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Review
Among the books discussed in this essay
The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their
Influence on Nazi Ideology; The Ariosophists of Austria
and Germany, 1890-1935
by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
New York University Press, 293 pp., $15.95 (paper)
The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement
by Richard Noll
Princeton University Press, 387 pp., $27.95
Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification
by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, translated by Kirby Olson, in
collaboration with Xavier Callahan
Routledge, 144 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Madame Blavatsky's Baboon: A History of the Mystics,
Mediums, and Misfits Who Brought Spiritualism to America
by Peter Washington
Schocken Books, 470 pp., $14.00
1.
With the publication in 1995 of Peter Washington's admirable
study Madame Blavatsky's Baboon,[1] readers now at
last have access to a judicious as well as an entertaining
account of Theosophy, a late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century
movement that conjoined religious syncretism to esotericism
on the one hand and liberal idealism on the other. The Theosophical
Society was created in 1875 by Henry Steel Olcott and Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky, who exerted a charismatic sway over
converts until her death in 1891. In England, the United
States, and India as well as elsewhere, Washington shows,
Theosophy generated much bizarre metaphysics, absurd pomp,
and petty factionalism, but it also exerted a surprisingly
invigorating effect within the lives of many adherents.
And its political influence, too, appears to have been largely
benign; Theosophy allied itself not just with moralizing
personal betterment but also with pacific internationalism
and the self-determination of colonized "natives."
Or so the indigenous activists were at first led to believe.
But as they sooner or later discovered, Theosophy was never
meant to be a catalyst of revolution. Madame Blavatsky had
no taste for violence or even for social disorder, and her
anti-imperialism was so flimsy and opportunistic that at
different times she volunteered to serve as both a British
and a Russian spy.[2] And more generally, Theosophy sent
the world a mixed message about human equality-a contradiction,
we might say, between brotherhood and "the Brotherhood,"
those distant Mahatmas who allegedly served as deputies
of the Rulers of the Universe and who deigned to communicate
telepathically only with the top level of Theosophical initiates.
As Washington observes, furthermore, the emergence from
Central Asian obscurity of the conflict-thirsty G.I. Gurdjieff
during World War I suggested, however faintly, a potential
opening of Theosophy toward the militant right. In practice,
to be sure, Gurdjieff remained a one-man movement and took
little interest in the great powers and their bloodbaths.
Indeed, whether he found himself in the turmoil of revolutionary
Russia or in Nazi-occupied Paris, he showed a notable talent
for placating whichever Caesar happened to be ruling at
the moment. But Washington perceptively glimpses an affinity
between Gurdjieffian cruelty and the ethos of purgative
primitivism that led D.H. Lawrence among others-and the
later Yeats could have been mentioned in the same connection-to
flirt with proto-fascist authoritarianism as an alternative
to bourgeois soul-death.
Nor should we ever be surprised when occultism does link
arms with reactionary ideologies. Sooner or later, the gnostic
habit of thought battens upon vitalism, the belief in a
life force that cries out to be unshackled from convention.
And fascist doctrine stands ready to give vitalism a nationalistic
and nostalgic twist: we must inhale the spirit of our warrior
ancestors, who knew no democratic legalism and harbored
no pity for the unfit and the foreign.
As it happens, this is something more than a theoretical
scenario. If we retrace our steps to the 1880s and follow
the vogue of Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine (1888) not
in England or America but in Germany, we encounter a sinister
and portentous counter-history that rates only a passing
footnote in Madame Blavatsky's Baboon and no mention
at all in books by esoteric devotees. Astonishingly, the
most hellish of all totalitarian ideologies, Nazism, bore
more than a casual relationship to ideas of Blavatsky's
that she had promulgated with a very different politics
in mind.
The second volume of The Secret Doctrine featured
an evolutionary myth about our planet's seven "root-races,"
five of which had already made their successive debuts.
Humanity, Blavatsky revealed, had declined to a spiritual
nadir with race number four but was now on the rise again,
as our own fifth root-race worked its way toward superior
incarnations that would eventually produce the god-men of
root-race seven. Our ancestors' greatest disgrace, furthermore,
was thought to have occurred when the slimy Lemurians of
root-race four had interbred with still lower creatures.
And although that fateful miscegenation had occurred eons
before the Theosophical Society began preaching racial harmony,
the chief magi who dispensed wisdom to Blavatsky by thought
transference from Asia, Koot Hoomi and Morya, had allegedly
disclosed to her colleague A.P. Sinnett that one "sub-race"
within the fifth root-race-namely, the Aryan-possessed the
highest spiritual potentiality.
Of course, Theosophical notions about race hadn't been flashed
directly from heaven or even from Tibet. They were related,
however loosely, to academically fashionable inquiries into
the origins of modern languages, myths, and religions by
such scholars as Jakob Grimm, August Schleicher, and Max
Müller. Comparative linguistics appeared to show that
a primordial ethnic group-often designated by that same
name, Aryan-spoke the tongue from which every later Indo-European
strain derived. And parallel investigations of folk tales
and belief systems also yielded family trees, suggesting
that modern cultural divergence, with all its potential
for fatal scapegoating, was less a matter of geography and
tradition than of persistent, indeed ineradicable, hereditary
traits. Much Victorian academic discourse thus tended toward
racist stereotyping, even before Darwinian theory inadvertently
exacerbated matters by supplying a biological dimension
to the game of invidious classification. With the advent
of Social Darwinism, people who already felt that Africans,
Chinese, and Jews were throwback types, and who correspondingly
regarded their own Caucasian race as humanity's advancing
edge, could couch their prejudices in the idiom of natural
selection.
