Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy

In these five lectures, later published under the title Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology, Steiner lays the
foundations for a truly spiritual psychology. The first two lectures constitute a critical examination of the principles
of Freud and Jung. The last three lectures begin with a description of the threefold structure of human
consciousness (reflective or mirror consciousness, supra-consciousness, and sub-consciousness) and go on to
outline a psychology that takes into account both the soul's hidden powers and the complex connections between
psychological and organic, bodily processes.

These lectures were given in different locations and at widely different times, but are grouped together under one
topic. Three different Bn/GA numbers are represented in this First Edition of this grouping of lectures. This volume
is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland.
Translated by May Laird-Brown

I. Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis I (GA 178)

November 10, 1917
II. Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis II (GA 178)
November 11, 1917
III. Reflections in the Mirror of Consciousness, Superconsciousness and Subconsciousness (GA 143)
February 25, 1912
IV. Hidden Soul Powers (GA 143)
February 27, 1912
V. Connections Between Organic Processes and the Mental Life of Man (GA 205)
July 02, 1921

VI. Factors of Karma, Deficiencies in Psychoanalysis (GA 172)

13 November 1916, Dornach

Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy

GA 178

I. Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis I

10 November 1917, Dornach

Considering on this occasion the lectures which I am having to give just now in Zürich, 1Anthroposophy and the Science of the Soul
(Nov. 5), Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science (Nov. 7), Anthroposophy and Natural Science (Nov. 12), Anthroposophy and Social Science (Nov. 14).
I am freshly reminded that
one can hardly come into touch with the spiritual life of that city in any broad sense at present without giving some
attention to what is now called analytical psychology, or psychoanalysis. And various considerations connected
with this realization have decided me to introduce what I have to say today with a short enumeration of certain
points in analytical psychology, in psychoanalysis. We shall link it then with further remarks.

We have often noted how important it is for the researcher in the field of anthroposophical spiritual science, to
connect his considerations with what is offered by the moving forces of our own age. It may be said that all sorts of
people who feel drawn to psychoanalysis today are earnestly searching for the spiritual foundations of existence,
for the inner realities of the soul of man. And it may be called a curious characteristic of our own time that so many
of our contemporaries are becoming aware of quite definite, and most peculiar forces in the human soul. The
psychoanalysts belong to those who, simply through the impulses of the age, are forced to hit upon certain
phenomena of soul life.

It is especially important also not to remain entirely oblivious of this movement, because the phenomena of which
it takes cognizance are really present, and because in our own time they intrude themselves for various reasons
upon the attention of human beings. Today they must become aware of such phenomena.

On the other hand it is a fact that the people who concern themselves with these things today lack the means of
knowledge required for the discussion and, above all, for the understanding of them. So that we may say:
psychoanalysis is a phenomenon of our time, which compels men to take account of certain soul processes, and yet
causes them to undertake their consideration by inadequate methods of knowledge. This is particularly important
because this investigation, by inadequate methods of knowledge, of a matter that quite obviously exists and
challenges our present human cognition leads to a variety of serious errors, inimical to social life, to the further
development of knowledge, and to the influence of this development of knowledge upon social life.

It may be said that even less than half-truths are, under certain circumstances, more harmful than complete errors.
And what the psychoanalysts bring to light today can be regarded only as an assortment of quarter-truths.

Let us consider a few excerpts from the research magazine of the psychoanalysts. What is called psychoanalysis
today had its origin in a medical case observed by a Vienna interne, a Dr. Breuer, in the eighteen-eighties. Dr.
Breuer, with whom I was acquainted, was a man of extraordinarily delicate spirituality besides what he was as a
physician. He was interested to a high degree in all sorts of aesthetic, and general human problems. With his
intimate manner of handling disease, it was natural that one case, which came under his observation in the eighties,
was particularly interesting to him.

He had to treat a woman who seemed to be suffering from a severe form of hysteria. Her hysterical symptoms
consisted of an occasional paralysis of one arm, dreamy conditions of various kinds, reduction of consciousness, a
deep degree of sleepiness, and besides all this, forgetfulness of the usual language of her every day life. She had
always been able to speak German; it was her native language, but under the influence of her hysteria could no
longer do so; she could speak and understand only English.

Breuer noticed that when this woman was in her dreamy condition she could be persuaded, by a more intimate
medical treatment, to speak of a certain scene, a very trying past experience. Now I will make clear to you from the
description of the case given by the Breuer school, how the woman in her half-conscious condition, sometimes
artificially induced, gave the impression that her hysteria was connected with a severe illness of her father, through
which he had passed a long time before. Breuer could easily hypnotize a patient, and when he had placed her under
hypnosis and encouraged her to speak of it, she told of an experience she had had during her father's illness. She
had helped with the nursing, and always came back to this definite experience. I will quote from the report: [The
following quotations are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse. Ein
Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie, Zürich, 1917.]

“On one occasion she was watching at night in great anxiety and tension, for the sick man had a high fever, and a
surgeon was expected from Vienna to perform an operation. Her mother had left her for a time, and Anna (the
patient) sat by the sickbed, her right arm across the back of the chair. She fell into a kind of waking dream, and
saw, as if issuing from the wall, a black snake approaching, to bite her father. ...”

Men of the present day are always stricken by materialism, so we find in the report at this point the following
suggestion, which is of no value whatever:
(“It is very probable that in the meadow behind the house there were a few snakes which had frightened the girl
previously, and which now furnished material for the hallucination.”)

That is only an interpolated remark, to which you may attach importance, or not — it does not matter. The point is
that the snake seemed to her to come out of the wall to bite her father.

“She wanted to fight off the creature, but was as if paralyzed; the right arm hanging over the back of the chair had
gone to sleep and became anaesthetized and paralyzed and, as she looked at it, the fingers changed into little snakes
tipped with skulls.”

All this was beside her father's sick bed.

“She probably tried to chase away the snake with the lamed right hand, and so associated the anaesthesia and
lameness with the snake hallucination. When this had disappeared she wished, in her fright, to pray, but every
language failed her. At last she remembered an English nursery rhyme, and could continue to think and pray in this
language.”

The whole illness originated from this experience. From it there had remained the paralysis of one hand, reduction
of consciousness in varying degrees, and inability to express herself in any language but English. Dr. Breuer then
noticed that the condition was ameliorated whenever he had her tell this story, and he based his treatment upon this
fact. By means of hypnosis he drew from her little by little all the details, and really succeeded in bringing about a
marked improvement in her condition. The patient got rid of the matter, as it were, by uttering and communicating
it to another.

Breuer and his collaborator Freud, in Vienna, who were both influenced, as was natural at this period, by the school
of Charcot [Jean Martin Charcot, French M.D. (1825-1893).] in Paris, diagnosed this case as a psychic trauma, a
psychic wound, what is called in England a “nervous shock.” The psychic shock was supposed to consist of this
experience at her father's bedside, and to have had an effect upon the soul similar to that of a physical wound upon
the body.

It must be noted that from the beginning Breuer conceived the whole affair as a soul illness, as a matter of the inner
life. He was convinced from the beginning that no anatomical or physiological changes could have been shown, no
causes, for example, such as changes in the nerves leading from the arm to the brain. He was convinced from the
start that he was dealing with a fact within the soul.

They were inclined in these early days to regard these cases as induced by wounds of the soul, shocks, etc. Very
soon, however, because of Dr. Freud's active interest, theories took on a different character. With Freud's further
development of the subject Dr. Breuer was never fully in accord. Freud felt that the theory of soul wounds would
not do, did not cover these cases, and thus far Breuer agreed with him. I will remark in parenthesis that Dr. Breuer
was a very busy practicing physician, thoroughly grounded in science, an excellent pupil of Nothnagel [Hermann
Nothnagel, M.D. (1841-1905).] and because of external circumstances alone never became a professor. We may
well believe that if Breuer, instead of remaining one of the busiest physicians in Vienna, with little time for
scientific research, had obtained a professorship and so been able to follow up this problem, it might have assumed
a very different form!

But from then on Dr. Freud took especial interest in the matter. He said to himself: the theory of trauma does not
explain these cases. We need to determine under what conditions such a soul wound develops. For it might be said
with justice that many girls had sat beside a father's sickbed with equally deep feelings, but without producing the
same results. The unscientific layman deals with such problems promptly by the extraordinarily profound
explanation that one is predisposed to such symptoms while another is not. Although very “profound,” this is the
most absurd solution that can be arrived at, is it not? For if you explain things that occur on the basis of
predisposition, you can easily explain everything in the world. You need only say: the predisposition for a certain
thing exists.

Of course serious thinkers did not concern themselves with such ideas, but sought the real conditions. And Freud
believed that he had discovered them in cases like the following. You will find innumerable similar cases in the
literature of the psychoanalysts today, and it may be admitted that an immense amount of material has been
collected in order to decide this or that point within this field. I will describe this one case, making it as
comprehensible as possible. Its absolute historical accuracy is not important to us.

There was a woman with other guests at an evening party, a gathering of friends to bid good-bye to the mistress of
the house, who had become nervous and was about to leave for a health resort abroad. She was to leave on that
evening, and after the party had broken up, and the hostess departed, the woman whose case we are describing was
going with other supper guests along the street when a cab came around the corner behind them (not an automobile
— a cab with horses), driven at a great pace. In the smaller cities people returning home at night often walk in the
middle of the street instead of on the sidewalk. (I do not know if you have noticed this). As the cab rushed towards
them the supper guests scattered to right and left on to the sidewalks, with the exception of this one woman whom
we are considering. She ran along the street in front of the horses, and all the driver's cursing and swearing and the
cracking of his whip could not deflect her. She ran until she came to a bridge where she tried to throw herself into
the water in order to avoid being run over. She was rescued by passersby, and returned to her party, being thus
preserved from a serious accident.

This performance was of course connected with the woman's general condition. It is due, undoubtedly, to hysteria
if a person runs along the middle of the street in front of horses, and the cause of such an action had to be
discovered. Freud, in this and similar cases, examined the previous life back to childhood. If, even at an early age,
something happened that was not assimilated by the soul, it could create a tendency which might be released later
by any sort of shock.

And in fact such an experience was found in the childhood of the woman in question. She was taken driving as a
child, and the horses became frightened and ran away. The coachman could not control them, and when they
reached the river bank he sprang off, ordering the child to jump too, which it did, just before the horses plunged
into the river. Thus the shocking incident was there, and a certain association of horse with horse. At the moment
when she realized her danger from the horses she lost control of herself, and ran frantically in front of them instead
of turning aside — all this as an after-effect of the childhood experience. You see that the psychoanalysts have a
scientific method, according to present-day scientific ideas. But are there not many who have some such
experience in childhood without such a reaction, even with the association of horse with horse? To this single
circumstance something must be added to produce a “predisposition” to run in front of horses, instead of avoiding
them.

Freud continued his search, and actually found an interesting connection in this case. The woman was engaged to
be married, but was in love with two men at the same time. One was the man to whom she was engaged, and she
was sure that she loved him best; but she was not quite clear about that, only halfway so; she loved the other also,
this other being the husband of her best friend, whose farewell supper had taken place that evening. The hostess,
who was somewhat nervous, took her departure, and this woman left with the other guests, ran in front of the
horses, was rescued, and brought back quite naturally into the house she had just left. Further inquiry elicited the
fact that in the past there had existed a significant association between the lady and this other man, the husband of
her best friend. The love affair had already taken on “certain dimensions,” let us say, which accounted for the
nervousness of her friend, as you may easily imagine. The physician brought her to this point in the story, but had
difficulty in persuading her to continue. She admitted at last that when she came to herself in her friend's house,
and was again normal, the husband declared his love to her. Quite a “remarkable case,” as you see!

Dr. Freud went after similar cases, and his researches convinced him that the hysterical symptoms, which had been
attributed to a psychic “trauma” or wound, were due instead to love, conscious or unconscious. His examination of
life experiences showed that circumstances might greatly differ, indeed in the most characteristic cases, that these
love stories might never have risen into the consciousness of the patient at any time.

So Freud completed what he called his neurosis theory or sexual theory. He considered that sexuality entered into
all such cases. But such things are extraordinarily deceptive. To begin with, there is everywhere at the present time
an inclination to call sex to your aid, for the solution of any human problem. Therefore we need not wonder that a
doctor who found it to be a factor in a certain number of cases of hysteria set up such a theory.

But on the other hand, since analytical psychology is carrying on a research with inadequate tools, this is the point
at which the greatest danger begins. The matter is dangerous first, because this longing for knowledge is so
extremely tempting, tempting because of present circumstances, and because it may always be proved that the sex
connection is more or less present. Yet the psychoanalyst Jung, who wrote Die Psychologie der unbewussten
Prozesse (see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der
unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie,
Zürich, 1917.), Professor Jung of Zürich does not share the opinion that Freud's sexual “neurosis theory” covers
these cases. He has instead another theory.

Jung noted that Freud has his opponents. Among them is a certain Adler. This Adler takes a quite different
viewpoint. Just as Freud tested large numbers of cases, and settled upon sex as the original cause (you can read it
all in Jung's book), so Adler approached the problem from another side, and decided that this side is more
important than the one that Freud has placed in the foreground.

Adler — I will only generalize — found that there was another urge that played quite as important a role in the
human being as the sexual impulse emphasized by Freud. This was the desire for power, power over one's
environment, the desire for power in general. The “will to power” is even regarded by Nietzsche as a philosophical
principle, and as many cases may be found to support the power-impulse theory as Freud found for his sexual
theory.

One need only begin “analyzing” hysterical women to find that such cases are not at all rare. Assume for example
that a woman is hysterical and has spasms — heart spasms are a favorite in such cases — as well as all sorts of
other conditions. The home is stirred up, the whole environment, everything possible is done, doctors are
summoned, the patient greatly pitied. In short, she exercises a tyrannical power over her environment. A reasonable
person knows that in such a case there is really nothing the matter, even though such patients are aware of their
condition and suffered from it. They are in reality perfectly healthy — but ill when they wish to be. You may
diagnose them as well and ill at the same time. They do of course fall down when they faint in a heart spasm, but
they fall as a rule on the rug, not on the bare floor! These things may be observed.

Now this subconscious lust for power leads very easily to hysterical conditions. Adler investigated the cases at his
disposal from this particular standpoint, and found everywhere when hysterical symptoms appeared that somehow
the lust for power had been aroused and driven into unhealthy extremes. Jung said to himself: “Oh well, one cannot
say that Freud is wrong; what he observed is there, and one cannot say that Adler is wrong; what he observed is
also there. So it is probably sometimes one way, and sometimes the other!”

That is quite reasonable; it is sometimes one way and sometimes another. But Jung built upon this a special theory.
This theory is not uninteresting if you do not take it abstractly, simply as a theory, but see in it instead the action of
our present-day impulses, especially the feebleness of our present knowledge and its inadequacy. Jung says: there
are two types of people. In one type feeling is more developed, in the other thinking.

Thus an “epoch-making” discovery was made by a great scholar. It was something that any reasonable man could
make for himself within his own immediate environment, for the fact that men are divided into thinking men and
feeling men is sufficiently obvious. But scholarship has a different task: it must not regard anything as a layman
would, and simply say: in our environment there are two types of people, feeling people and intellectuals — it must
add something to that. Scholarship says in such a case: the one who feels his way into things sends out his own
force into objectivity; the other draws back from an object, or halts before it and considers. The first is called the
extroverted type, the other the introverted. The first would be the feeling man, the second the intellectual one. This
is a learned division, is it not? ingenious, brilliant, really descriptive up to a point — that is not to be denied!

Then Jung goes on to say; In the case of the extraverted type (that of the man who lives preferably in his feelings),
there exist very frequently in the subconscious mind intellectual concepts, and he finds himself in a collision
between what is in his consciousness and the intellectual concepts that float about subconsciously within him. And
from this collision all sorts of conditions may arise, conditions mainly characteristic of the feeling type.

In the case of those who occupy themselves more with the mind, the men of reason, the feelings remain down
below, swarm in the subconscious, and come into collision with the conscious life. The conscious life cannot
understand what is surging up. It is the force of the subconscious feelings, and because man is never complete, but
belongs to one of these two types, circumstances may arise that cause the subconscious mind to revolt against the
conscious, and may frequently lead to hysterical conditions.

Now we must say that Jung's theory is simply a paraphrase of the trivial idea of the feeling and the reasoning man,
and adds nothing to the facts. But from all this you needs must realize that men of the present are at least beginning
to notice all sorts of psychic peculiarities, and so concern themselves that they ask what goes on within a man who
shows such symptoms. And they are at least so far along that they say to themselves: These are not due to
physiological or anatomical changes. They have already outgrown bare materialism, in that they speak of psychic
phenomena. So this is certainly one way in which people try to emerge from materialism, and to reach some
knowledge of the soul.

It is, however, very peculiar, when you look at the subject more closely, to see into what strange paths people are
led by the general inadequacy of their means of cognition. But I must emphatically point out that men do not
realize into what they are being driven, and neither do their supporters, readers, and contemporaries. Thus, rightly
regarded, the matter has actually a very dangerous side, because so much is not taken into consideration. In the
subconscious mind itself there is a commotion, it is the theories which agitate in the subconscious. It is really
strange. People set up a theory in regard to the subconscious, but their own subconsciousness is agitated by it. Jung
pursues the matter as a physician, and it is important that psychological questions should be handled from that
standpoint, therapeutically, and that many should be striving to carry over the matter into pedagogy. We are no
longer confronted by a limited theory, but by the effort to make it into a cultural fact.

It is interesting to see how someone like Jung, who handles this matter as a physician, and has observed, treated,
and apparently even cured all sorts of cases, is driven further and further. He says to himself: when such abnormal
psychological symptoms are found, a search must be made in order to discover any incidents of childhood which
may have made such an impression on the human soul life as to produce after-effects. That is something especially
sought for in this field: after-effects of something that happened in childhood. I have cited an example which plays
quite a role in the literature of psychoanalysis: the association of horse and horse.

Later, however, Jung came upon the fact that in many of the cases of genuine illness it cannot be proved, even if
you go back to his earliest childhood, that the patient as an individual is suffering from any such after-effects. If
you take into consideration everything with which he has come in contact, you find the conflict within the
individual, but no explanation of it. So Jung was led to distinguish two subconsciousnesses: first the individual
subconsciousness, concealed within the human being. If in her childhood the young woman jumped out of a
carriage and received a shock, the incident has long since vanished from her consciousness, but works
subconsciously. If you consider this subconscious element (made up of innumerable details), you get the personal
or individual subconsciousness. This is the first of Jung's differentiations.

But the second is the superpersonal subconsciousness. He says: There are things affecting the soul life which are
neither in the personality nor in the matter of the outside world, and which must be assumed therefore as present in
a soul world.

The aim of psychoanalysis is to bring such soul contents into consciousness. That is supposed to be the healing
method: to bring everything into consciousness. Thus the physician must undertake to extract from the patient, not
only what he has experienced individually from his birth on, but also something that was not in the outside world
and is of a soul nature. This has driven the psychoanalysts to say that a man experiences, not only what he goes
through after his physical birth, but also all sorts of things that preceded his birth — and that all this creates
disorder within him. A man who is born today experiences thus subconsciously the Oedipus Saga. He not only
learns it in school; he experiences it. He experiences the Greek gods, the whole past of mankind. The evil of this
consists in the fact that he experiences it subconsciously. The psychoanalyst must therefore say — and he does go
so far — that the Greek child also experienced this but, since he was told about it, he experienced it consciously.
Man experiences it today, but it only stirs within him — in the thoughts of the extraverted man, in the subconscious
feelings of the introverted type. It growls like demons.

Now consider the necessity that confronts the psychoanalyst if he is true to his theory. He would have to take these
things seriously and say simply that when a man grows up and may be made ill by his relation to that which stirs
within him — a relation of which he knows nothing — that this connection must become conscious, and it must be
explained to him that there is a spiritual world inhabited by different gods. For the psychoanalyst goes so far as to
say that the human soul has a connection with the gods, but it is a cause of illness in that the soul knows nothing of
it.

