Under such conditions, it is all too clear that resort to psychoanalysis for purposes of therapy, this being the usual reason for its employment, cannot but be extremely dangerous for those who undergo it, and even to those who apply it, for they are concerned with things that can never be handled with impunity; it would not be taking an exaggerated view to see in this one of the means specially brought into play in order to increase to the greatest possible extent the disequilibrium of the modern world and to lead it on toward final dissolution.[141] Those who practice such methods are on the other hand without doubt convinced of the benefits afforded by the results they obtain; theirs is however the very delusion that makes the diffusion of these methods possible, and it marks the real difference subsisting between the intentions of the ‘practitioners’ and the intentions of the will that presides over the work in which the practitioners only collaborate blindly. In fact, the only effect of psychoanalysis must be to bring to the surface, by making it fully conscious, the whole content of those lower depths of the being that can properly be called the ‘sub-conscious’; moreover, the individual concerned is already psychologically weak by hypothesis, for if he were otherwise he would experience no need to resort to treatment of this description; he is by so much the less able to resist ‘subversion’, and he is in grave danger of foundering irremediably in the chaos of dark forces thus imprudently let loose; even if he manages in spite of everything to escape, he will at least retain throughout the rest of his life an imprint like an ineradicable ‘stain’ within himself.
Someone may raise an objection here, based on a supposed analogy with the ‘descent into hell’ as is met with in the preliminary phases of the initiatic journey; but any such assimilation is completely false, for the two aims have nothing in common, nor have the conditions of the ‘subject’ in the two cases; there can be no question of anything other than a profane parody, and that idea alone is enough to impart to the whole affair a somewhat disturbing suggestion of ‘counterfeit’. The truth is that this supposed ‘descent into hell’, which is not followed by any ‘re-ascent’, is quite simply a ‘fall into the mire’, as it is called according to the symbolism of some of the ancient Mysteries. It is known that this ‘mire’ was figuratively represented as the road leading to Eleusis, and that those who fell into it were profane people who claimed initiation without being qualified to receive it, and so were only the victims of their own imprudence. It may be mentioned that such ‘mires’ really exist in the macrocosmic as well as in the microcosmic order; this is directly connected with the question of the ‘outer darkness’,[142] and certain relevant Gospel texts could be recalled, the meaning of which agrees exactly with what has just been explained. In the ‘descent into hell’ the being finally exhausts certain inferior possibilities in order to be able to rise thereafter to superior states; in the ‘fall into the mire’ on the other hand, the inferior possibilities take possession of him, dominate him, and end by submerging him completely.
There was occasion in the previous paragraph again to use the word ‘counterfeit’; the impression it conveys is greatly strengthened by some other considerations, such as the denaturing of symbolism previously mentioned, and the same kind of denaturing tends to spread to everything that contains any element of a ‘supra-human’ order, as is shown by the attitude adopted toward religion,[143] and toward doctrines of a metaphysical and initiatic order such as Yoga. Even these last do not escape this new kind of interpretation, which is carried to such a point that some proceed to assimilate the methods of spiritual ‘realization’ to the therapeutical procedures of psychoanalysis. This is something even worse than the cruder deformations also current in the West, such as those in which the methods of Yoga are seen as a sort of ‘physical culture’ or as therapeutic methods of a purely physiological kind, for their very crudity makes such deformations less dangerous than those that appear in a more subtle guise. The subtler kind are the more dangerous not simply because they are liable to lead astray minds on which the less subtle could obtain no hold; they are certainly dangerous for that reason, but there is another reason affecting a much wider field, identical with that which has been described as making the materialistic conception less dangerous than conceptions involving recourse to an inferior psychism. Of course the purely spiritual aim, which alone constitutes the essentiality of Yoga as such, and without which the very use of the word becomes a mere absurdity, is no less completely unrecognized in the one case than in the other. Yoga is in fact no more a kind of psychic therapy than it is a kind of physiological therapy, and its methods are in no way and in no degree a treatment for people who are in any way ill or unbalanced; very far from that, they are on the contrary intended exclusively for those who must from the start and in their own natural dispositions be as perfectly balanced as possible if they are to realize the spiritual development which is the only object of the methods; but all these matters, as will readily be understood, are strictly linked up with the whole question of initiatic qualification.[144]