Such was the volatile climate into which Blavatsky's insouciantly
improvised theology, history, and anthropology were launched.
For a few years, to be sure, her influence looked harmless
enough. When, with Olcott's assistance, the first German
Theosophical Society was founded in 1884, its initial appeal
was felt mainly by members of the left-liberal Lebensreform
movement, who were typically fond of rural communes, vegetarianism,
alternative medicine, nudism, and the like. But as Nicholas
Goodrick-Clarke shows in his fine 1985 study, The Occult
Roots of Nazism, Theosophy was to make its strongest
impact on the völkisch right, which was nationalistic,
hierarchical, authoritarian, racist, and obsessed with modern
degeneracy from an ideal past that had supposedly been ruled
by Aryans in the narrower Teutonic sense of the term.
The Secret Doctrine needed only minor revision to
be accepted as a liberating gospel by radically reactionary
"Ariosophists"-Austrian and German followers of
Guido von List (1848-1919) and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels
(1874-1954), who in the years before the Great War began
prophesying what Goodrick-Clarke calls "a coming era
of German world rule." Like Blavatsky, the Ariosophists
despised the Church, which they regarded as having empowered
a sickly underclass and as having hijacked and corrupted
a Germanic sun-worshiping cult that deserved to be revived
as such. Blavatsky's fancy that humans had descended from
gods became serviceable when it was scaled down to include
only people of a certain lineage. As for her secret brotherhood,
it found an exact counterpart in the German esotericists'
posited corps of ancient Aryan man-spirits known as Armanen.
And her idea of race mixing as the root of decadence struck
a responsive chord in thinkers who were unsure of their
own social credentials, eager to find an all-purpose explanation
for the troubles of modernity, and vexed by the close Central
European presence of Slavs and Jews, who impressed them
as being ever more numerous, alien, and controlling.
The Occult Roots of Nazism traces the path by which
Ariosophists, who were more interested in nostalgic gestures
than in day-to-day politics, passed along their myths and
symbols to more militant anti-Semitic and nationalist organizations,
which in turn lent inspiration to the Nazi party after the
bitter debacle of World War I. Among the symbols thus transmitted,
none stirred more emotion than the swastika, which Blavatsky
herself had helped to raise to prominence, incorporating
it into the very seal of the Theosophical Society. Originally
an Eastern sign of fertility and fortune, that emblem meant
for Blavat-sky's followers the spinning electro-spiritual
force by whose means the Sons of God and their executive
agent, Fohat, set and kept our universe in motion.
By the time that Hitler personally put his finishing touches
on the Nazi emblem, Ariosophists had long since identified
the swastika with a Teutonic rune whose meaning, it was
thought, had been rendered inaccessible for millennia thanks
to the supplanting of Aryans by inferior races. Hitler placed
the swastika within a red field signifying the purity of
Aryan blood and, within that, a white disk that stood for
the sun. But the swastika itself still meant roughly what
it had conveyed to Blavatsky, the principle of sun-based
holy energy. Simply, that principle had now become the property
of a single culture. For a fervent Hitlerite, to contemplate
the Nazi flag was to be mystically transported into the
Ur-German heroic past-and, not incidentally, to harden one's
heart against groups that were disqualified by ancestry
from an intuitive rapport with Wotan worship and its runes.
Goodrick-Clarke is scrupulously reluctant to conclude that
the various lodges and orders of occult German nationalism
directly produced the Nazi phenomenon. It is true that Heinrich
Himmler retained his own private occultist and allowed him
to develop much of the symbolic bric-a-brac of the initiatory,
blood-conscious, mystery-minded SS. But as Goodrick-Clarke
stresses, Hitler was from the outset a modernizer and a
mass-party man; he ordered the lodges closed as soon as
he took power, while mobilizing for his own ends the völkisch
and xenophobic sentiment that Ariosophists had cultivated
in a more backward-looking spirit. What Teutonic occultism
offered the Third Reich, then, was chiefly a set of metaphors
and legends that blended into a psychologically potent cocktail
of resentment, pride, and longing for a homogeneous martial
state. The eclectic, self-amused, live-and-let-live Blavatsky
would have been appalled by what she had accidentally set
in motion.
Even so, we should not overlook the broad epistemic likeness
between Theosophical dreamers and the ideologues who smoothed
the way for the terroristic Nazi state. The common factor
was their shared rejection of rational empiricism. By pretending
that reliable knowledge can be obtained through such means
as clairvoyant trances and astrological casting, the original
Theosophists encouraged their German colleagues to "uncover"
in prehistory just what they pleased; and the resultant
myth of how Aryan hegemony was broken by quasi-simian races
formed a template for the infectious post-World War I story
of betrayal by Jewish materialists and the vindictive Allies.
The whole visionary apparatus-the vitalistic sun cult, the
mystic brotherhood, the pygmy usurpers, the lost ancient
continents, the millennial cycles, even the idea of a conspiracy
by a cabalistic "Great International Party" of
diabolical antitraditionalists-was already there in The
Secret Doctrine. There needed only a specific historical
grudge and a fevered demagogue to set in motion the march
toward paranoid eugenics and actual extermination of the
"polluting" social elements.
2.
