The Rudolf Steiner Archive

6. Eurythmy, Music, Drawing, and Language Classes

[ 1 ] To illustrate some of what I intend to discuss later, I will begin today with a disciplinary measure I tried at our Waldorf School in Stuttgart. After observing classes in all eight grades and familiarizing myself with the teaching methods, it came to my attention during a faculty meeting that one or another of the teachers was having difficulty managing this or that child, and that, in general, for one reason or another, a certain number of children at the school were unable to keep up with what the teachers hoped to achieve within a given timeframe. I then asked for a list of these children who were falling behind and had the children from each individual class—those who had proven to be struggling during the portion of the school year that had elapsed—come to me one after another. — Since I was only able to stay in Stuttgart during the Christmas break, this was only possible because both the parents and the children at our Waldorf School were exceptionally willing. — My specific task was then to work with the respective class teacher to determine what the actual issue might be, whether psychological or perhaps even physiological. When assessing a student’s abilities in this way—and I would like to say this to illustrate what follows—one must proceed from somewhat deeper principles than those commonly applied today under the influence of so-called experimental psychology, against which I have no objection, provided it remains within its proper limits.

[ 2 ] Above all, I tried to emphasize the principle that one must sometimes examine flawed dispositions in things that are very, very far removed from the actual expression of those flawed dispositions. For example, let’s take the following case: it turned out that a child—let’s say in the third grade of elementary school, that is, an eight- or eight-and-a-half-year-old, as is typical there—could not be made to pay any attention at all. When the child pays attention—let’s say—it is possible to teach it something, which, incidentally, it may soon forget; but it is not possible to properly bring the child to a certain degree—a desirable degree—of attention.

[ 3 ] So I took one such child under my wing. As I said, the children there are very willing because of the overall attitude of our teaching staff, which is, after all, trained in the manner I described to you recently. So I took one such child and tried the following test with him, for example. I said, “Quickly grab your left forearm with your right hand.” Or later, I drew the outline of an ear for him and asked, “Is that a left ear?” “Is that a right ear?” Or I would draw some geometric figure—one the child didn’t actually need to understand—next to another figure, and try to determine whether the child had a sense that one figure was symmetrical to the other, and how long it took the child to realize this—not measured by a clock, but measured by feeling.

[ 4 ] In this way, it was possible to see whether such a child had a quicker or slower aptitude for immediate facts of life. After a few months, I returned to the school, and it turned out—simply by taking such things into account, by asking the child in question similar questions right in the middle of class, and by doing this with him two, three, or four times—that a certain effect had already been achieved on the child. In fact, it always has a certain effect on the child when one tries to start from the visual, but from a visual element that is connected to the child’s own physicality, to the child’s own body—that is, not merely starting from something visual that the child looks at, which is outside the child, but starting from the image: “Grasp your left forearm with your right hand,” or something similar.

[ 5 ] This pictorial quality, in which the child must place itself within the image, is something that continues to have an effect on the child. Those unfamiliar with Spiritual Science cannot properly distinguish the full impression that such an image makes on a child from that of another, more abstract image that is merely viewed from the outside. For if we do not take Spiritual Science as our starting point, we underestimate the influence that the time a child spends asleep has on the child’s entire development. Far too little attention is paid in the observation of human beings to the processes that take place from falling asleep to waking up. Is it not true that, within our materialistic worldview and in our practical experience, we are more or less compelled—even if we wanted to deny it—to view the spiritual-soul aspect as arising directly from the physical-bodily aspect? As a result, we never realize that, while awake—from waking until falling asleep—we are dealing with a union of the spiritual-soul aspect with the physical human being, whereas from falling asleep until waking, we are dealing with an entirely different being lying there in bed. This being lying there in bed is actually deprived of its higher spiritual-soul aspect, and this spiritual-soul aspect leads an extracorporeal existence from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. But while this spiritual-soul aspect derives its consciousness from the physical body—our body is necessary for us to be conscious of the contents of our soul—our physical body is not necessary for experiencing these soul contents. Something is constantly taking place within the soul’s content during the time between falling asleep and waking up. And what takes place there can, of course, only be studied with the help of Spiritual Science research. It then turns out that only the pictorial—that is, that which evokes corresponding feelings—enters our soul life, and that everything we take in merely as abstract concepts, everything we take in as non-pictorial, static concepts, does not work upon us from the moment we fall asleep until we wake up; it does not enter our soul life in any direct way.

