refuse to give up a neurosis because it seemed
to them artistically productive. The public is
likely to differ from them on this point. The
productions of the neurotic are likely to be
flimsy, remote, and ephemeral in character. It
is likely that in every case of artistic or literary
talent, the output would be vastly improved were
the neurosis cured, that, without losing any fine
element of poetic or artistic fancy, the work
would gain immeasurably in breadth, virility,
compelling force, and the power of appeal. A
youthful friend of mine who was compelled to do
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 203
uncongenial work, once remarked that he would
not take the whole manufacturing plant in which
he worked in exchange for one of his day-dreams.
Needless to add, these day-dreams were not pro-
ductive of any good.
Another friend, a public lecturer, who was
the victim of various phobias, could never
face an audience without fear and trembling.
(It is likely that all stage-fright is from neu-
rotic obsession or phobias of some sort.) His
lectures had been upon remote literary and
artistic subjects, for he sought in this work to
flee from reality. After psycho-analysis, he
found the whole tenor of his thoughts changed.
He now brought his chosen themes into touch
with reality; his addresses had a contemporane-
ousness which before they had lacked. He dis-
carded notes and found that he could address an
audience boldly and fearlessly, that the old hesi-
tancy of speech, due to the conflict of unbidden
compulsive thoughts with those he wished to
express, was entirely gone, and that, since this
conflict was resolved, he had full control of his
faculties and his intellectual processes, therefore
a flood of well-chosen language issued forth
when he rose to speak. He discovered that he
had a consecutive body of thought upon which
to draw at a moment's notice. A theme, when
it had been incubated in the Unconscious (i.e.,
the Foreconscious had acted upon it), brought
forth a profusion of ideas connected and logical,
204 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
and produced whole series of lectures. In brief,
he was psychically re-educated; his complexes
were re-molded and his unconscious processes
thus made accessible to consciousness and hence
to his will; he was aware of his own inner
motives; his judgments were therefore more un-
biased and his thinking more unprejudiced and
logical; he had learned how to think and how to
live.
This individual's sex-life, which had had cer-
tain abnormalities due to his neurosis, now took
on a normal tone. One manifestation of this
that somewhat surprised him was that whereas
formerly he had read evil in the most harm-
less friendly relations of young persons of oppo-
site sexes, he now saw in these natural relations
only the good and beautiful. He realized, so
he told me, that the evil he had formerly seen in
these things was through objectification of his
own evil complexes.
Thus we see that the psycho-analyzed individ-
ual is conscious of his own motives. A brief
auto-analysis will bring them to light. A friend
relates that he hated letter-writing. He sat
down one day to discover why he hated it. In
the passive mood in which he could observe his
own processes, he found that the thought of writ-
ing or receiving a letter brought to mind a
woman teacher whom he had dearly loved and
revered at the age of twelve, doubtless as a
mother-substitute. She had given him much
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 205
good and friendly advice. When she moved
to another city he had kept up a long corre-
spondence with her, and had kept her letters tied
with ribbon for a number of years. These let-
ters he would read and re-read as a lover reads
and re-reads epistles from his sweetheart. When,
however, at the age of eighteen he went to the
city where the teacher lived to take up a posi-
tion which she had secured for him, he was un-
happy in his work (due to his severe neurosis),
he found that the teacher did not come up to
his ideal, as so frequently happens when the
neurotic makes a mother-substitute of an older
woman, he was bitterly disappointed and de-
stroyed the carefully preserved correspondence.
From that time on until he was cured of his
neurosis in his thirties, he hated letter-writing,
because it brought the image of this teacher and
the long correspondence to mind. Of course the
teacher, who was a very good and intelligent
woman, was in nowise to blame. She had taken
a friendly interest in the lad and was surprised
and disappointed at his vagaries, the cause of
which she of course did not know. The friend
takes all the blame to himself. He therefore
recognizes the unconscious element in his preju-
dices, also in his predilection for certain foods,
books or persons, his love of certain places, his
dislike of others. These are explained by
Pfister's formula which we have noted before,
"Now it is as it was at the time when” I ate
206 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
that food, or read that book, or knew that per-
son. The complex-ruled neurotic has a growing
body of phobias for this thing and that, this
person and that person, until at length his vicious
complexes by a method of accretion have gath-
ered to themselves so much material that every
act of his daily life, every place he visits, every
book he reads, every person he meets, give rise
to painful emotions and ideas with painful
emotional tone, and at length the complexes have
comprehended everything in reality. He there-
fore shuts out reality and lives in his self-created
world, since the vicious complexes have fastened
upon everything in life and reality has become
too harsh to bear. Everything he does is ac-
complished only with a superhuman effort of the
will, for all the acts of daily life, even the most
trivial, such as dressing in the morning, are
fraught with these painful emotions. Small
wonder that at length he shuts out reality and
retires into solitude, either a physical solitude
such as a monastery, or a psychic solitude,
whence nothing will induce him to emerge. It
is likely that most of the cases of aboulia, or loss
of will, which are so familiar to the pathologist,
are due to just this process of accretion in the
complexes. It is a familiar sight to see these
persons standing for hours on a street-corner be-
cause they have not the will to move. They
cannot be roused in the morning except by stern
authoritative methods. They never finish dress-
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 207
ing. If they go out to walk, they do not come
back, but walk on and on. By the law of inertia,
they go on forever doing what they are doing.
Since many of these persons are otherwise
normal, it is probable that most of them are
suffering from severe neuroses.
From all this needless pain and suffering the
psycho-analyzed person is freed and permanently
freed. The peace of mind and unity of being,
the harmony and inner peace that in many cases
religion or mental healing or suggestive treat-
ment of any sort has failed to bring, come from
the abreaction of his painful emotions and the
resolution of his inner conflicts through the psy-
cho-analytic treatment.
We perceive, then, what a powerful agent for
good psycho-analysis may be, not only in the
hands of the professional neurologist, but in the
hands of the clergyman and the educator.
2. The Psycho-analytic Method Applied to
Education
The gravest problems of our times are those
of secular and religious education. How to
present religious and scientific truths in such a
way as to make a permanent impression on the
plastic mind of youth is indeed a problem. So
multifarious and so divergent are the theories
of education, so difficult a task is it, that a man
of the ability and acumen of the late Henry
208 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
Adams decided, according to The Education of
Henry Adams, that after all life itself is the
only thing that can really educate. Unluckily,
we cannot leave the individual to be educated
by life — in schools he must learn something of
the search for human knowledge and the achieve-
ments of the human race - and even if we
could, life is not in all its phases the best edu-
cator. He is quite as likely to follow error as
truth if we leave his education to the chance
impingements or the fortuitous circumstances
of the average life.
On the whole, we may say that the methods
of arbitrary authority which are so universally
employed in education are bad. The youth
sees in the stern and uncompromising teacher a
father or mother substitute, especially if his par-
ents are harsh and he is driven to find father or
mother substitute outside the home, and will
visit all the wrath aroused by the unintelligent
parents upon the head of the teacher. He will
accept the ipse dixit of such a teacher with hate
and loathing. We are fast learning that the
imposition of authority will not gain the desired
ends of education.
. Our methods of education have been remark-
able for their lack of understanding and their
lack of insight into the processes of the child-
mind. Instead of going to the child-mind itself
for suggestions of educational methods, we get
some authority, often of second rate, to write us
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM, IN EDUCATION 209
text-books in which history, geography, arith-
metic, are set forth in a dry-as-dust fashion, and
then we compel the growing boy or girl to sit
at a desk for five hours a day conning these dry-
as-dust facts, which, so far as the child can see,
bear no relation whatever to his own life. Oft-
times the theories of mathematics, geography,
history, the sciences, what not, set forth in these
books as well-ascertained and proven facts are
naught but exploded theories, for science, un-
fettered by authority, goes on to new discover-
ies and discards the outworn theories of yester-
day, but in school-books there is little change.