The psychoanalyst seeks all sorts of expedients, sometimes quite grotesque. Let us assume that a patient comes and
displays this or that hysterical symptom, because he is afraid of a demon — let us say — a fire demon. Men of
earlier periods believed in fire demons, had visions of them, knew about them. Present-day people still have
connections with them (the psychoanalyst admits that), but these connections are not conscious; no one explains
that there are fire demons, so they become a cause of illness.

Jung however goes so far as to assert that the gods, to whom man is unconsciously related, become angry and
revenge themselves, this revenge showing itself as hysteria. Very well, it amounts then to this: such a present-day
man who is mistreated by a demon in his subconscious mind, does not know that there are demons, and cannot
achieve any conscious relation with them because — that is superstition! What does the poor modern man do then,
if he becomes ill from this cause? He projects it outwardly, that is to say he looks up some friend whom he had
liked quite well, and says: This is the one who is persecuting and abusing me! He feels this to be true, which means
that he has a demon which torments him, and so projects it into another man.

Often psychoanalysts, in treating such a case, deflect this projection upon themselves. Thus it often happens that
patients, in a good or evil sense, make the doctor into a god or a devil.

So you see the physician of the present day is forced to say to himself: Men are tormented by spirits, and because
they are taught nothing about them, cannot take possession of them in consciousness, they become therefore
tormenting spirits among themselves, project their demons outwardly, persuade one another of all sorts of
demoniacal nonsense, etc. And how disastrous this is assumed to be by the psychoanalysts is shown by the
following case which Jung describes. He says: “Certain of my colleagues claim that the soul energies that spring
from such torment, must be deflected into another channel.” Let us turn back then to one of the elementary cases of
psychoanalysis. A patient comes, whose illness was caused, according to her psychoanalytical confession, by her
having been in love, many years before, with a man whom she did not get. This had remained with her. Of course
she might be annoyed by a demon, but in most cases observed by the doctors it turns out that something has
happened in the individual subconsciousness, which they classify separately from the super-personal subconscious.
The doctors try to divert this immature fantasy or to transform it. If a love-thirsty soul can be persuaded to make
use of her accumulated affections in humanitarian services, perhaps as head of a charitable institution, it may turn
out well. But Jung himself says: “It is not always possible thus to divert this energy. Energies so implanted in the
soul have often a certain definite potential which cannot be directed.” Very well, I have no objection to this
expression, but wish only to point out that it is a translation of what the layman often discusses, and the way in
which he often expresses himself. But Jung describes a case which is interesting, and a good example of the fact
that these potentials cannot always be directed.

An American, a typical man of today, a self-made man, the efficient head of a business that he had built up, having
devoted himself to his work and achieved a great success, thought then: I shall soon be forty-five, and have done
my bit! Now I will give myself a rest. So he decided to retire, bought himself an estate with autos and tennis courts,
and everything else that belonged to it, intending to live in the country, and simply to draw his dividends from the
business. But when he had been for a time on his estate he ceased to play tennis or to drive his car, or to go to the
theater. He took no pleasure in the gardens that were laid out, but sat in his room alone, and brooded. It hurt him
there, and there, everything hurt him. Actually his head hurt, then his chest, and then his legs. He could not endure
himself, ceased from laughter, was tired, strung up, had continual headache — it was horrible. There was no illness
that a doctor could diagnose! It is often that way with men of the present, is it not? They are perfectly healthy, and
yet ill. The doctor said: "This trouble is psychic. You have adapted yourself to business conditions, and your
energies will not readily take another course. Go back to business. That is the only suggestion that I can make.”
The man in question grasped this, but found that he was no longer any good at business! He was just as ill there as
at home.

From this Jung rightly concludes that you cannot easily deflect energy from one potential to another, nor even turn
it back again when you have failed. This man came to him for treatment. (You know many people come to
Switzerland bringing such illnesses and non-illnesses!) But he could not help this American. The trouble had taken
too strong a hold; it should have been handled earlier.

You see from this that the therapy of deflection has also its difficulties, and Jung himself offers this example.
Important facts are met everywhere which — I now may say — will be successfully dealt with only by spiritual
science or Anthroposophy, in accordance with exact knowledge. But there they are, and people notice them. The
questions are there. It will be discovered that the human being is complicated, and not the simple creature
presented to us by the science of the 19th century. The psychoanalyst is confronted by a remarkable fact which is
quite inexplicable by the science of today. In Anthroposophy, together with the information given in my lectures,
you will easily find an explanation, but I can come back to the point in case you do not find it. It may happen, for
example, that someone becomes hysterically blind, that is, his blindness is an hysterical symptom. This is possible.
There are hysterically blind people, who could see, yet do not — who are psychically blind. Now such people are
sometimes partially cured — partially; they begin to see again, but do not see everything. Sometimes such an
hysterically blind man recovers sufficient sight to see people, all but their heads! Such a half-cured person goes
along the streets, and sees everyone without a head. That really occurs, and there are even stranger symptoms.

All this may be dealt with by spiritual science — anthroposophically oriented spiritual science — and in a lecture
that I gave here last year you may find an explanation of the inability to see the heads of people. [Lecture given at
Dörnach, August 5, 1916.] But the present psychoanalyst is faced by all these phenomena. And so much confronts
him that he says to himself: It may be quite disastrous for a man to be connected with the superpersonal
unconscious; but for God's sake (the psychoanalyst does not say ‘for God's sake,’ but perhaps ‘for science's sake’)
do not let us take the spiritual world seriously! It does not enter their minds to consider the spiritual world
seriously. Thus something very peculiar happens. Very few notice what strange phenomena appear under the
influence of these things. I will call to your attention something in Jung's book Die Psychologie der unbewussten
Prozesse, [see the above quotations that are translations of passages from C. G. Jung's Die Psychologie der
unbewussten Prozesse. Ein Ueberblick über die moderne Theorie und Methode der analytischen Psychologie,
Zürich, 1917.] recently published, which will show you where the psychoanalyst lands today. I shall have to read
you a passage.

“According to this example” (these are examples showing that a man has within him, not only the contents of his
present personal life, but far-back connections with all sorts of demonic, divine, or spiritual forces, etc.) —
“According to this example of the genesis of new ideas from the store of the primeval pictures” — (here he does
not call them ‘gods’ but ‘primeval pictures’) — “we will take up the further description of the transference
processes. We saw that the libido, in those apparently preposterous and curious fantasies, had seized upon its new
object, namely the contents of the absolute unconscious.” (The absolute unconscious is the superpersonal
unconscious, not the personal.) “As I have already said, the uncomprehended projection of the primeval pictures
upon the physician involves a danger for the further treatment that must not be under-estimated.” (The patient
transfers his demons to the doctor. That is one danger.) “The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of all
that mankind has thought and felt, but also every infamous and devilish deed of which men have been capable.”

Just think! Jung has come so far as to perceive that a man has subconsciously within him all the most fiendish
crimes, as well as the most beautiful of all that mankind has been able to think and feel. These people cannot be
persuaded to speak of Lucifer and Ahriman, [Compare Rudolf Steiner, The Luciferic and Ahrimanic Influences in
their Relation to Man, 1918, reprinted in Anthroposophie, Vol. 17, Book 2, p. 159.] but they agree upon the
preceding statement, which I shall read to you once more:

“The pictures contain not only the best and greatest of all that mankind has thought and felt, but also every
infamous and devilish deed of which men have been capable. If the patient cannot distinguish the personality of the
physician from these projections, then every possibility of mutual understanding is lost, and the human relationship
becomes hopeless. If, however, the patient avoids this Charybdis he falls into the Scylla of the introjection of these
pictures, that is to say that he attributes their qualities not to the physician but to himself.” (Then he himself is the
devil.) “This danger is equally serious. In projection he staggers between an extravagant and morbid adulation and
a hateful contempt for his physician. In introjection he falls into a ridiculous self-deification, or a moral self-
laceration. The mistake that he makes each time is in attributing to himself the contents of the absolute
unconscious. So he makes himself into a god or a devil. Here lies the psychological reason why men have always
needed demons, and were never able to live without gods — except a few particularly clever Western specimens of
yesterday and the day before, supermen whose god being dead, have made gods of themselves, rationalistic pocket
size gods with thick skulls and cold hearts.”

Thus you see, the psychoanalyst is driven to say: The human soul is so made that it needs gods, that gods are
necessary to it, for it becomes ill without them. Therefore it has always had them. Men need gods. The
psychoanalyst ridicules men, saying that when they lack other gods they make gods of themselves, but
“rationalistic pocket size gods with thick skulls and cold hearts. The idea of God” (he says further), “is simply a
necessary psychological function of an irrational nature. ...”

To describe the necessity of the God-concept in these terms is as far as one can go by the methods of natural
science! Man must have a God; he needs him. The psychoanalyst knows that. But let us read to the end of the
sentence:
“The idea of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing to do with
the question of the actual existence of God.”

When you read the complete sentence you run upon the great dilemma of the present day. The psychoanalyst
proves to you that man becomes ill and useless without his God, but says that this need has nothing to do with the
existence or non-existence of God. And he continues:

“For this latter question” (namely, of the existence of God,) “belongs to the most stupid questions that can be
framed. Man knows well enough that he cannot conceive a God, much less imagine that he really exists, or that
there can be any occurrence not conditioned by natural causes.”

Now I beg of you, here you find — here you are standing at the point where you may catch at things. The things
are there, knocking upon the doors of knowledge. Seekers are also there. They admit an absolute necessity, but
when that necessity is stated as a serious question they consider it one of the stupidest that can be suggested.

You see, you have there one of the points in the cultural life of today from which you may note exactly what is
always avoided. I can assure you that, in their examination and knowledge of the soul, these psychoanalysts are far
ahead of what is offered in current psychiatry by the universities. They are not only far beyond ordinary university
psychiatry and psychology, but in a certain sense they are right to look down upon this dreadful so-called science.
But one may catch them in any such passage, showing as it does what mankind is actually facing in the attitude of
contemporary science.

Many do not recognize this. They do not realize the force of belief in authority. There has never been such faith in
authority, nor has it ever reigned so absolutely as in the subconscious mind today. One asks again and again: Just
what do you do as physicians when you handle hysterical cases? You seek something in the subconscious mind
that is not solved within consciousness. Yes, but you find repeatedly just such a subconscious content in the case of
the theorists. If you lift it into full consciousness it turns out to be exactly what has been murmuring in the
subconsciousness of the modern doctors and their patients. And all our literature is so saturated with it that you are
in daily and hourly danger of imbibing it. And since it is only through spiritual science that men may become
aware of these things, many take them up unknowingly, draw them into their subconsciousness, where they remain.

This psychoanalysis has at least pointed out that the reality of the soul is to be accepted as such. They do that. But
the devil is everywhere at their heels; I mean that they are neither able nor willing to approach spiritual reality.
Therefore you find in all sorts of places the most incredible statements. But present humanity has not the degree of
attention necessary to perceive them. We should naturally expect any reader of Jung's book to fall off his chair
under the table at certain sentences, but men of the present do not do that; so only think how much of it must lie in
the subconsciousness of modern humanity. Yet for this very reason, because these psychoanalysts see how much
there is in the subconscious — and they do see it — they look upon many things differently from other people. In
his Preface Jung says something, for example, part of which is not bad.

“The psychological processes which accompany the present war, above all the incredible depravity of public
opinion, the mutual calumnies, the undreamed of fury of destruction, the flood of lies, and men's inability to halt
the bloody demon, are all adapted to set before the eyes of thinking humanity the problem of the restlessly
slumbering, chaotic realm of the subconscious. This war has shown pitilessly to the cultured man that he is still a
barbarian, and at the same time what an iron rod of correction awaits him should it again occur to him to hold his
neighbor responsible for his own bad character. The psychology of the single individual corresponds to the
psychology of the nations.”

And now comes a sentence which makes you wonder what to do with it.

“What the nations do is done by each individual, and so long as the individual does it the nation will do it too. Only
a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a change in the psychology of the nation.”

These sentences, placed side by side, show how destructively this thinking works. I ask you if it is sensible to say:
“What the nations do is done by each individual?” It would be equally reasonable to ask: Could an individual do it
without nations doing it too? It is nonsense, is it not, to say things like that. The unfortunate thing is that even
prominent thinkers are impressed by it. And this sort of thinking is not only to become therapy, but take the lead in
pedagogy. This again is founded upon the justifiable longing to introduce into pedagogy a new soul and spiritual
element. Are conclusions to be accepted which were reached by entirely inadequate methods of cognition? These
are nowadays the important questions.

We shall return to the matter from the standpoint of anthroposophical orientation, and throw light upon it from a
broader horizon. Then we shall see that one must set about it in a much bigger way, in order to succeed with these
things at all. But they must be handled concretely. The problems which as yet have been investigated only by the
old, inadequate methods, must be placed in the light of anthroposophical knowledge.

Take, for example, the problem of Nietzsche. Today I will only suggest it; tomorrow we shall consider such
problems more thoroughly. We know already from former lectures: [Lectures given at Dörnach, October 14, 20,
21, 26, 27, 28; November 2, 3, 4, 1917.] from 1841 to 1879 battle of spirits above; from 1879 on, the fallen spirits
in the human realm. In future such and similar things must of necessity play a role whenever a human life is
studied. For Nietzsche was born in 1844. For three years before he descended to earth his soul was in the spiritual
realm in the midst of the spirit battle. During his boyhood Schopenhauer was still living, but died in 1860, and only
after his death did Nietzsche devote himself to the study of Schopenhauer's writings. The soul of Schopenhauer
cooperated from above in the spiritual world. That was the real relationship. Nietzsche was reading Schopenhauer,
and while he was absorbing his writings Schopenhauer was working upon his thoughts.

But how was Schopenhauer situated in the spiritual realm? From 1860 through the years when Nietzsche was
reading his books, Schopenhauer was in the midst of the spiritual battle that was still being fought out on that
plane. Therefore Schopenhauer's inspiration of Nietzsche was colored by what he himself gathered from the battle
of spirits in which he was involved. In 1879 these spirits were cast down from heaven upon the earth. Up to 1879
Nietzsche's spiritual development had followed very curious paths. They will be explained in the future as due to
the influence of Schopenhauer and of Wagner. In my book Friedrich Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, you
may find many supporting details. Wagner had up to that time no particular influence except that he was active on
earth. For Wagner was born in 1813; the battle of spirits only began in 1841. But Wagner died in 1883, and
Nietzsche's spiritual development took its peculiar direction when Wagner's influence began. Wagner entered the
spiritual world in 1883, when the battle of spirits was over, and the defeated spirits had been cast to earth.
Nietzsche was in the midst of things when the spirits began to roam around here on earth. Wagner's post mortem
influence upon Nietzsche had an entirely different object from that of Schopenhauer.

Here begin the super-personal but definite influences, not those abstract demonic ones, of which the psychoanalyst
speaks. Humanity must resolve to enter this concrete spiritual world, in order to comprehend things which are
obvious if only the facts are tested. In the future Nietzsche's biography will state that he was stimulated by that
Richard Wagner who was born in 1813, and took part up to 1879 everything that led to the brilliant being whom I
described in my book; that he had the influence of Schopenhauer from his sixteenth year, but that Schopenhauer
was involved in the spiritual battle that was fought upon the super-physical plane before 1879; that he was exposed
to Wagner's influence after Wagner had died and entered the spiritual world, while Nietzsche was still here below,
where the spirits of darkness were ruling.

Jung considers this a fact: that Nietzsche found a demon, and projected it without upon Wagner. Oh well —
projections, potentials, introverted or extraverted human types — all words for abstractions, but nothing about
realities! These things are truly important. This is not agitation for an anthroposophical world-conception for which
we are prejudiced. On the contrary, everything outside of anthroposophy shows how necessary this conception is
for present-day humanity!

Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy

GA 178

II. Anthroposophy and Psychoanalysis II

11 November 1917, Dornach

I have designated what is called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis as an effort to gain knowledge in the soul
realm by inadequate means of cognition. Perhaps nothing is so well adapted to show how, at the present time,
everything urges the attainment of the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, and how on the other side,
subconscious prejudices lead men to oppose a spiritually scientific consideration of the facts. Yesterday I showed
you by definite examples what grotesque leaps modern erudition is obliged to take when it ventures upon soul
problems, and how to detect these leaps in the mental processes of modern scholars. It was pointed out that one of
the better psychoanalysts — Jung — divided patients into two classes: the thinking type, and the feeling type. From
this starting point he assumed that in cases of the thinking type, subconscious feelings force their way up into
consciousness and produce soul conflicts — or in the opposite type, that thoughts in the subconscious mind arise
and conflict with the life of feeling.

Now it might be suggested that these things will be fought out in scientific discussion, and that we might wait until
people make up their minds to overcome the subconscious prejudice against anthroposophical spiritual science. But
passive waiting becomes impossible in that such things do not confine themselves to the theoretical field, but
encroach upon life practice and cultural development. And psychoanalysis is not content to occupy itself with
therapy alone, which might be less dubious since there seems to be little difference — I said seems — between it
and other therapeutical methods; but it is trying to extend itself to pedagogy, and to become the foundation of a
teaching system. This forces us to point out the dangers residing in quarter-truths in a more serious manner than
would be called for by mere theoretical discussion.

Much that relates to this matter can be decided only with the passage of time, but today we shall have to enlarge the
scope of our examination in order to throw light upon one aspect or another. First of all I wish to call to your
attention that the facts which lie before the psychoanalyst really point to an important spiritual sphere which
present-day man does not wish to enter in an accurate and correct manner, but would prefer to leave as a sort of
nebulous, subconscious region. For our present sickly, materialistically infected approach, even in this domain,
likes nothing better than a vague, mystical drifting among all sorts of incomplete or unexecuted concepts. We find
the most grotesque, the most repulsive mysticism right in the midst of materialism, if you take mysticism to mean a
desire to swim about in all sorts of nebulous thinking, without working out your world-conception into clear,
sharply outlined concepts. The domain into which recognized facts are pushing the psychoanalysts is the field of
extra-conscious intelligence and reasoning activity. How often I have dealt with these matters — without going
into details, but merely mentioning them, since they are taken for granted by students of spiritual science. How
often I have reminded you that reasoning, intellectual activity, cleverness are not confined to the human
consciousness, but are everywhere, that we are surrounded by effective mental activity as we are surrounded by air,
interwoven with it, and the other beings as well.

The facts before the psychoanalyst might easily refer to this. I quoted to you yesterday the case described by Jung
in his book, Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prosesse. It had to do with a woman who, having left an evening
party with other guests, was frightened by horses, ran in front of them along the street to the river where she was
rescued by passers-by, brought back to the house that she had left, where she had a love scene with her host. From
the standpoint of Freud or Adler the case is easily explained on the basis of the love-drive or the power-drive, but
this diagnosis does not reach the vital point. Its foundation is reached only by realizing that consciousness does not
exhaust the cleverness, calculation, the artfulness of what penetrates man as intelligence, and by realizing that the
laws of life are not limited by the laws of consciousness.

Consider this case. We can at least raise the question: What did the woman really want, after she had been one of
the party, and had seen her friend depart for the health resort? She wanted the opportunity for what actually
happened, she wanted a legitimate excuse to be alone with the master of the house. Of course this had nothing to do
with what was in her consciousness, what she realized and admitted. It would not have been “proper,” as we say.
Something had to be brought about that need not be avowed, and we shall reach the real explanation by allowing
for her subconscious, designing intelligence, of which she was herself unaware. Throughout the entire evening she
had wanted to bring about a conversation with her host. If one is less clever a poor choice is made of means, if
more clever a better choice. In this case it may be said that in the woman's ordinary consciousness, which admitted
scruples as to what was proper or improper, allowed or not allowed, the right means could not have been chosen
for the end in view. But in that which was stored below the layer of the ordinary consciousness the thought was
incessantly active: I must manage a meeting with the man. I must make use of the next opportunity that presents
itself in order to return to the house.

We may be sure that if the opportunity with the horses had not offered itself, supported by association with the
earlier accident, she would have found some other excuse. She needed only to faint in the street, and would have
been brought back to the house at once, or she would have found some other expedient. The subconsciousness
looked beyond all the scruples of the ordinary consciousness, taking the attitude that “the end justifies the means,”
regardless of whether they would or would not harmonize with ideas of propriety and impropriety.