[ 6 ] In a healthy way, imagery only takes root in a child if it is in some way connected to the child’s own physicality, if the child’s own physicality is linked to it. Such subtle distinctions in life are of extraordinary importance for laying the foundation of the art of education. We must learn to take into account the influence of the spiritual-soul aspects in the state that a person experiences from falling asleep until waking up. If we do not come to understand this, then, in essence, we will achieve very little for later life through the school years or, indeed, through the entire period of upbringing.

[ 7 ] But it is only by considering these two aspects of human nature together—as we deal with the child—that we become aware of how what the child seemingly accomplishes as a completely unified activity is actually composed within the child. We must, in fact, be absolutely clear that if we try to approach the child with a purely intellectualistic approach, we may well fail with one child or another. If we strive to support what is lacking—for example, the ability to focus attention quickly—through such visual imagery, then we are offering the child something that it may need in that particular case.

[ 8 ] When, due to social circumstances, one is inevitably dealing with a larger number of students, it is possible—with good will—to provide a certain limited degree of individualized instruction even in large classes—for example, by setting aside the weaker students and trying to pay close attention to what they lack and what might be remedied by seemingly minor details. I do not, however, wish to present what is described here as a model, but the ideal must lie in this direction. The essential point is that, through such a study of children’s lives, one comes to understand how activities in human nature that appear entirely uniform arise from a duality, and this must be taken into account.

[ 9 ] The day before yesterday, I explained here how writing instruction should stem from drawing instruction—perhaps even from simple painting instruction—which will then serve other purposes as well, which I will mention. At the Waldorf School, I have made an attempt—and it seems to me that there is already some evidence of success after only a short time—to start with a kind of artistic approach with the very youngest children in every area. Our children at the Waldorf School, the youngest ones, are actually occupied with formal schoolwork for barely two hours a day. A considerable amount of time by today’s standards is devoted to ensuring that even the youngest children learn a foreign language. And it has—I know how many prejudices there are against it—an immensely profound effect in terms of making the children lively and attentive, in terms of awakening their souls, when one attempts to introduce foreign language instruction to very young children without any grammatical pedantry, but simply through a kind of matter-of-fact conversation. Our children begin French and English lessons as soon as they enter school. More time is devoted to this than is usually the case. The rest of the day—namely, the afternoon lessons—consists almost entirely of musical activities. However, we already incorporate into the actual school curriculum what I call the “drawing foundation for writing.” Thus, the youngest children are first and foremost taught to draw in the manner I will describe later. With the exception of a few religion classes—taught by pastors and clergy, the schedule for which must be adjusted according to the time available—we devote the afternoon almost exclusively to physical exercises and singing and music. This clearly demonstrates that, by starting this way with the youngest children, one can truly engage the whole person through this artistic foundation of the entire curriculum.

[ 10 ] It is through music, above all, that children internalize things. We have now organized the physical exercises in such a way that we distinguish between mere physiological gymnastics and what we call eurythmy. What we call eurythmy—eurythmy is also relevant from an artistic standpoint, but I will discuss that another time—I could describe from a pedagogical and didactic standpoint as “animated gymnastics.” This is added to mere physiological gymnastics. You see, mere physiological gymnastics—by which I mean gymnastics as it is practiced today—is, more or less, even if one denies it, based on a study of the human physical body. Certainly, I know that many objections can be raised against this. But on the whole, even when it comes to what one might call the “spiritualization” of physical education—since modern science no longer provides any reason to think otherwise—one still thinks only of the physiological or, at most, the psychological. Eurythmy differs from this in that every movement the child makes is animated; every movement is not merely a physical movement, but is just as much an expression of the soul as the sound of speech is an expression of the soul.

[ 11 ] It turned out, however, that out of all 280 children we have in eight classes at the Waldorf School, three did not want to participate in this lesson. They simply didn’t want to. The others take great joy in it. Upon investigating the matter, it was found that these three did not enjoy active participation. They are too lazy for it; they prefer movements that merely engage the person passively. They do not want to infuse the movement with this spiritual essence.

[ 12 ] Eurythmy ultimately means that, once one understands it, one can—through eurythmic expression—decipher a word or a sentence from eurythmy just as one would through spoken language alone. Eurythmy arose because—if I may use Goethe’s expression—the movement tendencies of the larynx, the palate, and the lips were studied through sensory-supersensory observation, and because, according to Goethe’s principle of metamorphosis, the movement of one organ is transferred to the whole human being. Goethe held the view that the entire plant is nothing more than a complex leaf. We say: All the movements that a human being can perform at will are a re-enactment not of the actual movements, but of the tendencies toward movement in the speech organs, so that the whole human being always becomes a living, moving larynx.

