The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Fourth Lecture

[ 1 ] I have begun to discuss how instruction in reading and writing must relate to the demands of being human. One will not only readily understand what has been said here, but will also come to develop a kind of practical approach to the matter once one is fully imbued with an understanding of how the soul-spiritual aspect relates to the physical-bodily aspect of the child as it passes through the stage of tooth replacement. Up until the change of teeth, the human being is essentially a sensory organism as a whole. And it is naturally attuned to its surroundings in such a way that one can say: There is a natural religiosity in the small child, attuned to its surroundings.

[ 2 ] All of this changes quite significantly once the child has passed through the stage of losing their baby teeth. One might say: the sensory realm—that which permeates the child’s entire being—comes to the surface. The senses separate themselves from the rest of the organism, go their own ways, and the human being internalizes precisely by emancipating themselves spiritually and psychologically from the physical body. The spiritual-soul aspect thereby becomes independent. But what must be firmly held in mind is that the spiritual-soul aspect does not actually become intellectual before sexual maturity; the intellectual only emerges as a natural faculty with sexual maturity. Therefore, one does not tap into any power that lives within the child by appealing to the intellect. The child’s capacity for perception—indeed, the child’s entire mental disposition—from the time of tooth replacement until sexual maturity is oriented toward the pictorial, toward what might be called aesthetic perception, a mode of perception that can be characterized roughly as follows: Until the change of teeth, the child lives in such a way that it wants to imitate what is actually happening in its surroundings—that is, what is, so to speak, demonstrated to the child—so that the child employs its entire motor system to behave, both generally and in specific cases, toward what it encounters in a way that reflects an inner inclination, a love, toward the object in question.

[ 3 ] This changes with the loss of baby teeth in such a way that the child no longer orients itself according to what it sees, but according to what is reflected in the soul-expressions of the respective educator or teacher. What we have for the child in terms of the content of its soul up until the loss of baby teeth is not necessarily something authoritative. Until the change of teeth—though, of course, the transitions are gradual rather than abrupt—the child does not really engage deeply with the meaning and content of what is said, but rather lives much more in the sound of language, in the way language is used. And anyone who has a deeper understanding of these things will know that when I say to the child, “You must not do that”—this command does not make a strong impression on the child. If, on the other hand, a person says with conviction, “You must not do that”—or “Do that”—then there is something quite decisive in the way one speaks. The child notices that when one says: ‘You must not do that’—that it is spoken with a different emphasis than when one says: ‘That is right; you should do that’—and the very young child is guided by this emphasis, which is a revelation of the nature of the act of speaking. The child only begins to grasp the meaning of words—and indeed the meaning of the revelations of the environment in general—once it has gone through the process of losing its baby teeth and after that process. But even then, the child does not yet engage with the intellectual aspect of the matter; rather, it engages with the emotional, the feeling aspect of the matter. It engages with it in the same way one responds to a matter in the presence of a certain authority—simply because that authority says so.

[ 4 ] A child who has not yet reached sexual maturity is not yet capable of developing intellectual convictions within itself that something is good or evil. No matter how much one may speculate about these things, direct observation confirms what I have said. Therefore, when introducing moral concepts to a child, one should present them in such a way that the child is once again presented with vivid, concrete images. It is entirely possible to interweave the actual subject matter with moral lessons. One presents, let’s say, examples from history, and one conveys—not by approaching the matter in a philistine, pedantic manner with all sorts of moral rules, but simply by approaching things with a sense of what is pleasing and what is displeasing—that one finds the moral appealing and the immoral displeasing, so that during the period from the loss of baby teeth to puberty, the child develops a sympathy for what is good and an antipathy toward what is evil. We do not structure the process around giving the child commandments; such commandments are ineffective. We can, of course, enslave the child with these commandments, but we do not foster a moral life; a moral life that is to spring forth and flourish from the very depths of the soul—if, setting aside commandments and prohibitions, we awaken in the child a subtle sense of good and evil, of beauty and ugliness, of truth and falsehood. And in fact, it is right for the revered authority to stand beside the child in such a way that it embodies goodness, truth, and beauty. The child will not become a fully developed human being—one who shapes themselves from their entire inner being, both physically and spiritually—if they are raised on commandments alone. In that case, we rely solely on the development of their intellect. We foster the development of the heart and the development of the whole person when, at this age, we evoke the feeling that something is true, something is beautiful, something is good—because the respected authority of the teacher or instructor demonstrates that they consider it to be true, beautiful, and good. In the human being—in the concrete, real human being—the child seeks the embodiment of truth, beauty, and goodness. This has an effect on the child when that which represents truth, beauty, and goodness emanates from the concrete individuality of the educator. This has an effect with tremendous vitality. The child engages their whole being to evoke an inner echo of what the teacher says or otherwise makes perceptible. And this is what matters above all else in the methodology of precisely that educational instruction which must begin at the elementary school age.