In such a case we are reminded of what Nietzsche, who surmised many of these things, called the great reason in
contrast with the small reason, the all-inclusive reason that does not come into consciousness, that acts below the
threshold of consciousness, leading men to do many things which they do not consciously confess to themselves.
Through his ordinary outer consciousness the human being is in connection first with the world of the senses, but
also with the whole physical world, and with all that lives within it. To the physical world belong all the concepts
of propriety, of bourgeois morality, and so forth, with which man is equipped.

In his subconsciousness man is connected with an entirely different world, of which Jung says: the soul has need of
it because it is related to it, but he also says that it is foolish to inquire about its real existence. Well, it is this way:
as soon as the threshold of consciousness is crossed, man and his soul are no longer in merely material
surroundings or relations, but in a realm where thoughts rule, thoughts which may be very artful.

Now Jung's view is quite correct when he says that modern man, the so-called man of culture, needs particularly to
be mindful of these things. For present culture has this peculiarity, that it forces down numerous impulses into the
subconsciousness, which then assert themselves in such a way that irrational acts — as they are called — and
irrational general conduct result. When the “power-urge” or the “love urge” are mentioned, it is because in the
moment that man and his soul enter the subconscious regions they come nearer to the realm where these instincts
rule; not that they are in themselves causes, but that man with his subconscious intelligence plunges into regions
where these impulses are effective.

That woman would not have gone to so much exertion for anything that interested her less than her love affair. It
required an especial preoccupation for her subconscious cunning to be aroused. And that the love impulse so often
plays an important role is due simply to the fact that the love interest is so very common. If the psychoanalysts
would only turn more of their attention in other directions, cease to concentrate upon psychoanalytic sanatoriums,
where the majority of the inmates seem to me to be women — (the same reproach is cast upon anthroposophical
institutions but, I think, with less justice), — if they were more experienced in other fields, which is of course
sometimes the case, if there were a greater variety of cases in the sanatoriums, a more extensive knowledge might
be obtained.

Let us assume that a sanatorium was equipped for giving psychiatric treatment especially to people who had
become nervous or hysterical from playing the stock market. Then the existence of other things in the subconscious
mind could be established with as much reason as the love-urge, introduced by Freud. Then it would be seen with
what detailed cunning, and artful subconscious processes, the man acts who plays the stock market. Then, through
the usual methods of elimination, sexual love would be seen to play a very small part, yet the subtleties of
subconscious acuteness, of subconscious slyness, could be studied at their height. Even the lust for power could not
always be designated as being the primary impulse, but altogether different instincts would be found ruling those
regions, in which man submerges himself with his soul. And if in addition a sanatorium could be equipped for
learned men who had become hysterical — forgive me! — it would be found that their subconscious actions
seldom lead back to the love-motive. For those with any thorough knowledge of facts in this field realize that,
under present conditions, scholars are seldom driven to their chosen science by “love,” but by quite different forces
which would show themselves if brought to the surface by psychoanalysis. The all-inclusive fact is that the soul is
led from the conscious down into the subconscious regions where man's unconquered instincts rule. He can master
these only by becoming aware of them, and spiritual research alone can lift them into consciousness.

Another inconvenient truth! For of course it forces the admission, to a point far beyond what the psychoanalyst is
prepared to admit, that man in his subconscious mind may be a very sly creature, far more sly than in his full
consciousness. Even in this field, and with ordinary science, we may have strange experiences. There is a chapter
on this subject in my book Riddles of the Soul In it I deal with the strictures upon Anthroposophy, found in a book
entitled Vom Jenseits der Seele, 1Beyond the Limits of the Soul. (This book has not been translated into English. Ed.) and written by that academic
individual Dessoir. This second chapter of my book Riddles of the Soul will be a nice contribution to thinking
people who would like to form an opinion of present scholarly ethics. You will see when you read this chapter
what kind of opposition must be encountered. I will mention, of all the points therein indicated, one or two only
which are not unconnected with our present theme.
This man makes all sorts of objections to this and that, founded upon passages taken from my books. In a very neat
connection he tells how I distinguish consecutive periods of culture: the Indian, the old Persian, the Chaldean-
Egyptian, the Graeco-Latin, and now we live in the sixth, he says, “according to Steiner.”

This forces us to refute these misstatements in a schoolmasterly manner, for it shows us the only way to get at such
an individual. How does Max Dessoir come to assert, in the midst of all his other nonsense, that I said we are living
in the sixth postatlantean culture period? It may be easily explained if you have any practice in the technique of
philological methods. I was connected for six years and a half with the Goethe Archives in Weimar, learned there a
little about the usual procedure, and could easily show, according to philological methods, how Dessoir came to
attribute to me this statement regarding the sixth culture period. He had been reading my book Occult Science, an
Outline, in which there is a sentence leading to a description of our present fifth postatlantean culture period. In it I
say that there are long preparations and, in one section, that events taking place in the 14th and 15th centuries were
prepared in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. About five lines further on I say that the sixth century was a
preparation for the fifth culture period. Dessoir, reading superficially, turned back hastily as scholars do, to the
place that he had noted in the margin, and confused what was said about the culture period with what had been
stated further back about the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Thus he says “sixth culture period” instead of fifth
because his eye had moved backward a few lines.

You see with what a grand superficiality such a person works. Here we have an example of how such “scholarship”
may be philologically shown up. In this literary creation such mistakes run through the entire chapter. And while
Dessoir affirms that he has studied a whole row of my books, I could prove, again philologically, which ones of
mine compose this “whole row.” He had read — and but slightly understood — The Philosophy of Spiritual
Activity, for he devotes a sentence to it that is utter nonsense. And he read Occult Science, but in such a way as to
bring out the kind of stuff that I have described. He read in addition the small work The Spiritual Guidance of Man,
and the little pamphlets on Reincarnation and Karma, and Blood is Quite a Special Fluid. These are all that he
read, as may be shown by his comments. He read nothing else. These are our present ethics of scholarship. It is
important once in a way to expose, in such a connection, the erudition of the present day. Out of the long list of my
books he chooses a very small number, and founds upon them, with quite perverted thinking, his whole statement.
Many of our scientists today do exactly the same thing. When they write about animals, for example, they usually
have for a foundation about as much material as Professor Dessoir extracted from my books.

Quite a pretty chapter could be written from observations of Dessoir's subconscious mind. He himself, however, in
a special passage in his book, permits us to take account of his subconsciousness. He relates rather grotesquely that
when he is lecturing it often happens that his thoughts go on without his full conscious direction, and that only by
the reaction of his audience does he recognize that his thoughts have taken a line independent of his attention. He
tells that quite naively. But only think! From this fact he embarks upon extended consideration of the many
peculiarities of human consciousness. I have pointed out somewhat “gently” that Dessoir thus strangely reveals
himself. I said at first: It cannot be possible that he means himself. In this case he must simply be identifying
himself with certain clumsy lecturers, and speaking in the first person. It would be imputing to him a good deal to
suppose that he is describing himself. But he really does exactly that. Well, in the discussion of such matters many
odd things must be noted.

He disposed of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by one remark, with the addition of a sentence that is
Dessoirish, but did not originate with me. The whole matter is crazy. He says at the same time “Steiner's first book,
the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” This forces me to point out that this book forms the close of a ten year
period of authorship, and to offer this incident as an example of academic ignorance, and ethics. I know of course
that although I have shown how incorrect his statements are, people will say again and again: “Well, Dessoir has
refuted Steiner.” — I know it very well. I know that it is speaking against walls to try to break through what men
imagine they have long since got rid of — belief in authority!

But this chapter alone will prove the difficulties against which spiritual science must struggle because it insists
upon clear, sharply outlined concepts, and concrete spiritual experiences. There is no question of logic with such an
individual as Dessoir, and a lack of logic characterizes in the broadest sense our present so-called scientific
literature.

These are the reasons why official learning, and official spiritual trends, even if they work themselves away from
such inferiority as the university psychiatry or psychology, are not in a position to make good because they lack the
smallest equipment for a genuine observation of life. So long as it is not realized how far from genuine research
and from a sense for reality that really is which poses as scientific literature — I do not say, as science, but as
scientific literature — and often forms the content of university and especially of popular lectures — so long as this
authoritative belief is not broken through, there can be no cure. These things must be said, and are compatible with
the deepest respect for real scientific thinking, and for the great achievements of natural science. That these things
are applied to life in such contradictory fashion must however be recognized.

After this digression let us return to our subject. Dessoir takes the opportunity to combine objective untruth with
calumny in his remark regarding the little pamphlet Spiritual Guidance of Man. He feels it to be especially
irritating that I have indicated important subconscious action of spiritual impulses by showing that a child while
building its brain manifests greater wisdom than it is conscious of later. A healthy science ought to take its starting
point from such normal effects of the subconscious, yet it needs something in addition. If you take up the book
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find mention of the Secret of the Threshold. In the explanation of this
“secret” it is stated that in crossing the threshold into the spiritual world a kind of separation takes place, a sort of
differentiation of the three fundamental powers of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. Remember in the part
dealing with the Guardian of the Threshold, the explanation that these three forces, which act together in ordinary
consciousness in such a way that they can hardly be separated, become independent of each other. If I sketch them,
this narrow middle section (see drawing) is the boundary between the ordinary consciousness and that region in
which the soul lives in the spiritual world. Thinking, feeling, and willing must be so drawn as to show this as the
range of will (red), but bordering upon the realm of feeling (green), and this in turn borders upon the realm of
thinking (yellow). But if I were to indicate their direction after crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, I
should have to show how thinking (yellow) becomes independent upon the one hand; feeling (green, right)
separates itself from thinking, will becomes independent too (red, right), as I sketch it here diagrammatically, so
that thinking, feeling, and willing spread out from one another like a fan.

You will find this described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. That these three activities, which before
passing the threshold border upon each other but work separately, interact in the right way and do not come into
confusion is due to the fact that the threshold has, so to speak, a certain breadth in which our

Diagram 1

ego itself lives. If our ego acts normally, has perfect soul health, then the interaction of thinking, feeling, and
willing is so regulated that they do not collide with one another, but mutually influence each other. It is the
essential secret of our ego that it holds thinking, feeling, and willing beside each other, so that they can affect each
other in the right way, but do not mix in any accidental fashion. Once across the threshold into the spiritual world
there is no danger of this since the three faculties then separate.

Certain philosophers (such as Wundt, for example), insist that the soul must not be described as threefold because
it is a unity. Wundt, too, confuses everything. The facts are that in the spiritual world thinking, feeling, and willing
originate in a threefold manner, yet in the soul on earth they act as a unity. That must be taken into consideration,
and if it be claimed, as recently reported, that Anthroposophy recognizes three souls though there exists but one,
and that Anthroposophy has therefore no reasonable argument — then the answer must be that the unity of man is
not impaired by the fact that he has two hands.

But now we are considering the relation of the ego to the soul-forces that work within it, and their action beyond
the threshold of consciousness in the spiritual world. (Drawing, middle and right). An opposite condition may be
brought about if the ego has been weakened in any way. Then the threshold is crossed, as it were, in the opposite
direction (See drawing, left). Then thinking swerves aside (yellow, left), mingles with feeling (green, left), and
willing (red, left), and confusion results. This happens if thinking is exposed in any way to the danger of not being
properly confined, so that it asserts itself unwarrantably in the consciousness. Then, because the ego is not working
as it should, thinking slides into the sphere of feeling or of will. Instead of working side by side, thinking mixes
itself with feeling, or will, the ego being for some reason unable to exert its normal power.

This is what has happened in the cases described by the psychoanalysts as hysterical or nervous. Thinking, feeling,
and willing have swung to the opposite side, away from the healthy direction that would lead them into the spiritual
world. If you have any gift for testing and proving you may easily see how it comes about. Take the case of the girl
sitting by the sickbed. Her strong ego-consciousness was reduced by loss of sleep and anxiety. The slightest thing
might cause thinking to leave its track alongside of feeling and to run over into it. Then thought would be at once
submerged in the waves of feeling, which are far stronger than the waves of thought, and the result in such a case is
that the whole organism is seized by the tumult of feeling. This happens in the instant that thinking ceases to be
strong enough to hold itself apart from feeling.

It is seriously demanded of the human being that he learn more and more to hold his thinking apart from the waves
of feeling and will. If thinking takes hold subconsciously of the waves of feeling something abnormal results. (See
drawing: at the right is the superconscious, in the middle the conscious, at the left the subconscious). This is
extremely important.

Now you may readily imagine that in this modern life, when people are brought into contact with so much that they
do not properly understand and cannot appraise, thoughts continually run over into feelings. But it must be
remembered that thinking alone is oriented upon the physical plane; feeling is no longer confined to the physical
plane, but stands in connection, by its very nature, with the spiritual plane as well. Feeling has really a connection
with all the spiritual beings who must be spoken of as real. So that if a man with inadequate concepts sinks into his
feeling-life, he comes into collision with the gods — if you wish to express it thus — but also with evil gods. And
all these collisions occur because a man is submerged with no reliable means of knowledge. He must so submerge
if he spends more time in the sphere of feeling than in the ordinary sphere of reason. In the sphere of feeling man
cannot emancipate himself from his connection with the spiritual world. Even if, in this materialistic age, he does
free himself in the realm of the intellect, he always enters the region of feeling with inadequate concepts, and so he
must become ill.

What then is the real remedy, and how are men to be restored to health? They must be guided to concepts that
reach out to include the world of feelings; that is to say that modern man must again be told of the spiritual world,
and in the most comprehensive terms. Not the individually adapted therapeutic instructions of the psychoanalysts
are meant, but the spiritual science which is applicable to all humanity. If the concepts of spiritual science are
really accepted — for not everyone takes them in who only listens to lectures, or reads about them — but if they
are really absorbed there will be no further possibility of the chaotic intermingling, in the subconscious, of the three
spheres of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing, which is the basis of all the hysteria and nervousness noted by
the psychoanalysts.

For this, however, a man needs the courage to approach a direct experience of the operation of spiritual worlds, the
courage to recognize that we are living now in a crisis that is connected with another (the established date being
1879), another crisis with painful consequences from which we are still suffering. I told you yesterday that many
things must be considered from standpoints other than the materialistic ones of our own time, and I chose
Nietzsche as an illustration.

Nietzsche was born in 1844. In 1841 the battle began in the spiritual world, of which I have already spoken, and
Nietzsche was for three years in the midst of it, absorbing from it all possible impulses, and bringing them down
with him to earth. Richard Wagner, born in 1813, took at first no part in it. Read Nietzsche's early writings, and
notice the combative tone, almost every sentence showing the after-effects of what he experienced spiritually from
1841 to 1844. It gave a definite coloring to all the writings of Nietzsche's first period.

It is further of importance — as I have also explained — that he was a lad of sixteen when Schopenhauer died, and
started at that time to read his works. A real relation ensued between the soul of Schopenhauer in the spiritual
world and that of Nietzsche on earth. Nietzsche read every phrase of Schopenhauer so receptively that he was
penetrated by every corresponding impulse of their author. What was Schopenhauer's object? He had ascended into
the spiritual world in 1860 when the battle was still raging, and wanted nothing so much as to have the power of his
thoughts continued through his works. Nietzsche did carry forward Schopenhauer's thoughts, but in a peculiar way.
Schopenhauer saw when he went through the gate of death that he had written his books in an epoch threatened by
the oncoming spirits of darkness, and with the struggle before him of these spirits against the spirits of light, he
longed to have the effects of his work continued, and formed in Nietzsche's soul the impulse to continue his
thoughts. What Nietzsche received from the spiritual world at this period contrasted strikingly with what was
happening upon the physical plane in his personal relations with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's soul life was
composed in this way, and his career as a writer.

The year 1879 arrived. The battle that had been going on in the spiritual realms began to be transferred to earth
after the fall of the spirits of darkness. Nietzsche was exposed by his whole Karma (in which I include his relations
with the spiritual world), to the danger of being driven by the spirits of darkness into evil paths. He had been
inspired by the transcendent egoism of Schopenhauer to try to carry on his work. I do not mean to say that egoism
is always bad. But when Wagner rose into the spiritual world in 1883 the spirits of darkness were below, so he
came into an entirely different atmosphere, and he became Nietzsche's unselfish spiritual guide. He let him enter
what was for him the proper channel, and allowed him to become mentally deranged at exactly the right moment,
so that he never came consciously into dangerous regions. That sounds paradoxical, but it was really the unselfish
way in which Wagner's soul affected Nietzsche from the purer realms above, rather than the manner in which
Schopenhauer's soul acted, he being still in the midst of the battle, up in the spiritual world, between the spirits of
darkness and the spirits of light. What Wagner wanted to do for Nietzsche was to protect him, so far as his Karma
permitted, from the spirits of darkness, already descended upon earth.

And Nietzsche was protected to a great extent. If his last writings are read in the right spirit, eliminating the things
that have sprung from strong oppositions, great thoughts will be discovered. I tried in my book Nietzsche, a Fighter
against his Time, to show the mighty thought impulses, detached from all his resisting impulses.

Yes, “the world is deep.” There is really some truth in Nietzsche's own saying: “The world is deep, and deeper than
the day divines.” So we must never try to criticize the wide regions of the spiritual life by means of our ordinary
consciousness. The wise guidance of the worlds can be understood only if we can enter into that guidance, free
from egoistic thoughts, even if we can fit the development of tragic happenings into the scheme of wisdom. If you
wish to look into the heart of things you will come upon many uncomfortable places.

In future whoever wishes to evaluate a life like Nietzsche's will make no progress if he describes only what
happened in Nietzsche's environment on earth. Our view of life will have to extend to the spiritual world, and we
shall be pushed to this necessity by the kind of phenomena that the psychoanalyst today tries to master by such
inadequate means of knowledge, but never will control. Therefore human society might be driven into regions of
great difficulty if it yields to psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of pedagogy.

Why should this be? Consider the fact that thinking slips down into the sphere of feeling. Now as soon as a man
lives with his soul in the sphere of feeling, he is no longer in the life that is bounded by birth and death or by
conception and death, but lives in the whole world, the extended world. This represents the usual life span (See
drawing, a); within the realm of feeling he lives also in the period from his last death to his birth into this present
life (See drawing, b); and with his will he lives even in his previous incarnation (Drawing, c).
Think of the relation to pupil or patient of an instructor who wishes to proceed by the method of psychoanalysis.
When he tries to deal with soul contents which have slipped down into the realm of feeling he lays hold, not only
upon the man's individual life, but upon the all-inclusive life which extends far beyond the individual. For this all-
encompassing life, however, there are between men no connections that may be handled by means of mere ideas.
Such connections lead instead to genuine life-relationships. This is very important. Imagine the existence of such a
connection between a psychoanalytic instructor and pupil. What takes place could not be confined to the realm of
ideas which are conveyed to the pupil, but real karmic connections would have to be established because one is
really encroaching upon life itself. It would be tearing the individual in question out of his karma, changing the
course of his karma. It will not do to handle that which extends beyond the individual in a purely individual
manner. It must be treated instead in a universally human way. We are all brought together in a definite epoch, so
there must be a mutual element which acts as soon as we go beyond the individual. That is to say: a patient cannot
be treated by psychoanalysis, either therapeutically or educationally, as between individuals. Something universal

Diagram 2

must enter, must enter even the general culture of the period, something which directs the soul to that which would
otherwise remain subconscious; and that which draws the subconsciousness upward must become the milieu — not
a transaction between individuals.

Here, you see, lies the great mistake that is being made. It has a terrific range and is of immense importance.
Instead of trying to lead them to the attainable knowledge of the spiritual world which is demanded by the times,
the psychoanalysts shut all the souls who show any morbid symptoms into sanatoriums, and treat each one in the
individual manner. It can lead only to the forming of confused karmic connections — what takes place does not
bring to light the subconscious soul content, but simply forms a karmic tie between doctor and patient because it
encroaches upon the individual.

You understand: we are dealing here with real, concrete life, with which it does not do to play, which can only be
mastered if nothing is striven for in this field except what is humanly universal. These things must be learned by
direct relations of human beings with the spiritual world. Therefore it would be useful if people were to stop
talking abstractly as Jung does, saying that a man experiences subconsciously everything that mankind has been
through, even all sorts of demons. He makes them into abstract demons, not realities, by saying that it is stupid to
discuss their possible existence. He makes them into abstract demons, mere thought demons that could never make
a man ill. They can exist only in consciousness, and can never be subconscious. That is the point: that people who
give themselves up to such theories are themselves working with so many unconscious ideas that they can never
happen upon the right thing. They come instead to regard certain concepts as absolute, infallible; and I must ever
repeat that when ideas begin to become absolute, men get into a blind alley, or reach a pit into which they fall with
their thinking.