But this is not yet all, for one other thing under the heading of ‘counterfeit’ is perhaps even more worthy of note than anything mentioned so far, and that is the requirement imposed on anyone who wants to practise psychoanalysis as a profession of being first ‘psychoanalyzed’ himself. This implies above all a recognition of the fact that the being who has undergone this operation is never again the same as he was before, in other words, to repeat an expression already used above, it leaves in him an ineradicable imprint, as does initiation, but as it were in an opposite sense, for what is here in question is not a spiritual development, but the development of an inferior psychism. In addition, there is an evident imitation of the initiatic transmission; but, bearing in mind the difference in the nature of the influences that intervene, and in view of the fact that the production of an effective result does not allow the practice to be regarded as nothing but a mere pretence without real significance, the psycho-analytic transmission is really more comparable to the transmission effected in a domain such as that of magic, or even more accurately that of sorcery. And there remains yet another very obscure point concerning the actual origin of the transmission: it is obviously impossible to give to anyone else what one does not possess oneself, and moreover the invention of psychoanalysis is quite recent; so from what source did the first psychoanalysts obtain the ‘powers’ that they communicate to their disciples, and by whom were they themselves ‘psychoanalyzed’ in the first place? To ask this question is only logical, at least for anyone capable of a little reflection, though it is probably highly indiscreet, and it is more than doubtful whether a satisfactory answer will ever be obtained; but even without any such answer this kind of psychic transmission reveals a truly sinister ‘mark’ in the resemblances it calls to mind: from this point of view psychoanalysis presents a rather terrifying likeness to certain ‘sacraments of the devil’.
35
The Confusion of the Psychic and the Spiritual
The account given above, dealing with some of the psychological explanations that have been applied to traditional doctrines, covers only a particular case of a confusion that is very widespread in the modern world, namely, the confusion of the psychic and the spiritual domains. Even when it is not carried to such a point as to produce a subversion like that of psychoanalysis, this confusion assimilates the spiritual to all that is most inferior in the psychic order; it is therefore extremely serious in every case. In a sense it follows as a natural result of the fact that Westerners have for a very long time past no longer known how to distinguish the ‘soul’ from the ‘spirit’ (Cartesian dualism being to a great extent responsible for this, merging as it does into one and the same category everything that is not the body, and designating this one vague and ill-defined category indifferently by either name); and the confusion never ceases to be apparent even in current language: the word ‘spirits’ is popularly used for psychic entities that are anything but ‘spiritual’, and the very name ‘spiritualism’ is derived from that usage; this mistake, together with another consisting in using the word ‘spirit’ for something that is really only mental, will be enough by way of example for the present. It is all too easy to see the gravity of the consequences of any such state of affairs: anyone who propagates this confusion, whether intentionally or otherwise and especially under present conditions, is setting beings on the road to getting irremediably lost in the chaos of the ‘intermediary world’, and thereby, though often unconsciously, playing the game of the ‘satanic’ forces that rule over what has been called the ‘counter-initiation’.
141
Another example of such means is furnished by the comparable employment of ‘radiaesthesia’, for in this case also psychic elements of the same quality very often come into play, though it must be admitted that they do not appear under the ‘hideous’ aspect that is so conspicuous in psychoanalysis.
142
The reader may be referred here to what has been said earlier about the symbolism of the ‘Great Wall’ and of the mountain
143
Freud devoted a book specially to the psychoanalytical interpretation of religion, in which his own conceptions are combined with the ‘totemism’ of the ‘sociological school’.
144
On an attempt to apply psychoanalytical theories to the Taoist doctrine, which is of the same order as