[ 13 ] This is something that has an immensely natural effect on a child’s nature; for one need only consider that speaking in sounds is a way of localizing the entirety of human activity. In speech, the activities of imagination and will converge, and as they meet, they become the activities of feeling, imagination, and will. The mental image activity, which in our civilized languages is for the most part a very abstract one, is now set aside in eurythmy, and everything flows from the whole human being out of the will, so that the will is actually engaged in eurythmy. Eurythmy is the opposite of dreaming. Dreaming transports a person into the experience of the world of mental images. The person lies there quietly, and the movements they imagine are not actually present in reality. They may undertake grand excursions into the countryside in their “dreams”—yet in reality, they do not move. All of this exists only in their imagination. In eurythmy, the opposite is true. In a dream, a person is half asleep; in eurythmy, they are more fully awake than they are in ordinary life. They carry out precisely what is suppressed in a “dream”; they suppress what is the main focus of the dream; they perform a movement for every mental image. This activity, however, does not suit some children. So, I am firmly convinced of this, and I must say that the short time we have spent dividing the period between gymnastics and eurythmy—which is otherwise set aside for gymnastics—in this way, has already convinced me—to a certain extent, of course; the matter must first be examined more thoroughly—that purely physiological gymnastics certainly achieves some of the goals we strive for, but this physiological gymnastics contributes nothing to strengthening the initiative of the will that emanates from the soul, at most indirectly, by teaching one to overcome certain physical clumsiness more easily. But in a positive sense, purely physiological gymnastics contributes nothing to the initiative of the will. And I cannot help but attach great social significance to this question as well.

[ 14 ] You see, I find myself wondering today: How is it that, even though we have endured the hardships of recent years, we now find ourselves facing a humanity that has so little understanding of the widespread paralysis of the will? Those who live here in Switzerland and never, for example, visit regions such as those found in Germany today simply cannot truly understand such a phenomenon. They will gain this understanding in five to six years, or perhaps a little later; for what is unfolding in certain regions of Europe—if no remedy is found—will spread throughout all of Europe—in regions that are still largely unaffected by it, people have no mental image of just how paralyzed the spiritual will of, for example, the Central European population currently is. That is a terrible thing. When one has made an effort, over weeks and months, to point this or that out to people, and then speaks with one or the other afterward, they say: “That may all be true, but it doesn’t really matter anyway!” That is a remark I have heard time and time again over the course of a year. And I can’t help but—having gone to great lengths to uncover the reasons for such things—view this as a consequence of the great adulation—if I may use that expression, though I ask that you not take offense at it—of mere physiological gymnastics. That does not strengthen the initiative of the will! The initiative of the will is strengthened when, as a child, one performs movements in which every single movement is at the same time a spiritual one, in which the soul pours itself into every single movement.

[ 15 ] When one tries in this way to approach things artistically and—if I may use the expression—in an artistically human way, one sees what even the youngest children actually gain from such an artistic approach to teaching. Through what they experience as “animated gymnastics”—and this is quite evident—their interest in the outside world grows. It follows as a completely natural consequence that their interest in the outside world grows. — Herman Grimm, the art historian, has expressed to me in various conversations his despair that the college students who come to the university—and to whom he is supposed to teach art history—could not distinguish, when shown a painting by Raphael, which figures are in the background and which are in the foreground; that they have not the slightest concept of what constitutes the background or the foreground. Herman Grimm often told me: “I am utterly despairing when I get these students and am then supposed to teach them art history.” — With children like these, who are already learning in their early years to imbue their own movements with a conscious inner life, this would, I believe, be entirely impossible. They develop such an interest in observing the outside world that it is quite astonishing. To this cultivation of the will, one must add, in a corresponding way, the cultivation of inner life, which arises when children are introduced to proper music and singing. And both must be kept in harmony. To achieve this harmony, we have just made the attempt to have singing, eurythmy, and physical education taught by the same teacher. When one attempts this, one finds that through eurythmy and gymnastics, the relationship to the outside world—particularly with regard to what emanates from the will—is strengthened and imbued with initiative, and that music in every form fosters a heartfelt internalization. This is something of extraordinary significance. But when one attempts to study the developing child in this way, one becomes aware of how, particularly in the developing child, things that appear to be unified actually arise from two sources of human experience.