A man like Dr. Freud is obliged to stretch the sexual domain over the entire human being in order to make it
account for every soul phenomenon. I have said to various people with psychoanalytic tendencies, whom I have
met: A theory, a world-concept must be able to hold its own when you turn it upon itself, otherwise it crumbles into
nothingness. The simple fallacy, if you extend it far enough, is an example. A Cretan says: All Cretans are liars. If
it is said by a Cretan, and it is true, then it would be a lie, which causes the saying to annul itself. It will not do for a
Cretan to say “All Cretans are liars,” expecting the sentence to pass unchallenged. That is only a sample of
absolutizing. But a theory should not crumble when turned upon itself. Just as the statement that all Cretans are
liars would be a lie if made by a Cretan, so does the theory of universal sexuality crumble if you test it out by
applying it to the subject itself. And it is the same with other things. You can understand such a principle for a long
time without applying it vigorously, in accordance with reality. But it will be one of the particular achievements of
anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that it cannot be turned in this manner against itself.

Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy

GA 143

III. Reflections in the Mirror of Consciousness, Superconsciousness and

Subconsciousness

25 February 1912, Munich

Today and the day after tomorrow I propose to discuss a few of the more important facts relating to consciousness
and to karmic connections.

If you cast even a superficial glance at that which exists in your soul from awaking in the morning to falling asleep
at night — in the form of ideas, moods, impulses of will, adding of course all the impressions that approach the
soul from without — then you have everything that may be called the objects of ordinary consciousness.

It must be clear to us that all these details of our conscious activity are dependent, under ordinary conditions, upon
the instrumentality of the physical body. The immediate, irrefutable proof of this is that one must awake in order to
live within these facts of the usual consciousness. For us this means that the human being must submerge himself
in the physical body with what is outside it during sleep, and his physical body must be at his disposal with its
instruments. He must be able to make use of them if the activities of the ordinary consciousness are to go on.

The following question then arises: In what way does the human being, as a soul and spiritual entity, make use of
his physical instruments, his organs of sense, his nervous system? In what way does he use his bodily organs in
order to exist in his ordinary consciousness? In the outer, materialistic world there is, first of all, the belief that the
human being possesses in his physical instruments that which produces the facts present to consciousness. It has
been frequently pointed out that this is not the case; that it is no more sensible for us to imagine that our inner
corporeality, our sense organs or brain, bring forth the details of consciousness than to imagine that a candle
creates the flame. The relation of what we call consciousness to the bodily mechanism is quite otherwise. We
might compare it with the relation of a man to the mirror in which he sees himself. When we sleep our state of
consciousness is comparable, let us say, to walking straight ahead in a certain space. If we do this we do not see
ourselves, how our nose or forehead looks, and so forth. Only when someone steps forward with a mirror and holds
it before us do we behold ourselves. But then we are confronted by what has always belonged to us. It is then there
for us. It is the same with the facts of our ordinary consciousness. They exist continually within us, and have, as
they exist there, nothing whatsoever to do with the physical body — as little as we ourselves have to do with the
mirror mentioned above. The materialistic theory in this field is simply nonsense; it is not even a possible
hypothesis. For the materialist in this field affirms nothing less than would be asserted were someone to declare
that because he sees himself in a mirror the mirror created him.

If you wish to give yourself up to the illusion that the mirror creates you because you see yourself only when it is
held before you, then you may also believe that parts of the brain or the sense organs produce the content of your
soul-life. Both statements are equally intelligent and true. That the mirror creates the human being is just as true as
that the brain produces thoughts. The facts of our consciousness persist. It is necessary for our ordinary
organization that we be able to perceive these existing details of consciousness. To this end we must encounter that
which reflects them — our physical body. We have thus in our physical body what we may call the reflecting
apparatus for the facts of our ordinary consciousness. These facts exist in our soul and spiritual entity. We cannot
perceive them psychically any more than we can perceive ourselves without a mirror. We become aware of that
which lives within us and is a part of us by having held before us the mirror of our bodily nature. That is the actual
state of things, except that one has not to do with a passive reflector in the case of the body, but with something
that contains processes of its own. Thus it may be imagined that instead of the mirror which is silvered to produce
reflection, the physical body has behind it all sorts of processes. The comparison suffices to show the relation of
our spirit and soul being to the body. We will hold before our minds the fact that for all we experience in normal,
everyday consciousness, the physical body is an adequate reflector. Behind or, let us say, below all the details of
this usual consciousness lie the things that rise up into our ordinary soul-life, and which we must designate as facts
within the hidden depths of the soul.

Some of that which exists in the hidden depths of the soul is experienced by the poet or the artist who knows — if
he is a genuine poet or artist — that he does not conceive his works by means of logic or outer observation. He
knows instead that they emerge from unknown depths, and are there, really there without having been gathered
together by the forces of ordinary consciousness. But from these hidden depths of soul-life other things also
emerge which, although in everyday life we are unaware of their origin, play a part in our everyday consciousness.

We saw yesterday that we can go down deeper, into the realm of half-consciousness, the realm of dreams, and we
know that dreams lift something up out of the depths of soul-life which we cannot lift up by straining the memory
in the simple usual way. When something long buried in memory stands before a human soul in a dream picture —
which happens again and again — the individual in most cases could never, through recollection alone, lift these
things up from the hidden depths of soul-life because the ordinary consciousness does not extend so far down. But
that which is inaccessible to this surface consciousness is quite within reach of the subconsciousness, and in the
half conscious dream state much that has remained or been preserved, so to say, is brought up or rises up.

Only those things strike upwards that have failed to produce their effects in the way usual to that emanation of
human experience which sinks into the hidden depths of the soul. We become healthy or ill, moody or gay, not due
directly to our ordinary course of life, but because a bodily condition results from that which has sunk down from
our life experience. It is no longer remembered, but there below in our soul this sunken something works, and
makes us what we become in the course of our lives. Many a life would be quite comprehensible to us, if we but
knew what hidden elements had descended throughout its course into these subconscious depths. We should be
able to understand many a man in his thirties, forties, or fifties, should know why he has this or that tendency, why
he feels so deeply dissatisfied in certain connections without being able to say what causes this discomfort. We
should understand a great deal if we were to follow the life of such a man back into childhood. We should be able
then to see how in his early years his parents and environment had affected him, what was called forth of sorrow
and joy, of pleasure or pain, perhaps entirely forgotten, but acting upon his general condition. For that which rolls
down, and surges out of our consciousness into the hidden depths of soul life continues its operation there. It is a
curious fact that the force, acting in this way, works primarily upon ourselves, does not leave, so to speak, the
sphere of our personality. Therefore when the clairvoyant consciousness descends, (and this happens through what
is called imaginative cognition), when the clairvoyant consciousness descends to the realm where, in the
subconsciousness, things rule which have just been described, the seeker always finds himself. He finds that which
exists and surges within him. And that is good; for in true self-knowledge the human being must learn to know
himself in order that he may observe and become acquainted with all the driving forces that work within him.

If he gives no heed to these facts; if when he gains clairvoyant consciousness through exercises in imaginative
cognition, and forces his way down into the subconscious — if he does not recognize that in everything working
within him he finds only himself — then he is exposed to manifold errors. For he cannot become aware of this in
any way comparable to the ordinary activities of consciousness. There arises for the human searcher the possibility,
at one step or another, of having visions, of seeing shapes which are quite new and do not resemble those with
which he has become acquainted in average experience. This may happen, but to believe that such things are part
of the outer world would be a serious mistake. These phenomena of the inner life do not present themselves as in
the ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache it is a fact of the ordinary consciousness. One knows it to be
located in one's own head. If anyone has a stomachache he is aware of it within himself. If we descend into what
we call the hidden depths of the soul, we remain absolutely within ourselves, and yet what we encounter may
present itself objectively, as if it were in the outside world.

Let us consider a striking example: Let us assume that someone has a longing to be the reincarnation of Mary
Magdalene. (I have already stated that I have counted during my lifetime twenty-four such Magdalenes!) Let us
assume also that this wish is not as yet admitted: we do not need to admit to ourselves our own wishes, that is not
necessary. But a woman reads the story of Mary Magdalene, and it pleases her exceedingly. The desire to be Mary
Magdalene may arise at once in her subconscious mind while in the surface consciousness nothing is present but
the attraction of this character. It pleases the person in question. In the subconsciousness, unknown to its possessor,
there is a growing desire to be this Mary Magdalene. This individual goes through the world, and as long as
nothing intervenes in her upper consciousness, that is to say, as far as she knows, she is simply pleased with Mary
Magdalene. The ardent desire to be Mary Magdalene is in her subconscious mind, but she knows nothing about
that, so it does not trouble her. She is guided by the details of the ordinary consciousness, and may go through the
world as though she had no such injurious subconscious desire. But let us assume that, as a result of employing this
or that occult method of reaching the subconscious, this woman succeeds in descending into herself. She might not
become aware of a desire to be Mary Magdalene as she would of a headache. If she did her attitude towards her
desire would be the same as towards a pain: she would just try to get rid of it. But in the case of an irregular
penetration this desire presents itself as something outside the personality. The vision pretends to say: Thou art
Mary Magdalene! It stands before her, projecting itself as a fact, and a human being, as evolution is today, is
unable to control such a condition with the ego. With good, correct, and careful schooling this cannot happen, for
then the ego goes along into every sphere; but as soon as something enters the consciousness without the
accompanying presence of the ego it is produced as an objective fact. This observer believes that she recalls events
surrounding Mary Magdalene, and identifies herself with her.

This is a real possibility. I emphasize this today in order that you may gather from it the fact that only careful
schooling, and caution in regard to your entrance into the domain of occultism can save you from falling into error.
It is to be understood that you must first see a whole world before you, must note objects around you, excluding
however that which you relate to yourself, or which is within you, even though it appears as a world tableau — if
you know that it is well to regard what you first see only as the projection of your own inner life, then you have a
good corrective for the errors along the way. This is the best of all: regard, as a general rule, everything as
phenomena emanating from yourself. Most of them arise out of our wishes, vanities, from our ambitions, in short,
from characteristics relating to the egotism of humanity. These things project themselves, for the most part,
outward, and you may now raise the question: How can we avoid these errors? How can we save ourselves from
them?

We cannot save ourselves from these errors by the ordinary facts of consciousness. The deception arises from the
fact that, although the human being is confronted in reality by a world-tableau, he cannot escape from himself, is
all entangled in himself. From this you may see that it depends upon our coming, in one way or another, out of
ourselves that we learn to differentiate: here you have a vision and there another. The visions are both outside
ourselves; one is perhaps only the projection of a desire, the other is a fact, but they do not differ as radically as in
ordinary life when someone else says he has a headache, and you have it yourself. Our own inner life is projected
into space, just as the inner life of another person. How shall we learn to distinguish the one from the other?

We must undertake research within the occult field, and learn to distinguish true from false impressions, although
they appear confused and all make the same claim to authenticity, as though we looked into the physical world and
saw besides ordinary trees, imaginary ones. The real objective facts and those which arise from our own inner life
are mixed together. How are we to learn to separate two realms which are so intermingled?

We do not learn this primarily through our consciousness. If we remain entirely within the confines of our mental
life there is then no possibility of differentiation. This possibility lies only in the slow occult training of the soul.
As we go on further and further we acquire real discrimination. This means that we learn to do in the occult realm
what we would have to do in the physical world if trees born of phantasy and genuine trees stood side by side. If
we run against phantasy-trees they let us pass through without resistance, but if we encounter real trees we bruise
ourselves against them. Something similar, although of course only as a spiritual fact, must confront us in the
occult field.

We can, if we go about it properly, learn in a comparatively simple way to distinguish between the true and false
within this field, not however through ideas, but by resolution of will. This resolution may be brought about in the
following way: If we look over our life we find in it two distinctly different groups of occurrences. We often find
that this or that in which we succeed or fail is related to our abilities. That is to say, we find it comprehensible that
in a certain field we do not succeed very well because in it we are not particularly bright. Where we assume on the
contrary that we have ability, we find success quite natural.

Perhaps we need not always discern so distinctly the connection between what we carry out and our abilities. There
is also a less definite way to realize this connection. If, for example, anyone in his later years is pursued by this or
that blow of fate and, thinking back says to himself: “As a man I did little to make myself energetic” — or must
say to himself: “I was always a careless fellow” — he may also say: “Well, the connection between my lack of
success and my other omissions is not immediately apparent, but I do see that things cannot really succeed for a
careless, lazy person to the same degree they are possible for one who is conscientious and industrious.” In short,
there are successes and failures which we can comprehend and find natural, but there are others which happen in
such a way that we cannot discover any connection, so that we say to ourselves: “Although in accordance with
certain abilities this or that should have succeeded, it nevertheless did not succeed.” Thus there is distinctly a type
of success or failure whose connection with our capacities we cannot see.

That is one thing. The other is that in regard to some things in the outside world which strike us as blows of fate,
we can sometimes say: “Well yes, that appears to be just, for we furnished all the predisposing conditions;” but
some other things that happen we cannot discover that we are in any position to explain. We have thus two types of
experience; those whose relation to ourselves and our capacities we realize, and the other type just characterized,
for which we cannot see that we are responsible. Our external experiences fall likewise into two classes: those of
which we cannot say that we have produced the determining conditions, in contrast to others which we know we
have brought about.

Now we may look around a little in our lives. That is a useful experiment for everyone. We could gather together
all the things whose causes we cannot see, whose success led us to say “a blind chicken has found a kernel of corn”
— things whose success we cannot attribute to ourselves. But we can remember and collect also failures in the
same way, and those seemingly accidental outer events for which we know of no modifying influence. And now
we make the following soul experiment: We imagine that we constructed for ourselves an artificial human being
who, through his own abilities, brought about all our successes whose cause we do not understand. If something
succeeded for us requiring wisdom just where we ourselves are stupid, then we conceive a person who is
particularly clever in this field, and for whom the enterprise simply had to succeed. Or for an outer event we
proceed in this way: let us say a brick falls on our head. We can see no reason, but we conceive someone who
brought it about by running up to the roof and loosening the brick, so that he needed only to wait a little for it to
fall. He runs down quickly, and the brick strikes him. We do this with certain events which we know have not been
brought about by us in any ordinary way, and which happen very much against our will. Let us assume that at some
time in our life we were struck by someone. In order that we may not find this too difficult we may place this event
back in our childhood; we can pretend that then we contrived to be beaten by someone, that is, we had done
everything to bring it about. In short, we construct for ourselves a human being who brings down upon himself
everything for which we cannot account. You see, if progress in occultism is desired many things must be done
which run contrary to ordinary events. If you do only what generally seems reasonable you get no further in
occultism, for that which relates to higher worlds may seem to ordinary people quite foolish. It does no harm if the
method does seem foolish to the prosaic outer man.

Well, we construct for ourselves this human being. At first it seems to us a merely grotesque performance,
something the object of which we perhaps do not understand; but we shall make a discovery about ourselves, in
fact everyone will who tries it, namely the astonishing discovery that he no longer wishes to detach himself from
this being which he has himself built up, that it is beginning to interest him. If you try it you will see for yourself:
you cannot get away from this artificial human being; it lives within you. And in a peculiar way: it not only lives
within you but it transforms itself and radically. It changes so that at last it becomes something quite different from
what it was originally. It becomes something of which we are forced to say “it really does exist within us.”

This is an experience which is possible to everyone. We admit that what has just been described — which is not the
original self-created being of phantasy, but that which this has become — is a part of what is within us. Now this is
just what has, so to speak, brought about the apparently causeless things during our lives. We find within ourselves
the real cause of what is otherwise incomprehensible. That which I have described to you is, in other words, the
way not only to peer into your own soul-life and find something, but it is the way out from the soul-life into the
environment. For what we fail to bring off does not remain with us, but belongs to our environment. So we have
taken something out of our environment which does not harmonize with the facts of our consciousness, but
presents itself as if it were within us. Then we gain the feeling that we really have something to do with what seems
so causeless in real life. A person acquires in this way a feeling of his connection with his destiny, with what is
called Karma. Through this soul experiment a real way is opened to experience within himself, in a certain manner,
his own Karma.

You may say: “Yes, but I do not understand exactly what you have said.” If you say that you do not fail to
understand what you imagine, but you lack understanding for something which even a child can grasp, but about
which you simply have not thought. It is impossible for anyone who has not carried out the experiment to
understand these things. Only he who has done this can understand. These things are to be taken only as the
description of an experiment that can be made and experienced by anyone. Each one comes to the realization that
something lives within him which is connected with his Karma. If anyone knew this beforehand no rule would
need be given him for the attainment of this knowledge.
It is quite in order that no one grasps this who has not yet made the experiment; it is not however a question of
understanding in the ordinary sense, but an acceptance of information regarding something that our soul may
undertake. If our soul follows such paths it accustoms itself not to live within itself only, in its own wishes and
desires, but to relate itself to outer happenings, to consider them. Exactly the things which we ourselves have not
desired, we have built into that which is here considered. And when we have come to face our Destiny so that we
can calmly take it upon us, and think in regard to what we usually murmur and rebel against: “We accept it
willingly, for we ourselves have decreed it,” then there arises a state of mind and heart in which, when we force our
way down into the hidden depths of soul, we can distinguish with absolute certainty the true from the false. For
then is shown with a wonderful clarity and assurance what is true and what false.

If you behold any sort of vision with the mental eye, and can as it were by a mere look, banish it, drive it away,
simply by the use of all the inner forces with which you have become acquainted — then it is just a phantasm. But
if you cannot get rid of it in this fashion, if you can banish at most that which reminds you of the outer world; if the
really visionary quality, the spiritual thing remains like a solid fact — then it is true. But you cannot make this
distinction until you have done what has been described. Therefore without the above-mentioned training there can
be no certainty in the differentiation between the true and false upon the super-sensible plane. The essential thing in
this soul experiment is that we always remain in full possession of our ordinary consciousness in regard to what we
desire, and that by means of this experiment we accustom ourselves to look upon what we in our ordinary
consciousness do not at all want, and is repugnant to us, as something willed into existence by us. One may in a
certain sense have reached a definite degree of inner development; but unless, through such a soul experiment, we
have learned to contrast all the wishes, desires, sympathy and antipathy which live in the soul with our relation to
what we have not wished, then we shall make mistake after mistake.

The greatest mistake in the Theosophical Society was first made by H. P. Blavatsky; for although she fixed her
spiritual attention upon the realm where Christ may be found, in the contents of her upper consciousness, in her
wishes and desires, there was a constant antipathy, even a passion against everything Christian or Hebrew, and a
preference for all other spiritual cultures on earth, and because she had never gone through what has been described
today she conceived of the Christ in an entirely false way. That was quite natural. It passed over to her nearest
students, and has been dragged along, although grotesquely coarsened, to the present day. These things extend to
the highest spheres. One may see many things upon the occult plane, but the power of discrimination is something
different from mere sight, mere perception. This must be sharply stressed.

Now the problem is this: When we sink down into our hidden soul-depths (and every clairvoyant must do this,) we
first come into what is fundamentally ourselves. And we must learn to know ourselves by really making the
transition, by having a world before us, of which Lucifer and Ahriman always promise to give us the kingdoms.
This means that our own inner self appears before us, and the devil says: “This is the objective world.” That is the
temptation that even Christ did not escape. The inner illusions of the inner world were presented, only He, through
His inherent power, recognized from the very beginning that it is not a real world, but a world that is within. It is
through this inner world alone, which we must separate into two parts in order to get rid of one — our own
personal part — and have the other remain, that we pass through the hidden depths of our soul-life out into the
objective super-sensible world. And just as our spiritual-soul kernel must make use of our physical body as a
mirror for outer perception, for the facts of ordinary consciousness, so must the human being make use of his
etheric body as a reflecting apparatus for the super-sensible facts which next confront him. The higher sense
organs, if we may so describe them, open within the astral body, but what lives in them must be reflected by the
etheric body, just as the spiritual and soul activity of which we are aware in ordinary life is reflected by the
physical body. We must now learn to manage our ether body, and it is entirely natural since our etheric body is
usually unknown to us, although it represents what vitalizes us, that we must become acquainted with it before we
can learn to recognize that which enters us from the super-sensible objective world and may be reflected by this
ether body.