[ 5 ] The objections to such an approach are, of course, as I said, obvious; for today, visual instruction is often misunderstood in such a way that people believe one must present to the child only what the child understands. And because ours is an intellectualistic age, this “understanding” is always colored by intellectualistic thinking. People today are generally still completely unaware that one can understand using spiritual faculties other than intellectual ones; but it is sometimes enough to drive one to despair when one sees what is actually recommended in so-called visual instruction. At times, the level is appalling when one believes one must lower oneself to the child’s level of understanding. Anyone who simply and radically asserts the principle that a child should be taught only what it understands does not realize what it means when a child—say, around the age of 7 or 8—has absorbed something purely on the basis of the teacher’s self-evident authority. Because the teacher regards something as beautiful or true, the child takes it in, and this then stays with the child as it grows. This grows with the child; perhaps in one’s thirties or forties, through matured experience—through the various experiences one has gone through—one comes to understand something that one may have accepted at the age of seven or eight solely on the authority of a beloved teacher; that understanding resurfaces. Now one understands it in light of other mature experiences. There is something immensely invigorating about this—when content already residing in the human soul emerges and comes alive alongside content that is now being gained. Memories that rely solely on the intellect deprive a person in later life of these invigorating forces, which arise from the resurfacing of content originally accepted purely on authority, now in the light of mature experience. In these matters, one must certainly look much more deeply into the human being than is often done today.

[ 6 ] And so we must take care at all times to ensure that the child is not driven into a one-sided intellect. But that is precisely what happens when we present the processes of life to the child in a way that is thoroughly intellectualized. What I am saying now applies to everything that is to be taught to the child between the change of teeth and puberty. Above all, for example, it is important that even in arithmetic we avoid intellectualizing, but rather that we start from what is, first and foremost, reality. You see, if there are 10 beans in front of me—they are right there; they are reality, which I can therefore divide into visible groups within myself.

[ 7 ] When I say, “3 + 3 + 4 beans equal 10 beans,” I am, from the outset, substituting thought for reality. But if I assume that I am saying, “In reality, there are 10 beans in front of me”; I can arrange them in such a way that I have 3 here, 3 here again, and then I must add 4—if I start from the sum that is actually there and work my way toward the individual addends, then I am grounded in reality; I start from what is always actually there—the whole—and move on to the parts. If I teach the child addition in such a way that I start with the total and divide it up in various ways—I can also distribute them differently; I can scatter the beans and group them differently; I can work out that 1 = 2 + 2 + 3 + 3—then I have divided up what remains constant as reality in a variety of ways. From this we see that, although it can be divided in a wide variety of ways, the more real element is the unchanging sum. You see that what also becomes clear through genuine insight into human nature—that a child at this age does not want to engage with the abstract—and the addends are something abstract—but rather with the concrete—necessitates teaching arithmetic in the opposite way than it is usually taught; that one starts with the sum when adding and then moves from there to the addends, and even points out how a sum can be distributed in various ways. By doing this, one gains a view of the child that is much more in tune with reality than with the usual method.

[ 8 ] And the same is true, in fact, for other types of calculations. It stimulates the child far more to ask, “How much do you have to take away from 5 so that you still have 2?”—than to tell the child, “Take 3 away from 5.” —And this question—“How much do you have to take away from 5 so that you still have 2?”—is also much more in tune with real life. In life, this is exactly the kind of situation one will encounter. And so the real issue is that, already in the teaching methods for this stage of life, a sense of reality must be cultivated.