[ 16 ] For decades, I have really focused my attention above all on children’s primitive drawings. One cannot fully grasp children’s drawing simply by trying to track the primitive forms that children produce; rather, to truly understand what is actually happening within the child as he or she draws, it is necessary to observe children who, for whatever reason, already show a tendency to draw as early as age 6, 7, and, conversely, to observe children who, for whatever reason, do not begin drawing until they are 9 or 10 years old. It is certainly not ideal that such children exist, but in our lives there have indeed been plenty of such children to observe. There is a great difference between the drawings produced by those who begin drawing around the age of ten and have never drawn before, and the drawings produced at ages 6, 7, or 8. The difference is that children who are somehow encouraged to draw at an early age—as you all know, I need only repeat this—draw in a very primitive way. They draw, for example, a head (they draw it), head, two eyes, a mouth—they often draw the teeth—and then immediately the legs. Or they draw: a head, then they also draw the torso, make two lines there (for the arms), and sometimes they realize that this still looks a bit like a hand or something similar.

[ 17 ] Well, you can certainly follow along with such drawings. After all, an extraordinarily rich collection of material has been compiled in the educational handbooks. The point, however, is that we must learn to understand such drawings from the very essence of the human being. This is extraordinarily difficult today because, fundamentally, we lack a comprehensive view of art; because we do not grasp the entire process of human artistic creation in the right way. Our view of art is influenced by artistic creation as it has developed in recent times. And in fact, it is only in the very last few years that a stand has been taken—often in a rather inadequate manner—against what has developed there—often in a rather inadequate manner, I say this explicitly. For, fundamentally speaking, our entire artistic output depends in some way on the model, that is, on external perception.

[ 18 ] I have truly spent a great deal of time in studios throughout my life and have seen how everything in the work of today’s artists—namely sculptors and painters—depends on the model. This then leads one to believe, for example, that the Greeks, too, were dependent on models in their artistic work, and yet this is not the case. It is not the case. Anyone who truly understands something like—let’s say, for my sake, the Laocoön Group, or any single figure—we do, of course, have such examples from the later period of Greek art—but anyone who truly immerses themselves in these things will gradually come to recognize the independence of the Greek artist, in particular, from the model. Certainly, the Greek artist was able to observe well, and he was able to retain the image well. But that alone is simply not enough. The Greek artist, particularly as a sculptor, created in such a way that he proceeded from the feeling of the limb—from his own feeling and perception of the limb and its movement—in his artistic creation; for example, he inwardly sensed a bent arm with a clenched fist, and he rendered not merely what he saw with his eyes on the external model, but rather this inner sensation—this feeling for the human form—which he imprinted upon the material. Indeed, this inner sense of the human being has been lost to European civilization since the time of the Greeks. And one must first study the transition from this sense of the human being—from its organic self-knowledge, which was present in the Greeks, which is ultimately found in every Greek poem, which is found in every Greek drama, if one is only willing to look for it—one must recognize the difference between this sense, this organic self-knowledge of the human being—or rather, the human being’s self-perception or self-sensing— and what arises from the unreflective imitation of what is observed, from building upon the model. And certainly, for the Greek artist, everything he desired came together. It is easy, isn’t it, to say: through the Olympic Games and the like, the Greeks were able to survey the forms. Certainly, that also contributed to it; but the essence of artistic creation was this inner feeling, this organic perception. And so, in his creative work, he was entirely independent of the model, which served for him, at most, as a kind of outline to which he adhered externally. The essential element for him was this inner feeling, this organic self-knowledge.

[ 19 ] And I must say: even when I look at a child’s drawings—however primitive and schematic they may be—I find in each one a convergence of the child’s perception and the child’s primitive, instinctive sense of certainty in the organs. One can, I would say, distinguish in every single line of these children’s drawings: here the child is trying to depict something that originates from the eye; there the child is trying to depict something that originates solely from inner feeling. Take a whole series of children’s drawings; try to see how the child draws arms and legs, and you will see that this stems from inner feeling; suppose the child draws a profile—that stems from visual perception. These two sources of the soul’s life flow together. And things become interesting when you then look at drawings by children who have not drawn until a certain age; they are, more or less, actually drawing with their intellect. Young children do not draw with their intellect; they draw from experience—primitive perceptions intertwined with primitive sensory perception. I believe one can always tell the difference: when a child draws the mouth, the outline of the mouth is based on observation; when they draw the teeth, that is derived in some way from inner sensory perception. But if you observe the drawings of a child who is just beginning to draw at the age of 9 or 10, you will see that they sometimes produce much more beautiful expressionist works than the Expressionists themselves; they draw—and under certain circumstances even paint, especially with colored pencils—what they imagine, what they have thought up. It is sometimes quite remarkable how children draw something—where at first you have no idea what they’re trying to depict—and then say, “That’s the devil,” or “That’s an angel.” It doesn’t look anything like an angelic being, but the child says, “That’s an angel.” They paint their intellect; they paint what they have imagined.