We need to remind ourselves, after such an example, that
esoterically acquired convictions are not always and everywhere
a menace. In a stable democracy such as our own, manifest
occultism tends to produce more amusement than terror. And,
in fact, a direct line of descent connects Theosophy to
an array of ludicrous and generally harmless New Age practices
that now surround us, from astrology, crystal gazing, homeopathy,
and pyramid power to Wicca nature worship, prophecy, channeling,
past-life regression, goddess theology, belief in extraterrestrial
visitation, and obeisance to self-designated gurus and ascended
masters. (Indeed, two of Blavatsky's own Masters have reappeared
in person, ageless and helpful as ever, in the Great White
Brotherhood that is said to guide our American contemporary
Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a k a Guru Ma.) Although one can
agree with Carl Sagan's contention, in his recent book The
Demon-Haunted World, that such fads reflect a popular
revolt against science and a lamentable resurgence of superstition,
it would be perverse to mention them in the same breath
with Nazi ideology.[3]
Sagan does, however, single out one occult atavism that
can bear deadly consequences: it is the psychotherapeutic
practice, which I addressed in these pages two years ago,
of persuading clients that their neurotic symptoms derive
from repressed or dissociated memories of childhood sexual
abuse and torture.[4] Just what that practice has to do
with occultism may not be evident to every reader. But as
Sagan remarks, the trancelike state in which patients typically
"retrieve memories" of previously unsuspected
traumas brands recovered memory therapy as a modern variant
of spiritualism; and that connection is only strengthened
by the not infrequent "remembering" of subjection
to devil-worshiping cults.
Sagan's point needs to be placed in a broader historical
and conceptual frame, however, if the manifestly silly conjuring
of Satanic "memories" is not to be mistaken for
a rare departure from a therapeutic tradition that otherwise
stands above reproach. Although many tend to assume that
psychotherapy rests on authenticated discoveries about the
mind, the talking cure was actually born in a climate of
occultism, retained its gnostic affinities in the anni
mirabili of its modern flowering, and has yet to make
an altogether clean break from those affinities. Contemporary
therapists who are struggling to render their profession
more accountable to ethical and empirical norms may not
realize it, but they are at war with an irrationalist legacy
that deserves to be identified as such.
As several scholars have established in increasingly convincing
detail, the key thinkers who pointed therapy toward the
retrieval of forgotten trauma-Charcot, Janet, Breuer, and
Freud-were deeply if indirectly indebted to a parlor healer,
theorist of the paranormal, and proto-Theosophist, Franz
Anton Mesmer, who enjoyed an enormous vogue in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.[5] Not coincidentally,
this was the same Mesmer who triggered the American and
European craze of spiritualism, which in turn provided the
young Helena Blavatsky with her livelihood as a medium.
Thus Theosophy and psychotherapy share a key forebear-one
who had written his medical thesis on planetary influences
and who inspired the founding of a quasi-Masonic, symbol-mongering
"Society of Harmony" that declared the human race
to be capable of registering mystic sympathies with every
cranny of the universe.
The theatrical Mesmer, clad in a robe emblazoned with Rosicrucian
alchemical signs, had "magnetized" people who
would later be classified as hysterics, supposedly redirecting
their warped fields of electrochemical energy into wholesome
channels. Like his institutionally sanctioned counterparts
a century later, he put many of his subjects into hypnotic
trances and provoked "crises" that were considered
prerequisite to cure; and like them, he placed truth value
on the "information" that was thus speciously
fed back to him from his own suggestions. And so did his
immediate followers the Marquis de Puységur and the
Chevalier de Barberin, who turned Mesmerism directly into
the modern therapeutic path by minimizing the importance
of imagined magnetic fluid and emphasizing instead both
the psychic attunement of the healer to the patient's hidden
illness and the providing of advice about everyday problems
and relationships.
Jonathan Miller has traced the steps whereby medical and
scientific thinkers gradually stripped Mesmerism of its
occult trappings, reducing it to mere hypnosis and thus
preparing the way for recognition of nonconscious mental
functioning.[6] As Miller emphasizes, the resultant "unconscious,"
corresponding to "the processes which are integral
to memory, perception, and behavior," has little in
common with the custodial and repressive Freudian unconscious,
whose twentieth-century sway among theoreticians actually
retarded the development of cogni-tive psychology as we
now know it. The psychoanalytic unconscious, too, ultimately
derived from Mesmerism, but from its subsequently discredited
side-that is, from the unsustainable claim that hypnotic
states bring to expression reliably veridical memories that
must therefore have been stuffed away in some normally forbidden
corner of the psyche.
In the practice of Mesmerism, the news that came back from
hypnotized subjects tended to be reports of time travel
and spirit contacts. Hence Mesmer's vogue among esotericists
and his disrepute among the more secular-minded. His nineteenth-century
medical avatars aimed lower, but they fell victim to his
key fallacy of mistaking mere suggestibility for telltale
evidence of buried trauma. Hypnotized subjects can produce
quite real physical manifestations that arise entirely from
compliance with the hypnotist's wishes. Overlooking that
key fact, Charcot and his followers ingenuously accepted
the symptomatology of "hysteria" as it was acted
out under the influence of hypnotic collusion. As Mikkel
Borch-Jacobsen puts it in a groundbreaking new book, Remembering
Anna O., the eventual hypothesis of the dynamic, repressing
unconscious "was (and is) simply an end run around
the hypothesis of simulation, by way of arguing that the
hysteric's right hand doesn't know (or forgets, or represses)
what the left hand is doing."[7]
Borch-Jacobsen shows that Josef Breuer's "Anna O."
case of 1880-1882-the fountainhead of all modern "cures"
through memory retrieval-involved an especially egregious
instance of such misinterpretation. Like other talented
"hysterics" who honed suffering into a full-time
reproach to family members and to a misogynistic social
order, Bertha Pappenheim specialized in histrionics that
were probably both inspired and amplified by hypnotism.
