The Rudolf Steiner Archive

5. About Psychoanalysis I

[ 1 ] During the lectures I am currently giving in Zurich, it has once again become apparent to me that one can hardly engage with the intellectual life of this city to any significant extent without turning one’s attention to what is now called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis. Various considerations arising from this observation prompt me today to begin my remarks with a brief reference to certain aspects of analytical psychology and psychoanalysis. We will then have to follow this up with other remarks. But we have seen, after all, how significant it is, especially for the anthroposophically oriented scholar of the spiritual sciences, to base his reflections on what the times offer, on what moves the times. One could say that today, all sorts of people who are earnestly searching for the spiritual foundations of existence and for the inner workings of the human soul are drawn to psychoanalysis, and that it is, in a certain sense, characteristic of our era that a number of our contemporaries are paying attention precisely to very specific, peculiar forces within the human soul. And among those who are simply being, so to speak, led by the impulses of the times—I would say, having their noses pushed toward certain phenomena of the life of the soul—are the psychoanalysts.

[ 2 ] It is also particularly important not to be entirely oblivious to this movement, because the events that this movement is directed toward are already taking place, and because in our time—for various reasons that we can certainly discuss further—they appear particularly vividly before people’s inner eye. People today must become attentive to such phenomena.

[ 3 ] On the other hand, the fact remains that people who deal with these matters today lack the means of understanding to discuss them—and, above all, to understand them. So one can say: Psychoanalysis is, in our time, a phenomenon that compels people to become attentive to certain mental processes; on the other hand, however, it leads people to view such mental phenomena with, I would say, inadequate means of understanding. And this is particularly significant because this examination—using inadequate means of understanding—of a matter that is quite obviously present and challenges human understanding in the present leads to the most diverse and serious errors and is not without danger for social life, for the further development of knowledge, and for the influence of this further development of knowledge on social life.

[ 4 ] It’s fair to say that, under certain circumstances, quarter-truths can be more harmful than outright errors. And the ideas emerging among psychoanalytic theorists today must certainly be regarded as a kind of quarter-truth.

[ 5 ] Let us try to bring to mind, so to speak, a few things from the psychoanalysts’ research journal. After all, what we now call psychoanalysis originated from a clinical case observed by a Viennese physician—a Viennese internist—Dr. Breuer, as early as the 1880s. Dr. Breuer, whom I knew personally, was an extraordinarily refined man, in addition to being a physician. He took a truly deep interest in all manner of aesthetic and general human questions. Now, given his intimate approach to medical cases, it is understandable that a particular case he encountered in the 1880s held special interest for him. — He had to treat a woman who apparently suffered from severe hysterical symptoms. These consisted of the woman occasionally experiencing paralysis on one side of her body, states of drowsiness, a fading of consciousness, and a very pronounced, deep form of somnolence; furthermore, she had forgotten the language she normally used as her everyday tongue. She had always been able to speak German—that was her language—but under the influence of her hysterical illness, she could no longer speak German; she could only speak English and understood only English.

[ 6 ] Breuer observed that when the woman was in her twilight state, it was possible, through more intimate medical treatment, to prompt her to talk about a specific scene she had experienced—a very traumatic experience. Now, based on the account of this case provided by Breuer’s school, I would like to illustrate how the woman was prompted—out of her twilight state, and in some cases during artificially induced twilight states as well (Breuer was skilled at putting people under hypnosis)—to speak about some of these experiences. And this led to the conclusion that the hysteria from which she was afflicted was connected to a very specific illness she had experienced with her father a long time ago. Her father was ill, and she played a very significant role in caring for him; on one occasion, she had an experience while tending to him. She kept returning to this experience, and the account she gave on such an occasion—as I have just described it—is as follows: “One night she woke up in great fear for the patient, who was running a high fever, and in a state of tension because a surgeon from Vienna was expected to perform an operation. Her mother had stepped away for a while, and Anna (the patient) was sitting at the sickbed with her right arm draped over the back of the chair. She fell into a state of lucid dreaming and saw a black snake slithering toward the patient from the wall, about to bite him.”

[ 7 ] Materialism is always a burden on people today; and so we find the following remark in this medical report, which is not worth further consideration: “It is very likely that there were indeed some snakes in the meadow behind the house, which had frightened the girl before and which now served as the source of the hallucination.” So this is just a side note, which you may or may not take seriously; it doesn’t really matter. So the snake came out of the wall and wanted to bite the father—that’s how she imagined it. “She wanted to fend off the creature, but was as if paralyzed; her right arm, hanging over the back of the chair, had ‘fallen asleep, become numb and paralytic,’ and as she looked at it, her fingers turned into little snakes with skulls.” So that was everything that happened at her father’s sickbed. “She probably tried to chase the snake away with her paralyzed right hand, and as a result, the numbness and paralysis of that hand became associated with the snake hallucination. When the hallucination disappeared, she wanted to pray in her fear, but every language failed her; she could not speak in any of them until she finally found an English children’s book and was then able to continue thinking and praying in that language as well.”