[ 20 ] The same is true when, during the crucial years—between the ages of 6, 7, and 9—the inner sense of the organs is not nurtured; then the intellect immediately takes over. And this intellect is, in essence, the enemy of intellectual human life and also of social life—though I certainly do not mean to advocate for the dumbing down of humanity. But what matters is that we recognize the intellect for its parasitic nature, that we recognize it in such a way that we regard it as fully developed only when it arises from the whole human being and does not manifest itself one-sidedly. But we will only achieve anything in this direction if we support artistic drawing and music instruction—I will speak more about all these things later—at the same time with other branches of education, above all through language instruction and also through mathematics instruction.

[ 21 ] Language instruction—you see, first you have to understand the whole purpose of language instruction. I must say, the purpose of language instruction actually dawned on me when I had the opportunity to observe what happens when children who speak a dialect sit together in school with other children who do not speak a dialect. Observing the children who speak a dialect and guiding them is, in fact, extremely important and also interesting. Every dialect, you see, has a certain distinctiveness. It stems from what I would like to call a person’s inner feeling—just as there is an inner sense of the organs, which has greatly diminished under our present-day intellectualism—such an inner experience that, fundamentally, compels the whole person into language. But in our so-called educated colloquial language—which has become abstract and is sometimes called “written language”—there is no longer a true connection between inner experience and what is expressed in the sound or sequence of sounds. Certain subtle differences that exist in the relationship of the observant person to their surroundings find beautiful expression in the dialect. You no longer sense any of that in the “cultivated” spoken language. For example, when I heard as a boy: “Himmlitzer”—I knew right away that it was something that had to resemble the sound itself. “Himmlitzer”—just try to feel the word “Himmlitzer.” In certain dialects, it refers to lightning or a flash of lightning; that meaning is absolutely embedded in the sound itself, in the sequence of sounds. The language conveys this. It conveys it in an intrinsically musical way. This close connection between inner emotional experience and language is actually infinitely stronger in the dialect than in our standard spoken language.

[ 22 ] But there is something else to consider. It is, after all, a peculiar phenomenon that, when we study language comparatively, we find that the inherent logic of language is actually greater in primitive languages than in cultivated vernaculars. One would expect the opposite. It is—though not the case with African languages, which are indeed primitive languages—I will return to this briefly later—it is the case with certain primitive languages that there is a remarkable internal logic to the language, which then becomes much more abstract and simpler as the language becomes more civilized. And so there is in fact more internal logic in a dialect than in a cultured colloquial language, and one can achieve a great deal; if, say, one has to work entirely with the dialect at a village school, then one must, of course, begin with the dialect; one must speak the dialect with the children; one must try to bring to consciousness what is already unconsciously present in the language—and that is, in fact, the grammar. Grammar should, in essence, be taught in a very lively way—so lively, in fact, that one assumes it is already there when the child speaks. Everything is already there when the child speaks. One lets the child speak sentences that come naturally to them, whose inner connection and structure the child can feel. And then one begins by making the child aware of how what it does unconsciously can become conscious. This by no means needs to be turned into a pedantic analysis, but one can develop the entire grammar simply by bringing to consciousness the life of grammar that is already there once the child has learned to speak.

[ 23 ] Yes, one can make this assumption: that, in fact, the entire grammar is already contained within the human organism. If one takes this premise seriously, one comes to realize: By bringing the conscious grammar out of the unconscious practice of grammar in a lively way at the right time, one is simply working to develop the child’s sense of self. And with this insight in mind, I would say that as the child approaches the age of 9—when self-awareness normally awakens properly—one must orient everything toward that goal, bringing into consciousness what lies unconsciously within the child’s organism. Then the child reaches this Rubicon of development at age nine in a normal, favorable way; then one elevates the unconscious to the conscious in the proper manner. Then one works with the forces within the child that seek to develop, not with forces that one first introduces into the child from the outside. And this method of teaching language—building on what the child can already say—and supporting this language instruction through lively interaction, which is fostered between children who speak standard colloquial language and those who speak dialects, by allowing one group to measure itself against the other emotionally, not in an abstract way—emotionally bridging one word, one sentence, or one dialectal phrase to the other—such language instruction leaves one thoroughly exhausted after just 1½ hours. Even the teachers who are called upon to teach in this lively manner at the Waldorf School have had enough after teaching in this way for 1½ to 1⅓ hours in the morning. When one conducts language instruction in this way, with the inner conviction that one is actually fostering awareness and self-awareness through it, then one is working in conjunction with the artistic elements incorporated into drawing and music lessons; these are two mutually supportive processes.