Thus in some schools it is still taught that
thinking is a function of the brain, that a thought
makes a track in the brain-tissue, that the more
thinking we do, the greater the number of con-
volutions, so that if you took the brain of let
us say Isaac Newton and examined it after his
death, you would find that it had many more
convolutions than that of plain John Smith the
farmer. Did our good teachers but know it,
this materialistic theory, carried out to its logical
conclusion, leads to a denial of the existence of
the soul, immortality, God. Yet our children
are still taught that this is absolute fact. Such
teaching can result only in a narrow, provincial,
prejudiced outlook on life.
At this point, I must deal with a subject
which I approach with some reluctance, namely
the growing sex-life of the boy or girl. It
210 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
is, however, necessary that we look the matter
squarely in the face without flinching and
discuss it without equivocation or prudery,
since upon normal sex-life depends the whole
future of the youthful individual. The re-
sults of our present system are most pernicious
during the years of adolescence. At the begin-
ning of the adolescent period the individual
undergoes a profound psychic change. He is
beset by a whole host of new and unfamiliar
sensations and emotions. When the growing
boy, beset by new foes in the way of erotic
fantasies, assailed by enemies which he is un-
prepared to face, because of the withholding of
sexual enlightenment, is forced to sit quiescent
at a desk for hour after hour, his nose in a book
which he loathes, the effect cannot be described
as other than appalling. This is the period
when the boy ought to be learning to direct his
new energies into muscular activities, when he
should be developing altruistic impulses, when
his attention should begin to turn outward to
others, not inward toward his own developing
person, with its profound physical and psychical
changes, its changes of structure and of func-
tion. Sitting at his desk, the model of pro-
priety, his fancy wanders over a host of new
and fascinating ideas, all of which would be
termed “obscene” by the good teacher could she
look into his mind. Nasty boy! No, the ado-
lescent is merely passing through a natural phase
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 211
Y
of his development. There is nothing essen-
tially wrong in these growing sex feelings.
There is something essentially wrong when he
does not have them. They are the beginnings
of his adult life. They have their uses. The
youth is but passing from a state of savagery
into a civilized state. He covers every out-
house with obscene writings and pictures, which
are nothing but the phallic symbols of our pri-
mordial ancestors, the basis of those very sym-
bols we retain in sublimated form in our
churches. This must be regarded as but a pass-
ing stage of development: a dangerous stage,
too, since this is the time when the foundation
of severe neuroses is laid which may dog the in-
dividual to the grave. The normal individual
soon lives through it.
The normal method of education is the evo-
lutionary method. That is to say, we cannot
take dry facts which seem to bear no relation to
the individual and fit them to his person like
a ready-made coat. Each stage of development
demands its own peculiar method of education.
We must fit the coat to the growing youth, not
try to squeeze him into a ready-made garment
manufactured by the thousand in some remote
tailoring establishment. It is astonishing that
we have not made more of the great Froebel in
our educational methods. He was one of the
first to recognize that in his own life the individ-
ual relives the experiences and development of
212 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
the whole human race. Yet, so far, only in
our kindergartens have we made any wide ap-
plication of his principles. Only the psycho-
analyst seems to have made any wide applica-
tion of this knowledge, the cogency of which
is beginning to be recognized by all thinkers.
Consider the wisdom of the following from
Froebel's Mother Play:
Is it not true, O thoughtful mother, that in all you do for and
with your child, you are seeking one aim, returning forever to
one central point of endeavor? This aim is the nurture of life.
The impulse to foster life is the very core of your motherly
being. It gives unity to your feeling, thought, and action. It
explains why your feeling, thought, and activity rise in unison
to meet each manifestation of life and activity in your child.
Nothing gives you greater joy than this ebullient life, pro-
vided that its manifestations are strong, calm, and in accord
with the laws of nature. Unless your motherly instinct has been
warped by habit, prejudice, or misunderstanding of itself, it
responds at once to the movements of your child. You will
foster his impulsive movements, exercise his strength, cultivate
his activity, and prepare him through doing for seeing, through
the exertion of his power for its comprehension. In a word, you
will seek through self-activity to lead him to self-knowledge.
Here is a whole philosophy of education in
a few brief words. Here is the object of all true
education, “through activity to lead him to self-
knowledge.” The child himself points the way;
education must be a matter of unfolding per-
sonality, of growth and development along the
lines indicated by the growing organism, "in ac-
cord with the laws of nature.”
That sex plays a large part in the determina-
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 213
tion of the individual's career and adult life is
just beginning to be recognized. Froebel him-
self doubtless suffered from some sex repression.
He tells us in his diary that his father, a pastor,
was known for his austerity and severity. He
saw his father going about among the people,
rebuking them for their sins, which often were
of a sexual nature. The growing boy was over-
whelmed with the thought that the sex life
caused such disintegration of human character
and such dissonances in their lives. How beau-
tiful was the world of nature, free from these
conflicts, in contrast with human life! He was
most unhappy over the situation until one day
he was looking at the opening hazel buds, when
his elder brother, home on a visit, enlightened
him as to the sexual nature of plants. Now all
was changed; he saw the things of sex not as
something abhorrent, peculiar to the human race
and due to sin, but as beautiful, inevitable, and
above all, natural.
By withholding sexual enlightenment, parents
and teachers must bear the blame for a good
many sexual anomalies. The period of early
adolescence is the so-called masturbation period,
although many individuals have begun this habit
many years earlier. To understand this wide-
spread practice, we must know the evolutionary
process by which the personality grows. Dur-
ing infancy and early childhood, the individual
finds his satisfactions in his own person; this
214 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
and the mother are all the world it knows. It
is likely that its attachment to its mother is at
first only because of self-gratification through
the nutritive function. The child is intensely
and inherently individualistic. One who has
watched the play of small children will recognize
this trait. All its thoughts and desires center
in self. But with the beginning of adolescent
years, the normal person turns to the world with-
out for his satisfactions and for objects of love.
Thus, if the boy has been addicted to mastur-
bation, which is a symptom of auto-eroticism,
self-love, he will outgrow this trait in due time
if he be a normal person and will turn his atten-
tion to the world without. His acts are at any
rate no worse than those of the alcoholic and
drug addict who finds satisfaction in self-stimu-
lation or the neurotic who satisfies inner cray-
ings in fantastic reveries. All of these acts are
asocial and baneful in their effects. The youth
will put his bad practices behind him and turn
his love to her who will be his life partner if he
develops normally. But if sexual enlighten-
ment is withheld, or on account of bad environ-
ment and wrong training, his infantile fixations
persist into adult life, he will not give up the
practice. The evil complex which keeps his
emotional life in its child state will cause the
practice to persist.
It is likely that all of these pernicious prac-
tices could be prevented if the child had a proper
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 215
and normal sex education. We develop the in-
tellects of our children, but their emotional life
is left to run riot. The best way to cure a neu-
rosis is to prevent it. If children were brought
up with a normal, active, out-of-door life, were
not made the victims of an adult lust for fond-
ling, were taught in good season, that is in their
early teens, the secrets of sex life, it is likely
that they would grow up more normally and
that none of the tendencies that lead to solitary
vice of any sort would have opportunity to de-
velop. There would certainly be far fewer neu-
roses to devastate human life.
Many a neurosis has developed because a
youth was frightened by an over-zealous teacher,
pastor, or relative into believing that mastur-
bation would eventually work great physical
harm in his life or had done so already. He
is told that this practice will destroy the spinal
cord, use up brain-tissue, and finally result in
idiocy or insanity. What evil work of good and
pious but ignorant people the neurologist has
to undo here! What years of misery, useless-
ness, and deepest anguish are the outcome of
such teaching! And what years of fruitless
effort, what incredible sums of money are spent
by the neurotic in search of mental health!
What anguished cries burst forth, and what sup-
plications to the Almighty for release from this
living death are wrung from anguished lips!