You now see what we experience when we descend into the hidden depths of our soul life. It is primarily ourselves,
and the projection of our wishes is very similar to what we usually call the life in Kamaloca [Region of Burning
Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.] It differs from it only in that when anyone in ordinary life thus pushes
forward into imprisonment within himself (which is what it may be called,) he has still his physical body to which
he can return. But in Kamaloca the physical body is gone, even part of the etheric body — the part which most
immediately reflects for us — but the universal life-ether surrounding us serves as an instrument of reflection, and
mirrors everything that is within us. Thus in the Kamaloca period our own inner world is built up about us as an
objective world, all our wishes, desires, all that we feel, and to which we are inwardly attuned.
It is important to understand that the primary characteristic of the life in Kamaloca is our imprisonment within
ourselves, and this prison is the more securely fastened by the fact that we cannot return to any sort of physical life
to which our whole inner activity has been related. Only when we live through this Kamaloca period in such a way
as to realize gradually (we do come to this gradually,) that it all may be got rid of by experiencing our-self
otherwise than through mere desires and so forth, only then is our Kamaloca prison opened.

How is this meant? In the following way: Let us suppose that someone dies with a definite wish; this wish belongs
to that which projects itself outward and is built up around him in some kind of imagery. Now as long as this desire
lives within him it is impossible, in regard to it, to open Kamaloca with any sort of key. Only when he realizes that
this wish cannot be satisfied except by discarding it, when his attitude towards it becomes the opposite to what it
has been, then gradually with the wish everything that imprisons us in Kamaloca will be torn from the soul. Only
then do we come into the realm between death and rebirth which has been called the devachanic [Devachan =
Heaven.], and which may be entered also through clairvoyance when we have recognized that which belongs to the
self alone. In clairvoyance it is reached through a definite degree of development; in Kamaloca through the passage
of time, simply because time so torments us through our own desires that at last they are overcome. By this means
that which has been dangled before us as if it were the world and its splendor is destroyed.

The world of super-sensible realities is what is usually called Devachan. How does this world of super-sensible
facts appear before us? Here upon this earthly globe we can speak of Devachan only because in clairvoyance, when
the self has been really conquered, we enter at once into the world of super-sensible facts, which are objectively
present, and these facts coincide with those of Devachan.

The most important characteristic of this devachanic world is that in it moral actualities are no longer separable
from the physical, that moral and physical laws are one and the same. What does that mean? Well, is it not true that
in the ordinary physical world the sun shines upon the just and the unjust? Whoever commits a crime may be put in
prison, but the physical sun is not darkened. That is to say: in the physical world there is a realm of moral and
physical laws, leading in two very different directions. It is not so in Devachan, not at all; instead of this,
everything proceeding from morality, from intelligent wisdom, from the aesthetically beautiful, and so on, leads to
growth (is creative,) and that which arises from immorality, intellectual falsity, and aesthetic ugliness leads to
withering and destruction. And there the laws of nature are such that the sun does not shine upon the just and the
unjust alike but, if we may speak figuratively, it darkens upon the unjust; so that the just, passing through
Devachan, have there the spiritual sunshine, that is to say, the influence of the fertilizing forces that bring about
their forward progress in life. The spiritual forces draw back from the dishonest or ugly human being. The
following is possible there which is impossible here on earth. When two people — just and unjust — walk here
side by side, the sun cannot shine upon one and not upon the other; but in the spiritual world the effect of the
spiritual forces depends absolutely upon the quality of the individual concerned. That is to say: the laws of nature
and the spiritual laws do not follow two separate roads, but one and the same. That is the fundamental, essential
truth. In the devachanic world the natural, moral, and intellectual laws act together as one.

As a result the following occurs: If a human being has entered and lives through the devachanic world he has
within him what is left over from his last life of justice and injustice, good and evil, aesthetic beauty and ugliness,
truth and falsehood. All this residue acts however in such a way that it takes immediate possession of the natural
laws. We may compare the law there with the following in the physical world: If anyone in the physical world had
stolen or lied and, seeking the sunlight, found that the sun did not shine upon him, could not find it anywhere, and
thus through lack of sunshine developed a disease ... or let us rather assume as an example that someone in the
physical world who was a liar had difficulty in breathing; that would be an exact parallel with what would be the
case in the devachanic world. To the person who has burdened himself with this or that, something happens in his
spiritual and soul nature so that the natural law at once and absolutely expresses the spiritual law. Hence, if the
further development of this personality is brought about in this way, as he progresses gradually and is more fully
permeated by these laws, such characteristics develop in him that he becomes an expression of the qualities which
he brought over from his past life. Just let us suppose that someone has been two hundred years in Devachan, and
has gone through it, having been in his last life a liar: the spirits of Truth withdraw from him. There dies in him that
which in a truthful soul would be invigorated.

Or let us assume that someone with a pronounced quality of vanity which he has not given up goes through
Devachan. This vanity in Devachan is an extraordinarily evil-smelling emanation, and certain spiritual beings
avoid a personality who gives out the offensive evaporation of ambition or vanity. This is not a figurative
statement. In Devachan vanity and ambition are extremely evil exhalations, and lead to the withdrawal of the
beneficent influence of certain beings who retreat before this atmosphere. This could be compared to the placing in
the cellar of a plant which thrives only in sunlight. A vain person cannot thrive. He will grow up with this
characteristic. When he reincarnates he lacks the strength to build in the good influences. Instead of developing
certain organs in a healthy way, he forms an unhealthy part in his organism. Thus not only our physical limitations,
but our moral and intellectual ones as well show us the kind of human beings we become in life. Only when we
emerge from the physical plane do natural and spiritual law go side by side. Between death and a new birth they
are a single whole. And in our soul are implanted the natural forces which destroy if they are the result of the
immoral deeds of past lives, but which fructify if they are the result of noble ones. This is true not only for our
inner constitution, but also for that which falls upon us from without as our Karma.

In Devachan the essential fact is that no difference exists there between natural and spiritual law, and it is the same
for the clairvoyant who really penetrates to the super-sensible worlds. These laws of the super-sensible worlds are
radically different from those which rule upon the physical plane. It is simply impossible for the clairvoyant to
differentiate in the manner of the materialistic mind when someone says: “That is only a law of objective nature.”
Behind this objective natural law there exists always in reality a spiritual law. A clairvoyant cannot cross a
scorched meadow, for example, or a flooded district, cannot perceive a volcanic eruption without thinking that
behind the facts of nature are spiritual forces, hidden spiritual beings. For him a volcanic eruption is at the same
time a moral deed, even though its morality may lie in an entirely different, undreamed-of realm. Those who
always confuse the physical with the higher worlds will say: “Well, when innocent human beings are destroyed by
a volcanic outbreak, how can one assume that it is a moral deed?” We do not need to worry about that. Such a
judgment would be as cruelly philistine as the opposite idea: namely, to regard it as a punishment from God upon
the people who are settled around the volcano. Both judgments are possible only to the narrow-minded standpoint
of the physical world. Such is not the question, which may have to do with much more universal things. Those who
live on the slope of a volcano, and whose property is destroyed by it, may be for this life entirely innocent. It will
be made up to them later. This does not make us hardhearted and unwilling to help them (that again would be a
narrow-minded interpretation of the matter). But in the case of volcanic eruptions the fact is that in the course of
the earth evolution certain things happen through human deeds which retard human evolution, and just the good
gods must work in a certain way for a balance which is sometimes achieved through such natural phenomena.

This application of the law is to be seen only in occult depths: that compensation is created for what is done by
men themselves against the genuine development of humanity. Every event, whether a mere activity of nature or
not, is at bottom something moral, and spiritual beings in the higher worlds are the bearers of the moral law behind
the physical fact. If you simply conceive a world in which no separation of natural and spiritual laws can be
considered, a world in which, with other words, justice rules as a natural law, you have then the devachanic world.
Therefore one need not think that in this devachanic world through any sort of arbitrary decision an unworthy
action has to be punished, because in that realm the immoral destroys itself as inevitably as fire consumes
inflammable material, and morality is self-stimulated, and advances itself.

We thus see that the essential characteristic, the innermost nerve of existence, so to speak, is quite different for the
different worlds. We gain no idea of the several worlds if we do not consider these peculiarities which differ so
radically upon different levels. We may thus correctly characterize physical world, Kamaloca, and Devachan: in
the physical world natural and spiritual law run side by side as two series of facts; in Kamaloca the human being is
confined within himself, as if in a prison of his own being; the devachanic world is the complete opposite of the
physical; there natural and spiritual law are one and the same. These are the three characteristics, and if you
consider them carefully, striving sensitively to realize how very different from our own a world must be in which
the moral, intellectual, even the law of beauty are at the same time natural law, then you will gain an acute
impression of conditions in the devachanic world.

In our physical world when we meet an ugly or a beautiful face we have no right to treat the ugly person as if he
must be psychically revolting, or the beautiful one as if he must necessarily be worthy of high esteem. In Devachan
it is quite otherwise. There we meet no ugliness that is not deserved, and it will be impossible for anyone who,
because of his preceding incarnation, is obliged in this one to wear an ugly face, but who strives throughout this
life to be true and honorable, to meet us in Devachan with any sort of unpleasant appearance. He will have
transformed his ugliness into beauty. But it is equally true that he who is untruthful, vain, or ambitious in this life
will wander about in Devachan with some hideous form. And something else is also true: In ordinary physical life
we do not see that an ugly face continually robs itself, nor that a beautiful one contributes something to itself, but in
Devachan it is like that; ugliness is an element of progressive destruction, and we cannot perceive beauty without
assuming that it is the result of an equally continuous furtherance and help.
We must feel quite otherwise towards the devachanic or mental world than towards the physical world. And this is
necessary: to differentiate in these sensations, to see the essential which matters, in order that you may appropriate
not only the description of these things, but that you may take away feelings, sensitivity towards that which is
described in spiritual science. If you try to soar upwards to an appreciation of a world in which morality, beauty,
and intellectual truth appear with the inevitability of natural law then you have the feeling of the devachanic world;
and this is why we must, so to say, collect so much material and work so much, in order that the things which we
work out for ourselves may at last be merged into one feeling.

It is impossible for anyone to come easily or lightly to a real knowledge of what must gradually be made clear and
comprehensible to the world through spiritual science. There are many different movements that say, “Oh why
must so many things be learned in spiritual science? Are we to become pupils again? Feeling is all that matters.” It
does matter, but it must be the right feeling, which must first be developed! This is true of everything. It would be
pleasanter, would it not, for the painter if he did not have to learn the technique of his art, if he did not have to
bring out upon the canvas, at first slowly, the final result, if he needed only to exhale in order to have his finished
work before him! In our world today it is a curious fact that the more the realm of the soul is in question, the harder
it is for people to realize that nothing is accomplished by mere exhaling! In music it would not be admitted that one
could become a composer without learning anything of composition; there it is quite obvious. This is so also with
painting, though people admit it less easily, and in poetry they admit it even less, otherwise there would be in our
own time fewer poets. For actually no time is as unpoetic as our own though there are so many poets. If it is not
necessary to have studied poetry, but only to be able to write (which naturally has nothing to do with poetic art)
and of course to spell correctly — we need only to be able to express our thoughts! And for philosophy still less is
required. For today, that anyone may judge straight away anything concerning the conceptions of life and the world
is regarded as a matter of course, since everyone has his own point of view. One finds again and again that no
value is set by such people upon the carefully worked out personal possession of the means and methods of
cognition and of research in the world, gained through every resource of inner work. Instead, it seems to them
obvious that the standpoint of one who has labored long before venturing to give out even a little about world
secrets has no greater value than that of the one who simply takes it upon himself to have a standpoint. Anyone can
count nowadays as a man with a world conception.

This, on the contrary, is what really matters, upon which everything depends; that we labor with all our energy in
order that what we work out for ourselves we may at last gather together and carry over into feelings, which
through their coloring give the highest, the truest knowledge. Struggle through, by working towards a feeling, an
impression of a world in which natural and spiritual law coincide. Then if you work seriously — no matter though
people believe you to have learned only theoretically, although you have striven hard in working through this or
that theory — you will realize that it makes an impression upon the devachanic world. If you have not simply
imagined a feeling, but evolved it by years of careful work, then this feeling, these nuances of sensibility, have a
strength which will bring you further than they could reach of themselves; for through earnest, eager study, they
have become true. Then you are not far from the point where these nuances burst asunder, and there lies before you
the reality of Devachan. For if the nuances of feeling are truly worked out they become a power of perception.

Therefore, if work along these lines is undertaken by student groups upon a basis of truth, honesty, and patient
practice, outside of all sensation, their meeting places become what they should be: schools to lead men into
spheres of clairvoyance. And only those who cannot wait for this, or who will not co-operate, can have an
erroneous view of these matters.

Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy

GA 143

IV. Hidden Soul Powers

27 February 1912, Munich

We have spoken recently of many things concerning the existence of hidden soul depths, and it will be well in any
case to continue to occupy ourselves with various details of this subject which it may be useful for an
anthroposophist to know. Generally speaking, it must be said that a complete clarification of these things is
possible only if it can be worked out on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge.
We have considered what may be called the human organization from the most diverse viewpoints. Therefore,
when we wish to point out something in hidden soul depths, it will be easy for each one to relate it correctly to
what was shown regarding the human structure as we know it from the more or less elementary presentations of the
anthroposophical world-conception.

It has been repeated that everything included in our visualizations and percepts, our impulses of will, our feelings,
in short, all that goes on in our souls under normal conditions between awaking in the morning and falling asleep at
night, may be called the activities, peculiarities, and powers of the ordinary consciousness. Now we shall indicate
by a diagram all that falls within this ordinary human consciousness, all that is known and felt and willed between
waking and sleeping, within these two parallel lines (a–b).

In this section (a–b) belong, in addition to our visualizations, every sort of percept. Thus, if we put ourselves into
correspondence with the outer world through our senses, and procure thereby in every possible sense-impression a
picture of this world, remaining in connection, in touch with it, then that belongs also to our ordinary
consciousness. But since all our feelings and impulses of will belong to it as well, one might say that in the area
indicated by the parallel lines (a–b) everything belongs of which our normal soul activities give us information in
everyday life.

The point is for us to know with certainty that to this so-called soul life the physical body is assigned as an
instrument, including the senses and the nervous system. If we add two more to these parallel lines we may indicate
the physical sense organs and the nervous system, which we may call the tools of this consciousness — the sense
organs chiefly, but also to a certain extent the nervous system.

Diagram 1

Below the threshold of this ordinary consciousness lies everything which we may describe as the hidden aspects of
soul-life, or the subconscious. (See diagram, b–c.) We shall get a good idea of all that is, so to speak, embedded in
this subconsciousness if we remember having heard that the human being, through spiritual training, attains to
imagination, inspiration, and intuition; [These three terms as used by Rudolf Steiner denote three super-sensible
faculties. (Tr.)] so we must substitute for the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will belonging to the surface
consciousness, the imagination, inspiration, and intuition of the subconsciousness. We know, however, also that the
subconscious activity is not aroused by spiritual training alone, but that it may exist as inheritance of an old,
primitive atavistic state of the human mind. Under these conditions there arise what we define as visions, and
visions of this naive consciousness would correspond to imaginations gained through training. Premonitions arise;
and these might be primitive inspirations. We can show at once the difference between an inspiration and a
premonition by a significant example.

We have already mentioned that in the course of the 20th century there will occur in human evolution what may be
called a sort of spiritual return of Christ, and that there will be a number of persons who experience this working of
Christ from the astral plane into our world in an etheric form. We may acquire knowledge of this event by
authentic training, recognizing the trend of evolution, and also that this must come about in the 20th century. It
may, however, happen, as it often does at the present time, that individuals here and there are gifted with a natural,
primitive, clairvoyance which is, so to speak, a kind of obscure inspiration which we may call a premonition of the
approach of Christ. Perhaps such people might not have accurate knowledge of the matter involved, but even such
an important inspiration may arise as a premonition, though in the case of a primitive consciousness it may not
retain its premonitory or visionary character. The vision constitutes some sort of picture of a spiritual event. Let us
say, for example, that someone has lost a friend whose ego has passed through the gate of death. This friend now
dwells in the spiritual world, and a kind of bond establishes itself between this person and the one still living in this
world. It may be that the person in this world cannot rightly understand what the deceased desires and has a false
idea of what is being experienced by the departed. The fact that such a condition exists presents itself in a vision
which, as a picture, may be false though founded upon the fact that the dead is really trying to establish a bond with
the living, and this gives weight to the presentiment so that the living person who experiences it knows certain
things, either about the past or future, which are inaccessible to normal consciousness. If the human soul acquires,
however, a definite perception, not a vision which may, under the circumstances, be false, but a factual perception
— an occurrence, let us say, of the sense world, but in this case in a sphere invisible to the physical senses, or an
incident in the super-sensible world — it is called in occultism deuteroscopy, or second sight. With all this I have
described to you only what takes place although subconsciously, within the human soul, whether developed by
correct training or appearing as a natural clairvoyance.

The phenomena enumerated when contrasting the subconscious with the ordinary consciousness, differ
considerably from those confined to the conscious mind. The relation of this ordinary consciousness to the
underlying causes of its activities has already been described in one aspect by this phrase: the impotence of
ordinary consciousness. The eye sees a rose, but this eye, which is so constituted that in our consciousness the
image of the rose arises has, like the consciousness itself, no power over the blooming, growth and fading of the
rose in spite of its perception and the resultant image. The rose blooms and fades through the activity of the forces
of nature and neither the eye nor the consciousness has any control beyond the sphere which is accessible to their
perception.

This is not the case regarding subconscious happenings. We must hold fast to this fact, for it is extraordinarily
important. When we perceive something through the use of our eyes in normal sight, pictures in color or anything
else, we can alter nothing in the objective facts by mere perception. If nothing happens to harm our eyes they
remain unchanged by the mere act of seeing; only by crossing the boundary between normal and blinding light do
we injure our eyes. Thus it may be said that if we confine ourselves to the facts of the normal consciousness, we do
not react upon ourselves. Our organism is so constituted that changes are not ordinarily induced in us by this
consciousness.

It is quite otherwise with that which appears in the subconscious. Let us assume that we are forming an
imagination, or that we have a vision which may be the response of a good being. This good being is not in the
physical, but in the super-sensible world, and let us imagine this world where such beings exist and which we
perceive, perchance, through an imagination or a vision, to be between these lines (b–c). In that world we have to
seek all objects of subconscious perception. But if we identify anything in that other world as an evil or demonic
being, either through an imaginary image or a vision, we are not, in regard to this being as powerless as we are with
the eye in regard to the rose. If in a super-sensible imagination or vision of an evil being we develop a strong
feeling that it must depart, it is bound to feel as if it were powerfully thrust from us. It is the same when we form an
imagination or vision of a good being. If in this case we develop a sympathetic feeling, the being feels impelled to
approach and to connect itself with us. All beings who in one way or another inhabit that world feel, when we form
visions of them, our attracting or repelling forces. With our subconsciousness we are in a position resembling
somewhat that of the eye if with it we were able not only to see a rose, but by means of simple sight could arouse a
desire that the rose approach and could draw it toward us or, if the eye, seeing something disgusting, could not only
form such a judgment but could remove this object by mere antipathy. The subconscious is in touch with a world in
which the sympathy and antipathy which are present in the human soul can take effect. It is necessary for us to
impress this upon our minds.