[ 24 ] First, I would like to say a few words about the integration of language instruction with art classes and music lessons.

[ 25 ] I was strangely moved when I found in the handbooks of recent educational literature the claim that art instruction is hindered by language instruction, because language instruction—and speaking in general—drives people toward abstraction. One loses the ability to see; one loses the ability to perceive the forms and colors present in the external world—so it is claimed. This is not the case, however, if language instruction is not conducted in an abstract manner, but rather in a way that draws upon inner experience. Then the two support one another, and the process of developing self-consciousness up to about the age of nine will gradually become visible in that it transitions into an artistic perception of the external world, including an artistic sensibility for external form.

[ 26 ] And that is why I also provide the following support at the Waldorf School, because the work is to be based entirely on the artistic. Our teachers must not be satisfied if the children can draw a circle, a square, or a triangle; rather, our children must learn to feel the circle, the triangle, and the square. They must draw the circle in such a way that they sense its roundness. They must learn to draw the triangle in such a way that they sense the three corners—so that even as they begin to sketch the first corner, they already have the sensation: “There will be three corners.” Likewise, they draw the square in such a way that they sense the formation of the corners—a sensation that permeates the entire line from the very beginning. A child in our school must learn what an arc is, what a horizontal line is, what a vertical line is, and what a straight line is—but not merely for visual observation, but for inner tracing with the arm and the hand. This should also serve as the foundation for writing instruction. No child here should learn to write a “P” without first having an experience of a vertical line and an arc; not merely an abstract, outwardly directed perception of the vertical line and the arc, but rather an intuitive way of perceiving them—an intuitive experience of these things.

[ 27 ] By gradually stripping away everything purely intellectual from the artistic—from the whole person—we will also attract whole people: people with genuine initiative who, in turn, possess vitality, not people who, as is now becoming apparent in our population after it has undergone this great trial, do not really know where they stand by the age of 30. It’s enough to drive one to despair in this regard. If, as part of one’s profession—if I may use this paradoxical expression—one has to get to know people, then one may have the following experience: For example, one has to assess 26- to 30-year-olds to determine whether they are suitable for this or that position. Yes, it’s impossible to deal with them these days—this is a very widespread phenomenon—when you approach them with the expectation that they should show initiative, especially those entering practical professions. You’re told: “Yes, now you’re demanding this and that of me, but first I want to go to India, or first I want to go to the West to learn the customs of my profession there.” In other words, the person wants to settle into the situation completely passively at first. They don’t want to achieve anything through their own initiative; rather, they want to put themselves in a position where the world will make something of them. I know that by saying this, I am saying something terrible to many people. But at the same time, I am hinting at something that, when viewed from the perspective of a fully developed human being, reveals everything that education and instruction have failed to achieve in these people over the past decades—namely, people who, when necessary, can truly develop initiative—initiative that reaches deep into the soul—at the appropriate age. Of course, it is easy to say that one should foster initiative. The question is how to do this—how to structure the curriculum and the educational environment so that they do not work against the initiative of the will, but rather in the spirit of that initiative. That is what matters.

Q&A

[ 28 ] So that I leave no stone unturned, I would now like to answer a few of the questions that have been posed to me. First, I would like to address the question of psychoanalysis, which is, after all, raised so often from various quarters. Psychoanalysis is truly the child of our materialistic age. Our materialistic age does not even get around to seeking harmony between the creative spirit—which, I would say, is the artist of our body—and the physical, bodily organization. The two stand side by side—the physical-bodily and the spiritual-psychic—and theories strive to build bridges between them. What a variety of such bridges have we witnessed in recent times, intended to be built between the spiritual-psychic and the physical-bodily—from the views of Descartes right up to psychophysical parallelism and so on! All these theories are, at their core, born merely of the inability to view the human being as a whole. One fails to see how everything physical is shaped out of the spiritual, and how everything spiritual, when you get right down to it, simultaneously reveals itself in this physical life on the other side as something physical. One need only understand that, fundamentally, it is only through abstraction that one separates one from the other. And so it has come to pass that certain phenomena—which can be understood once one grasps this harmony between the physical and the psychological—have been completely misunderstood in more recent times.