No one but the Recording Angel can ever know
what these badly-taught individuals suffer.
216 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
The truth is, masturbation is not the cause of
any nervous ill in itself. It is only where the
individual has been frightened that it may be
said in any sense even to be a contributing cause.
Its physical results have been grossly exagger-
ated by ignorance and avarice. It is not a cause
at all, but a symptom. As we have seen, the
neurotic masturbates because he has never out-
grown the childish fixation upon himself; he is
neurotic and auto-erotic. We must therefore
treat fundamentals: get rid of the cause and the
symptom along with other neurotic symptoms
will disappear. When once the sex-instinct or
craving is released from its bad repression, the
resistances are broken down, and the individual
is freed from his inner conflicts that throw him
back upon an inner world as a relief from reality,
and thus his gaze is turned outward -- he will
cease from all these evil practices.
In the course of his development, the normal
individual breaks loose from his infantile fixa-
tions; his craving is then turned toward his life
partner, or is sublimated and turned toward
social ends. But in the neurotic these fixations
persist, and then the subject must be freed by
psycho-analytic treatment. We have seen the
multitude of evils to which repression of the sex-
instinct lead. And it is of little use for the neu-
rotic to struggle for self-control; while he is in
the neurotic state no struggle can end in anything
but defeat, for no futile attempts at self-con-
- RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 217
1
trol will serve to keep the instincts chained and
innocuous; they will seek some avenue of expres-
sion, if not normal, then abnormal. The only
efficacious method of dealing with sex-instinct
is to free it from repression, then turn the re-
leased energy to social ends.
No educator should ever be allowed to train
youth who is not an expert psychologist, who
does not know the mental processes of youth,
nor is not cognizant of the character and potency
of the Unconscious in the determination of the
individual's mode of life. It is better if he
himself be psycho-analyzed and know his own
strengths and weaknesses. Unless he have this
background, he cannot understand, nor deal
effectively and intelligently with growing youth.
He will reward and punish because of personal
prejudice, not from a disinterested view of the
merits of a case, unless he knows himself and
understands the mechanism of each individual
consciousness with which he deals. Every
student will present individual and peculiar
problems; the success of his education depends
upon the educator's comprehension of these
problems and the methods with which he deals
with them.
We shall take two types of student and ques-
tion our educator regarding them. What makes
A bright, happy, keen, alert, and apt at his les-
sons, active on the playground, a social leader,
sure of his powers, capable of accomplishment,
218 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
while B is morose, melancholy, self-centered,
solitary, ill at ease, diffident, inefficient, asocial?
Many an educator would be at a loss to answer.
He would probably murmur something about
"family, heredity, bad constitution," or the like.
But unless the educator can answer this ques-
tion intelligently, he is no educator, for he does
not know the inner workings of his students'
minds. A characteristic answer to the above
question would be, "B masturbates.” Just so
- but does the educator know why? For it is
not the cause, but the symptom of some moral
and mental defect; more than likely perfectly
curable. Put B through a brief psycho-analysis,
and you will probably find that there is an effi-
cient cause in his emotional background for
his evil practices, and that while his defect is
not congenital, there are evidences in his case of
family conflict and infantile fixations not yet
broken up. The chances are ten to one that for
some reason he hates his father, consciously or
unconsciously, that his father was unduly harsh,
cruel, vicious, or dissolute, or the boy feels that
the father is not worthy of the mother and so
would supplant him ~ in any case he loathes
the father and so suffers from the Edipus-
complex. This much is certain: he will never
be happy or efficient until he is freed from his
neurosis. Freed from its binding fetters, and
sometimes even a brief psycho-analysis will
accomplish this, the chances are good that the
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 219
youth will be as bright, happy, keen, active, and
social as his comrade A. No one can be happy
or efficient who suffers from some secret, heart-
breaking anguish. No amount of good counsel
about the evils of his life, no amount of en-
couragement to more strenuous effort, no moral
guidance, no spur of any sort, will in the least
avail, until the fundamental thing is reached and
removed. No one can live a whole life with a
cancerous neurotic growth eating at his heart
and devouring his life.
We shall have no education of youth worthy
of the name until the springs of human action,
the motivation of human life, and the psychic
mechanism of the various neuroses and hyste-
rias are thoroughly understood by educators.
3. The Psycho-analytic Method in Religious
Education
If the aim of secular education is the broaden-
ing and deepening of personality through cul-
tivation of intellectual forces, and the enrich-
ment of personality through creation of new
values and wider intellectual horizons, the aim
of religious education, as differentiated from
secular, must be the elevation of the individual
life through bringing it in touch with the divine,
the inculcation of high ethical ideals, and the
development of altruistic impulses. To be effec-
tive, religious education must penetrate to the
220 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
deepest recesses of the personality; it deals with
the emotions as secular education deals with the
intellect, that is, it must begin where secular
education leaves off, it must profoundly affect
and change the emotions of the individual, and
by directing them away from egotistic and self-
ish impulses, turn them outward and assist in
focussing them upon other lives. "Thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and
with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This
is the great and first commandment. And a
second like unto it is this, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself.” (Matt. xxii, 37–39.)
That is to say, the individual best exemplifies
his love to God in love to his fellow. True
religion centers in love, and he who because of
repression cannot love normally, cannot be truly
religious. How completely the world called
Christian has forgotten this gospel of love is
demonstrated in all the horrors of the great war.
We have already seen how the individual
inhibited in his love-life is unhappy, badly
adjusted to his environment, out of tune with
God and the universe. The object of religion
should be to bring about the desired harmony.
(a) The Bible as Fetish
Many religious educators think of the Bible as
a kind of fetish. They seem to feel that in
some vague and mystic manner the mere read-
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 221
ing of the Bible will work profound changes in
individual life. The representative of a certain
religio-social organization informed me that in
a large factory the men had been induced by
one of the representatives of this society to sign
a pledge card that they would read a chapter
of the Bible every day. What good is to be
accomplished by this promiscuous mechanical
reading is a mystery. It is safe to say that no
real good is accomplished by such methods, or
rather lack of method. It places the Bible
exactly on a level with the piece of bone or shell
carried by the savage, to which some mysterious
virtue has been transmitted by some god, so that
it shields him from harm or gives him power over
his enemies. It is as if, aside from its content,
the Bible had a mysterious force for good which
one might absorb by mere unintelligent reading.
As a Jesuit writer has well pointed out (Rev.
Bernard J. Otten: Does it Matter Much What I
Believe?), not all of the truths of the Bible are
on the surface. One must read with intelligence
and understanding to get the underlying truths.
As he says, inspired by the Bible, Catholic has
persecuted Protestant, Protestant has perse-
cuted Catholic, Gentile has persecuted Jew.
Without a background of intelligence and
scholarship, the meaning of the Bible is uncer-
tain. We have seen in the case of the great
Origen (page 121) how a misreading of the
Scripture may lead even to self-mutilation; we
222 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
know that a great deal of the Sadistic and
Masochistic cruelty for which religion has been
responsible in all the centuries of the Christian
era has been directly inspired by a misreading of
the Scripture. Every individual sect of Protes-
tantism finds there justification for its own
peculiar dogmas.
As Father Otten goes on to say, an infallible
book demands an infallible interpreter, else
harm is likely to come from its inspirations as
well as good.
We must recognize that the Bible is not one
book but a great body of religious literature
extending over many centuries and that it runs
the whole gamut of human thought and specula-
tion, from the creation myths of Genesis to the
highly ethical Gospel of Jesus.
The teaching in most of our Church Schools,
inspired by the Bible as fetish, has been stereo-
typed and dreary enough. The pupil feels with
reason that many of the things taught bear no
relation whatever to his own life, or indeed to
contemporary life in any of its aspects. Certain
religious publishing houses announce that by
their method of teaching, the whole Bible will be
read and studied in a period of three or four
years. Why should the whole Bible be studied?