Sympathy and antipathy, and in general all subconscious impulses, act in the manner described not only upon their
own world, but above all upon what is within ourselves; and not only upon a part of the etheric body, but upon
certain forces of the physical body. We must consider here as enclosed between these lines (b–c) that living force
within the human being which, pulsing in his blood, can be called the blood warming power and, also, the force
residing in our healthy or unhealthy breathing power, conditioned more or less by our whole organism. (See
diagram b–c.) To all this, upon which the subconscious works within us, there belongs in addition a large part of
what is called the human etheric body. The subconscious or hidden soul powers work within us so as to affect our
blood heat upon which depend the pulsation, the liveliness or sluggishness of our circulation. It may thus be
comprehended that our subconsciousness is directly connected with the circulation of our blood. A slower or a
more rapid circulation depends primarily upon the subconscious powers of the individual.
An influence upon the demonic or beneficent beings inhabiting the outer world can only be exerted if the human
being has visions, imaginations, or some other sort of subconscious perception of a certain clarity. That is to say, if
they really stand before him; only then can his sympathy or antipathy set in motion subconscious powers that act
like magic in this outer world. This distinct standing-before-the-soul in the subconsciousness is not necessary for
the effect upon our own inner organism as described above. (See diagram b–c). Whether the person in question
knows or does not know which imaginations correspond to a certain sympathy, this sympathy nevertheless affects
the circulation of his blood, his breathing system, and his etheric body.

Let us assume that during a certain period of his life someone has a tendency to have feelings of nausea. If he were
subject to visions or had imaginative sight, he would recognize these visions and imaginations as perceptions of his
own being; they would appear projected into space, but would, nevertheless, belong to his own inner world. They
would represent the sort of inner forces that produced the feelings of nausea. But even if he could not practice this
kind of self-knowledge and were simply nauseated, these inner forces would act upon him nevertheless. They
would influence the warmth of his blood and his forces of breathing. It is actually the case that a human being
possesses more or less healthy breathing and circulation, according to the character of his subconscious feelings.
The activity of his etheric body and, indeed, all his functions, are dependent upon the world of feelings existing
within him.

When, however, the facts of the subconscious mind are really experienced by the soul, it is shown not only that this
connection exists, but that because of it a continuous effect is produced upon the general human organism. There
are certain feelings, certain states of mind, that work down into the subconscious and, because they call forth
definite conditions of blood, of the breathing power, and of the etheric body, affect the organism beneficially, or
obstruct the entire life. Thus, as a result of what works down into the subconscious, something is always arising or
subsiding. The human being either deprives himself of his life forces, or adds to them through what he sends over
from his state of consciousness into the subconscious conditions. If he takes pleasure in a lie he has told, if he is not
horrified at it — this being the normal feeling about lies — if instead he feels indulgence, or even satisfaction, then
what he feels about it is sent down into his subconscious. This injures the circulation, breathing, and the forces of
the etheric body. The result is that when this human being goes through the gate of death he will have become
stunted, poorer in forces, something will have died in him which would have lived had he felt the normal horror
and disgust at his lie. In the latter case, his disgust would have worked against the lie, transformed itself into the
forces here indicated (see diagram), and he would have succeeded in sending something enlivening, creative, into
his organism.

We see from the fact that forces are continually transferred from the conscious to the subconscious, that the human
being contributes from this subconscious to his own invigoration or deterioration. True, he is not yet strong enough
in his present state to spoil out of his soul, so to speak, any other parts of his organism except the circulation of his
blood, his breathing system, and etheric body. He cannot injure the coarser and more solid portions, but is able to
affect detrimentally one part only of his organism. What he has injured is most distinctly visible when what
remains of the etheric body has been influenced in this way; for the etheric body is in constant connection with the
warmth of the blood and the constitution of the breath. It is impaired by evil feelings. Through good, normal, and
sincere feelings it gains, however, fertilizing, strengthening and maturing powers. We may say, therefore, that a
human being, through his subconscious activities works directly, creating or depleting, upon the factual reality of
his organism by descending from the level of his powerless surface-consciousness, into the region where
something arises or perishes within his own soul, and thereby in his entire organism.

We have seen because the subconscious may be experienced more or less consciously by the soul and something
may be known about it, that it achieves an influence in a sphere which we may describe by an expression used
throughout the Middle Ages as the elemental world. A human being cannot enter directly into any kind of
connection with this elemental world; he can do so only indirectly through those experiences within himself which
are effects of the subconsciousness upon the organism. But when he has for a time learned to know himself so as to
be able to say: if you feel this, and send down this or that emanation from your conduct into your
subconsciousness, you destroy certain things or cripple them; if you have other experiences and send down a
different sort of reaction you improve yourself, — if a human being for a time observes within himself this ebb and
flow of destructive and beneficent forces, he will become ever riper in self-knowledge. This is the genuine form of
self-knowledge.

Self-knowledge gained in this manner is as definite in its effect as would be a scorpion's sting on our toe every time
we felt in the physical world the impulse to lie or were tolerant of lying. We may be sure that one observing such
an immediate result would cease to lie. If the direct physical effect upon us should be a more or less serious
mutilation it would resemble what actually happens, although unperceived, through what is sent down into the
subconscious mind from these daily experiences. What is sent down because of our tolerant attitude toward a lie is
such that it does bite off and take away from us something the loss of which injures us and which through our
future karma we must regain. If we send down a right feeling into the subconscious mind — there is naturally an
almost endless scale of feeling which may descend — we grow within ourselves, create new life forces in our
organism. Such an observation of our own up-building or deterioration is an immediate result of true self-
knowledge.

It has been recently reported that many do not understand how to distinguish a genuine vision or imagination [This
term as used by Rudolf Steiner, denotes a super-sensible faculty (Tr.)] belonging to something objective from that
which appears in space but is the creation of our own subjective nature. Well, it cannot be said: write down this or
that and you will then be able to make the distinction. There are no such rules. One learns gradually through
development; and the ability rightly to distinguish that which belongs to ourselves alone from that which, as outer
vision, belongs to a genuine entity can be attained only when we have endured the continual gnawing of deadly
subconscious activities. We are then equipped with a certain assurance. Then also the condition arises in which a
human being, confronting a vision or imagination may ask himself: Can you penetrate it through the power of your
spiritual sight? If the vision persists when this active force is turned upon it then it is an objective fact, but if this
concentrated gaze extinguishes the vision it is proved to be only his own creation. Anyone who, in this respect,
does not take precautions may have before him thousands of pictures from the Akashic Record; if he does not test
them to see whether or not they can be extinguished by a resolutely active gaze, the akashic pictures which may
give so much information, count only as images developed by his own inner nature. It could happen, for example,
that such a person sees nothing beyond himself, externalizing himself in quite dramatic images which he believes
to extend throughout the entire Atlantean world, throughout generations of human evolution — but which may be,
in spite of such apparent objectivity, nothing but the projection of his own inner self.

When the human being has passed through the gate of death the obstructions no longer exist by which something
within himself becomes an objective vision. In ordinary life of the present day what is subconsciously experienced,
sent down by the individual human being into his subconscious mind, does not always become vision and
imagination. It becomes imagination through correct training, and vision in the case of atavistic clairvoyance.
When the human being has passed through the gate of death his collective inner self becomes at once an objective
world. It is there confronting him, Kamaloca [Region of Burning Desire, or of Cleansing Fire; also Purgatory.]
being in essence nothing but a world built up around us out of that which is experienced within our own soul. This
condition is reversed only in Devachan. [Devachan = Heaven]

Thus we can easily comprehend what has been said regarding the effect of sympathy or antipathy present in
visions, imaginations, inspirations and premonitions: that these act in all cases upon the objective elemental world.
Upon this point it has been stated that in the physically incarnate personality only that which he has developed into
vision and imagination acts upon this elemental world. In the case of the dead the forces affect the elemental world
which were present in the subconscious mind, and which are always taken along when a human being passes
through the gate of death, so that everything experienced after death influences in reality the elemental world. As
surely as waves are aroused in a stream by whipping it do the subconscious experiences transmit themselves after
death to the elemental world; as certainly as waves that are whipped extend in flattening circles, or a current of air
passes undeterred on its way, do these forces spread over the elemental world. Therefore this world is constantly
filled with that which is aroused by the content of the subconscious mind which mortals take with them through the
gate of death. The point concerning us here is that we gain the ability to bring about the conditions necessary for
sight in the elemental world. One need not wonder at the clairvoyant when he recognizes quite correctly that
occurrences in that world are activities of the dead. It is even possible, as you will see, to follow the effects of these
after-death experiences into the physical world — of course under certain conditions. When the clairvoyant has
gone through all that has been described, and acquired the ability to perceive the elemental world, he reaches then
after a time a point where he may have strange experiences.

Let us suppose that a clairvoyant looks at a rose with his physical eyes, and receives a sense impression. Let us
further suppose that he has trained himself so that the color red gives him a definite shade of feeling. This is
necessary, for without it the process goes no further. Unless colors and tones produce definite nuances of feeling
when clairvoyance is directed at an outside object, the sight progresses no further. Suppose that he gives the rose
away. Then, if he is not clairvoyant, what he felt would have sunk into his subconscious mind, and would be
working, either beneficially or detrimentally, upon his health, and so on. But if he is clairvoyant, he would perceive
just how the image of the rose acts in his subconscious mind. That is to say, he would have a visionary picture, an
imagination of the rose. He would perceive at the same time — as has been explained — how his feeling about the
rose affected, either beneficially or detrimentally, his etheric or his physical body. He would observe the action of
all this upon his own organism. When he has this image before himself he will be able by its means to exert an
attractive force upon the being which we may call the group-soul of the rose and which underlies its existence. He
will be looking into the elemental world, seeing the rose's group-soul in so far as it dwells there.

If the clairvoyant goes still further, has emerged from perception of the rose, has given it away, has followed his
own inner procedure in concentrating upon the rose and its results, and has reached the point of seeing something
of it in the elemental world — then there appears in place of the rose a wonderful shining image belonging to the
elemental world. Then, if the procedure has been followed up to this point, something special happens. The
clairvoyant can now disregard what is before him. He can then give the command to himself: Do not look with
your inner sight at what seems to be a living etheric being going out into the world. Do not regard it! Then,
strangely, the clairvoyant sees something which, passing through his eye, shows him how the forces act which
form it, how they issue from the human etheric body and build up the eye. He sees the formative forces belonging
to his own physical body. He sees his own physical eye as he ordinarily sees an external object. That is in fact
something which may occur. A way may be followed from the outer object up to the point where, in absolute inner
darkness — no other sense impressions being admitted — what the eye looks like is seen in a spiritual picture. The
human being sees his own inner organ. He has entered the region (see diagram), which is really formative in the
physical world: the creative physical world. It is first perceived by the clairvoyant in observing his own physical
organization. Thus he follows the way back to himself. What sent such forces into our eye that we see it giving out
rays of light which really express the essential nature of sight? Then we see the eye surrounded by a sort of yellow
glow; we see it enclosed within us. This was brought fourth by the entire process that brought the human being
finally up to this point.

The forces that may issue from a dead person follow the same course. The human being takes with him the
contents of his subconscious mind into the world that he inhabits after he passes through the gate of death. Just as
we enter our own physical eye, do the forces sent out by the dead from the elemental world reenter the physical
world. The deceased has perhaps an especial longing for someone whom he has left behind. This longing, at the
time lying in the subconscious, becomes at once a living vision and in this way affects the elemental world. What
was only a vision in the physical world becomes a power in the elemental world. This power follows the way
indicated through the longing for the one who is living and, if the conditions permit, it may create some disturbance
in the physical world near the living, who may notice rapping sounds or something of the kind. These are heard just
like any physical sounds. Occurrences of this kind, originating in this way, would be noticed more frequently than
is usually the case were people more observant of the times favorable to such activities. The times of gradual going
to sleep and of similar awaking are the most favorable, but no attention is paid to them; yet there are few, if any,
who have never received during such moments of transition what were really manifestations of the super-sensible
world, ranging all the way from disturbing noises to audible words.

All this has been pointed out today in order to show both the reality and the nature of the connection between
human beings and the world. Impressions of an objective sense-world, received by the ordinary consciousness, are
powerless and without any real relation — even to that world; but as soon as the human experience descends into
the subconscious the relation with realities is established. The helplessness of the former consciousness passes over
into a delicate magic, and when the human being has passed through the gate of death and is released from the
physical body, his experiences are such that they are effective both in the elemental world and, under favorable
circumstances, even upon the physical plane where they may be observed by the ordinary consciousness.

In describing what may take place, only the simplest example has been used, because it is best to begin with the
simplest case. Of course we shall — since we have left ourselves time for it — work out also what we need to
know in order to proceed to more complicated matters which may lead us into the more intimate relations between
the world and humanity.
Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy
GA 205

V. Connections Between Organic Processes and the Mental Life of Man

2 July 1921, Dornach

Today I shall have something to add to what was stated yesterday. I am reminding you of something which most of
you have already heard from me. When the human being passes through death the physical body remains behind
within the earth-forces, the etheric body dissolves within the cosmic forces, and the human being finds his
continuing life, his existence, throughout the realms which lie between death and a new birth. I said that we can
follow up the formative forces within the human being himself which project from one life into the other.

We know that man is in essence a threefold being, with three independent members; I mean, in regard to the
formative forces of the physical body, the physical organization. We have the system of the nerves and senses,
which naturally is spread over the whole body, but is located primarily in the head; we have the rhythmic system,
including the rhythm of the breath, circulation, and other rhythms; then we have the metabolic and limb
organization, which we consider as one because man's movements are intimately and organically connected with
his metabolism.

You know that each human being has a differently, an individually shaped head. If we consider the forces which
shape the human head — of course you must not think of the physical substances, but of the formative forces, of
that which gives to the head its physiognomy, its entire character, its phrenological expression — if we consider
these forces, we find them to be those of the metabolic and limb system belonging to the previous incarnation
which have now become form. Thus we have in the head the transformation of the earlier metabolic organism, and
if we consider what we possess as a metabolic and limb system in this present incarnation, these formative forces
are found to be undergoing a metamorphosis and shaping the head for our next incarnation. Therefore, if we
understand the building of the human form we can, as it were, look back, through a corresponding development of
the idea of metamorphosis, from the human head of today to the metabolic system of the previous incarnation; and
we can look from the present metabolic system forward to the head formation of the next incarnation. [See:
Guenther Wachsmuth, Reincarnation as a Phenomenon of Metamorphosis, Anthroposophie Press, New York,
Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London.]

This conception, which in our spiritual science and in the spiritual science of all ages plays a certain role, these
truths concerning repeated earth lives remain by no means without substantiation, for whoever understands the
human organism can read them directly from it. But the present trend of natural science is as far removed as
possible from embarking upon the sort of investigation which would be necessary in this case. Of course one
cannot escape, through the study of anatomy and physiology alone, the foolish conclusion that the liver and lungs
may be investigated by the same method. One lays the liver beside the lungs upon the dissecting table and regards
them as organs of equal value, since both consist of cells, and so on. In such a way one can obtain no knowledge of
these things, and two organic systems which are as different from one another as the lungs and liver cannot be
studied by an external comparison of their cellular configuration, as they must be according to present ideas.

If we really wish to discover the pertinent details, methods must be employed through which a conception of these
things may be gained. If the methods which I have described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its
Attainment are sufficiently developed, then the human power of cognition is greatly strengthened. I am repeating
here certain statements that I have already explained in lectures given last autumn in the Goetheanum building: Our
ordinary cognition is strengthened, through which we look out with our senses at our environment, and through
which we also examine our inner life, where we meet primarily our thinking, feeling, and willing. And if we
broaden our knowledge to the degree possible through these exercises which have been often described, then our
view of the outer world changes, and in such a way that as a first result we realize the absolute folly of speaking of
atoms in the manner of present world-conceptions. What is behind sense perception, behind its qualities, behind
yellow and red, behind C sharp, g, and so forth, is not vibration but spiritual essentiality. The outer world becomes
ever more spiritual the further we press forward in cognition, so that we really cease to take seriously all those
constructions derived from chemical or other ideas. All atomism is thoroughly driven from our minds when we
broaden our knowledge of the outer world. Behind the phenomena of the senses there is a spiritual world.
If, on the other hand, through such an enlarged vision we look more deeply into our inner life there arises — not
that confused mysticism which forms a justifiable transition, pointed out and explained yesterday — but there
arises instead, when inner cognition is developed, a psychic knowledge of the organs. We learn really to recognize
our inner organization. While our outer perception is more and more spiritualized, our inner perception is, first of
all, more and more materialized. Working in this inner direction, not the nebulous mystic but the real spiritual
researcher will become acquainted with each single organ. He learns to know the differentiated human organism.
We attain to the spiritual world in no other manner than by this detour through the observation of our own inner
materiality. Unless we learn to know lungs, liver, and so forth, we do not gain on this detour through our inner
being any kind of spiritual enthusiasm which, freed of the confusion of mysticism, works towards a concrete
knowledge of the inner organs.

At all events, we gain a more exact knowledge of the configuration of the soul. To begin with, we learn to give up
the preconceived idea that our psychic constitution is merely an adjunct of the sensory and nervous system. Only
the world of representations is correlated to the nervous system, the world of feeling not at all. The world of feeling
is connected directly with the rhythmic organization; and the world of will is adjusted to the metabolic and limb
system. If I will something, a corresponding activity is induced in my metabolic and limb system, the nervous
system being there only in order that concepts may be formed in regard to what takes place in the will. There are no
nerves of will, as I have often stated; the division of nerves into sensory nerves and nerves of will is absurd. The
nerves are all of one kind, and the so-called nerves of will exist for no other purpose than the inner observation of
the processes of will. They too are sensory nerves.

If we study this thoroughly we come at last to consider the human organism in its entirety. Take the lung organism,
the liver organism, and so forth. Looking at them within, you reach a point when you survey, as it were, the surface
of the several organs, naturally by means of spiritual sight. What exactly is this surface of the organs? It is nothing
less than a reflecting apparatus for the soul life. Our perceptions, and also what we elaborate in thought are
reflected upon the surface of all our inner organs; and this reflection makes known our recollections, our memory
during life. Thus, after we have perceived and digested something in thought, it is mirrored upon the surface of our
heart, liver, spleen, and so forth, and what is thus thrown back constitutes our memories. And with a not very
extensive training you may notice how certain thoughts shine back in memory from the whole organism. Very
different organs take part in this. If it is a question of remembering, let us say, very abstract conceptions, then the
lung surface participates strongly. If it is a question of thoughts colored by feeling, of thoughts which have a
nuance of feeling, then the surface of the liver is concerned. Thus we can describe very well, and in detail, how the
various organs take part in this reflection which makes its appearance as recollection, as the power of memory.

When we concentrate upon the whole soul nature we must not say: In the nervous system alone we have the
organic correlate of the soul life, for the entire human organism is the correlated organization for the life of the
soul.

In this connection much knowledge, once present as instinct, has simply been lost sight of. It still exists in certain
words, but people no longer realize how wisdom is preserved in words. For example, if anyone in the time of the
ancient Greeks had a tendency to depression when forming his recollections, they called it hypochondria, meaning
a process of cartilage-formation or ossification of the abdomen where, as a result of this rigidity, reflection was
brought about in such a way as to make memory a source of depression. The entire organism is involved in these
things. That is something which must be kept in our minds.

When speaking of the power of memory, I drew attention to the surface of the organs. In a certain sense everything
experienced strikes the surfaces, is reflected, and that leads to recollections. But something enters the organism at
the same time. In ordinary life this is transmuted, undergoes a metamorphosis, so that the organ produces a
secretion. The organs having this function are mostly glandular. They have an inner secretion, which during life is
changed into force. But not everything is thus transformed into organic metabolism, etc. Certain organs take up
instead something which becomes latent within them, and constitutes an inner force; for example, all thoughts
connected mainly with our perception of the outer world through which we form images of outer objects. The
forces developed in these thoughts are, in a certain manner, stored up within the lungs.

You know that the inside of the lungs comes into activity through the metabolism, the movement of the limbs, and
these forces are so transmuted that during the life between birth and death our lungs are somewhat of a reservoir of
forces which are continually influenced by the metabolic-and-limb system. We find that at the time of death such
forces have been stored up. The physical matter naturally falls away, but these forces are not wasted. They
accompany us through death, and throughout the entire life between death and a new birth. And when we enter a
new incarnation these forces which were in the lungs form our head outwardly, stamp upon it its physiognomy.
That which the phrenologist, the craniologist study in the outer form of the skull would be found forecast within
the lungs during the previous incarnation.