[ 8 ] This entire illness originated from this event. As a result of this event, the patient was left with unilateral paralysis of the hand, states of semi-consciousness, and the inability to express himself in any language other than English.

[ 9 ] Dr. Breuer then noticed that her condition always improved when he let her talk about it, and he based his treatment plan on this observation. He gradually attempted to uncover the full facts of the case by hypnotizing the patient, and through this he actually succeeded in bringing about a significant improvement in her condition, so that the patient was, in a sense, freed from the matter by letting it go and confiding it to another person.

[ 10 ] Breuer and his colleague, Freud, in Vienna—who, understandably given the historical context of the time, were under the influence of the Charcot school in Paris—initially attributed it to what might be called a psychological trauma, a psychological wound, or “nervous shock,” as it was known in England. The psychological shock was thus thought to have occurred during this experience at the patient’s bedside and to have had a similar effect on the psyche as a physical wound has on the body.

[ 11 ] From the outset—and this must be noted—Breuer viewed the entire matter as a mental illness; he thus regarded it as an internal issue. He was convinced that no anatomical or physiological changes would have been detectable—that is, for example, that there would not have been any underlying change in the nerves running from the hand to the brain or the like. He was convinced from the outset that he was dealing with an internal psychological phenomenon. In the early days, people were inclined to view the matter in such a way that they said to themselves: Such things can occur as a result of psychological wounds, traumas, shocks, and the like. — But soon, as Dr. Freud in particular began to study the matter—and Dr. Breuer by no means fully agreed with Freud’s further investigation of it—the issue took on a somewhat different character, namely because Freud said to himself: Explaining the matter with psychological shock or psychological trauma simply won’t work; that’s not enough. — Breuer, too, was convinced that one could not get by merely speaking of psychological wounding. — I note, in parentheses, that Dr. Breuer was a very busy practicing physician, thoroughly trained in the sciences, and an excellent student of Nothnagel, who failed to become a professor only due to external circumstances. If one wishes to speculate on such matters at all, one might believe that had Breuer been awarded a professorship and been able to pursue the matter—while he was one of Vienna’s busiest internists and thus had little time to devote to it scientifically—it might have taken on an entirely different form! — Now it was primarily Dr. Freud who devoted himself to the matter. He told himself that we cannot make do with mere trauma, with psychological injury; the point is to investigate under what conditions such a—one might well call it—psychological injury takes effect. For, isn’t it true that people rightly said to themselves: The girl sat at her father’s sickbed, but many people sit at sickbeds who certainly have just as deep an impression, yet such a thing does not happen to them. — The unscientific layperson, after all, is very quick to come up with an extraordinarily profound explanation in such a case; he says: Well, one person has the disposition, the other does not. — Well then, isn’t that, admittedly, very profound, but also the silliest thing one can say? For if one explains all the things that exist in the world as predispositions, one can easily find explanations for everything—one need only say: “It’s simply a predisposition to something.”

[ 12 ] Naturally, people who took their thinking seriously did not want to concern themselves with such matters, and so they sought to identify the conditions underlying the issue. Freud believed he could arrive at such conditions through cases such as the following. You will find countless such cases already documented in the literature of psychoanalysts today, and it can be said that a truly immense body of material has been compiled to shed light on this or that aspect of the field. One case documented by psychoanalysts, for example, is the following. I will recount it in the way that makes it most understandable. After all, absolute historical accuracy is by no means a concern for us here.

[ 13 ] A lady was attending an evening party with other guests. The party was a farewell celebration for the lady of the house, who had become nervous and had to go to a spa abroad. She was scheduled to leave that evening. The farewell celebration took place. After everyone had gone their separate ways and the lady of the house had left, the lady in question—whose story is about to be described—was walking down the street with a few other guests who had just come from supper—as they say—when, coming from behind and rounding the corner, a horse-drawn cab turned into the street at a very high speed. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience—it’s something people often do in cities when walking home—but instead of walking on the sidewalk, they frequently walk in the middle of the street. As the carriage came racing up from behind, the people returning from supper ran to the right and left onto the sidewalk. Only the lady in question did not run onto the sidewalk; instead, she ran away from the carriage, fleeing ahead of the horses along the street, and despite the coachman’s cursing and ranting—coachmen do this in such situations—she could not be dissuaded from dashing ahead of the carriage. She kept running ahead of the carriage, despite the crack of the whip, until she reached a bridge, where she tried to throw herself into the water for fear of being run over. She was rescued by passersby, brought back to her party, and thus spared from a major accident.

[ 14 ] Well, this phenomenon is, of course, connected to the overall state of mind of the lady in question. It is a distinctly hysterical reaction to run away from the horses instead of turning onto the sidewalk. The task at hand was to investigate the causes of such a situation. Freud first arrived at this conclusion because, in this case as in others, he was inclined to look for certain aspects of the causes in the person’s past life—that is, in the experiences the individual had gone through as a child or even earlier. If something occurred there that, so to speak, has not been fully processed psychologically, it can leave behind a predisposition, which can then be triggered later by some shocking event.