Who is interested or edified by the long catego-
ries, the dreary length of the Torah, the monot-
onous genealogies, the primitive pornographic
material, except the ethnologist, the scientific
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 223
researcher? How or why should children hear
the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, involving
the account of what happened to the stranger
who came to Sodom with his concubine while
Lot was resident there? If such material is used
for teaching, what good is accomplished?
(b) The Nature of the Bible
The teacher must first of all know his mate-
rial. So long as teachers are chosen for their
piety rather than their intelligence, we shall
continue to have little result from our religious
training. It goes without saying that the
teacher must unite intelligence and training to
his piety.
He must know his material. The Bible is
a collection of literature: historical, pseudo-
historical, pietistic, prophetic, poetic, apocalyp-
tical, ethical. It stands to reason that for
the purposes of teaching its parts are of un-
equal merit. Many of the Old Testament
accounts are chronicles of blood-lust and vio-
lence. They are not available for teaching as
preparatory to the study of Jesus' Gospel of
love; they directly contradict it. The Psalms
are partly utterances of a lofty religious spirit,
partly polemics against the enemies of Israel,
reeking of violence and vengeance. The cos-
mological material of the early chapters of
Genesis is nothing more or less than a series of
224 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
sex-myths, common to all primitive religions.
Now, if the teacher has the intelligence and
training essential to a true knowledge of the
nature of this great literature, he is in a position
to make effective use of it as teaching material.
He will successfully bridge the gap of centuries
and demonstrate to his class how the lessons
drawn from the Prophet Amos who came to the
great shrine at Bethel and rebuked the Israel-
ites because they had “sold the poor for a pair
of shoes," may be applied to the bad conditions
of modern society. He will show how the ques-
tionings of Job, who marvelled at the triumphs
of evil and the defeat of good, are the eternal
questionings of the human heart, searching to
find out God. If he knows his backgrounds,
even the story of Cain and Abel, the dreams of
Joseph, the story of David and Goliath, may
be made to serve. The essential thing is that
he bridge the gap between Orient and Occident,
the primordial past and the bustling, material-
istic present, between the modes of thought
which belong essentially to other times and
places and the present time, the present place.
Thus, he will make his teaching effective.
He must be an expert religious psychologist;
he must know how and why universal myths
arose, what universal human need is back of
them. He must, like the secular educator, know
the minds and mental processes of each of his
pupils. He must know why they evince certain
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 225
religious tendencies, why they have predilec-
tions for one part of the Scripture more than
another. Many of these tendencies, as we have
seen, are due to neuroses and not to true reli-
gious feeling and aspiration at all. The teacher
must learn to distinguish the true from the false.
For if an individual is driven to join the church,
or transfer his allegiance to some other sect, and
the basis of his decision is a neurosis, he will not
be permanently happy nor permanently loyal in
his new situation, because, as we have seen, the
cause of his trouble is not really religious, it lies
elsewhere. In this connection let it be said that
the psycho-analytically trained teacher or pastor
can guide his pupil through the tortuous mazes
of religious doubt and fear, help him resolve his
conflicts, and bring him to sublimation in a true
conversion. In that case, the preceptor will
make the individual permanently happy, moral,
and efficient.
The teacher must, however, guard strictly
against giving moral counsel before the pupil is
prepared for this. If the pupil's inner conflicts
are not resolved, the teacher will be but striking
his head against a stone wall. The pupil will
remain impervious until he is in a condition of
freedom from his psychic bonds. If a man be
drowning, the sensible person would get him safe
to dry land ere he gave him good advice. So
with religious training; the drowning person
must be saved from the engulfing flood of his
226 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
neurosis. Then he will receive religious counsel
with willing heart and mind.
(c) The Symbolism of Religion
In our first chapter, we saw something of the
wide prevalence and efficacy of the religious
symbol. "Schleiermacher," says Pfister (Psycho-
analytic Method, page 275), "even considers
religion the product of symbolizing activity.”
It is true, the fantasies of religion are all ex-
pressed in symbols. Our normal every-day life
is expressed in symbols; we cannot speak a word
nor express a thought without using a symbol.
The etymology of words in common use shows
how a literal meaning becomes a symbolic as
time passes. Thus the word “concept,” used so
frequently in these chapters, is from the Latin
concipio, which in turn is from cum, together
and capio, to take. Through the elaboration
and symbolism wrought by the passage of the
race into a higher state of culture, spatial terms
thus become temporal.
The intelligent religious educator may make
wide application of this principle. It is through
symbolism that religion gains an effective hold
on human life. The content and concepts of
religion may change through changing centuries,
but its symbolism remains. The story of David
and Goliath may be symbolized to mean the
struggle of truth against the encamped hosts of
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 227
evil; the story of Gideon and the broken pitchers
may be used to illustrate the inherent cowardice
of the evilly-motivated person; the parables are
already symbolized, and their application to
modern life may be made in almost endless ways.
However, violence must never be done to the
text in making these modern applications, as was
so frequently the case with an older exegesis.
The pupil must comprehend the true nature and
basis of the myth; he must be taught the mech-
anism by which primitive myths are created
and gain wide credence. The instruction must
be free from the slightest element of deceit; the
pupil will be quick to penetrate the sophistry of
the teacher and will lose all respect for him. He
wants to know the truth, and it should be told
him so far as the teacher is able to tell it. These
stories gain rather than lose by a full knowledge
of their origin. Their power of universal appeal
lies in the very nature of their origin and sym-
bolic elaboration.
Symbols are pictures, therefore more easily
grasped and comprehended than concepts; the
symbol has an emotional appeal which the scien-
tifically expressed concept lacks. The symbol
is subject to a wide variety of interpretation, it
therefore appeals to widely diversified types of
mind.
The myths of the Bible might very well form
the basis for sex-instruction for the adolescent.
They are rich in this material, and certainly if
Their lose bylo tell it
228 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
we teach those parts of the Bible which deal
with these matters, we should enlighten the mind
of youth as to their real meaning, not seek to
gloss over and escape to what seems to the
prudish mind more wholesome portions of the
Scripture. I have distinct recollections of a
young lady teacher who read Ephesians v. 5 to
her class, of which I was a youthful member,
and, ignoring our questions, went on to the rest
of the Sunday School lesson without further
comment. An excellent opportunity was missed
for sexual enlightenment. It was not of course
the place of this young lady to speak of such
things; the conclusion would seem to be, there-
fore, that a class of adolescent boys should have
a man-teacher who is free from prudery and
from injurious fixations. Parents who them-
selves suffer from infantile fixations will invari-
ably object to a frank discussion of such matters
in the public school or the Church School, and
this will make the religious educator's task diffi-
cult. It is but fair to say, however, that there
is an increasing number of parents who are only
too glad to have their children enlightened in
matters of sex, if only some one else will do it.
Our Church Schools suffer appallingly from
lack of good teachers. As we have seen, piety is
likely to be the criterion of the teacher's fitness,
rather than intelligence, though he cannot well
afford to dispense with either. The teacher of-
ten has not had the benefit of a good secular
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 229
education. But if he is recht in Glauben, cor-
rect in belief, as an old German play has it, he
is accepted as competent. Many religious teach-
ers are those who have definitely shut out of
their lives all that is bright and wholesome,
and, driven into religion by severe neurosis,
they focus their attention upon a narrow reli-
gious field of thought. In this class we find
men and women who have never opened the
pages of a classic, have never set foot inside a
theater, never heard a scientific lecture nor read
a scientific book, nor mixed with a wide variety
of human types. Quite commonly, they are
typical shut-in personalities. Until we get a
better and more intelligent type of teacher, our
Church Schools will continue to languish and
our religious education fail to be effective.
