Medicine: A Soul Without Psychology

Ancient man had a psyche, by which he meant a soul. Modern man has a psyche, by which he is apt to mean a cumbersome machine full of id and superego, conscious and unconscious, with optional accessories such as Oedipal feedbacks. In place of the soul he has put psychology. In The Death and Rebirth of Psychology, published last week (Julian Press; $4), Dr. Ira Progoff suggests that with recent modifications psychology can now give man back his soul.

To do this, young (35) Dr. Progoff, now practicing “depth psychology” in Manhattan, attempts a bold task: reconciling the often violently discordant views of modern psychology’s major prophets—Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung and Otto Rank. Says Progoff: “When we make allowances for the areas where they overlap, repeat each other, or say the same thing in different words, and when we balance out the personal facts that led to undue emphasis in one direction or another, there remains a fundamental con-isistency in the development of [their] thought and practice.” As Progoff sees it, Freud took the initial dive, and then the other three followed, each penetrating a little more deeply into the depths of the psyche, each coming a little closer to “the spiritual core of man’s being.”

The Prophets. Freud, says Progoff, was guided by “the habits of mind of a medical man working with a neurological emphasis” and by his materialistic determinism, which led to his early belief that merely to analyze the origin of a condition was enough to cure it. (Also, Freud’s unusual family setting, with a young mother but a father old enough to -be his grandfather, led to overemphasis on Oedipal feelings.) Though Pioneer Freud made a tremendous contribution, Progoff believes that his analytical and reductive point of view “leads to a dead end for depth psychology.” At the heart of Progoff’s case against Freud is the fact that he saw man almost entirely as a material being controlled by biological urges. Thus man’s spiritual search for the “core of his being”—which is essential in every religion and almost every philosophy of life—was reduced by Freud to a matter of the “superego accepting the ego.” This, to Progoff, means that Freud was guilty of intellectualizing and mechanizing “a basic cosmic experience.”

Adler came closer to this cosmic ex perience. He called it “social feeling,” and through it “gained a profound and intimate connection with life.” This, suggests Progoff, sprang from his extravert nature, just as his theory about “organ inferiority” leading to compensation, and often overcompensation, must have been derived from his childhood. (Adler’s earliest memory was of himself as an ailing, rachitic two-year-old, bandaged like a mummy, immobile on a park bench while his elder brother bounced around showing off his prowess.) A disciple of Freud until he broke with him in 1911, Adler insisted that human beings are called upon to advance “an ideal society amongst mankind.”

Switzerland’s Carl Jung came still closer to man’s spiritual core. Adler had broadened the picture to include social instincts; Jung deepened it to include religious instincts. From Jung’s complex and often obscure theories Progoff distills an essence: that mankind has a collective “Self,” which can be fully realized only through a religious outlook, regardless of creed. This abstract Self, with many features of the ancient soul, is utterly foreign to the sexual debris that Freud found at the bottom of the unconscious well.

Next came Vienna’s Otto Rank, and it is with him that Author Progoff really stands.

Into the Fire. Unlike his three peers, Rank was no physician but an earnest young engineering student who was attracted into Freud’s orbit in 1905 as pupil, later as secretary of the psychoanalytic inner circle. He served Freud faithfully for 20 years, finally broke away, denouncing Freud’s “therapeutic nihilism.” Rank’s rebellion took him through many stages. In one he attached overwhelming importance to birth trauma as a source of neurotic difficulties. In another he blasted Freud’s emphasis on the unconscious, called for a “psychology of the conscious.” Immortality—at which Freud scoffed, which Adler ignored, and at which Jung only broadly hinted—achieved outstanding importance for Rank. It became something that each individual had to attain for him self on the plane of “spiritual realities.” To Rank, man’s core was the “will to immortality,” that is, “man’s inherent need to live in the light of eternity.”

Progoff sums up Rank’s achievement: “Both Jung and Adler went to the borders of psychology and looked beyond. Each was convinced . . . that the truth about man’s life lies somewhere over the edges of psychological theory. It remained for Otto Rank to demonstrate that this was much more than a personal belief of theirs but an unavoidable outcome of psychoanalysis. [He] showed that all analytical types of psychology require a step beyond themselves; otherwise they remain on the treadmill of self-conscious analysis.” Depth psychology, believes Dr. Progoff, has only a transitional role in history, and if it is to fulfill its purpose, i.e., to show modern man the meaning of his life, “it can do so only by guiding him to an experience that is beyond psychology.”

Together, Freud, Adler, Jung and Rank have formed the foundations of a new psychology. But this, Progoff believes, will eventually consume itself, phoenixlike, in its own fire as it puts man—with an infinitely deeper rational understanding of himself than he ever had before—into harmony with the deeper, nonrational forces of the universe. This will be the point when man achieves “a soul without psychology.”