Her symptoms largely reproduced the tics and convulsions
that had been featured, just months before she began consulting
Breuer, in sensational and much-discussed Viennese stage
demonstrations of Mesmeric power by one Carl Hansen. And
far from being permanently removed by Breuer's treatment,
as Breuer and Freud would later deceptively maintain, most
of those symptoms sprang up within the treatment, were rewarded
with habituating doses of morphine and chloral hydrate that
had been meant to alleviate a very real facial neuralgia,
and partook of a doctor-patient folie à deux that
would end only when, pressed to do so by his neglected wife,
Breuer abandoned the fruitless "cure."
At that point Pappenheim, half in spite and half in self-reproach,
ventured to assert that she had been simulating afflictions
from the outset. If so, Breuer's much-vaunted ability to
banish individual symptoms by encouraging her to talk about
them becomes all too readily understandable. What we know
for certain is that Pappenheim had stage-managed the course
of treatment, which involved the hypnotic and autohypnotic
production of fantasies and hallucinations to which she
herself ascribed a purgative effect. The Anna O. case thus
resembled, in Henri Ellenberger's words, "the great
exemplary cases of magnetic illness in the first half of
the nineteenth century….in which the patient dictated
to the physician the therapeutic devices he had to use,
prophesied the course of the illness, and announced its
terminal date."[8] In a word, the founding example
of modern psychotherapy was just another instance of Mesmerism
in the chatty mode of Puységur and Barberin.
From the mid-1880s through the early Nineties, Freud himself
was renowned in Vienna as a suggestive healer. His practice
then rested squarely on the use of hypnosis-a tool he would
later sheepishly characterize as borderline "mystical"[9]
-to allay tumultuous emotional crises and induce supposedly
cathartic memories. Some of his medical colleagues suggested
that neither the memories nor the cures were authentic-a
conclusion that Freud himself eventually embraced, but not
before contracting a permanent fondness for the repression
etiology of neurosis. Tellingly, when Freud and Breuer broached
their theory of hypnotically deciphered hysteria in 1893,
its earliest favorable recognition came from a paranormal
enthusiast and a founder of the Society for Psychical Research,
F.W.H. Myers.[10] The same society would later welcome Freud
as a corresponding member (Jones, 3:397).
As Peter J. Swales recounts, the children of Freud's most
important patient in that period, Anna von Lieben (the "Frau
Cäcilie M." of Studies on Hysteria), detested
him as "'der Zau-berer,' 'the magician,' come
to put their mother into a trance yet again and to accompany
her through her fits of ravings, screamings, and long declamatory
speeches."[11] Freud kept the immensely wealthy Anna's
treatment going, without any discernible benefit on her
side, for five years, often with twice-daily sessions.[12]
Interestingly, Anna was already a morphine addict, and Freud
had no hesitation about feeding her habit. Indeed, that
was his regular means of bringing her eruptions to subsidence.
As Swales observes, the key insights that this inventive
"hysteric," whom Freud repeatedly called his "teacher,"
gave him into repressed trauma, dream interpretation, sexual
fantasy, transference, the conversion of ideas into symptoms,
and cathartic "abreaction" were all contaminated
not just by hypnotic suggestion but by Anna's chronically
doped and dependent state-a factor that is never directly
mentioned, much less duly weighed, in Freud's fragments
of her case history in Studies on Hysteria.
The later abandonment of hypnosis by Freud and others by
no means immunized psychotherapy against such epistemic
folly; it merely rendered the question-begging effect of
clinical suggestion harder for either the practitioner or
the patient to recognize. Freud himself likened his "pressure
technique"-the next method he used to extract the desired
kind of memories-to both hypnotism and crystal gazing (SE,
2:271). And he candidly observed that his final and supposedly
objective tool of free association also produced a state
that "bears some analogy to…falling asleep-and
no doubt also to hypnosis" (SE, 4:102). As Borch-Jacobsen
emphasizes in a significant new article, psychoanalysis
never did adopt precautions against the visionary generation
and misconstrual of pseudomemories.[13]
Moreover, a gnostic tendency lay at the very heart of analytic
work as the mature Freud conceived it. In drawing on a privately
determined symbology to assign thematic meanings to dreams,
associations, errors, and symptoms (productions that can
easily be taken to signify anything whatsoever), and then
in leaping inferentially from those arbitrary interpretations
to putative childhood "scenes" that had to be
"recalled" or at least acknowledged if a cure
was to occur, classical analysis didn't just resemble divination;
it was the very thing itself.[14] And in this light, Freud's
lifelong paranormal sympathies-almost always treated as
a minor biographical curiosity-deserve to be considered
an integral part of the record.
As Ernest Jones's otherwise flattering biography concedes
in its startling chapter entitled "Occultism,"
Freud displayed "an exquisite oscillation between skepticism
and credulity" where occult topics were concerned (Jones,
3:375). The expressions of doubt, however, were partly diplomatic
and partly aimed at holding in check an embarrassing affinity
for "the uncanny" and "the omnipotence of
thoughts." Freud engaged in magical propitiatory acts
and tested the power of soothsayers; he confided to Jones
his belief in "clairvoyant visions of episodes at a
distance" and "visitations from departed spirits"
(Jones, 3:381); and he even arranged a séance of
his own with his family members and three other analysts.
He also practiced another hermetic art, numerology, attaching
fated meaning to certain room, telephone, and ticket numbers
and uncritically accepting such bizarre fancies as Wilhelm
Fliess's assertion that the day of a woman's death ought
to coincide with the onset of her daughter's menstrual period.