[ 15 ] In fact, it was easy to find such an experience in the childhood of the lady in question. As a child, she had been riding in a carriage when the horses suddenly shied, bolted, and charged straight toward the riverbank. The coachman jumped off and urged the child to jump off as well; at the very last moment, she managed to jump off, while the carriage and horses plunged into the river, and the horses perished along with the carriage. So there was that shocking event. There was also, once again, a certain association between the horse and the child. The moment the lady saw the danger the horses posed, she lost her footing and her sense of reality, and ran in front of the carriage instead of dodging it, under the influence of the aftereffects of her childhood experience. But then again, you can see from this that psychoanalysts already employ a scientific methodology, just as science is practiced today—psychoanalysts already have that. But isn’t it true that there are, of course, many people to whom something like this happens in their youth and who nevertheless will not do the same thing—run away from the horses—even if horses are associated with horses. So something else must be added to that one factor if such a predisposition is to arise—that is, running away from horses instead of avoiding them.

[ 16 ] Freud continued his investigation. And indeed, a very interesting connection was found in this very case. This connection was as follows: the lady in question, who had run away from the horses, was engaged to a gentleman. But she loved two men: the man she was engaged to—she was completely convinced that she loved him more than the other—but she also loved the other man. She wasn’t entirely sure about that, though; it was sort of half and half. The other man, however, was the husband of her best friend, and this friend was the housewife whose farewell dinner had been celebrated that evening. So the housewife, who was a bit nervous, left; the friend had been at the farewell dinner, had left with the other guests, ran off ahead of the horses, and when people inquired, they learned that there had indeed been significant connections in the past between the other gentleman—that is, her best friend’s husband—and this lady. The romantic relationship had, after all, taken on—well, let’s say—a certain depth. And now this depth was even somewhat connected to the friend’s nervousness, as you can well imagine. In short, without suspecting a thing—in her own opinion, at least—this lady left with the other guests, ran out into the street in front of the horses, was rescued, and the guests brought her back—which, under the circumstances, was only natural—to the house from which they had just come, where they had eaten the farewell dinner. And now the doctor was investigating the entire medical case. He actually managed to get the lady to tell him the story. But here she faltered, and only with great difficulty could he persuade her to continue the story. It then emerged that, in fact—as we know, the woman had just left, and the man was home alone—the man, in this situation, after she had regained her composure and was back to normal, had declared his love for her. So you see, a very strange affair.

[ 17 ] Dr. Freud has now investigated other cases of a similar nature, and his research has shown him that such things occur only when love is somehow involved, when there is some element of love at play, when something related to love lies dormant beneath the surface of consciousness. Freud had come to the conclusion that when one investigates the lives of such hysterical patients—who, as was previously believed, had come to be in their condition due to psychological trauma—one can find that, whatever the circumstances may be, whatever constellations may exist, love must be at play from some angle or another. Mind you, it is precisely the case—and these are the most characteristic and significant cases—that the patient in question need not have been at all aware of this love story.

[ 18 ] Well, that completed what Freud called his “neurosetheory,” his theory of sexuality. He found that in all such cases, sexuality played a role. You see, these ideas are, of course, extremely seductive. First of all, there is a general tendency today to invoke the sexual wherever one seeks to explain anything human. Therefore, we should not be surprised that a doctor who finds love to be a factor in so many cases of hysterical disorders would formulate such a theory.

[ 19 ] On the other hand, this is precisely the point where—because analytical psychology is an attempt at understanding using inadequate means—the greatest possible danger begins. That is why the matter becomes so dangerous, because, I would say, this thirst for knowledge is so immensely seductive; seductive due to the circumstances of the times, but also because the sexual relationship demonstrably always plays some role. Now, the psychoanalyst Jung, who wrote the book *The Psychology of Unconscious Processes*—Professor Jung in Zurich—does not believe that one can make do with Freud’s theory of sexuality and neurosis; rather, he holds a different view.

[ 20 ] Jung noted that Freud also has his opponents. Among Freud’s opponents is a certain Adler. Adler takes a completely different standpoint. Just as Freud examined a large number of cases—you can read all about this in Jung’s book—and saw the sexual factor at play in every one, leading him to the conclusion that: “So the sexual is actually the triggering cause”—Adler, however, looked particularly at another aspect of the matter and found that this other aspect was far more important than the one Freud had emphasized. Adler—I’m just giving a general overview here—found that, just as the sexual plays a very dominant role in human beings, another drive also plays a very dominant role: the drive to gain power over one’s environment, the power drive. For Nietzsche, the will to power was even supposed to be a philosophical principle. And just as Freud “theorized” the sexual drive, one can also compile countless cases illustrating the power drive. One need only analyze a hysterical patient; such cases are not at all rare. Suppose a woman is hysterical; she experiences spasms—heart spasms, in particular, are very common in such cases—and all sorts of other symptoms. The whole house is thrown into a frenzy, the entire neighborhood, everything imaginable; doctors are summoned, and the patient is pitied immensely. In short, she exercises a tyrannical power over her surroundings. A reasonable person knows in such a case that, in reality, there is usually nothing wrong with such a person, even though they are fully aware of their pathological condition and suffer from it. But in reality, nothing is wrong with them; they are actually healthy—and yet they are also sick, if you will. One can regard them as both healthy and sick. They certainly fall down when they faint from a heart attack; but they usually fall onto the carpet, and not beside it! One can observe these things very clearly.