[ 9 ] You see, our age would not lack a sense of reality to such a degree if—even though we do not always admit it—we did not actually hold the view today that a thing is true if it is observable and logical. But logic alone does not constitute truth; rather, truth is produced only when something is both logical and in accordance with reality. In this regard, we are witnessing something monstrous today. For example, Einstein’s theory of relativity—which is very ingenious and, in certain respects, absolutely remarkable—contains illustrations that are actually such that, if one has a proper sense of reality, one feels constantly torn apart and fragmented. Just consider that, according to Einstein, a clock flies out into space at the speed of light and is supposed to remain unchanged. Such things exist; one need only ask what it would be like if it returned: it would not only be pulverized, but it would be much more than that. Something is presented that is easy to conceive of, that is logical. The theory of relativity is as logical as possible, but it does not correspond to reality in many of its applications. The fact that such things can make such a deep impression on our contemporaries at all stems from the fact that we have, in a certain sense, lost our sense of reality.

[ 10 ] So, especially when one takes into account this second stage of a child’s life, one must also give the utmost consideration to the need to engage with reality in all things, not with the abstract. If one does this, then one will prepare the child in the right way for their later earthly life, both in terms of their cognition and, in particular, in terms of their emotional and volitional powers. For one must truly first understand what a child is in order to be able to handle properly, both at school and at home, what needs to be done for the child in terms of education and instruction.

[ 11 ] Before becoming an earthly being, a human being is, after all, a soul-spiritual being who lives in soul-spiritual worlds. I have already alluded to this. The human being descends and, as a soul-spiritual being, unites with the physical-etheric human germ, which comes into being partly through the activity of the soul-spiritual being itself, but partly also through the stream of heredity that flows through the generations and reaches the human being who wishes to incarnate in a physical body via the father and mother. When one has before one this soul-spiritual being that first approaches the human being, one will regard it with reverent awe. As a teacher, one will, in a sense, approach the child’s development with a religious feeling; I would say, with a priestly feeling, because the way in which the soul-spiritual reveals itself in the child truly becomes a revelation of the soul-spiritual in the physical-etheric. If one has the sense that a being sent by the gods descends to Earth and incarnates in a body, then one acquires the right attitude, which one must cultivate in school. But one learns this only by being able to observe how the child gradually develops. What is revealed in the child before the change of teeth—in the structure of its body, in the form of its chaotic movements, in the animation of its facial expressions, and so on— in all of this we must see what, insofar as it emanates from the child’s inner core, is essentially a residual effect of what the human being experienced in the divine-spiritual world before their earthly life.

[ 12 ] Only those who, in a sense, perceive the child’s previous life in the divine-spiritual world in what takes place in the child’s body up until the child’s teeth fall out can truly observe the child’s expressions and impulses of life. And that is why the habit that was the most essential element of the soul in pre-earthly life continues to live on in the child. There, one is completely devoted to the spiritual environment; there, one lives, as it were, outside of oneself—all the more individual, yet outside of oneself. One wants to continue this. One wishes, so to speak—and this is why a natural religiosity arises in the child’s life—to continue in the body what one was accustomed to doing in the spiritual worlds during one’s pre-earthly existence.

[ 13 ] The situation is different when, during the change of teeth, one has reached the point of shaping one’s own body according to the first model provided by heredity. At this age, one acquires the first body shaped from one’s own individuality. One comes to Earth with what has developed from habitual memory into a memory that is more pictorial and three-dimensional, so that—with the aftereffects of impulses from earlier Earth lives—one experiences life on Earth during the period between the change of teeth and puberty as if it were a good acquaintance. It is very important to keep this in mind when raising a child at this age: What is going on inside the child is similar to when I meet an acquaintance on the street whom I remember. The feeling that arises when I encounter a person I knew in the past takes place at a level that is lowered into the subconscious when human being X, in their earthly existence—now in their physical-moral state—faces that impression. The child has a much stronger sense of this when something is taught to them: “This is something I already know.” The more you appeal to this feeling—that you actually want to convey something familiar to the child—the more you make the lesson vivid and imagery-rich for the child, because it has previously existed as a vivid image in the child’s own inner life, so that the child feels: “My own being lies within this image”; I understand this because it is something familiar to me”—the more you evoke this feeling, the more effectively you educate the child. The child does not yet have very pronounced specific likes and dislikes; but it has general likes and dislikes for everything in the earthly world that comes into contact with it. If you take into account that one thing is as appealing to the child as a dear friend is to me when I meet them again, or that another is as unappealing as someone who has slapped me is to me—if you take into account that such sympathies or antipathies exist, even if you assume this only hypothetically and act accordingly—then you have the right pedagogical approach.