4. The Object of Education
Youth is essentially idealistic; it looks out
with glowing eyes upon a world of infinite pos-
sibility and rosy promise. To its pulsing energy
no task seems too difficult, no obstacle seems
insurmountable. The future stretches before it
as a highway of pleasant accomplishment and
successful attainment.
Youth, we say, is bound to be disillusioned.
Nevertheless, it is precisely our task to catch
this energy and optimism before it takes flight,
and so mold it and direct it that the individual
lives a normal, happy, efficient life.
230 RELIGION AND THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
The older methods of education took the
youth with all this energy and optimism and
sought by every known means to repress them,
and by killing all initiative and individuality,
turn out educated men and women who might all
have been run in one mold.
But, latterly, we are seeing the light. We
are seeing that these old methods are not edu-
cation at all, that they kill the energy necessary
to the individual's success and happiness. We
realize to-day that the object of education must
be the unfolding of the personality along the
lines indicated by individual gifts, capabilities,
and predilections and the enrichment of the in-
dividual life. In the next place, and this logi-
cally follows from the first object, its object is
to equip the individual to live an active, useful,
effective life in the world into which he is thrown.
In former times, when education was limited
to the few, its object was to turn out the scholar
and the gentleman, rather than the useful citi-
zen, and apparently it mattered not whether it
fitted him for useful citizenship.
To-day, we recognize that no man is truly
educated unless he is well equipped to fight life's
battles and endure its hard knocks with courage
and fortitude. It is his function not alone to
ornament society but to serve it. In so far as he
serves social needs, in however humble a capac-
ity, he performs a useful function, makes a real
and valuable contribution to society, and so
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN EDUCATION 231
furthers its progress. To this end, he must be
complete master of his faculties, physically
strong, mentally sound and whole. He must be
mens sana in corpore sano.
APPENDIX I
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS
N VERY one who attempts to recount a dream
has the feeling that much of what occurred
in the dream has escaped him. This may be
true in some degree, for most dreams, unless they
are set down in writing immediately upon wak-
ing, are quickly repressed into the Unconscious.
The function of the dream is primarily to pro-
tect the sleeper so that he will get his due amount
of recuperative sleep. It is demonstrated be-
yond peradventure that the dream is a wish-ful-
filment. Every dream when analyzed shows this
element, even the nightmare or anxiety dream.
By fulfilling the wish of the dreamer, the dream
guards his sleep. The sleeper may be thirsty,
for instance. He dreams that he drinks from a
cool stream, his wish is thus fulfilled, and he
sleeps calmly on. Sometimes in anxiety dreams
we have the feeling that it is only a dream any-
way and we sleep peacefully on. The dream
contains thoughts that would disturb us if al-
lowed to come into consciousness. Therefore,
what we call the "censor” which guards our
psychic life symbolizes the material so that we
shall not recognize it as disturbing psychic ma-
233
234
APPENDIX I
terial and thus effectually disguises it, or else
tells us that it is only a dream anyway, then we
have the "dream within a dream.” Inasmuch
as the dream may contain unpleasant thoughts,
we quickly forget it upon awakening, and it
sinks into the Unconscious. This is the reason
for the quick forgetting.
The dream contains what Freud calls the
“manifest content and the “latent content."
The manifest content is the imagery which ac-
tually appears in the dream. Thus the dream
about the elevator which took the form of a
"little white house," related on page 65, has cer-
tain dream-pictures: the large building, the high
platform, the little house, the stout man. This
is the manifest content. But back of this, as we
saw in the dreamer's analysis of the dream, there
are certain thoughts and wishes which belonged
to the thinking processes of the preceding day.
In this connection it may be stated that dreams
always deal with recent psychic material, but
they are likewise "overdetermined,” that is, they
also contain wish-material which survives from
childhood, they have likewise sex-material. The
elevator dream had such material, which I do not
care to discuss in this place. Suffice it to say,
such material existed. This material we call the
“latent material.” It is the cause of the dream.
There are layers of consciousness, beginning with
the upper layers of the Foreconscious, which lie
between the Conscious and the Unconscious,
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 235
ny
reaching down into the remotest recesses of
the Unconscious. The dream, in symbolic form,
will contain psychic material from each of these
layers. The remotest reaches of the Uncon-
scious are very difficult to explore, the resistance
which the individual sets up against such ex-
ploration is too great The events of the
twenty-four or forty-eight hours preceding the
night of the dream are the "instigators” or im-
mediate causes of the dream. In repressions
caused, as we have seen, by infantile fixations,
organ inferiorities, unpleasant experiences, lie
the primary or efficient cause of the dream. It
is only after an analysis penetrates the deeper
recesses of the Unconscious that these appear.
We have here another cause for our apparent
forgetting of the dream. The feeling that there
is much of the dream that escapes us in the re-
counting is due in large measure to a feeling that
there is more of it than appears in its actual
imagery. This "more" is the latent dream ma-
terial. It exists in consciousness as a kind of
shadowy background of the actual dream. We
feel there were many more happenings in the
dream than we are able to tell, but they re-
fuse to come to consciousness. This is on
account of strong resistances which force this
material down into the Unconscious and keep it
repressed.
In the actual dream we usually have a good
deal of condensation. One figure may repre-
236
APPENDIX I
sent several persons and have some characteris-
tics of each. Dr. Coriat (Meaning of Dreams)
reports the dream of a physician in which he saw
a colleague with light, silky hair, although his
colleague's hair was dark (page 28f.). This
light silky hair really belonged to some boys
whom the dreamer had seen on the previous day.
He desired his colleague to have the healthy ap-
pearance of these boys, therefore in the dream he
gives him the light silky hair which they had.
I dreamed of a person who admitted me to the
house of a friend. The figure seemed to vibrate,
now appearing to be the friend's wife, again
seeming to be his secretary. A woman dreamed
that she saw a strange bird with a human head.
It looked a little like one of Dürer's apostles (St.
Paul), it reminded her of Dürer and of a lec-
turer who had given an illustrated lecture on
Dürer some years before. Thus the face stands
for the apostle, Dürer, and the lecturer. This
phenomenon appears frequently in dreams.
Sometimes a person will appear as two persons
in the dream. This "reinforcement” is due to
the strength of the actual person's image in the
Unconscious. If the dreamer suffers from the
Edipus-complex, the mother image will fre-
quently appear as two or more persons, or sev-
eral persons will each show some of her
characteristics. The strength of the fixation
and its potent influence upon the dreamer's
psychic life are responsible for this.
IS
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 237
Nearly every one has had the feeling that
when he recounts a dream he is adding material
to that of the actual dream. This we call the
“elaboration of the dream.” The tendency of
the intellect is to react upon the dream material
and strive to bind it up into a connected whole,
make a coherent narrative of its fragmentary
imagery. We have to allow for this in our an-
alysis of dreams, but inasmuch as the subject
can only relate what is in his mind, it makes
little difference how he may elaborate the dream
material. The same causes that are active in
the dream help to produce the elaboration. So
true is this, that subjects who claim they never
dream, are asked to make up” dreams. These
artificial dreams have the same characteristics
as the real dream. A subject was asked to pro-
duce an artificial dream. It was as follows: "I
stand upon a rainbow and wear a gown that has
the colors of the spectrum, with the violet tints
at the bottom and the red tints at the top. I
slide down the rainbow into the water.” The
subject had seen a rainbow on the previous day.
She confessed that she desired some beautiful
new gowns. The sliding down into the water
was doubtless a desire for parturition, although
the analysis did not go so far. From examples
given by Freud, Pfister, Coriat, and others, I
consider this to be the case. The sliding down
is likely to symbolize the sexual act; the waters
are probably the amniotic liquor which appears
so frequently in the dreams of women.