[ 21 ] This—that which is repressed into the unconscious, that which is the power drive—leads particularly easily to hysterical states. Adler sought primarily to examine the cases available to him in light of this power drive, and found that wherever hysterical cases occur, it can be demonstrated in some way that the power drive has been provoked in some manner and distorted into a pathological state. Jung says to himself: Well, after all, one cannot say Adler is wrong; what he observed is there. One cannot say Freud is wrong; what he observed is there. So it will just be one way at times and another way at other times.

[ 22 ] That makes perfect sense; things will be one way one moment and another the next. But now Jung is building a special theory on this. This theory is not uninteresting if one does not merely take it abstractly as a theory, but rather views it in such a way that one sees in it, at the same time, the influence of temporal impulses—of what plays into time—namely, I would say, the cognitive impotence of our time, the inadequacies of our understanding. Jung says: There are, in general, two types of people, two kinds of human beings. In one type, feeling is more developed; in the other, thinking is more developed. |

[ 23 ] Well, once again a great scholar has made an epoch-making discovery that any reasonable person in their immediate surroundings could actually make at any time—it’s practically lying right there on the street; for the fact that people can be divided into emotional types and intellectual types is, after all, pretty much self-evident. But scholarship has another task as well; it must not view things in such a layman-like way—by saying, for example: “Among the people around us, there are two types, emotional people and rational people”—but scholarship must do something else as well. In such a case, scholarship says that the person who empathizes, so to speak, steps out of themselves toward objectivity; the other, so to speak, withdraws from the object or pauses before it and reflects upon it. The first is called the extroverted type, the other the introverted type. The first would thus be the emotional person, the second the rational person. So isn’t it true that this is a scholarly classification—insightful, witty, and truly accurate to a certain degree? That cannot be denied.

[ 24 ] Now Jung goes on to say: In the extraverted type—that is, the type in which a person lives primarily through feelings—intellectual concepts very often get stuck in the subconscious; the person lives through feelings, but the intellectual concepts remain stuck in the subconscious. And now they come into conflict with what they have in their consciousness and what is swarming down there in the subconscious in the form of intellectual concepts. All sorts of states can arise from this conflict. These states will occur primarily in people who have an emotional disposition.

[ 25 ] In contrast, for those who are more concerned with the mind—the rationalists—emotions remain buried beneath the surface, surging in the subconscious, swarming there, and coming into conflict with conscious life. Conscious life cannot explain what is actually assailing it. These are the subconscious emotions. And because human beings are never truly complete—but are sometimes one type, sometimes another—situations can arise in which the subconscious rebels against the conscious mind. And this can very often lead to hysterical states.

[ 26 ] Well, one could say that Jung’s theory is really nothing more than a rephrasing—as I mentioned—of the trivial distinction between the “feeling” person and the “intellectual” person, and it does not offer any particular deepening of the issue. But from all this you must see that, at any rate, people today are becoming aware of all sorts of psychological peculiarities, that these psychological peculiarities appear before their inner eye and they grapple with them, asking: What is going on inside a person in whom such things occur? — At any rate, people have come far enough to say to themselves: These are not physiological or anatomical changes. — People have moved beyond mere materialism after all; they do not accept mere materialism; they speak of the soul. So this is certainly one path along which people are seeking to move beyond mere materialism and to take the soul into account.

[ 27 ] But it is highly peculiar how, upon closer inspection, the shortcomings of our understanding have such a peculiar effect—how the very attempt to understand using inadequate means leads people down strange paths. But I must expressly point out that people do not see what they are being driven into, and neither do their followers, readers, and contemporaries. When viewed correctly, this matter actually has a very dangerous side to it, because so much goes unnoticed in the process—it stirs up turmoil even in people’s subconscious. It is quite peculiar: the theories themselves stir up turmoil in the subconscious. People formulate a theory about the subconscious, but the theory itself stirs up turmoil in their subconscious.

[ 28 ] Jung approaches the matter as a physician, and it is, after all, significant that patients are treated psychologically from this perspective. Numerous people are working to translate this approach into the field of education and apply it pedagogically. So we can already see that we are not dealing here with a limited theory, but rather with an attempt to turn something into a cultural phenomenon. It is very interesting how someone like Jung, who approaches the matter as a physician—by observing all kinds of cases, treating them, and even seemingly curing them—is driven further and further. And so Jung is driven to the following conclusion. He tells himself: When one finds such abnormal phenomena in a person’s psychological life, one must search further within that person’s psychological life, seeking above all to determine to what extent infantile, childhood events have left an impression on the person’s psychological life and continue to have an effect. — That is, after all, something one seeks in particular in this field: infantile aftereffects, aftereffects from childhood. I have, of course, cited the example for you that plays a major role in psychoanalytic literature.