[ 14 ] Then the child reaches sexual maturity; at this point, another significant change takes place within the child. The more general sympathies and antipathies take on a specific character; individual things become particularly valuable or worthless, but in a different way than before. This is because a person’s true destiny begins with sexual maturity. Before that, a person is more immersed in the general; they experience earthly life more as a good acquaintance. Now, however, once a person has reached sexual maturity, individual events approach them in such a way that they perceive them as part of their destiny. It is only when a person perceives life as a matter of destiny that it becomes, for them, true individual life. Therefore, if it is to unfold as a matter of destiny, what lies within the person from earlier times must also be brought to the surface once more. Everything I teach the child during their school years should initially be accepted on authority; if it is to become part of their destiny, it must resurface, it must be experienced individually. This is something we must take into account once again. — And with regard to moral concepts, the situation is such that we must lead the person to develop, before puberty, such a fondness for the good and such a distaste for the evil that later, when what they have developed there in sympathy and antipathy resurfaces in their soul, they themselves make these feelings of sympathy their own commandments and the feelings of antipathy into what they should refrain from doing. That is when a person experiences freedom within themselves. One does not experience freedom within oneself unless, before experiencing “You shall do this”—“You shall not do that,” one has first experienced—purely on an emotional level—a delight in what is good and a distaste for what is evil. Morality must be cultivated through feeling.

[ 15 ] With regard to religion, one should be clear that, until the time of the first set of permanent teeth, a person lives in a state of natural, instinctive religiosity. This natural aspect then recedes as the soul-spiritual emancipates itself from the physical; therefore, one must raise up into the soul-level that which the human being possessed in terms of natural religiosity. Only after a person has passed through sexual maturity can religious understanding truly begin. But what initially took place through imitation of the father or mother must later—once the spirit has emancipated itself—be transferred to the invisible, supersensible powers. In this way, what is inherent in the child actually develops gradually and concretely, not abstractly, from within the child itself. Nothing is imposed upon the child.

[ 16 ] You see, there’s a curious fact here. You can put it to the test. For all reasonably sensible people today—and almost everyone is sensible, I mean that in all seriousness—there’s nothing more to it than being sensible, being intellectually sensible, and being educated. But to educate the whole person—that is much more difficult. One need only look a little into the writings of people who, as reasonable people, write about education; one will always come across the statement: One should not impose something from the outside on a child, but rather bring to fruition what is already within them. —- Really, you read that everywhere; but how does one do that? That is what matters; it is not enough to have a general principle. Programmatic principles are cheap these days, but life in reality is what really counts. That is where we must arrive—to life in reality. Truly, for those who are able to live in reality, it is sometimes enough to drive one to despair when the full extent of the difficulty comes at them in such a threatening, dangerous way. Today, 30, 40, or 100 people can get together and write down, in individual paragraphs, what the best methods of education and instruction are, and set forth other requirements. I am convinced that in most cases, when such people come together, they come up with something quite sensible. I mean this without any irony, because our materialistic education has reached its peak. Founding associations and drawing up programs that are absolutely excellent—that is something you see everywhere today. But that accomplishes absolutely nothing. That is why the Waldorf School first came into being in such a way that there was no program, no set of demands—only children and teachers; that it took into account the individuality of every single child, but also the individuality of every single teacher. One must know the teachers. One can intelligently set out in paragraphs what teachers should do. But what matters is what the teacher is capable of. And to enable the teacher to develop everything of which he or she is capable, what is needed is not a set of educational principles, but a knowledge of human nature that engages with life itself, that revitalizes the whole being of the human person. The point is indeed that we must strive everywhere to truly foster development. But to do so, we must know where to look for what we wish to develop: we must link religious feeling and religious thought—later on—to the imitation characteristic of early childhood, and moral judgment to the second stage of childhood.