You see how definitely, from life to life, the transmutation of forces may be followed up. When this is done
reincarnation will no longer be an abstract truth alone, but will be studied concretely, as one can study physical
things. And spiritual science becomes valuable only when in this way we penetrate into concrete facts. If we speak
only in generalities of repeated earth lives, and so forth, then these are mere words. They have meaning only if we
can enter upon the single concrete facts.

If that which has been stored in the lungs is not controlled in the right way it is squeezed out, as I said yesterday,
much in the same way as a sponge is squeezed out, and then, from that which should form the head only in the next
incarnation, there arise mainly abnormal phenomena which are usually called coercive thoughts, or described by
some other term as illusions. It is an interesting chapter of a higher physiology to study in lung cases the strange
notions which arise in the patient in the advanced stages of the disease. This is connected with what I have just
explained to you, with the abnormal pressing out of thoughts.

You will see undoubtedly that the thoughts which are pressed out under these conditions are coercive because they
already contain the formative forces. The thoughts which we ought normally to have in consciousness should be
pictures only, they must not contain a formative force, and should not coerce us. Throughout the long period
between death and rebirth these thoughts do coerce us; then they are causative, formative. During earth life they
must not overwhelm us; they should use their power only during the transition from one life to another. This is the
point to be considered.

If you now study the liver in the manner I have just explained in regard to the lungs, you will discover that there
are concentrated in the same way within the liver all the forces which in the next incarnation determine the inner
disposition of the brain. Again by a detour through the metabolic organism of the present life, the forces of the liver
pass over, this time not into the shape of the head, but into the inner disposition of the brain. Whether or not
someone is to be an acute thinker in the next incarnation depends upon how he behaves in the present one, in order
that thus, upon the detour through the metabolism there may arise within the liver definite powers. But if these are
ejected during the present incarnation they lead to hallucinations or to powerful visions.

You see now concretely what I pointed out yesterday more theoretically: that these things arise, having been
squeezed out of the organs, then force their way into consciousness. Out of the general hallucinatory life, which
should extend from the end of one incarnation into the next, they assert themselves within a single incarnation and,
in this way, make their abnormal appearance.

If you study in the same manner all that is connected with the kidneys and excretory system you will discover that
they concentrate within themselves the forces which, in the following incarnation, influence the head organization
preferably in the field of affective emotions. The kidneys, the organs of excretion, bring forth in preparation for the
next incarnation essentially that which has to do with the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense, but by a
detour through the head organization.

If these forces are squeezed out during the present incarnation they display all the nervous symptoms connected
with over-excitement of the human being, inner excitement specifically, hypochondriacal symptoms, depression, in
short all the conditions connected particularly with this aspect of the metabolism.

In reality everything remembered with a strong ingredient of feeling or passion is also connected with what is
reflected from the kidneys. If we consider lung or liver reflections we find them to be more often memory ideas,
the memories proper. If we turn to the kidney system we see what sort of lasting habits we have in this incarnation;
and within the kidney system are being prepared already the temperamental tendencies in the broadest sense which,
by a detour through the head organization, are intended for our next incarnation.

Let us study the heart with the same idea. For spiritual-scientific research, the heart is an extraordinarily interesting
organ. You know that our trivial science is inclined to treat knowledge of the heart rather lightly. It looks upon the
heart as a pump which pumps the blood through the body. Nothing more absurd can be believed, for the heart has
nothing to do with pumping the blood. The blood is set in motion by the full agility of the astral body and ego, and
the heart's movement is only the reflex of these activities. The movement of the blood is autonomous, and the heart
only brings to expression the movement caused by these forces. The heart is in fact only the organ that manifests
the movement of the blood, the heart itself having no activity in relation to this blood movement. The present
natural scientists become very angry if you speak of this. Many years ago, I think in 1904 or 1905, on a journey to
Stockholm I explained this to a scientist, a medical man, and he was furious about the idea that the heart should not
be regarded as a pump, that the blood comes into movement through its own vitality, that the heart is simply
inserted in the general blood movement, participates with its beat, and so on.

Well, something is reflected from the surface of the heart which is not a matter of memory or of habit. The life
processes become spiritualized when they reach the outer surface of the heart. For what is thrown back from the
heart are the pangs of conscience. That is to be taken simply, entirely as the physical aspect. The pangs of
conscience which radiate into our consciousness are that ingredient in our experiences which is reflected from the
heart. Spiritual cognition of the heart teaches us this.

But if we look into its interior we see gathered there forces which again stem from the entire metabolic and limb
organism, and because everything connected with the heart forces is spiritualized that is also spiritualized within it
which has to do with our outer life and deeds. And however strange and paradoxical it may sound to anyone clever
in the modern sense, the fact remains that what is thus prepared within the heart are the karmic propensities, the
tendencies of our karma. It is revoltingly foolish to speak of the heart as a mere pumping mechanism, for the heart
is the organ which, through mediation of the limb and metabolic system, carries what we understand as karma into
the next incarnation.

You see, if we learn to know this organization we learn to differentiate and recognize its connection with the
complete life extending beyond birth and death. We look then into the whole structure of the human being. We
cannot speak of the head in relation to metamorphoses, for the head is simply cast off, its forces having completed
their activity in the present incarnation. That which, however, exists in these four main systems, in lung, kidney,
liver, and heart, after making a detour through the metabolic and limb system, passes over forming our head with
all its predispositions and tendencies in the next incarnation. We must seek within the organs of our body the forces
which will carry over into the next incarnation what we are now experiencing.

The human metabolism is by no means a mere simmering and seething of chemicals in a retort which modern
physiology describes. You need only to take a step in walking and a certain metabolic effect is produced. The
metabolism then taking place is not simply the chemical process which may be examined by means of physiology
and chemistry, but bears within it at the same time a nuance of morality. And this moral nuance is in fact stored up
in the heart and carried over as karmic force into the next incarnation. To study the human being in his entirety
means to find in him the forces which reach over beyond earth life. Our head itself is a sphere, and this form is
modified only because the rest of the organism is attached to it. Our head is formed out of the cosmos. When we go
through death we must, with the spiritual and soul organization which remains to us, adapt ourselves to the whole
cosmos. The whole cosmos then receives us. Up to the middle of the period between two incarnations — I have
called it in one of my Mystery Dramas the Midnight of Existence — up to this time, if I may so express myself, we
continue to spread out into our environment and what thus goes out from us into the surrounding world gives the
astral and etheric configuration for the next incarnation.

All this, coming in essence from the cosmos, is determined by the mother. Through the father and impregnation
comes that which is formed in the physical body and in the ego. This ego, as it is then, after the Midnight Hour of
Being, passes over into an entirely different world. It goes over into the world from which it can then follow the
path through the paternal nature. This is an extremely important process. The period up to the Midnight Hour and
the period from the Midnight Hour on — both between death and rebirth — are really very different from each
other. In my Vienna lecture cycle in 1914 I pictured these experiences in their inner aspect. 1Rudolf Steiner, Inner Nature of Man,
Vienna, Easter 1914, six lectures.
If we look at them more from the outside, we must say: The ego is more cosmic in the first
half, up to the Midnight Hour, and prepares within the cosmos that which then enters the next incarnation indirectly
through the mother. From the Midnight Hour of Existence on up to the next birth, the ego passes over into what the
old Mysteries called the netherworld; and on the detour through this netherworld it passes through impregnation.
There the two poles of humanity meet as it were, through mother and father, from the upper world and from the
netherworld.

What I am now saying was an intrinsic portion of the Egyptian Mysteries which came out of the old instinctive
knowledge, at least so far as is known to me. The Egyptian Mysteries led particularly to knowledge of what they
then called the upper and the lower gods, the upper and the underworld of gods; and it may be said that in the act of
impregnation a polar equilibrium of the upper and the underworld of gods is brought about. The ego between death
and rebirth goes first through the upper and then through the lower world. In olden times there was not the strange
nuance which many connect today with upper and netherworld. People of today nearly always look upon the upper
as the good and the netherworld as the bad. This nuance was not originally connected with these worlds; they were
simply the two polarities which had to participate in the general world creation. Humanity in the direct experience
of the upper world, viewed it more as the world of light, the netherworld more as the world of gravity. Gravity and
light were the two polarities when expressed exoterically, and thus you see that such things may be described
concretely.

In regard to the other organs I have told you that the overflowing of organic forces may become hallucinatory life,
especially that which is squeezed from the liver system. But if the heart squeezes out its contents it is really the
collected forces, ejected and brought into consciousness, which call forth in the next incarnation that strange urge
to live out one's karma. If we observe how karma works, it may be said that a figurative description from the
human side might represent it as a kind of hunger and its assuagement.

That must be understood as follows: Let us proceed first from the standpoint of ordinary life. Let us take a striking
case: A woman meets a man and begins to love him. As that is usually regarded, it is somewhat as though you were
to cut out a small piece from the Sistine Madonna, for example, a little finger from the Jesus boy and gaze at it.
You have a piece of the Sistine Madonna, but you do not see anything. Neither do you see anything if you merely
consider the fact that a woman meets a man and begins to love him. The matter is not like that. You must trace it
backwards. Before the woman met the man she had been in other places in the world; before that she had been
somewhere else, and still earlier somewhere else again. You can find all sorts of reasons why the woman went
from one place to another. There is sense in it and, although it is naturally hidden in the subconscious, there is a
connection throughout, and we can, by going back into childhood, follow the way. The woman in question — and
this is directed at no one in particular — follows the path from the beginning which culminates in the event under
discussion. The human being at birth hungers to do what he does, and he does not give up until he satisfies this
hunger. The pressing forward to a karmic event is the result of such an indescript spiritual feeling of hunger. One is
driven to it, as it were, by the whole self. The human being has forces within him which lead to later events, in
spite of the freedom which nevertheless exists, but acts in a different field. Well, the forces which manifest in this
way as hunger, leading to karmic satisfaction, are concentrated in the heart; and when they are pressed out
prematurely and enter the consciousness during the present incarnation, they may create pictures which produce a
stimulus, and then frenzy results.

Frenzy is nothing but the outburst in this incarnation of a karmic force intended for the subsequent incarnation.
Think how differently we must accustom ourselves to look upon world events, having understood these
connections. People put questions such as: Why did God create frenzy? Frenzy has plenty of good reasons for
existence, but everything working in this world may appear at the wrong time, and the displaced manifestation, due
in this case to Luciferic forces — everything premature in the world is brought about by Luciferic forces — this
precipitate appearance of karmic forces intended for a later incarnation produces frenzy.

You see, what is to be carried over and continued in later incarnations may really be studied in the abnormalities of
the present life. You may easily imagine what an important difference exists between what remains in our heart
throughout our entire incarnation, and the condition it will be in after it has gone through the long development
between death and rebirth, to appear then in a new life in the outer behavior of a human being.

However, if you look into your own hearts you can see pretty clearly, though of course only in latency, not in a
finished picture, what you will do in your next life. We need not confine ourselves to the general statement: what
will take effect karmically in the next life is prepared in this one, but we can point directly to the receptacle in
which the karma of subsequent incarnations is stored. These are the things which must be concretely regarded if we
wish to practice genuine spiritual science.

You may imagine what enormous importance these things will attain when they are studied and made a part of the
general education. What does present medicine know of the possibility of a liver or heart disease when it does not
recognize the most important fact of all, that is, the actual purpose of these organs! And it does not know that. It
does not even discover a correct connection between excitement hallucinations and the kidney system, nor of the
quiet hallucinations, those which simply appear and are present as I have just explained, and are, so to say, liver
hallucinations. Hallucinations which appear as though crawling on a human being so that the victim wants to brush
them off come from the kidney system. These are the excitement hallucinations which have to do with the
emotions and temperament. From such symptoms a much more exact diagnosis can be made than by the means in
ordinary use today. And diagnoses based upon purely external evidence are very uncertain in comparison with
what they would be were these things studied with the above-mentioned symptoms in mind.

Now all these things are connected with the outer world. The lungs, as an inner organ or organic system, contain
the compressed coercive thoughts with all that we receive and concentrate in that organ through perception of outer
objects. The liver has an entirely different relation to the outer world. Because the lungs preserve the thought
material they are quite differently shaped. They are more closely connected with the earth element. The liver,
which conceals in particular the quietly appearing hallucinations, is connected with the element of water; and the
kidney system, paradoxical as it sounds, belongs to the element of air. One thinks naturally that this ought to be the
case with the lungs, but the lungs as organs are connected with the earth element, though not with it alone. On the
other hand, the kidney system — as an organ - — belongs to the element of air, and the heart system to that of
warmth, being entirely formed out of that element. Hence, this element which is the spiritual one is also the one
which takes up the predisposition of our karma into the delicate warmth structures of the warmth organism.

Since the human being as a whole stands in a relation with the outer world, you can readily realize that the lungs
have a particular relation to the outer world in connection with the earth element, and the liver in regard to the
watery element. If you examine the earthly qualities of plants you will find in them the remedies for diseases which
originate in the lungs. (This is of course to be considered in its broadest implications.) If you take what circulates in
the plant, its circulation of juices, you will have the remedy for all disturbances connected with the liver. Thus a
study of the reciprocal relation of the organs with the outer world offers in fact the foundation for a rational
therapy.

Our present therapy is a jumble of empiric notes. One can reach a really rational therapy only by studying in this
way the reciprocal relations between the domain of the human organs and the outer world. Of course the
voluptuous longing for subjective mysticism must then be overcome. If the aim is to reach no farther than the well-
known “little divine flame” of Meister Eckhardt, and so on; if only the outpouring of inner delight is the aim, and
the beholding of beautiful images without penetrating this element to the definite configuration of the inner organs,
then important therapeutic knowledge cannot be acquired. For this knowledge is gained upon the path of genuine
mysticism which advances to the concrete reality of the inner human organism.

We learn, by the detour through this inner knowledge, to discern the passage through the incarnations. In just the
same way, when we regard the outer world, in penetrating this carpet of the sense impressions, we attain to the
spiritual. We rise into the world of the spiritual hierarchies, which we did not reach through the detour of inner
mysticism. The hierarchies are found through a more profound contemplation of the outer world. Upon this path
there follow results which may be first expressed by analogies; yet they are not mere analogies, for there exist
deeper connections and relations.

We breathe, do we not? And I recently reckoned for you the number of inhalations during twenty-four hours. If we
count eighteen breaths to the minute we have in an hour 60 x 18, and in twenty-four hours 25920 inhalations in a
day and night.

Diagram 1

Let us take another rhythm in the human being, the rhythm of day and night. When you awake in the morning you
draw into your physical and etheric bodies the astral body and ego. This is also breathing. In the morning you
inhale the astral body and ego, and when you fall asleep at night you exhale them again; thus one complete breath
in 24 hours, in one day. That is 365 such breaths in a year. And take the average age of a human being, 72 years,
and you have approximately the same result. If I had not started with 72, but somewhat lower, I should have
reached the same figure. That is to say, if you take the entire earthly life of a human being, and count each single
day, each falling asleep and awakening, as one breath, you have then in an entire life as many inhalations and
exhalations of the astral body and ego as you have in and out breathings in 24 hours. You make in the course of
your life as many in and out breathings of the astral body and ego as you make daily in your in and out breathing of
air. These rhythms correspond absolutely, and show us how man is fitted into the cosmos. The life of one day from
sunrise to sunset, as a single circuit, corresponds with an inner sunrise and sunset that lasts from birth to death.

You see the human being becomes a part of the whole world organism; and I should like to close these
considerations by pointing out to you an idea, asking you to think about it rather thoroughly, and to make it a
subject of meditation. Science today postulates a cosmic process, and within this cosmic process the earth once
arose. In the end the earth, when the entropy is fulfilled, will be consumed in cosmic heat. If today we form for
ourselves a concept such as the Copernican, or any modification of it, then we take into consideration only the
forces which formed the earth out of the primeval nebula, and human life really becomes a sort of fifth wheel on
the wagon; for the geologist and the astronomer do not consider mankind. It does not occur to them to seek in any
sense within mankind itself the cause of a future world organism. The human being is everywhere present in this
cosmic process, but he is the fifth wheel on the wagon. The world process takes its course, but he has nothing to do
with it. Consider it in this way: the world process comes to an end, ceases, is dispersed in space. It stops, and the
causes of what ensues are always within the human being himself, inside his skin; there they find their
continuation.

The inception of what is now the world lies far back within man of primeval ages. It is thus in reality. The books of
ancient wisdom tell us this in their own language, and the saying of Christ-Jesus points to these things: Heaven and
earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. All that constitutes the material world is dissolved, but
that which issues from the spirit and soul and is expressed in words survives the destruction of the earth and lives
on into the future. The causes of the future exist within us, and need not be investigated by geologists. We should
seek them among the inner forces of our organism which pass over into our next earth-life first, but then continue
into other metamorphoses. Hence when you search for the future of the world you must look within man.
Everything external perishes utterly.

The nineteenth century erected a barrier against this knowledge, and this barrier is called: the law of the
conservation of energy. This law carries forward the forces of man's environment; but all these will dissolve and
disappear. Only that which arises within humanity itself can create the future. The law of the conservation of
energy is the most false imaginable. In reality its result is simply to make mankind a fifth wheel in the creative
process of the cosmos. Not the statement of the law of the conservation of energy is correct, but that other saying:
Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. These two are in diametrical contrast; and it
is simply thoughtlessness when today certain members of this or that positive denomination wish to be believers in
the Bible and, at the same time, adherents of the theories of modern physics. This is sheer dishonesty which claims
today to be something culturally creative. This dishonesty must be driven from the field of creative culture —
which it actually opposes — if we are to emerge from these forces of decline into ascending powers.

Factors of Karma, Deficiencies in Psychoanalysis

GA 172

13 November 1916, Dornach

Translator Unknown

From our Studies of such an impulse in human life as is contained in man's calling or vocation and in all that is
connected with it, you will have seen how difficult it is to make these matters clear. For in effect, so many things
are here involved. We must bear in mind that all that is introduced into our life through the law of Destiny or
Karma depends on countless factors. To this, indeed, the manifold nature of human life is due. In describing certain
human aspects of our life's destiny by the word ‘calling’ or ‘vocation’ one remark must perhaps be made, namely
this: We ought not to confuse what we may describe as man's calling or vocation with what is commonly spoken of
as his office or position in the widest sense of the term. For it goes without saying, much confusion would arise, if,
having in mind what one man or another represents in his official position, we applied to this the points of view
which have here been brought to bear on the vocational life. Frequently, though by no means always, man has to
pursue his vocation in some official position, and many an extraneous factor comes into play at this point in human
life, mingling other Karmic threads with that one which we may call the ‘Karma of vocation.’ We are living in a
time which is slowly undergoing a certain transformation. Nevertheless, in our time, the aspects we are here
outlining for the ‘Karma of vocation’ are by no means exclusively predominant in placing a man into this or that
position in life. As you are well aware, the Karma of vocation is still cut across in many ways by the Karma of
classes, social castes, etc. Within such groupings, ambitions, vanities, the prejudices of himself and other people,
and many other factors too, help to determine how a man is placed in his official post. All these things, entering
into the Karma of vocation as extraneous factors, make it possible for Ahrimanic influences constantly to interfere
with the true course of human activity. A man who has been placed at a certain post in life — who has become a
Cabinet Minister for instance, or a Privy Councillor or the like (through circumstances which are well enough
known, and need not be gone into here) — such a man need not by any means have the corresponding vocation. He
can occupy a high position and yet his vocation may only be that of a ‘pen-pusher’ — perhaps not even that. Nor
must you imagine that the position then remains unoccupied. That is just the peculiarity of our time. In its
materialistic interpretation of the just foundations of Darwinism, it has evolved such a theory of life as the
‘Selection of the Fittest,’ which is now being criticised so vehemently by Haeckel's pupil, Oskar Hertwig. (Our
standpoint need not be that of the pessimist who adversely judges his own time and constantly refers back to the
‘good old days.’ We simply take our stand on the real facts.) While on the one hand the people of this age pride
themselves on the ‘Selection of the Fittest,’ this age in its reality is dominated by the very opposite tendency —
that of selecting the worst, the un-fittest, for the very posts in life which one would think the most important. Bitter
as it may be for our time to hear it, this truth would be admitted, were it not for the fact that our time is impressed
with a far-reaching belief in authority, combined with the greatest possible opportunism and slackness. I say again,
it is a bitter truth, which would be recognised were it not for the prevalence of what is called ‘public opinion.’
(Public opinions, according to a 19th century philosopher, are private stupidities.) We should recognise the fact to
which I here refer, were we not so much impressed by the public opinions with which we are fed to-day from such
unclean sources. On this we must be clear, our age needs above all to be educated to a more intense grasp of life.
The prevalent one-sidedness — the selection of the un-fittest — must be recognised for what it is, albeit these ‘un-
fittest’ are overwhelmed with adulation by the aforesaid ‘public opinion.’