Nor, though he and Fliess fell out at the turn of our century,
did he ever renounce his allegiance to such notions.
Perhaps most significantly, Freud was strongly attracted
to mental telepathy, an unconfirmed paranormal phenomenon
which, though it needn't be linked to manifestly occult
beliefs and practices, nevertheless entails the very power
that Madame Blavatsky and others touted as their pipeline
to Theosophical wisdom. Jones himself was barely able to
dissuade Freud from publishing a credulous paper of 1921
entitled "Psycho-analysis and Telepathy" (SE,
18:177-193). But Freud, who plainly told his inner circle
of his "conversion to telepathy" (Jones, 3:394),
could not be altogether hushed.
In a 1922 paper called "Dreams and Telepathy,"
Freud tried to assume a neutral pose but let slip an affirmation
of "the incontestable fact that sleep creates favourable
conditions for telepathy" (SE, 18:219). In a 1925 paper
on "The Occult Significance of Dreams," he speculated
that a telepathic message might make itself known only by
being incorporated into a dream (SE, 19:138). And in a chapter
of his 1933 New Introductory Lectures entitled "Dreams
and Occultism," he analyzed one such dream containing
news that, he suspected, had traveled telepathically between
a father and a distant daughter (SE, 22:31-56). He even
surmised, as Blavatsky had done before him, that telepathy
had been our "original, archaic method of communication
between individuals" (SE, 22:55).[15]
In his 1921 paper, Freud noted that both telepathy and psychoanalysis
meet with disbelief from learned skeptics but appeal to
a folk sense of uncanny causality, and he expressed solidarity
with what he called "the obscure but indestructible
surmises of the common people against the obscurantism of
educated opinion" (SE, 18:178). He went even further
in "Dreams and Occultism," declaring, "It
would seem to me that psycho-analysis, by inserting the
unconscious between what is physical and what was previously
called 'psychical,' has paved the way for the assumption
of such processes as telepathy" (SE, 22:55). And having
decoded to his satisfaction the telepathic dream I have
already mentioned, he admitted that "it is only the
interpretation of the dream that has shown us that
it was a telepathic one: psycho-analysis has revealed a
telepathic event which we should not otherwise have discovered"
(SE, 22:38).
Now, believing in telepathy is by no means the same thing
as subscribing to the existence of an astral plane; Freud
was no Theosophist. On the contrary, by expanding his sense
of what the mind can discern on its own and of what two
minds can accomplish at a distance, he hoped to forestall
any need to invoke the supernatural within his "science."
But that science itself rested largely on conclusions gleaned
uncritically from fantasy-producing trance states-and not
just from those of drugged and hypnotized patients like
Bertha Pappenheim and Anna von Lieben. There was also Freud's
own cocaine-aided "self-analysis," a rash of visions
supposedly granting him access to memories from the earliest
years of his life-memories that, in fact, his undeveloped
brain would have been incapable of storing at all, much
less of preserving for decades in pristine form. Without
such self-telepathy, as it were, we would never have learned
about the parricidal and incestuous urges that secretly
tyrannize every human mind.
Freud's sense that unconscious power can annul the strictures
of physics and biology remained one of the peculiarities
of his thought. [16] In that sense, despite many eloquent
protestations to the contrary, he decisively cast his lot
with occultism and against science. And likewise, a hermetic
strain in Freudian speculation, whereby fanciful instinct
theories are extended analogically from the personal psyche
to prehistory and thence to the totality of organic nature,
has remained prominent from Freud himself and his fervently
occultist disciple Sándor Ferenczi-the "Court
Astrologist of Psychoanalysts," as he jestingly called
himself (Jones, 3:386)-through Geza Róheim and Norman
O. Brown. The most recent exemplar of that tradition is
the American philosopher-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who
perceives between Freud's lines a revelation that "the
divine is immanent in nature" and that all forms of
life are suffused with a love that seeks to articulate itself.[17]
It is not Freud, however, but his rival and sometime protégé
C.G. Jung who affords us the most arresting insight into
the linkage between occultism and the therapeutic ethos.
Among the formative influences on Jung were writings on
ancient mysteries by the Theosophist G.R.S. Mead, who had
actually served as Madame Blavatsky's secretary. As Richard
Noll reminds us in an important study published in 1994,
The Jung Cult, Mead
"viewed his impressive scholarly work as a personal
path to spiritual renewal and wisdom (gnosis). All of his
writings are focused on bringing the reader closer to his
or her own personal mystical experience of gnosis through
the ideas of the ancient adepts. For Mead, as for Jung,
scholarship was holy work. Jung's post-Freudian work (after
1912), especially his theories of the collective unconscious
and the archetypes, could not have been constructed without
the works of Mead on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and the Mithraic
Liturgy." (p. 69)
Noll leaves us in no doubt that Jung was himself an esotericist-not
just a scholarly student of the alchemical and astrological
traditions but a believer in a solar-based life force and
in the power of hermetic symbols to reorganize the psyche
and even provide a kind of salvation. His collective unconscious
and his archetypes, nominally scientific entities, are in
fact occult constructs, since no known physical process
can explain how the individual can tap into the memory bank
of the entire species and summon powers that reside nowhere
in particular. As Jung himself put it, "the main body
of the collective unconscious cannot be strictly said to
be psychological, but psychical" (Noll, p. 102). Furthermore,
the therapeutic regimen that Jung began to develop around
1912 constituted a full-fledged völkisch mystery cult,
featuring a buried pagan layer of the unconscious mind,
direct experience of God as what Noll calls "an inner
sun or star that was the fiery core of one's being"
(Noll, p. 141), and communion with one's ancestors in the
Land of the Dead.