[ 17 ] But we must also fully take into account how the child, between the loss of baby teeth and puberty, is oriented toward the visual; we must seek something essential in the artistic element in education and instruction. Painting—and perhaps also sculpting and music—must truly be integrated in the right way, so that we develop them in every area based on the demands of the child’s very nature.

[ 18 ] But in other respects as well, we must present things to the child in a way that meets the needs of a child’s nature, not as our materialistic age dictates. Our materialistic age, for example, provides us with quite a good understanding of how to distinguish between different plants. But—one might say—a fundamental requirement for the teacher who is to educate children between the loss of their baby teeth and puberty is this: whatever science currently thinks about plants—how they are classified, categorized, and described—all of that must be set aside when dealing with a child of that age. One must raise the question here: Is a plant even a reality? Can a plant be understood in and of itself? — For that is simply not possible. If you find a strand of hair somewhere, you will not study how that strand of hair could have formed on its own. It must have been plucked from a person or fallen out. In terms of its reality, it is conceivable only in connection with the entire organism. A hair is nothing in and of itself; it cannot be understood in and of itself. It is a sin against the sense of reality to attempt to describe a hair in isolation. Likewise, it is a sin against the sense of reality to attempt to describe a plant in isolation. Although it may sound paradoxical at first: plants are the hair of the living earth. Just as you can only understand the structure of a strand of hair by considering and understanding the structure of the human head—indeed, the human organism as a whole—and how something like hair emerges from this overall structure; so, if you wish to teach a child botany, you must view the earth in the most intimate connection with the plant world. You must start with the soil when working with the child and evoke a mental image of the earth as a living being; just as a human being has hair, so the earth, as a living being, bears plants. Never view the plant in isolation from the soil; never show a child a plucked plant as something that is supposed to have reality, for it has no reality. A plant can no more exist without the soil than hair can exist without the organism. The essential thing is to evoke in the child, through instruction, the sense that this is indeed the case. When the child feels: “Here is the earth, shaped in such and such a way, and from this earth, shaped in such and such a way, the plant produces this or that flower”—when the child comes to feel at all: “The earth is a living organism”—then the child adopts the proper, reality-based attitude toward the earth, toward the entire earthly realm, whereas this can never be the case if one considers the plant in isolation from the earth. Then the child—as we can see through close observation of what is developing within the child—becomes capable, around the age of 10, of comprehending something like what I have just described in abstract terms. It must be transformed entirely into imagery. Until this age, we must clothe everything related to the plants that grow out of the Earth’s living organism in fairy tales, in images, and in legends. Only then must we move on to considering what is necessary for the human being to distinguish themselves from their surroundings. Until the age of nine, the child does not distinguish itself from its surroundings. It does not completely separate the “I” from its surroundings. Therefore, we must speak of plants as if they were little people or little angels, acting and feeling like humans; we must speak of animals in the same way; and we must speak of the separate, objective world only at a later age.

[ 19 ] But one must not jump so abruptly from one to the other. Rather, true reality—the living earth from which plants grow—has another counterpart: the animal kingdom. Isn’t it true that we view them by placing one animal next to another; those that are similar belong to a class, to an order, and so we arrange them side by side. At most, we might say that the more perfect ones have emerged from the less perfect ones, and so on. But in doing so, we fail to place human beings in any relationship to their surroundings. If one looks at animal forms with an open mind, it very quickly becomes clear that there is a difference between a lion and a cow. When one looks at a cow, one very quickly realizes: what we humans have specifically in our digestive system is developed in a one-sided way in the cow; the cow is entirely a digestive system, and the other organs are more or less rudimentary. That is why it is interesting—forgive me for mentioning this—to watch a cow digesting. As she lies there in the pasture, she digests with such enthusiasm, a physical enthusiasm; she is entirely digestion. Just look at her for a moment; you can literally see how the substances pass from the stomach into the other parts of her body. You can see from the cow’s contentment, from its inner being, how all this takes place. Look, on the other hand, at the lion. Don’t you have the feeling that if the heart were not prevented by the mind from exerting too much influence on the limbs, your heart would be as warm as the lion is? The lion is organized in such a way that it develops, on one side, the human chest structure; the rest is again merely accessory organs. And the birds: the bird is actually nothing but a head when we look at it. Everything else in it is atrophied; it is truly a head. And so we can see—I am presenting these somewhat vivid examples because they are vivid—that all kinds of animals embody a part of the human being in a one-sided way. Whatever is fully harmonized in human nature—where one aspect is developed in such a way that it is tempered and harmonized by the other—develops on its own in one animal or another. What would become of the human nose if it were not kept in check by the rest of the body! You find animals that have particularly highly developed nasal structures. What would become of the human mouth if it were to function on its own, if it were not tempered by the other organs! Thus, you will always find in animal forms the one-sided development of a certain aspect of the human being.