The offices are occupied, in fact, only too frequently by Ahriman-Mephistopheles. And you may well see from the
further course of Goethe's Faust how Mephistopheles fulfils his office. Not until the end of his life does it become
possible for Faust to free himself from Mephistopheles. Faust comes to the imperial court. He even makes an
invention — most important for the last few centuries. He invents paper-money. Mephistopheles is the real
inventor. Afterwards, Faust is conducted into the world of classical antiquity by Homunculus. Homunculus
himself, once more, is brought into being with Mephistopheles' assistance. Faust even becomes a military
commander and conducts wars. But from Goethe's manner of description in this act especially, we see that it is
really Mephistopheles who conducts them. Only at the very end do we see Faust gradually free himself from
Mephistopheles.

Though Faust is roaming through the world without any definite position — having vacated his professorship —
nevertheless, we must admit, the whole way in which Mephistopheles stands at his side is not unlike the way the
Mephistophelean forces frequently play into the life of mankind to-day.

That is the one thing which must be borne in mind, but there is another thing as well. It is by no means easy rightly
to discover in human nature what it is that really works in Karmic evolution. Here, too, the development of natural
science has reached a point, which must be attained once more by spiritual-scientific study.

Notably when it tries to enter into the life of the soul, the natural-scientific way of thought makes the most ghastly
errors. Witness the rise to-day of a mistaken school of science, which ventures to approach the human life of soul,
studying it in the spirit of mere natural science. This school of thought admits that the life of the soul does not
merely take its course as it appears to man's present consciousness. It admits that much is there beneath the
threshold of consciousness — or as they say, in the unconscious or subconscious — beating-up into the conscious
life.

In former lectures we have mentioned specific things which are truly there in the subconscious, and surge up into
consciousness like the clouds of smoke which arise in the Solfatara country when one sets a light to a piece of
paper. Much indeed is present down below in depths of consciousness.
So we may say: There are those today, who, wishing to pursue a science of the soul, already divine the fact that
dark unconscious faculties of soul — and failings of soul — must be included for any true explanation. But as these
schools will not yet admit a comprehensive spiritual-scientific world-conception, they can only bring to light
mistaken notions. Those who take this standpoint of a purely natural-scientific psychology, observe a human life,
— how it has evolved. They have indeed departed from the belief that what a soul feels and wills, wherewith it is
happy or unhappy, filled with joy or grief, depends only on what the soul itself has preserved in the immediate
consciousness. So now they try to catechise the soul. Somehow they try to get out of human souls the joys and
pains, the disappointments of life which they have some time undergone and in their every-day power of thought
have forgotten. What is forgotten, so these theorists declare, has not therefore vanished. It is still burrowing on in
the subconsciousness.

Cravings, above all, are burrowing in the subconsciousness — cravings which at some earlier time of life remained
unsatisfied or were repressed. Take a concrete instance — it is a woman in her 30th year. At the age of 16 she fell
in love. She evolved a strongly erotic craving (so says this school of science), but this craving, if she had given
herself up to it — if it had been fulfilled — would have led into some bye-way of life. Influenced by education, by
the exhortation of her parents, she repressed it. To put it tritely, she ‘swallowed it down’ in her soul's life. Then she
lived on. Fourteen years have passed. Perhaps she has married meantime according to her station. For her daily
thoughts and feelings it is long forgotten. But the forgotten has by no means disappeared. The soul is not
exhaustively contained in what it knows. In the underlying levels of consciousness the thing is still there, and
presently it finds expression. For though the lady in her outer life is happy, she suffers from an indefinable,
pessimistic leaning, a partial weariness of life or something similar. She is, as they say, ‘nervous,’ neurasthenic, or
the like.

Now they seek to introduce this kind of psychology into medical science. They try to cure such souls by
catechising them. Such experiences, they say, abiding in the hidden depths of the soul's life and for the surface
consciousness apparently forgotten, must be drawn forth. If this be done — if under the influence of a good
catechiser (who must of course, after the prevailing notions of to-day, be a physician) the patient gets to grips with
the thing — then it will all grow better.

Cures are indeed effected in this manner. Often indeed they are more or less real cures, though in the majority of
cases they will prove to be only semblances of cures. (We can explain how this is on some other occasion.)

That is one kind of thing they seek for, down in the depths of the soul's life. Here is another: It is a man of 35 or 40,
suffering from a certain weariness of life, a morbid indecision. He does not know why, and the people around him
do not know why. He knows it least of all. One who busies himself with the aforesaid ‘science of the soul,’ will try
in this case too, to rummage in the forgotten though not vanished depths of the inner life, and will elicit the fact
that in his 15th, 16th or 17th year, may be, the man had this or that plan in life, which plan fell through. He was
obliged to turn to another plan of life — not according to the one he cherished. In all that he daily feels and thinks
and wills, he has apparently been reconciled to the change. But what a man consciously feels and thinks and wills
is not the entire life of the soul. In hidden depths the disappointed plan lives on as a real force.

Once more, these people believe that they can effect a cure by catechising and bringing the disappointment to the
surface, giving the man an opportunity to discuss the whole matter with his catechiser.

But there are many other things besides, which they believe are resting there in the soul's depths without man's
consciousness being aware of it. In short, they have perceived the fact that consciousness is a small circle and the
soul's life a far larger circle of which the consciousness comprises only a little part. Not only so, they also look in
the very depths of the soul's life for something else which is not of the soul — which, it appears, a theologian
recently described — with questionable taste — as ‘the animal slime at the bottom of the soul.’ Thus they find
disappointments, suppressed craving's, broken plans of life and finally the ‘animal slime at the very bottom of the
soul,’ which means: all that is rooted in life, coming, so to speak, from flesh and blood, from the hidden animal
nature, and rising from the soul's foundation in an unconscious way (for the consciousness would naturally rebel
against it and does indeed rebel).

There is of course some truth in this theory of the ‘animal slime.’ We often see it happening in life: —
Consciousness says to itself, ‘I want nothing more; I want to discover this or that. Therefore I turn to this or that
person.’ But the ‘animal slime’ is really at work, for it may well be animal cravings which are only camouflaged
and masked by what the consciousness declares.
Moreover this school of science (‘science,’ I say, with a grain of salt) has conjectured that in these same
unconscious regions we shall also find what comes from the individual's connection with race and nation, with all
manner of historic residues which play their part in the human soul unconsciously, while consciousness behaves
quite differently. In view of what is now surging through the world, we cannot even deny that these things are
apparently confirmed by multitudinous examples. For who will fail to see how many a man declares by word of
mouth lofty ideals of ‘right and freedom for the nations,’ while in his soul's reality that alone is active, which,
stirring the slime in the soul's depths, arises out of such connections as the Psycho-analyst would analyse — or
pretend to analyse — in the above directions.

Moreover, the theologians among the Psycho-analysts especially, include in the subconscious regions of the soul's
life the ‘demonic’ element which, they allege, arises from still more hidden depths — from the mysterious depth of
the ‘irrational.’ I am unaware how the natural scientists and the theologians among Psycho-analysts come to terms
with one another. But the latter class too undoubtedly exists, and they especially are fond of saying that unknown
demons are at work in the subconscious in the human soul, so as to make men Gnostics for example, or
Theosophists. ‘Psycho-analyse the soul and penetrate to the foundations where the primeval slime resides and you
will find it. Gnosis is a demonic teaching, likewise Psycho-analysis’ ... no, I beg your pardon, not Psycho-analysis.
Psychoanalysis, according to these men and women (for ladies, too, are taking part in these things) Psycho-analysis
is not included in the black list, but Theosophy and other things.

I do not wish to enter now into any detailed criticism of Psycho-analysis. I only wish to have pointed out that in the
Psycho-analytic school we have the evidence, how modern research is driven to observe what works and weaves
beneath the conscious portions of the soul. But the prevailing scientific prejudices can only result in the most
wrong conclusions on these matters. Meanwhile these people are quite unwilling to consider the investigations of
Spiritual Science. Consequently they will not discover how impossible it is truly to analyse what they find in the
soul's life, so long as they are unaware that man's existence takes its course in repeated lives on Earth. For in their
Psycho-analysis they try to explain, what is there at the bottom of the soul, out of one Earth-life only. No wonder
they are then obliged to place it frequently in a distorted light.

For example, suppose we find disappointed plans of life, deep down within the soul. We ought first to consider
what kind of meaning this wrecking of a plan in life may have for the human being's existence as a whole, which
goes on through repeated lives on Earth. Then perhaps we shall discover that there are also working in the man's
subconsciousness certain aspects of his life, which, by a true working of destiny, have prevented the fulfilment of
his plan. And then we shall observe that the disappointed plan, which is still there in the soul's depths, is not merely
destined to make the man ill in this incarnation, but to be carried through the gate of death when this life is at an
end, and to become a potent force in the life between death and new birth. For only in the next life will it play its
proper part. It may indeed be necessary for such a broken plan of life to be preserved and nurtured to begin with, in
the depths of the soul, so that it may be strengthened and enhanced. Then between death and a new birth it will be
able to rise to its true stature, till in the next life on Earth it assumes its predestined form, which, on account of
other qualities within the soul, it was not able to assume in this life.

Then as to the so-called ‘animal slime at the bottom of the soul's life’ (though, as I said, the expression is by no
means in good taste), undoubtedly such a thing is there. But I beg you to remember what I have explained, of the
relation between the head of man and the remainder of his organism. The latter is in many respects connected with
man's earthly life, his present incarnation, while the head is the result of former planes of evolution of the Earth
itself, and is, moreover, related to the man's former incarnations. If you consider this, then you will understand how
many things are working upward from the remainder of the organism (by virtue of the part it plays in the whole
karmic connection) — things which are at a different stage of maturity than that which comes from the human head
and from the nervous system. But the Psycho-analyst, who to begin with only ‘analyses’ the ‘slime,’ will go
completely wrong. Analysing this ‘animal slime,’ as they call it, he is like a man who wants to know what kind of
corn will grow on a given soil. He analyses the soil. He digs and finds a certain manure, with which the field was
manured. He says, Now I know the manure, and out of this the corn will presently spring forth. But the corn does
not grow from the manure, albeit the manure is necessary. The point is, what is imbedded in the basic slime; for
that which is imbedded in it is generally destined to work on through the gate of death, into the next evolution on
the Earth. It is not a question of investigating the animal slime itself. The point is, what is imbedded in it as a real
‘seed of the soul.’

Psycho-Analysis, so called, gives ample opportunity to observe how perilous are the prejudices of the present time.
True, it is entering a realm to which the thought of our time is tending. For the soul can no longer rest satisfied with
what the surface experience of consciousness provides. So do the men of our time find themselves driven to the
very quarters where they should indeed investigate; but as they cannot understand spiritual science they have no
guiding lines for such investigation. Therefore they rummage about in the most clumsy way in these realms which
are assigned to them by their profession, or by their own agitations. They put everything in the wrong place, not
knowing how to put in it the right. For this they could only do, if they were able to follow up the real Karmic
threads as I have tried to indicate them now, in the one case and in the other. Above all when Psychoanalysis
begins to burrow in the elemental realms, it proves itself appallingly unsound.

Nevertheless, the desire to pursue the continuous thread of destiny into its finer and more intimate ramifications is
important. That which goes on in the conscious life of a man's soul, from the time he awakens until he falls asleep
again, reveals very little of the Karmic stream which works on and on through his incarnations. What we
experience consciously in waking life largely belongs to the present incarnation, and it is good so. For in the
present incarnation man should be healthy and efficient. On the other hand, much of what is carried through the
gate of death — as a seed which grows out of our experiences and trials and faculties acquired during the present
life — plays a great part in our life from our falling asleep to our awakening, and very largely finds its way into our
dreams. We must only be able to estimate the dream-formations truly. We say, Dreams are reminiscences, — and
so they often are. But in the stream of our Karma they do not work in a simple and straightforward way. In their
inherent forces they often signify the opposite of what appears upon the surface. Let me give you an example from
literature to explain what I now mean.

Vischer, the aestheticist, tells a pretty little story in his book, Auch Einer. I quote it here because I am now
speaking in a wider sense of the vocational life and all that is connected with it. Vischer relates a conversation
between a father and his son. They are going for a walk together, and after the father has asked him many things
the boy tells the following story: ‘Teacher told us one should always find out what kind of a job a man has. A man
should have a proper occupation. By that you can recognise whether he is a sound and good man altogether.’ ‘Oh,’
said the father. ‘Yes, and after teacher had told us that in school, I dreamt I was walking past yonder lake, and in
the dream I asked the lake what kind of a job it had. And the lake said: My job is to be wet.’ ‘Hm,’ said the father.

A witty story, revealing some knowledge of life in him who thought it out. The father said ‘Hm’ because he did not
wish to spoil the boy. He did not wish to tell him what nonsense his teacher had been talking. No doubt he kept his
thoughts to himself. He should have enlightened his son more wisely than the teacher. He should have said, One
must not pass judgments in such a superficial way, for it may well be that one's judgment of what constitutes a
‘decent and proper occupation’ is mistaken, and one will thus be led to misjudge one's fellow-men. Or again, the
man's career might somehow have been marred. In short, the father should have instructed the son. But in this case
he did not need to do so. For in the young human being the dream can still work helpfully. The dream, which in
this instance came to the boy's consciousness, is there as a real inner force, in place of such instruction. In the sub-
consciousness the dream is working. And it works in such a way as to expunge from the soul the nonsense which
the teacher created by his foolish teaching. This explains the forming of the dream in the boy's sub-consciousness,
which is wiser than the surface consciousness. It spreads an atmosphere of laughable absurdity over the teacher's
foolish exhortations. The lake says, ‘It is my job to be wet.’ That will work wholesomely. It will drive away the
noxious effects to which such teaching might otherwise give rise.

In this case the dream is indeed a reminiscence; it follows in the very next night. But at the same time it is a
corrector of life. Indeed the life of the astral body frequently works in this way. Beside the relics of what is there in
the soul from the experiences of life, we should frequently find this factor. Especially where a mistaken education
is at work, we can frequently detect in the sub-conscious forces of the soul this ‘corrector,’ who often works even
in the same incarnation, especially in young human beings. But above all, this corrector is carried through the gate
of death and there works on. There is really a kind of self-corrector in the human being. This must be borne in
mind.

With all these things I only want to point out how much there is in the soul of man, pressing on from one
incarnation to another. There is a whole complex of forces, working across from one incarnation to another. We
must now consider what is the relation between this complex of forces and the human being of the present,
inasmuch as his life continues between birth and death.

In this respect man is really a four-stringed instrument, on which the above-named ‘complex of Karmic forces’
plays. Physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego are the four strings, and Karma plays on them. According
as the one or the other string is played on more or less intensely by the bow of Karma (if we may retain this
analogy of the violin which also has four strings), so does the individual life arise. It may be more the etheric body
or the astral body, or the etheric and the astral together, or the physical and the astral together, or the physical body
and the Ego. In the most manifold ways, the four strings of human life can play together. Therefore it is so difficult
if we desire to speak not in general and vague abstractions but in reality. It is so hard to decipher the several
melodies of a man's life, for we can only decipher them if we are able to behold how the fiddle-bow of Karma
plays on the four strings of Man.

Consider the human being in those years of life when the physical body and especially the etheric body are
developing (as indicated in my little book Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy) — from the
seventh to the fourteenth year — all these things are approximate. During this time we shall find certain
peculiarities emerging, which distinguish this period of life especially. Certain things, we shall observe, are in a
way consolidated during this time. True, many of these things already emerge in the first seven years of life — for
all these things merge into one another. But it is only between the seventh and about the fourteenth year that we
can observe it deeply and accurately. Certain inner characteristics become consolidated in the growing human
being, expressing themselves through the corporeality, through the whole conduct and appearance as it expresses
itself in the tenure of the body, in the gestures, in the behaviour as a whole. What is thus consolidated (not all, but a
great part of it) causing the human being to be short and thickset, or to have shorter or longer fingers, or to tread in
a certain way — with a firm step in one case, tripping it lightly in another (to describe the radical contrasts) — in
short, all that is connected with the bodily aspect of deportment, is here intended. As I said, not all, but a great part
of what thus appears in the growing human being comes from his Karma. It is the effect of his vocation in the
former life on Earth. People who do not observe what I have now said, often make a great mistake, especially when
they try to be clever, observing the child's behaviour, and wishing somehow to determine his occupation in this life
from the way he deports himself. In this way it is easy to make the mistake of wishing to place him into a similar
vocation to what he had in his preceding life on Earth. And that would not be wholesome for him. What we
observe in this period of life are the effects of the former incarnation; and when this period is at an end, or even
before (as I said, these things merge into one another), the astral body emerges in a very peculiar way, and reacts
on what has been developing hitherto. Once we are aware of these facts as derived from spiritual science, we can
observe them even outwardly on the physical plane. The astral body reacts. According to quite other Karmic
forces, it transmutes that which resulted from the pure ‘Karma of vocation’ between the seventh and fourteenth
year. Thus there are two forces in the human being in conflict with one another. The one set of forces mould and
form him; these arise more from the etheric body. The others, counteracting and partly paralysing the former, come
more from the astral body. Through these latter forces, man is impelled to transform what was stamped upon him
by his vocational Karma of the former incarnation. We may say therefore: The working of the etheric body is
formative. (All that appears as gesture, posture and deportment in the physical body comes from the etheric.) The
working of the astral body is transformative. And in the interplay of the two forces, which are very decidedly in
conflict with one another, much of the working of the Karma of vocation finds expression.

This, however, is woven together with other Karmic streams. For we must also bear in mind the physical body. As
to the physical body, it is especially important to observe in the first epoch of life how the human being places
himself through his Karma into the world. The kind of physical body we have depends on this. For by our Karma
we place ourselves into a certain family, belonging to a certain nation and so forth. Thus we get quite a definite
kind of body. But not only so. Think how much the course of our life depends on the situation into which we place
ourselves, in that we enter a certain family. This already gives the starting-point of infinitely much in our life.

In effect, notably in the first seven years of life, when the physical body is developing, forces are working in (or
rather, about) the physical body — forces which come not from the vocational aspect of our former incarnation,
but from the way in which we lived with other human beings. In our former incarnation we stood in this or that
relation to this or that human being. (I mean now, not in a particular part of our life — for that belongs to a
different chapter — but throughout our life.) All this we assimilate. We carry it through the gate of death, and
through these forces we bring ourselves once more into a certain family, a certain situation or set of circumstances.
Thus we may say: That which places our physical body into life and works on through our physical body — that is
what shapes the situations of our life. (It goes on working, of course, through our succeeding lives.) And now it
receives a counter-force through the Ego. The Ego works so to annul the given situations of our life. It battles
against all that determines our circumstances. Thus we may say: The physical body works so to create life's
situation; and the Ego works to re-create it. In the working together of these two-battling one with another —
another stream of Karma enters our life. For? there is always present in man on the one hand what strives to
maintain him in a certain situation, and on the other, what strives to lift him out of it. Thus I would say, primitively
speaking, 1 and 4, and 2 and 3, work upon one another. (See the diagram at the end.) And in manifold other ways
the four strings play together. The way we come into connection with fresh human beings in a given life according
to our Karma, depends on 1 and 4 and their connections. And this leads back in turn to our relationships of life in
former lives. The way we find our connections in calling, work and occupation depends on 2 and 3 and on their
mutual interplay.

To begin with I beg you to consider these things well. We shall then continue in the next lecture.

1. Physical body: Creating our life's situation.

{
2. Etheric body: Forming.
}}
3. Astral body: Transforming or re-forming.
{
4. Ego: Re-creating our life's situation.