These were all standard features of Ariosophy and its fellow
back-to-Wotan movements in Germany and Austria. Indeed,
Jung drew several of his vitalistic and race-conscious notions
from leading exponents of those movements, and he taunted
the Jewish Freud by making pointed references to them in
his letters. Though Anglo-American Jungians continue to
deny it, Jung's thought, in Noll's words, "arose from
the same Central European cauldron of neopagan, Nietzschean,
mystical, hereditarian, völ-kisch utopianism out of
which National Socialism arose" (p. 135). Thus it is
surely no coincidence that Jung initially welcomed Hitler's
ascension and, at least for a while, cheerfully accepted
the challenge of hewing to "Aryan science" in
matters of psychology, declaring that Jewish notions were
incapable of answering to the creative Germanic soul.[18]
It should also be clear by now that Jung was a far more
committed occultist than Blavatsky herself. We know that
Blavatsky slapped together her claims from published sources
and faked her mediumistic feats. As Noll relates, however,
beginning in 1913 Jung began to cultivate private visionary
experiences through a trance technique that he later named
"active imagination":
"In these visions he descends and meets autonomous
mythological figures with whom he interacts. Over the years…a
wise old man figure named Philemon emerges who becomes Jung's
spiritual guru, much like the ascended "masters"
or "brothers" engaged by Blavatsky or the Teutonic
Brotherhood of the Armanen met by List. Philemon and other
visionary figures insist upon their reality and reveal to
Jung the foundation of his life and work…. These visionary
experiences… form the basis of the psychological theory
and method he would develop in 1916." (p. 210)
Sometimes, however, Philemon had to be put on hold while
other voices, especially an insistent female one, clamored
to be heard:
"Jung then wondered if his unconscious was forming
an alternate personality…. He decided to interact with
the voice,…[employing] a technique used by the spiritualist
mediums: "I thought, well, she has not the speech centers
I have, so I told her to use mine, and she did, and came
through with a long statement. This is the origin of the
technique I developed for dealing directly with the unconscious
contents." (p. 203)
Thus was born the notion of the anima, every man's female
second self. (A woman's corresponding "animus"
appears to have been a chivalrous afterthought.)
But before he generalized and psychologized the spirit-woman
in that manner, Jung took her to be an ancient matriarchal
deity who had literally taken up residence in his mind.
It only remained for him to conclude that he himself, in
Noll's words, "had undergone a direct initiation into
the ancient Hellenistic mysteries and had even experienced
deification in doing so" (p. 213). As Jung eventually
revealed to his followers, that is exactly what he thought
had occurred during one of his many trances in 1913. In
fact, he was inclined to believe that he had temporarily
occupied the being of Jesus Christ himself.
By comparison with that apotheosis, all of Theosophy's transcendental
claims appear fairly modest. After all, Blavatsky, Sinnett,
and the others never asserted that they themselves were
divinities. But they did assert that pagan mysteries contain
the necessary means of restoring psychic integrity to wan
victims of modern materialism, and that was exactly Jung's
message as well. As he put it forcefully in a letter to
the stunned Freud, psychoanalysis ought to
"revivify among intellectuals a feeling for symbol
and myth, ever so gently to transform Christ back into the
soothsaying god of the vine, which he was, and in this way
absorb those ecstatic instinctual forces of Christianity
[to make] the cult and the sacred myth what they once were-a
drunken feast of joy where man regained the ethos and holiness
of an animal." (Noll, p. 188)
Freud's own lesson-that the ego should make peace with its
buried demons, the better to control them-was rather more
dour and conservative. However, it was no less a product
of romantic speculation about ancestral memory, impish inner
personages (the ego, id, and superego, each with its own
motives, knowledge, and tactics for getting its way), and
the grave consequences of trying too hard to deny expression
to our instincts. And, of course, one must be a spiritualizing
philosopher in the first place to conceive of animality
as something to be bargained with rather than as a pervasive
fact of our constitution. In this sense Jung, Freud, and
Blavatsky were all closer to one another than any of them
was to Darwin or Pavlov.
3.
None of this means that psychotherapy is doomed to be a
hermetic art or that it serves no useful function, nor even
that contemporary Freudians and Jungians, whom I have thus
far ignored, retain Freud's and Jung's own predilection
for the paranormal. Nor does the genealogical link between
Ariosophy and Jungianism condemn the latter as a tool of
reactionary indoctrination. All such pronouncements on the
basis of origins alone must be resisted as illogical and
antihistorical.
At the same time, an awareness of the gnostic strain in
Freud and Jung does cast a suggestive light on the central
issue that now confronts, and radically polarizes, the therapeutic
community throughout the West: whether caregivers should
address themselves to helping clients cope with their current
dilemmas as they perceive them or, rather, send those clients
on a regressive search for a hypothetical early past and
initiate them into "knowledge" of repressed traumas
and introjected personages. There is all the difference
in the world between "taking a history"-investigating
the relationships and vicissitudes that have predisposed
the patient to act in self-defeating ways-and producing
a previously unsuspected, artifactual history that is dictated
by boilerplate diagnostic expectations. The cabalistic penchant
lingers precisely insofar as therapists insist that true
healing must entail a confrontation with some predetermined
class of memories, powers, insights, buried selves, or former
incarnations. And it is no coincidence that the dangers
of drastic harm are all clustered at that end of the therapeutic
spectrum.