238
APPENDIX I
Another characteristic of the dream is "dis-
placement.” A finger may stand for a phallus,
the mouth for a feminine sex organ. This seems
incredible, but analysis of many dreams bears
it out. It is held by most authorities that the
sex function first appears in the child as the
nutritive function. I have quoted Freud on
page 7, note, as saying that the "sexual pre-
sentation complex (in dreams) is transposed to
the eating-complex." The displacement in the
dream is similar to the word-displacement which
is the basis of so many witticisms. Thus in
"Alice in Wonderland," Alice is told that the
pupils in the under-water school study "reeling,
writhing, and drawling," instead of "reading,
writing, and drawing.” The phenomenon is
familiar in errors in speech of every-day life.
The classic story of the man dining with a
miserly friend whose table was notable for the
meager array of food and who remarked, “There
is one thing about Roosevelt, he always gives a
man a square meal,” when he meant to say
"a square deal,” is well known. As in this case,
the results are often ludicrous. In daily life
these speech-errors arise from the conflict be-
tween what is really in a man's thoughts and
what he wants to say. The public speaker will
proceed fluently with his address up to a certain
point, then he will begin to stammer and hesi-
tate. Something else is in the background of
consciousness striving for expression. We often
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 239
feel in our every-day associations that a man is
lying when he hesitates in his speech; for we
know that he is thinking one thing and saying
another. Sometimes the hesitation or speech-
error is due to an unconscious conflict; the man
may be telling the truth, but some repressed
thought or idea strives for utterance, interferes
with his utterance and causes stammering. Al-
though this does not seem to be a serious dis-
order, analysts know that it is a most difficult
disorder to cure. Coriat (Meaning of Dreams,
pp. 172–173) says: "Stammering, also, is fre-
quently a symbol of an unconscious mental
process, the speech defect arising in an effort
to conceal a repressed thought or idea, often
an idea of an unpleasant or shameful nature
which continually tends to obtrude itself in
consciousness. Like a slip of the tongue, stam-
mering is not accidental, but is motivated or
caused by an unconscious mental process of
which the sufferer is unaware." He says further
(Abnormal Psychology, Second Edition, p. 381),
“This speech disturbance is one of the protean
forms of an anxiety neurosis.”
. I have spoken of the "symbolism” of dreams,
especially of typical symbols: the serpent, etc.,
and it might appear that these are arbitrary;
that every symbol appearing in any dream what-
soever must have a given meaning regardless of
the age, sex, character of the dreamer, circum-
stances of his life, causes of the dream, mental
240
APPENDIX I
state at the time he dreamed the dream, and the
like. This is of course not true. By the very
mechanisms we have discussed: condensation,
reinforcement, latent and manifest material, the
censorship which changes the latent material to
manifest material, and, in general, the symboli-
zation process, it must be evident to the
reader that no symbol can be assigned an arbi-
trary meaning. This would be to degrade the
whole analysis to the level of charlatanry and
make it one with the pseudo-science of astrology.
Dream-books are based upon an arbitrary inter-
pretation of dream symbols. A symbol may be
masculine or feminine according to where and
how it appears in the dream. It may have one
of a thousand different meanings. It must here
be emphasized that the interpretation of dreams
and neurotic symptoms must be understood, as
Adler says (Ueber den Nervösen Charakter,
page 4), “through the testimony of the only per-
son who is in a position to testify, namely, the
patient himself.” The interpretation of sym-
bols is not arbitrary, then, but comes to light
during the dream-analysis from the conscious
evidence of the subject himself. Thus we see
that the same image in different dreams may
have many different meanings and we are at
once rid of the reproach which so many have
brought against the Freudian psychology, that
the interpretation of symbols is arbitrary, or
that one symbol is stretched and warped to
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 241
mean almost anything. The patient himself
gives the meaning. To be sure, there are typi-
cal dreams. If, let us say, a thousand persons
had the typical "flying dream," and each
of these · was found to have the same
or similar latent content, a very good case
might be made out for the flying dream
as typical of certain mental processes, the same
in every case. Our judgment here must rest
upon an empiric basis, as most judgments do in
medical practice, whether it be psycho-therapeu-
tics or surgery or what-not. They must all rest
upon experience.
Let me here develop further the conception
of dreams as representing repressed desires.
The Unconscious of the child is not sharply dif-
ferentiated from his Conscious. His dreams are
therefore direct, unelaborated wish-fulfilments.
The piece of cake or the fruit he was denied
during the day, he will dream of at night and
eat the same in his dream. The excursion he
was denied during the day (see Freud's Inter-
pretation of Dreams, p. 107 f.) will appear in
his dream the following night. The dreams of
adults are seldom so obvious as this in their
expression of wish-fulfilment. I can, however,
cite at least one case where it was just as evi-
dent. A young man who was very fond of
dining out and dissipated a good deal of his
time and energy in this pleasant but useless pas-
time related to me: “I have this dream again
242
APPENDIX I
and again. I dream that some one calls me on
the telephone in my apartment and invites me
to come down town and dine with him at Sher-
ry's or Delmonico's. I can not see any wish
expressed in the dream (!but I have it fre-
quently." The wish-element is often so dis-
guised and symbolized that it takes a keen
analyst to discover it. Thus the meaning of
the dream of the elevator in the form of a little
house had the wish element but not obviously
expressed. Even anxiety dreams have the wish
element. They show the subject's preference
for an anxiety dream rather than face his hard
life-problem and solve it. As all neuroses are
a flight from reality, so the anxiety dream means
"I would rather suffer the mental torture of a
nightmare than face reality.” This may be hard
to prove, but it is so. The dreams of those
suffering from sexual repressions are full of
phallic symbols. I cannot cite examples of this
without betraying confidences, but I will simply
point to the brief dream-poem from the Greek
given on page 67, in which the lovelorn girl,
suffering from repression on account of having
no lover, dreams of a "tower of gold and
ivory.” i Subjects sometimes dream of a land-
i Cf. "Song of Solomon” iv, 4: “Thy neck is like the tower of
David builded with turrets," also the two dreams related in
iii, 1–5 and v, 2–7, the first of which shows the wish-fulfilment
and the second the repressed love desire turned to anxiety: “The
watchmen smote me, they wounded me ... the keepers of the
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 243
scape covered with such towers. Fortunately,
in the poem, the girl herself gives the interpre-
tation, and therefore it is unmistakably a mascu-
line symbol, a phallic symbol, in fact. She
admits that the dream is a wish-fulfilment, for
she declares that in her husband's arms, "she will
dream no dreams,” obviously, because the wish
is fulfilled in real life.
Latent dream material is often of a very un-
pleasant nature. Therefore the “censor" or re-
sistance, which looks after our psychic life and
strives to keep it from disturbances, allows this
material to pass through the Foreconscious into
the Conscious only in symbolized form. In
neurotic subjects, the censor is sometimes off
duty, he is caught napping, and allows the un-
pleasant repressed material to pass into the
dream unchanged. Patients suffering from anxi-.
ety hysterias will frequently have such disturb-
ing dreams at the moment of falling asleep.
This is because the censor is inactive.
Many subjects will relate what they call "pro-
phetic dreams." They dream of an event and
it occurs. This is either coincidence, or because
it might have been foreseen that the event would
occur, the subject wished it and brought it about,
or because the subject has elaborated a vague
walls took away my mantle from me" (a defloration symbol,
cf. myths of shepherds stealing the veils of bathing nymphs, etc.,
also the form of incest prohibitions in Lev. xviii, "thou shalt not
uncover thy father's nakedness").
244
APPENDIX I
dream through conscious mental processes to
make its event coincide with events that oc-
curred later. Compare with this the prophecies
of the automatic writer related on page 137, also
the prophetic books of the Scriptures like Daniel,
which were written after the events related ac-
tually occurred. A subject will dream of a vague
figure which might be almost any person and in
the dream see this person disappear and a rush-
ing train take its place. The next day he will
learn that so-and-so was killed by a train. He
will immediately connect the dream with the
occurrence and give a circumstantial account of
how in a dream he saw so-and-so run over by a
train. Most prophetic dreams have just as
slight foundation as this. They are not to be
trusted, any more than any prophecy related
after the occurrence of the event. The highly
figurative language of the Apocalypse is taken
by certain sects to prefigure the second advent
of Christ. It might mean almost anything else.