[ 20 ] This was well known even in ancient, instinctive wisdom; it has simply been forgotten in our materialistic age. At the beginning of the 19th century, echoes of this knowledge were still present; today we must rediscover it. Yes, for example, Oken—who, drawing on ancient tradition, had a sense that an animal form lives within every human organ—uttered the somewhat grotesque statement: What is the human tongue? The human tongue is an octopus. The octopus we find in the sea is a tongue developed on one side. — But within this lies something of what can truly become knowledge regarding the relationship between human beings and the vast animal world. It is certainly true that, when one frees it from the abstractness in which I have presented it—when one grasps it inwardly and shapes it into an image—it then connects in a wonderful way to the fables and tales of encounters with animals. Just as we used to tell children stories in which animals act like humans, we can now extend this concept to include the entire animal kingdom. There is a wonderfully beautiful transition here.

[ 21 ] We now see two kinds of feelings and sensations emerging in the child. One is evoked by the plant world. The child walks through meadows, fields, and farmland, looks at the plants, and thinks to itself: “There, beneath me, is the living earth, expressing itself through the plant world, which enchants me.” I am looking at something that exists outside of myself, something that belongs to the earth. Just as the child feels deep within that the plant world belongs to the earth—and that this corresponds to the reality of life—so, too, does the child feel deep within the true kinship of human beings to the animal kingdom, of human beings who are structured as the harmonization of the entire animal kingdom spread across the earth.

[ 22 ] Thus, the child perceives natural history as a relationship between itself and the world, as a relationship between the living earth and that which sprouts from it. Poetic feelings of imagination that lie dormant within the child are awakened; the child is truly integrated into the universe in accordance with his or her own sensibilities; and for children of this age, natural history also becomes something that leads to moral experiences.

[ 23 ] You see, it is indeed the case that pedagogy and didactics cannot consist of external technical rules, but must arise from a genuine understanding of human nature, which then evolves into a sense of being-in-the-world—a sense that, as a teacher and educator, one conveys to the child.

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Question and Answer

[ 24 ] I have also been asked a number of questions related to the points discussed:

Question: A listener would be very grateful to hear whether psychoanalysis can be used as a tool in schools.

[ 25 ] Well, I’ve been familiar with psychoanalysis more or less since its inception. It has its roots in its very beginnings under the influence of a very brilliant physician, with whom I was friends in the 1880s—Breuer; even though he withdrew from it after psychoanalysis had gone astray: its very beginnings stem from Breuer, who was a very significant physician. Psychoanalysis did not become what it would have become under Breuer; and so it has actually become—to put it briefly—what it was bound to become in the materialistic age. You see, the present age, the present civilization, has little appreciation for the true connection between mind, soul, and body—a connection that must be traced, as I have at least sketched out in one form or another in these lectures; and so it came to pass that those who do see how the soul is related to the body arrived at some very peculiar interpretations.