[ 29 ] Jung now points out, however, that among actual cases of illness, there are a great many in which it cannot be demonstrated that the individual has any particular condition, even when one goes back to the earliest childhood. When one considers everything the person has come into contact with—one does not find the conflict within the individual standing before one that could explain the matter. This leads Jung to distinguish between two types of unconscious: first, the individual unconscious, which is thus contained within the person, even if not in consciousness. Isn’t it true that if the young lady jumped out of the car as a child and suffered a shock, that experience has long since faded; it is no longer in her consciousness, but it continues to influence her subconsciously. If we now take this unconscious—a person has countless aspects of the unconscious within them—we arrive at the personal or individual unconscious. This is the first distinction Jung makes.

[ 30 ] “The second, however, is the transpersonal unconscious. He says: There are also things that influence the life of the soul—things that are not part of the personality, yet are not part of the material world outside either—and which must therefore be assumed to exist in a spiritual world.

[ 31 ] Psychoanalysis, after all, aims to bring such mental contents into consciousness. That is precisely what the therapy, the healing method, is supposed to be: bringing the matter into consciousness. Therefore, the physician must set out not only to uncover what the patient has experienced individually, but also all sorts of other things that the patient has not experienced individually—things that did not even exist out in the world, but are rather psychological content. In doing so, psychoanalysts come to the conclusion that they say: In fact, a person has not only experienced what they themselves have experienced since their physical birth, but all sorts of things going back even further than that. And that is now churning within them. A person born today, for example, also experiences the myth of Oedipus on a subconscious level. They don’t merely learn the myth of Oedipus in school; they experience this myth. They experience the Greek gods; they experience the entire past of humanity. And the problem lies precisely in the fact that people now experience all of this, but it does not rise to the surface of consciousness. The psychoanalyst must therefore tell themselves—and they even go so far as to say: The Greek child experienced that as well; but the Greek was told about it; thus, he also experienced it in his consciousness. Modern man also experiences it, but it rumbles within him—in the extroverted person as subconscious thoughts, in the introverted person as subconscious feelings. It rumbles inside people; it rumbles like demons.

[ 32 ] Now just imagine the dilemma the psychoanalyst actually faces if he remains true to his theory! He would actually be faced with the necessity of taking these things seriously and simply saying: Well, if a person grows up today—and the very fact that he has a relationship with what is churning within him, yet knows nothing of this relationship, can lead him to illness—then one must simply make him aware of this relationship; one must explain to him precisely that there is a spiritual world, that there are gods within it, and that there are various gods. For even the psychoanalyst goes so far as to say: The human soul has a relationship with the gods; but the fact that it knows nothing of these relationships is a cause of illness. The psychoanalyst seeks all manner of means of information. But these means of information are sometimes grotesque. — Let’s suppose a hysterical patient comes in and exhibits this or that hysterical symptom because he is afraid of a demon—let’s say a fire demon. People in the past believed in fire demons, had conceptions of fire demons, and knew about them. People today also have relationships with fire demons—the psychoanalyst admits this—but these relationships are not conscious, and people are not told that fire demons exist. So this leads to the cause of the illness. Jung even goes so far as to say: The gods with whom one has a relationship, but of whose existence one is unaware, take revenge; they are angry; they take revenge; and this revenge manifests itself as hysteria. — Fine. So he says that such a modern person, who is now being tormented in his subconscious by a demon, does not know that there are fire demons; a fire demon torments him, but he cannot establish a connection with it, because—that’s superstition! That’s not possible. What, then, does such a poor modern person do when he becomes ill because of this? He projects the issue outward; that is, he seeks out some friend whom he used to like quite a bit, or someone similar, and says: “It’s him who’s persecuting me, he’s badmouthing me.” — He feels persecuted by him and so on. In other words, the person in question has projected the demon that was tormenting him onto another person.

[ 33 ] Often, the therapy employed by psychoanalysts consists of diverting the focus onto themselves. It is very common—in both a positive and a negative sense—for patients to turn the doctor into a god or a devil.

[ 34 ] You can see the extraordinarily interesting fact that today’s doctors are compelled to admit to themselves: People are tormented by spirits, and because they are not taught about spirits—because they do not absorb such teachings, that is, because they do not incorporate any of this into their consciousness—they become tormentors of one another, projecting their demons outward, talking all sorts of demonic nonsense to one another, and so on. — And just how radically disastrous the psychoanalyst views this may become clear to you from the fact that Jung cites the following interesting case. He says that certain colleagues of his maintain that if someone possesses such psychological energies within themselves that stem from such torments, then these must be channelled toward something. So let’s assume—let’s go back to elementary cases in psychoanalysis: A female patient comes in; her illness stems from the fact—as one discovers after listening to her psychoanalytic confession—that she was once in love with someone she couldn’t have, and that has stayed with her. It could also be a demon tormenting her; but in most cases observed by doctors, something has occurred in the individual subconscious—which they distinguish from the supra-individual subconscious. And there the doctor attempts to channel this by trying to redirect what is an unformed fantasy. So he says: If there is a soul in need of love who has not found “the one,” she must channel this surplus of love—which she cannot otherwise express—into acts of charity; she must preside over this or that charitable event, and so on. — Well, this may be well-intentioned; but Jung himself says that this energy cannot always be channeled in this way. Of course, the learned gentleman must have some explanation for this; that is why he says that the energies residing in the soul in this way have a certain momentum; one cannot always direct them. Well, I have nothing against these expressions; I just want to emphasize that it is, after all, nothing other than a rephrasing of what the layperson very often discusses—but, of course, in the way the layperson expresses it. But Jung now recounts a case that is very interesting, one that clearly illustrates how this flow simply cannot be directed.