Unfortunately the writer is not present to sub-
mit to analysis and tell posterity what he really
did mean by his bad mixture of Greek and
Hebrew idioms and language. It is probably an
old Hebrew document worked over by a later
Christian hand.
There is one sort of prophetic dream to which
significance has been attached. This is the anx-
iety dream caused by organic disturbance.
Freud (Interpretation of Dreams, p. 27 f.) cites
DREAMS AND DREAM MECHANISMS 245
cases of organic disturbance which gave rise to
anxiety dreams. An incipient cardiac disorder,
he states, may give rise to an anxiety dream from
which the patient wakes in nervous terror.
Coriat (Meaning of Dreams, p. 145) and others
justly remark that such dreams are of little use
for diagnosis of physical disorders, since the
same symptoms are produced by hysterical dis-
orders without organic basis. Let no one, there-
fore, who has nocturnal dyspnoea or palpitation,
or nightmares of various sorts, think he is imme-
diately going into a decline. I know of a sub-
ject who suffered from such disturbances for
years without any physical deterioration. The
origin of these dreams in his case was purely
hysterical.
I may therefore conclude this appendix with
the statement that prophetic dreams are not of
the least value in foretelling the future.
APPENDIX II
BIRTH DREAMS
TN our exploration of myth and folk-lore, we
are struck with the fact that certain types of
legend and myth recur again and again. There
is the tale of the prince, for instance, set down
by the genie in a half-clothed state before the
gate of a strange city. This we saw (page 8)
was analogous with the dream of nakedness
which nearly every one has experienced. We
noted that the myth is the dream of a whole
people, it is the individual dream projected upon
the nation. In this connection, we noted the
sex-imagery which occurs in every primitive cos-
mology. On the same basis, we may explain
the arbitrary gender of the names of inanimate
things in many languages. It is not chance
that makes the word "heaven” (der Himmel)
masculine in German, and "earth" (die Erde)
feminine. To the ancients, the sky seemed a
bowl that embraced the earth; it was thought
by early peoples that the sky, or the sun, im-
pregnated the earth and caused it to bring forth
fruit. The poet has taken full advantage of
this arbitrary gender. Von Eichendorf, in his
poem “Mondnacht,” which Schumann set to
247
248
APPENDIX II
1
1
1
1
music, takes advantage of the arbitrary gender
to create the beautiful image of the heaven
(masculine) bending over to kiss the earth (fem-
inine), an image entirely untranslatable into
English. "Es war als hätt der Himmel die Erde
still geküsst" (It was as though the heavens
had silently kissed the earth).
All of these conceptions root in early myths.
A circumstance that we frequently encounter in
myths of all races is the descent of the hero
into an underground passage, tunnel, or cavern,
That gold-mine of folk-lore, The Arabian Nights,
has countless tales that recount such an adven-
ture. Ali Baba descends into the cave where
the forty thieves have hidden their treasure;
the Kalendar Prince, after the fall of the brazen
statue from the island mountain, descends into
a cavern, where he finds the prince hidden whom
he is fated to slay; Alladin, through the agency
of the lamp, opens the underground cavern and
discovers hidden treasure. Modern mystery
tales deal with the underground, whether it be
a tunnel connecting an old castle with the sea-
shore, or a tunnel leading through the heart of
the earth, or a coal-hole down which the detec-
tive follows the villain. These underground
passages, tunnels, and caverns have a mysterious
glamour for which it is hard to account unless we
know the origin of such tales.
We have but to remember that to the ancients
1 For instance, the Orpheus myth.
BIRTH DREAMS
249
the earth was the mother of all things to get
light on the subject. "The bowels of the earth,”
“the womb of the earth,” are figures of speech
encountered frequently in both ancient and
modern literature. We have seen that primal
creation myths are a projection of the individ-
ual birth story upon the cosmos, an objectifi-
cation and enlargement of individual experience
to embrace creation. Inasmuch as we are now
familiar with the origin and mechanism of
dreams, it is but a step (in fact, the only logical
step) to a realization that the dream of the
individual of passing down into a cavern,
through a tunnel, or into some subterranean
passage, which at length leads upward (usually
obliquely upward) to the light, is a dream based
on the memory of his own birth. This some-
what startling fact was made clear to Freud in
the analysis of many such dreams; to Pfister,
who recounts a number of them in his Psy-
choanalytic Method, and to Coriat, whose ex-
perience is very broad. Jung, Adler, and Brill
are also familiar with this phenomenon.
These dreams are strikingly similar. There
is often a descent into water (the amniotic
liquor), then a passage into some sort of dark
cavern (the uterus); then a feeling of being
pushed forward from behind (as in actual
birth); the movement obliquely upward (as
through the vagina) to the light. There is
frequently a great fear felt in this exit of the
250
APPENDIX II
dreamer to the light. The child first knows
fear when it emerges from the warm security
of the uterus into the light of day. It is no
longer protected, safe and warm in the mother's
body. It has become an independent being, an
individual thrust into life, to sink or swim, sur-
vive or perish. Many neuroses which demon-
strate the shut-in or introversion tendency, with
certain hysterical symptoms, really mean that
the individual would like to return to the dark,
warm security of the mother's body; thence,
to be born again a whole man. We have al-
ready seen that Jesus was aware of this un-
conscious desire so common among mankind,
and idealized it into the conception of being
re-born and entering the Kingdom of Heaven.
The most striking birth dream that I have
encountered is the under-water dream of the
Dakotan, recounted in Will Levington Comfort's
Child and Country (pp. 321-329). I do not
know whether Mr. Comfort is familiar with
Freud and the theories and procedure of psycho-
analysis. If he is, I should suspect him of
“tampering with the evidence,” this dream is
so complete and its interpretation so true to
form. I shall assume, however, that the dream
is recounted actually as it occurred and that
the narrator has not been influenced by the
Freudian psychology.
The Dakotan states that he has had many
under-water dreams, beginning with his child-
BIRTH DREAMS
251
hood, and in these dreams he “learned the deeps
of fear.” He goes on to tell the instigators of
the dream he is about to relate. It was a cold
rainy night, he tells us, and he was in a cot-
tage on the Pontchartrain, that leaked badly.
When he retired, he was both wet and cold. So
much for the instigator or immediate cause.
Suddenly, he felt that he was submerged in deep
water. There was a "low monotonous lap and
wash of water and a slight heaving, lifting
sensation, as of my being swayed gently to and
fro.” It was cold, but not extremely cold; he
had hardly a sense of being at all; the cold was
really a low state of consciousness rather than
an actual, physical cold. It was dark, and he
seemed to be a single cell floating in a space,
which he seemed entirely to fill (!). "No sense
of self or body in comparison to outer things
was existent, except when a larger form instilled
me with fear.” He seemed to be back in the
very Beginning of things. All was blackness.
Then there came a dawning light, a gray light
that filtered through the blackness and filled
him with fear. Then he seemed to sink slowly
into the depths. He lay on a soft, oozy silt,
surrounded by slimy, snaky fronds and stems of
water-plants. Some of these had dim phos-
phorescent lights at their extremities. The ray
of light filtered down again and again filled him
with fear. Now he reached the lowest ebb of
consciousness; then he felt renewed fear of the
252
APPENDIX II
Ray (of light). He desired to flee, but was
without means of locomotion (a common experi-
ence in dreams). “Through sheer intensity of
panic, I expanded. Then there was a thrusting
forward of the inner vital centre against the
forward wall of the sack. It was the most vital
part of me that was thrust forward, the heart
of a rudiment, so to speak. That which re-
mained, followed in a kind of flow. The move-
ment was an undulation forward, brought about
by the terror to escape.
"Fear is always connected with Behind.