The worst of those dangers is surely the evincing of "multiple
personalities" from a patient who came to therapy with
a far milder complaint. As Carl Sagan recognizes, this is
a fairly common though not inevitable outcome of recovered
memory treatment, which can pass the disintegrating victim
along to the snakepit of a "dissociated identity"
ward from which the only exit may be either suicide or the
exhaustion of insurance benefits. What Sagan doesn't realize,
however, is that a growing number of certified psychoanalysts,
having found it more ideologically attractive to smoke out
long-past sexual abuse than to rehearse the same old oedipal
fantasies, have now enthusiastically joined in the bringing
of "split-off selves" to cathartic expression
in therapy.[19]
Some analysts have thus reverted, shockingly, to the recovered
memory quackery that Freud himself was practicing in the
mid-1890s, when he brutally overrode his patients' denial
of having been molested in early childhood and told them
that he detected the nature of their traumas in their current
symptoms of constipation, sores in the mouth, and so on.
In that period, when Freud had already passed from hypnotism
through the pressure technique to reliance on free association,
he was convinced that merely by attuning his psyche to a
patient's speech he could hear what two adults had been
saying in her presence when she was eleven months old.[20]
Amazing-but scarcely more so than the contemporary analyst's
feat of getting to know little girls, grown-up molesters,
and skittish adolescents through acts of empathy with the
adult patient whose mind harbors all of these dissociated
"introjects":
"As I come to occupy my patient's internal world, to
reside experientially within it, I surely come to know,
in the most intimate of ways, my fellow inhabitant's [sic],
her internal objects and their accompanying self-representations.
I interact with them, I act like them, ultimately I will
become them! I need to know the multifaceted dimensions
of what I have become in relationship to a particular person,
to allow the pastliterally to impress itself on the treatment-to
know the patient… "from the inside out."
"[21]
Nothing but a crystal ball need be added to this scene to
render its spiritualist premises explicit.
Whether practiced by Freud in 1896 or by his memory-scouring
heirs in 1996, the combination of coaxed belief and induced
crisis, with the therapist's conjectures then "verified"
by the agitated patient's discomfiture on the couch, amounts
to a perfect recipe for creating panic and delusion. Empathetic
therapy, it seems, has made no lasting gain in prudence
since the eighteenth century. Indeed, Mesmerism looks like
a pleasant diversion in comparison with modern treatments
that result in the destruction of families and the prosecution
of innocent people.
Nevertheless, it should be noted that therapeutic harm does
not correlate directly with the degree of outlandishness
in a practitioner's diagnosis. Take, for example, the patients
who form the research base for the sublimely gullible Harvard
psychiatrist John Mack, who accepts UFO abduction stories
at face value.[22] Having been hypnotically reinforced in
the belief that alien kidnappers once played doctor with
them in hovering spacecraft, those patients must be regarded
as classic victims of therapeutic occultism. Yet they tend
on the whole to be only mildly dysfunctional. The explanation
is simple: these people weren't raised by the creatures
who supposedly diddled them. In contrast, the relatively
plausible allegation that one must have been raped by one's
father characteristically shatters the identity of the patient
who falls prey to such a staple notion in the professional
folklore of our time.
If occult concepts per se were psychologically noxious,
we would expect Jungian ministrations in particular to wreak
havoc on their clients, many of whom come away from therapy
believing in fortune telling, mystical "synchronicity,"
communion with pantheistic sources of wisdom, and similar
willful notions. But those beliefs seem to render them only
more cheerful, self-trusting, and tedious at parties. Once
again, then: as we saw in the case of Theosophy versus Ariosophy,
it is not a weakness for illusions that renders a doctrine
or a therapeutic regimen deadly but a preference for illusions
that blame a live human "perpetrator" for whatever
discontents are being magnified.
But social harm apart, we might venture to hope that psychotherapy,
as an institution that likes to maintain good-neighbor relations
with science, will someday make a full reckoning with its
gnostic component. All those therapists who acquire "knowledge"
by first applying suggestive pressure and then disregarding
its influence on their findings are more akin to mediums
than to physicians. Do they really want to continue down
the yellow brick road that has led from Mesmer and Puységur
through Freud and Jung to the latest promises of cure via
channeling, rebirthing, and past-life regression? And will
their guilds never tire of issuing discreet caveats about
"going too far" with diagnostic procedures that
actually go in circles?
If I remain pessimistic about the thoroughgoing reform of
psychotherapy, it is because of a powerful factor that we
have remarked throughout this two-part essay: the unquenchable
human thirst for meanings that can ease our doubts, sanction
and regulate our urges, and flatter our self-conception.
Established religion, Theosophy, and psychotherapy as it
is often-by no means always-practiced have all plied the
same trade, and with degrees of success that owe nothing
to the demonstrable cogency of their assertions.
Of those three competitors for our spiritual allegiance,
psychotherapy would appear to suffer a handicap by virtue
of its mundane secular character. But this too may be an
illusion. Freud put matters backwards when he called the
discovery of the unconscious a great blow to human narcissism.
As the shrewd if occasionally delirious Jung was quick to
perceive, we needn't defer to Rome or the Himalayas to learn
about divinity. The gods, Jung told the dissatisfied and
yearning Western bourgeoisie, already reside within our
heads, they find us quite interesting and lovable, and they
are eager to impart their secrets to us. Does mere empirical
rationality stand a chance against an appeal that speaks
so directly to our needs?
This is the second of two articles.
Notes
[1] See my review in the last issue.