[ 35 ] A man—an American, a typical modern-day person, a self-made man—has established himself as a capable leader and manager of a business; he has devoted himself to this business with tremendous energy, achieved great success, earned a large income, and now thinks: “I’ll be forty-five soon; I’ve worked hard enough in my life—now I’m going to treat myself to some rest.” And so he buys a country estate with cars, tennis courts, and everything that goes with it. He planned, then, to leave his business at forty-five, move out to the country estate, and live there, drawing only the royalties from the business. But lo and behold, after he’d been at his country estate for a while, he didn’t play tennis, didn’t drive, didn’t go to the theater, took no pleasure in the flower beds that had been laid out—instead, he sat alone in his room, brooding to himself. It hurt him, it hurt him—everything hurt him—and indeed, one moment his head ached, the next his chest, the next his legs. So he could no longer stand himself, stopped laughing, was tired, exhausted, had constant headaches—it was terrible. No illness; no illness that a doctor could diagnose. That’s how it is with so many people these days, isn’t it? They’re actually perfectly healthy and yet they’re sick. Yes, so there was no illness. The doctor could think of nothing else to say but: “Look, the problem is psychological—that’s what doctors say these days—you’re mentally ill; you’ve adapted to the business environment, you’re caught up in it, and now your energies can’t immediately take on different directions; they have their own momentum, they can’t be directed.” Go back to your business—that’s the only remedy I know.” —Well, the gentleman in question sees that, too. But lo and behold, now he can’t get anything done at work either! He’s unfit for duty; he’s just as sick there as he was out at his country estate.

[ 36 ] From this, Jung rightly concludes: It is not so easy to transfer energies from one gradient to another. Even if one wants to bring them back, it is not possible. The person in question even came to him for treatment, but he could not help this man either, because it was already too late; the disease had already taken too strong a hold, and intervention should have come earlier. This shows you that the therapy of diversion also has its difficulties. Jung cites this example himself.

[ 37 ] Everywhere one encounters facts that are significant and important—facts that, I think I can safely say, can only be grasped intellectually through spiritual science or anthroposophy; but they are there. People notice them. So the questions are there; you find them everywhere. People will come to realize that the human being is a complex being, that he is not that simple being about whom we formed an illusory conception through the advanced science of the 19th century. Today’s psychoanalyst is faced with a remarkable fact. If you take this fact—yes, for today’s science it is downright inexplicable. In anthroposophy, you will easily find an explanation using the tools you’ve already acquired in my lectures. But I can return to this phenomenon if you are unable to find the explanation on your own. It can happen, for example, that someone becomes hysterically blind—that is, unable to see. There are hysterically blind people who could certainly see but do not; they are spiritually blind. Now it may be that such people are partially healed; they begin to see again, but they do not see everything. For example, the peculiar case may arise where such a hysterically blind person regains their sight, sees everything about a person—except the head! Such a partially healed person then walks around the streets seeing everyone without a head. This really does happen. There are even more curious phenomena.

[ 38 ] Well, as I said, all of this can already be addressed through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and from a lecture I gave here last year, you can easily find an explanation, for example, for this phenomenon—that sometimes one cannot even see people’s heads. But, as I said, today’s psychoanalyst is confronted with all these phenomena. And he already has enough evidence to tell himself: It can become extraordinarily perilous for a person if they have connections even to the transpersonal unconscious. But for heaven’s sake—yes, for heaven’s sake—the psychoanalyst does not say this; but for the sake of science, under no circumstances should we now take the spiritual world seriously! Anything but that! People simply cannot grasp the idea of taking the spiritual world seriously. And that is when something quite strange comes about. Very few people notice what strange phenomena arise under the influence of these things. I would like to draw your attention to an extraordinarily interesting point from Jung’s book *The Psychology of Unconscious Processes*, which was published only recently; from it you will see what conclusions the psychoanalyst has already reached today. I must, however, read you a short passage: “According to this example”—these are the kinds of examples where he shows that human beings have connections not only to what is in their individual lives or in the present, but also, reaching far back, to all manner of demonic, divine, and spirit-like forces, and so on—“according to this example of the emergence of new ideas from the treasure trove of primal images,” here he does not call them gods, but primal images, “let us resume the further description of the transference process. We saw that the libido has seized its new object precisely in those seemingly incoherent and bizarre fantasies, namely the contents of the absolute unconscious.” So the absolute unconscious is the transpersonal unconscious, not the personal one. “As I have already said, the unrecognized projection of primal images onto the doctor is a danger that should not be underestimated for the further course of treatment.” In other words, the patient projects his demons onto the doctor. That is a danger. “For these images contain not only all that is most beautiful and greatest that humanity has ever thought and felt, but also every worst atrocity and devilry of which human beings have ever been capable.”