With the approach of danger I had started for-
ward. There had been no forward nor back-
ward before. Now a back, a dorsal, came into
being, and the vital centre was thrust forward
within the cell, so as to be farthest away from
danger. It is in this way that the potential
centre of an organism came to be in the front,
in the head, looking forward and always pointed
away from the danger - protected to the last.”
Then he seemed to flow forward, striving to
cling to the oozy bottom, but to no avail. The
Fear increased; he gained in strength and speed
of locomotion, going faster and faster. He
feared the Ray, but was thrust forward with
increased acceleration into the light. As he
emerged, he of course awoke.
Now comes the remarkable part of the dream-
story, namely, the Dakotan's own interpreta-
tion: "The embryo in the womb eats and
BIRTH DREAMS
253
11
assimilates, all unconscious. With life there is
movement. The first movement takes the form
of sucking-in that which prolongs life. Then
there is the driving forward by Fear from with-
out. Low life is a vibration between Fear and
Gluttony. In every movement is the gain of
power to make another movement. That is the
Law of life.”
Here we have a precise and circumstantial
birth dream, interpreted as such by the dreamer.
All the data are there: the low ebb of conscious-
ness, the water or amniotic liquor, the slimy in-
terior of the uterus, the rhythmic movement
that precedes the actual birth, the one desire the
infant knows, the desire for nourishment, and
the Fear that accompanies the entrance of the
wailing infant into this life. We have likewise
the elaboration of the dream (see Appendix I)
by conscious thought, for the Dakotan tells us
that he gives us “the picture as it appears to
me from this distance."
Who can doubt that such a dream is really a
memory of actual, individual birth? There are
other data, such as the pictures of snake-like
fronds, that are obviously phallic in character
that proclaim the sex-origin of the dream. I
advise the reader to read this account in the
original, and from what he may have learned
of psycho-analysis, form his own conclusions.
The swish and lapping of water, the humming,
"ummmmmmmm,” which he describes is exactly
11
254
APPENDIX II
like that I myself have heard when going under
the influence of ether. It is somewhat like the
hum of the dentist's motor, or the sound of
water running through a cavernous space. This
seems to characterize a lowered state of con-
sciousness, such as that of the unborn infant.
For aught I know, it may be the sound of one's
own circulation, the beating of blood in the ears,
as when one listens to the sound of the sea” in
a conch-shell.
Through the distortion of the dream, the
image may be reversed, and the dreamer may
seem to be going into the water, not coming out.
Freud tells of a woman who dreamed thus.
"In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a
child from the uterine waters is commonly pre-
sented by distortion as the entry of the child into
water; among many others, the births of Adonis,
Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illus-
trations of this.” (Interpretation of Dreams, p.
244.) In this place Freud recounts the dream
of a young man who was in a deep shaft, whence
he emerged into a field which was being
harrowed (symbol of coitus). A female patient
dreamed that "At her summer resort at the ...
Lake, she hurls herself into the dark water at
a place where the pale moon is reflected in the
water.” This was correctly interpreted as a
parturition dream.
Freud concludes: “It is only of late that I
have learned to value the significance of fancies
BIRTH DREAMS
255
and unconscious thoughts about life in the
womb. They contain the explanation of the
curious fear felt by so many people of being
buried alive, as well as the profoundest un-
conscious reason for the belief in a life after
death which represents nothing but a projection
into the future of this mysterious life before
birth. The act of birth, moreover, is the first
experience with fear, and is thus the source and
model of the emotion of fear.” (Italics are
Freud's.) Cf. the rôle that fear plays in primi-
tive religion, discussed in the first chapter of
this book.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PSYCHOANALYTIC
ALFRED ADLER: The Neurotic Constitution
I. H. CORIAT: What is Psychoanalysis?
The Meaning of Dreams
Abnormal Psychology
SIGMUND FREUD: Interpretation of Dreams
Psychopathology of Everyday Life
Totem and Taboo
Delusion and Dream
Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious
Reflections on War and Death
C. G. JUNG: Psychology of the Unconscious
WILFRED LAY: Man's Unconscious Conflict
ALBERT MORDELL: The Erotic Motive in Litera-
ture
OSCAR PFISTER: The Psychoanalytic Method
F. B. PRESCOTT: Poetry and Dreams
NON-PSYCHOANALYTIC
HENRI L. BERGSON: Creative Evolution
Time and Free-will
Dreams
257
258
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JOSEPH GRASSET: The Semi-insane and the
Semi-responsible
WILLIAM JAMES: Psychology, 2 vols.
Varieties of Religious Experience
RUDOLF C. EUCKEN: Main Currents of Mod-
ern Thought
MORTON PRINCE: The Unconscious
JOSEPH JASTROW: The Subconscious
IX
INDEX
Abreaction, 153, 180, 199 displacement, 237
Adler, Alfred, 47
duration, 68
inferiority complex, 47 elaboration, 237
dreams, 239
latent content, 198, 234, 243
Affect, 180, 197
manifest content, 234
Ambivalence, 120
mechanism, 64, 233
Atonement, 158
psychoanalysis, 196
prophetic, 243
Bible,
symbolism, 66
as fetish, 220
typical, 240
nature of, 223
Ecclesiastes, 60
Censor, 223
Education, 229
Church, 161
Emmanuel Movement, 176
and Puritan, 163
Evil, cosmic, 100
Church School, 222, 228
personal, 100
Clergy, 186
Compensation, 46
Forgetting, 80, 175
Complex, 26, 85
Freud, Sigmund, 12
how formed, 49 link
déjà vu, 81
and phobias, 206
dreams, 84
Confessional, 188
hysteria, 177
Conyersion, 145
immortality, 130
method of, 150
organic disturbance, 244
Coriat, I. H., 51, 118, 126, 155, rebirth 148, 254
977, 183, 244, 249
Froebel, 202
Determinism, 74
Dream, 63, 71
and myth, 248
birth, 247
Healing, mental, 168
supernatural, 173
Homoerotism or Homeroticism,
30, 183
259
260
INDEX
Hypnosis, 176
Hysteria, 169
forgetting, 175
James, Wm., 76, 89
Jesus, 34
on rebirth, 150
Job, 57
Judaism, 33
Pathological Types, 115
Paul, 35
hysteria of, 36
Pfister, Oskar, 35, 116, 123,
126, 179
Prince, Morton, 125
Psycho-analysis, 137, 142
and education, 207
and hysteria, 180
method of, 194
and religious education, 219
Latent Dream Content, 234
2
Manifest Dream Content, 234
Rebirth, 146
Masochism, 120
dreams, 149, 250
wish, 250
Motivation of Life, 41
Mysticism, 87
Religion,
applied, 160
and neuroses, 94
changing, 158
and repression, 97
and education, 191
Mystics, 92
emotional basis of, 19
Myth, Garden of Eden, 6
modern, 10
flood myth, 249
and sex, 39, 89
primitive, 3
Neuroses, 104
and Unconscious, 32
and art, 202
Religious Problem, I, 146
and child, 107
Resistance, 180, 198
and medicine, 110
not congenital, 114
Sadism, 115
phobias of, 105
and religion, 117
and religion, 107
Salvation, 154
and sex education, 109
Sex, and adolescent, 209
and youth, 212
and religion, 39, 89
Nervous Breakdown, 184
Sin, conviction of, 12
blood-guilt, 12
Occult, the, 128
Spiritism, 129
automatic writing, 136 Sublimation, 126, 154
ouija, 134
Symbolism, of dreams, 66
table tipping, 133
of religion, 226
Oedipus Complex, 28, 52, 54,
196
Transference, 155, 181, 199
I
INDEX
261
Unconscious, and religion, 32
and life, 42, 83, IOI
and death, 129
and hysteria, 179
and occult, 128
nature of, 21
and spiritism, 132
Unity, 193
Waters, amniotic, 237, 249

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