[ 26 ] The following example, which you can read in a book by the witty Schleich, may illustrate just how difficult it is to say the right thing here. I had already heard this story before the book was published and had discussed it with Schleich. Schleich was once visited late in the afternoon by a gentleman who, shortly before, had pricked his hand with an ink-covered pen in his office, causing him a slight pain in his hand. When the man saw that he had a black mark there, he immediately ran to the doctor, saying he was going to die of blood poisoning that very day; the doctor had to amputate his hand at once. The doctor said, “You won’t die from the wound; I’ll suck the pus out of it—it’s nothing serious.” — The doctor sucked the pus out of the wound; the man left feeling utterly despondent, ran to two renowned surgeons, and told them they had to amputate his hand, or else he would die. They wouldn’t do it either. So he went to several more; none of them would do it. Schleich did begin to feel uneasy, however, and stopped by again that evening. The man kept insisting that the hand had to be amputated, or else he would die of blood poisoning. But the hand looked perfectly fine—the wound had been drained—so there was nothing Schleich could do; he couldn’t amputate it. The next morning, Schleich grew restless and rang the doorbell: the man in question had indeed died during the night. Well, Schleich’s diagnosis: death by autosuggestion. He concluded: A person can die from autosuggestion if he imagines it strongly enough.

[ 27 ] Schleich was unable to see the truth. The entire incident did not happen the way he described it; rather, it happened as follows: I would like to add that the body was autopsied to determine whether there was blood poisoning. There was no question of blood poisoning. That afternoon, the man experienced some sort of condition—an internal condition—that degenerated into something resembling a stroke. It was a stroke that was developing. He became anxious, so much so that he carried out the tasks he was accustomed to performing while in that state. Under the impression of what was approaching, he had already jabbed himself in the hand with a pen. Now, there is such a thing as a certain kind of unconscious prophecy. The man knew that he would die that night; in his subconscious, he knew it. He misinterpreted his own subconscious. He took the external fact of the prick as the cause. But that is only the effect of the cause of death that was already present within him. And so what we have here is not death by autosuggestion, but a very natural death that was merely prophetically foreseen, and whose prophetic foreboding was misinterpreted.

[ 28 ] I cite this as an example to show that, when interpreting the psyche, cause and effect are very often confused. For example, I once encountered a case in which a man climbed a tree to pick cherries or plums. He fell and died. Now, in this case, one might think that death was the result of the fall. But that was not the case. He fell from the tree because he suffered a fatal stroke while up in the tree. Any layperson would have concluded that he fell and sustained fatal injuries in the process. This happens constantly when the soul is being assessed, because there is no observation of the soul-spiritual in the present moment. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish where the soul-spiritual begins and the physical-bodily ends. Instead of understanding how the soul-spiritual continues to influence the physical-bodily—resulting in something like an overly intense and transformed memory impression that manifests in the physical body—psychoanalysis talks about all sorts of psychological nonsense, about sex life, about half-baked life perspectives, and so on. Thus, psychoanalysis is, I would say, a twofold form of dilettantism. It is dilettantish because it lacks a genuine psychology, and dilettantish because it lacks a genuine physiology. Because psychoanalysis can no longer draw the correct conclusions—neither with regard to the psychological nor with regard to the physiological—that is why, for those who understand these matters, psychoanalysis—isn’t that so?—is nothing but the application of psycho- and physio-dilettantism everywhere—dilettantism that multiplies upon itself, that is, dilettantism squared. You see, observations in the field of psychoanalysis can, under certain circumstances, become very valuable if they are interpreted correctly, as I have demonstrated with an example I heard myself.

Another question concerns Coué's teachings.

[ 29 ] Well, it is indeed significant that things like Couéism have such a strong influence on our contemporaries. The fact is that, of course, one can achieve certain things by practicing such procedures as those of Coué and others. But first of all, practicing such procedures usually robs people of their freedom, and second, one must be clear about how long it takes to deceive people in this way regarding their illness. Illness is not so superficial that healing can be achieved so superficially.

Question regarding Count Keyserling's Darmstadt movement, the “School of Wisdom.”

[ 30 ] Since I was once forced to refute falsehoods about myself that Count Keyserling had put forward, and since this was received with such wisdom, I would like to treat him as I always treat all other movements: I have a habit of not really speaking about other movements. Those close to anthroposophy will have always noticed that, as long as these other movements do not need to be rejected in any way—because they themselves are attacking anthroposophy—I do not speak about them. That which is to live in the world as truth must assert itself through its own powers, not through its relationship to other movements. And anthroposophy, which seeks to be comprehensive rather than one-sided, must also assert itself through what lies within it. I would like to leave it up to each individual to decide for themselves what to think of Count Keyserling’s School of Wisdom.