[ 39 ] Do you think Jung goes so far as to realize that human beings unconsciously harbor within themselves all manner of atrocities and devilry alongside the most beautiful things humanity has ever been capable of thinking and feeling? So it’s true, isn’t it, that people somehow hesitate to speak of Lucifer and Ahriman; but he is able to articulate a statement like this: “For these images contain not only all that is most beautiful and greatest that humanity has ever thought and felt, but also every worst atrocity and diabolical act of which human beings have ever been capable.” If the patient cannot distinguish the doctor’s personality from these projections, then all possibility of communication is lost, and a human relationship becomes impossible. But if the patient avoids this Charybdis, he falls into the Scylla of introjecting these images—that is, he attributes their qualities not to the doctor, but to himself.” In that case, he himself is the devil; he himself believes that he is the devil. “This danger is just as serious. With projection, he vacillates between an exuberant and pathological idolization and a hate-filled contempt for his doctor. With introjection, he falls into ridiculous self-idolatry or moral self-flagellation. The mistake he makes in both cases is that he personally attributes the contents of the absolute unconscious to himself. In this way, he makes himself both God and the devil. Herein lies the psychological reason why people have always needed demons and could never live without gods—with the exception of a few particularly wise specimens of *homo occidentalis* from yesterday and the day before yesterday, supermen whose god is dead, which is why they themselves become gods—namely, rationalistic “duodez gods” with thick-skulled heads and cold hearts.”

[ 40 ] So you see, the psychoanalyst goes so far as to say: The human soul is such that it needs the gods, that it requires the gods, that it must become ill if it does not have the gods. That is why it has always had the gods; people need the gods. The psychoanalyst even scoffs that if they do not have the gods, they must become gods themselves—but only “rationalistic twelve gods with thick-skulled heads and cold hearts.” “The concept of God,” the psychoanalyst continues, “is in fact an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature...”

[ 41 ] Well, don’t you see, one cannot go any further than to demonstrate the necessity of the concept of God in this way, using scientific methods. People must have God—as psychoanalysts know today—they need him. But I didn’t finish reading the sentence; let’s read it to the end: “The concept of God is, in fact, an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature that has absolutely nothing to do with the question of God’s existence.”

[ 42 ] So here, by reading the preceding and following sentences together, you come face to face with the great dilemma of our time. The psychoanalyst proves to you that a person becomes ill when he lacks a God; but this necessity has nothing to do with the existence of God. And he continues: “For this latter question”—namely, the question of God’s existence—“is one of the most foolish questions one can ask. It is well known that one cannot even conceive of a God, let alone imagine that he actually exists, any more than one can conceive of a process that is not necessarily causally determined.”

[ 43 ] Now I ask you: here you stand at the point where you can grasp these things. These things are there, knocking at the door of knowledge. The people who are searching are there, too; they recognize the absolute necessity, but—when what they consider an absolute necessity is raised as a serious question, they regard it as one of the most foolish questions that could possibly be raised.

[ 44 ] There you have one of the points where, from today’s intellectual life, you can immediately see what people actually always overlook. I can assure you that these psychoanalysts, as experts on the soul or as researchers of the soul, are still far, far beyond what conventional university psychiatry has to offer—they are far, far, far beyond what university psychiatry and university psychology generally have to offer, and in a certain sense they are right to look down on this terrible so-called science. But one can catch up with them at a point where one can truly see what challenges contemporary humanity faces in its confrontation with modern science.

[ 45 ] Many people don’t realize this. People today have no idea what belief in authority is like nowadays. There has never been such a belief in authority as prevails today; it has never been more deeply embedded in the subconscious than it is today. One must say it again and again: For heaven’s sake, what are you actually doing when you, as therapists, treat hysterical people? — You are looking for subconscious content that is not detached from consciousness. Yes, but one finds such subconscious content in abundance among the theorists. When one brings it up from the subconscious, then something like this comes to consciousness—precisely what must now come to your consciousness: what is churning in the subconscious of modern doctors and modern patients. The entire literature is permeated with it; it is indeed everywhere, and you are exposed to it every day and every hour, absorbing it. And because one can only become aware of such things through spiritual science, that is why so many people absorb these things unconsciously, soak them up into their subconscious, and they then remain there in the subconscious.

[ 46 ] This psychoanalysis has at least made people aware that the psychological must be taken as psychological. That is what they do. But the devil is always breathing down their necks. I would say that they cannot grasp spiritual reality—and, above all, do not want to grasp it. That is why, everywhere in the present day, one finds preambles and postfaces that present the most unbelievable things. But people today lack the level of attention required to examine these things. Of course, anyone who reads Jung’s book *The Psychology of Unconscious Processes* would practically fall off their chair when reading such a sentence. But people today do not do that. So just think how much really lies within this unconscious in modern humanity. And that is also why these psychoanalysts, seeing how much lies in the unconscious—for they do see it—view certain things differently from other people. Right in the preface, for example, Jung says something that, in one part of the sentence, is not bad: “The psychological processes accompanying the current war—above all, the incredible coarsening of public judgment, the mutual slander, the unimagined fury of destruction, the unheard-of flood of lies, and people’s inability to rein in the bloody demon—are uniquely suited to forcefully bringing to the attention of thinking people the problem of the chaotic unconscious that slumbers restlessly beneath the ordered world of consciousness. This war has relentlessly shown civilized man that he is still a barbarian, and at the same time, what an iron rod of discipline awaits him should it ever occur to him again to blame his neighbor for his own bad qualities. But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of nations.” And now comes a postscript that, once again, leaves one unsure of what to make of it. “What nations do, every individual also does, and as long as the individual does it, so does the nation. Only a change in the individual’s attitude is the beginning of a change in the psychology of the nation.”