[ 29 ] Suppose a young person has a deeply traumatic experience. Any such traumatic experience has an organic effect, particularly before the age of 20—in later years, such an effect still occurs, albeit to a lesser extent. Something is also happening on the physical level. Of these connections, however, only what takes place on the very surface is truly understood today. People do notice how a person turns pale when afraid and how they blush when ashamed. But people do not see how a traumatic experience—which may, for weeks, direct the human mind toward a certain emotional state—also causes something purely physical within the entire human organism to shift in a different direction than it would have if that traumatic experience had not occurred. The human organ will initially have a completely normal structure. This normal structure now reacts initially against the shock. After a certain number of years—since human life proceeds rhythmically—a certain kind of repetition of the original organ disturbance will set in. When one encounters a 38-year-old person exhibiting certain psychological anomalies, one can only understand this process by realizing: The experience occurring in the soul in this case points to an earlier experience that took place as many years before the age of 35 as the recurrence occurs after the age of 35. The actual cause of the psychological anomaly we observe in the 38-year-old may thus lie in an experience that the person in question had in their 32nd year of life. The emergence of the experience in the 38th year can be understood by recognizing the connection between the psychological shock that occurred in the 32nd year and certain physical organs. In another case, it may be that the current experience points to another experience that took place as many years before the age of 28 as the number of years that elapsed from the age of 28 until the recurrence of the experience. One must cultivate a gift for observation in order to recognize the connection between the soul-spiritual realm and organology. What does our age do instead? Even if one is a physician and thinks in a thoroughly materialistic way, one cannot deny that there is, after all, a life of the soul. Materialism is characterized precisely by the fact that it understands nothing of matter, and in the age of materialism, one can experience the tragedy that this materialism does not understand material processes. And precisely for this reason, one does not relate the soul experience to the material. Instead, people mistakenly say: An isolated realm of the soul, which has been there for many years, is now surfacing again; one must bring it to the surface and make it conscious, whereas what really matters is studying the human being’s organic state of health, not experimenting on them psychoanalytically.

[ 30 ] The same is true of the application of psychoanalysis to education. It is only because people fail to grasp what is emphasized in this lecture—namely, the unified interaction of the mental-emotional and the physical-bodily—that they speak of the application of psychoanalysis in education. One cannot deal one-sidedly with, say, only the mental-emotional aspect. We will discuss this in more detail later.

[ 31 ] Now I would like to point out something else: the pitfalls of puberty. I’ll be brief here. These pitfalls of puberty arise only when children are not raised properly. If children have the kind of inner insight and inner experience that I have described today, this has such an effect on the child’s entire psychological and physical constitution that different feelings and a different relationship to the outside world emerge than if I were to develop the child too intellectually or not artistically enough, particularly in the 7th and 8th years of life. The mistakes made in education during the 7th and 8th years of life manifest in the distorted feelings of puberty. Today, however, we are witnessing the most curious phenomena, and if one were to speak about what mothers or fathers often tell us today about their children, one would see just how deeply materialism has penetrated everyone’s minds. People come today and say that their 5- or 6-year-old child exhibits sexual misbehavior. This shows that people can no longer distinguish between things. If a knife has become a razor, it is simply no longer a pocket knife. Similarly, behaviors that occur in children and that outwardly seem to betray sexual urges are not sexual acts at all, but merely call for the child to be raised in a natural way; then, any abnormal feelings during puberty will certainly not arise. Anyone familiar with life knows that it is no more a sexual act when a child scratches near their genitalia—perhaps because of a small area of inflammation there that may be barely noticeable on the surface—than when they scratch their nose or cheek. This says more and points to more than is usually assumed, and one must simply see through this. And then one will not fall into the same trap as Freud, who—instead of looking at things as they are, namely that it makes no difference whether a child scratches its cheek or somewhere else before reaching puberty—claims, out of today’s materialism, that it is a sexual act when a child takes pleasure in a pacifier. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, based on this theory, one can indeed reduce everything to a single perspective. Goethe sought to capture this in one of his very humorous poems, in which he contrasts the evidence that the world consists of atoms of such-and-such a nature and the worldviews according to which everything is constructed as will or as unconscious being with the statement: “The world is an anchovy salad.” (Goethe: Lyrical Poems.) Gustav Theodor Fechner, the humorist, truly did a good deed as well. In his little book, *The Moon Made of Iodine*—which was published as early as the 1820s—he once demonstrated, following the pattern of the “proofs” people offer for so many things, that the moon consists solely of iodine. This little book should be widely distributed today as an illustration of certain ways of thinking about the world, rather than allowing it to fade into obscurity.