[2] See K. Paul Johnson, The Masters Revealed: Madame
Blavatsky and the Myth of the Great White Lodge (State
University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 213-214, 226-227.
[3] Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle
in the Dark (Random House, 1996).
[4] See Crews, "The Revenge of the Repressed,"
The New York Review, November 17, 1994, pp. 54-60;
December 1, 1994, pp. 49-58. The essay is reprinted in Crews
et al., The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute
(New York Review Books, 1995).
[5] See, e.g., Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of
the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry
(Basic Books, 1970); Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated:
The Completed Arc (North-Holland, 1991; second edition
forthcoming from MIT Press, 1997); and Adam Crabtree, From
Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological
Healing (Yale University Press, 1993). Unfortunately,
Crabtree's book fails to take cognizance of the methodological
excesses that characterize the entire Mesmeric tradition.
[6] Jonathan Miller, "Going Unconscious," in Hidden
Histories of Science, edited by Robert B. Silvers (New
York Review Books, 1995), pp. 1-35.
[7] Borch-Jacobsen, Remembering Anna O., p. 71. It
should be pointed out that hypnotherapy per se needn't entail
any assumptions about the mind beyond its suggestibility.
Hippolyte Bernheim, professor of medicine at the University
of Nancy, in whose commanding presence Freud became a passionate
believer in posthypnotic suggestion, sharply dissented from
the causal inferences that Charcot and, later, Freud himself
drew from the subject's ability to produce manifestations
expected by the hypnotist. Freud turned out to be at once
Bernheim's most eager and most perversely obtuse pupil.
[8] Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious,
p. 484. As Ellenberger observes, Pappenheim had enlisted
Breuer in trying out the Aristotelian idea of catharsis
as it had been famously expounded by Freud's future father-in-law,
Jacob Bernays, in a book of 1880: "For a time catharsis
was…the current topic of conversation in Viennese salons.
No wonder a young lady of high society adopted it as a device
for a self-directed cure, but it is ironic that Anna O.'s
unsuccessful treatment should have become, for posterity,
the prototype of a cathartic cure."
[9] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 volumes, translated by James
Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1953-1974), Volume 11, p. 22. Hereafter
cited parenthetically as "SE."
[10] See Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,
3 volumes (Basic Books, 1957), Volume 1, p. 250. Hereafter
cited parenthetically as "Jones."
[11] Peter J. Swales, "Freud, His Teacher, and the
Birth of Psychoanalysis," in Freud: Appraisals and
Reappraisals: Contributions to Freud Studies, Vol. 1,
edited by Paul E. Stepansky (Analytic Press, 1986), pp.
3-82; the quotation is from p. 50.
[12] Incidentally, Freud almost certainly had Anna von Lieben
in mind when he wrote to Fliess on August 1, 1890, that
he would have to cancel a planned reunion in Berlin, since
"my most important patient is just now going through
a kind of nervous crisis and might get well in my absence."
See The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess 1887-1904, translated and edited by Jeffrey Moussaieff
Masson (Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 27.
[13] Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, "Neurotica:Freud and the
Seduction Theory," October (Spring 1996), pp. 15-43.
[14] This point could be disputed on the grounds that a
psychoanalyst, after all, draws inductive hypotheses from
the behavior of an interlocutor. That, however, is just
what mediums do as well, tailoring their message to a "cold
reading" of the subject's likely traits and problems.
In both practices-one conducted spontaneously and cynically,
the other earnestly and at great length-dogmatic assertions
are rendered believable by being intermingled with disarmingly
accurate ones.
[15] Something more than politeness may have been involved
when, in turning down the proffered editorship of a journal
devoted to ESP, Freud wrote, "if I had my life to live
over again I should devote myself to psychical research
rather than to psychoanalysis" (Jones, 3:392). One
can see why Freud's predilection for telepathy made Jones
so uneasy. As the latter told his colleagues in a circular
letter, public knowledge of the fact would serve those whose
"opinion has always been that psychoanalysis is a branch
of occultism" (Jones, 3:394).
[16] See, e.g., Freud, A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview
of the Transference Neuroses, edited by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis,
translated by Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer (Harvard University
Press, 1987), especially the editor's discussion on pages
75-107.
[17] Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature
(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), p. 221. Lear voices
the familiar irrationalist cry that if Freud's insights
cannot be scientifically corroborated, then the "bounds
and methods" of science will have to be "redrawn"
(Lear, p. 220). As he elaborates, "If science is to
treat archaic mind as its subject matter, the science should
be conceived as growing out of and completing the archaic
expressions it is striving to understand" (Lear, p.
97). Madame Blavatsky would have heartily concurred.
[18] C.G. Jung, "Zur gegenwärtigen Lage der Psychotherapie,"
Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, Volume 7 (1934),
pp. 1-16.
[19] See Crews, The Memory Wars, pp. 14-29.
[20] For discussion, see The Memory Wars, pp. 206-213.
[21] Jody Messler Davies, "Dissociation, Repression,
and Reality Testing in the Countertransference: The Controversy
over Memory and False Memory in the Psychoanalytic Treatment
of Adult Survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse," Psychoanalytic
Dialogues, Volume 6, No. 2 (1996), pp. 189-218; the
quotation is from p. 209.
[22] See John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with
Aliens (Scribner, 1994).
Biographical Note
Frederick Crews is Professor of English Emeritus at the
University of California, Berkeley.
Source
"The Consolation of Theosophy" was
originally published in The New York Review of Books
Vol. 43, No. 15 (October 3, 1996) and is also contained
in Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Emeryville,
Ca.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007) and is reproduced here
with the permission of the author.
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