[ 47 ] So these sentences, when placed side by side, again show just how destructive this is to thinking. For I would like to ask you: Does it make any sense to say, “What the nations do, every individual does as well”? Then it would have to make sense to ask: Could the individual do it without the nations doing it? Isn’t it absolute nonsense to say such a thing? And it is this nonsense that has an overwhelming effect today, even on outstanding, great minds; it has an overwhelming effect. Now, this very matter, in which such destructive thinking is at work, is not only supposed to serve as therapy but also to provide pedagogical guidance. Once again, it is based on the legitimate longing to introduce a new psychological and spiritual element into pedagogy. Should we introduce something that has been discovered using entirely inadequate means of knowledge? These are the important questions today!

[ 48 ] We will now return to this matter from the perspective of anthroposophical orientation, examine it from a broader horizon, and then see how one must approach it on a much, much larger scale if one is to come to terms with these things at all. But one must also begin in a concrete way. Above all, one must bring such problems—which are usually still approached only with the old, inadequate means of knowledge—into the light of anthroposophical knowledge.

[ 49 ] Take, for example, the problem of Nietzsche. Today I want only to touch on this problem; we will examine such problems in greater detail tomorrow. We already know from previous lectures: From 1841 to 1879, *The Struggle of the Spirits*; from 1879 onward, the fallen spirits in the realm of humans. Such matters and others like them will inevitably play a role in the future when considering human life. For Nietzsche was born in 1844; for exactly three years, before his soul descended to earth, it was engaged in the struggle of the spirits in the realm of the spirits above. He was still a boy when Schopenhauer was still alive. Schopenhauer died in 1860. It was only after Schopenhauer’s death that Nietzsche devoted himself to reading Schopenhauer’s writings. There, Schopenhauer’s soul—which is above in the spiritual realms—exerts its influence. That is the real relationship. Nietzsche reads Schopenhauer; but Schopenhauer continues to exert his influence in Nietzsche’s thoughts, which assimilate Schopenhauer’s writings.

[ 50 ] But what is Schopenhauer’s situation up there? From 1860 onward, throughout the years when Nietzsche was reading Schopenhauer, Schopenhauer was caught up in the “struggle of the spirits” while that struggle was still being waged up there. So whatever it is about Schopenhauer that inspires Nietzsche, he himself takes it up in the context of the battle of the spirits into which he is thrust. In 1879, these spirits are cast down from heaven to earth. Until 1879, we see Nietzsche’s train of thought taking very peculiar turns. In the future, this will be explained by the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner. You will find some evidence of this in my essay “Friedrich Nietzsche, a Fighter Against His Time.” Until then, Wagner’s influence had been limited to his impact on earth. For Wagner was born in 1813; the battle of the spirits did not begin until 1841. But Wagner died in 1883. Nietzsche’s train of thought then began to take its peculiar direction, in a certain sense, as Wagner’s influence began. But Wagner entered the spiritual world in 1883, when the battle of the spirits above was already over, when the spirits had already fallen from heaven to earth. Nietzsche was there when the spirits were roaming here on earth; Wagner lived above when they had already fallen. Wagner’s posthumous influence on Nietzsche reveals an entirely different task, unlike Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche. This is where the concrete, transpersonal influences begin—not those abstract, demonic ones that psychoanalysis speaks of. Humanity will have to resolve to enter this concrete spiritual world and truly grasp the things that are obvious if one merely examines the facts. In the future, a biography of Nietzsche will be written according to the fact that he was inspired by that Richard Wagner, born in 1813, who experienced everything that led to the brilliant being I have characterized in my book, up until 1879; that he was influenced by Schopenhauer from the age of sixteen onward, but that Schopenhauer had already undergone the spiritual struggle in the spiritual world above before the year 1879; that he was exposed to Wagner’s influence after Wagner had been led into the spiritual world posthumously, while he himself remained down here, where the spirits of darkness reigned.

[ 51 ] Jung believes it is a fact: Nietzsche finds a demon; he projects it outward, onto Wagner. Well, projections—tendencies, introverted and extroverted personality types—all words for abstractions, but none of them represent reality! You see, my dear friends, things are meaningful. And it is not simply a matter of wanting to campaign for a worldview one is enamored with, but rather it is precisely what exists outside of this worldview that shows how necessary this worldview is for contemporary humanity.

[ 52 ] More on that tomorrow.