[ 32 ] (In response to an objection that Dr. Steiner had addressed only Freud and not the other schools of thought:)

[ 33 ] To answer your question, I would actually need to give a whole series of lectures. Since that is not possible, I would just like to say the following: The extent to which, in our time, I would say, fanaticism for certain schools of thought prevails is particularly evident among the followers of psychoanalysis. While answering a question, I referred to Freud’s view on sexuality as a specific example. It is, of course, true that other psychoanalysts have strayed very far from this one-sided, sexualistic interpretation. In particular, in recent months, certain psychiatrists have veered very, very sharply, so to speak, away from the original Freudian school, and even from the Jungian school—but anyone who can assess psychoanalysis in the context of the entire development of modern civilization will never see anything new in psychoanalysis, or rather will not be able to see the seed of something new, but rather the ultimate consequence of materialism. It is precisely characteristic of materialism that, instead of addressing the connection between the spiritual-psychic and the physical through a living perception, it seeks to characterize the physical solely from the most external perspective—as is the case in physics and chemistry—and that, on the other hand, it remains stuck at the abstract characterization of the spiritual-psychic. And this is taken to the utmost extreme in psychoanalysis by simply tracing the psychological states continuously throughout a person’s life. There is no need whatsoever to deny that the positive aspects one has in mind when speaking of psychoanalysis today are, as such, correct. Certainly, it is entirely correct that certain psychological experiences can be understood, recognized, and observed again as they continue to exert their influence in a specific transformation. But the point is that, in the intervening period, such an interaction has taken place between what is regarded in psychoanalysis as an isolated psychological phenomenon and the effects on the organs that, when the phenomenon reoccurs, a strong one-sidedness emerges if one is unable to take these effects on the organs into account.

[ 34 ] There is something very peculiar about these theories—of which psychoanalysis is one—in the present day. You can take my word for it that I have studied the points that have been raised in great depth. The issue is to recognize that there is a tendency today to wrongly generalize theories—which are valid for a specific, limited field—into universal laws. Psychoanalysis is a textbook example of this. Summarizing something into a law or a theory is justified only if its applicability can be consistently demonstrated in practice. Yet this is precisely what the psychoanalyst cannot do with his theory. Because the psychoanalyst does not know the true connection between the physical and the psychological, he relates current psychological states one-sidedly to earlier psychological states. This is particularly evident in Jung’s work. Jung stands completely apart from a comprehensive view of world phenomena. Now, it must be acknowledged that Jung accepts certain complexes and even traces them back through the series of psychological evolution. — The so-called Oedipus complex, as described by certain psychoanalysts, is of course something very interesting and also very captivating. The error, however, lies in the fact that the series of phenomena presented does not encompass the necessary scope of all other phenomena with which it is interconnected. What I mean can be illustrated by a simple example. If you place a cut rose and a crystal on a table, you can say that both are objects. However, this equating of the rose and the crystal under the term “object” is justified only from an external perspective. The cut rose is not a reality, and you cannot view it in the same way as the crystal, which is, in a certain sense, a self-contained entity. Of course, the crystal, too, must be viewed from an even broader perspective in harmony with its actual surroundings. — One must simply seek out the context of phenomena into which a given complex fits. One cannot take into account only what lies immediately before one. Even a tree blossom, for example, cannot be regarded as an object in and of itself—at most, the tree itself; from a broader perspective, one must even take into account the nature of the soil, the nature of the air, and so on. The primary mistake of psychoanalysis is that it considers phenomena in isolation, phenomena that can only be explained when linked to other series of phenomena. This one-sided approach leads to errors. I referred to the sexual example solely because, in the literature, for instance, the fish symbol is explained as a sign for the male sexual organ and substantiated in a way that cannot be scientifically substantiated. Such explanations are simply grotesque. Likewise, the phenomenon of the so-called Oedipus complex cannot be viewed solely within a specific school of thought—that is, in isolation—but must be placed in context with other factors, and one must rise to a perspective that encompasses the development of humanity as a whole.

[ 35 ] (In response to another objection concerning Spiritual Science:)

[ 36 ] If you wish to gain an understanding of my Spiritual Science, you cannot do so merely by reading these educational lectures; rather, you must study it more thoroughly. It is a more or less grotesque claim that my Spiritual Science has anything to do with that of the 19th century.

[ 37 ] The Spiritual Science that I advocate cannot be discerned as such from these educational lectures alone; rather, these educational lectures are merely a consequence of this Spiritual Science.