Psychology as a search for meaning
Although it began as part of the protest against religion, the net result of modern psychology has been to reaffirm man’s experience of himself as a spiritual being.
Despite its conscious intention, the discipline of psychology recalls the modern man to an awareness of his inner life, thus re-establishing the ancient religious knowledge that man’s fundamental accomplishments began within himself.
This is a paradoxical outcome of Freud’s work, and it has the broadest implications for our time.
We are now in the midst of a transformation affecting the fundamental nature and spirit of psychological work.
Depth psychology in particular, by which we mean all the varied theories interpreting the “unconscious depths” of man, has arrived at conclusions that reverse the major assumptions with which psychology began as a field of modern study.
Its culminating insights suggest not only a new conception of human personality, but a new approach to art and religions as well as a change in the way we see ourselves in history.
Our aim in the chapters that follow is to describe this transformation, its beginnings, its stages of growth, and its conclusions.
We shall retrace its course of development, concentrating our attention on the progressive deepening of insight in the lives and works of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, C. G. Jung, and Otto Rank.
These are the four men who made the most fundamental and continuous contributions to depth psychology.
We shall look into their personal experiences as far as the pertinent data are available to us.
We shall present and interpret their writings, especially the advanced writings of their later years.
And by integrating the disagreements and correspondences of their individual systems, we shall seek to crystallize die new view of man that emerges as the culmination of their collective endeavors.
In order to understand the development of depth psychology in perspective, we must think of it in relation to the changes in the tempo and structure of life that have accompanied the growth of modern industrial society.
In the last hundred years the face of our civilization has been radically altered, and the consequences for human beings have often been sharp and severe.
In history, whenever a fundamental social change takes place, at least one generation and sometimes two or three ore pinned psychologically between the old and the new.
Inevitably, the most painful burden falls on those individuals of the intermediary generation who are caught in the squeeze of transition.
The recent surge of popular novels about Africa has familiarized us with the spiritual confusion that results when primitive tribesmen are converted
into an economical “labor supply”; but that is no different in principle from the kind of social and psychological dislocation that has occurred in Europe and America at
each step of the emergence of the modern mode of life.
In Europe, for example, before it was industrialized, just as in Africa before it was Europeanized, individuals experienced the meaning of their lives in terms of the local religious orthodoxies and the accustomed national or tribal ways of life.
Wherever its impact was felt, however, the new technological culture disrupted the old patterns irrevocably.
Often it came close to destroying them altogether, and it left only a void in their place.
The traditional customs and beliefs had provided built-in psychic security for the individual.
They had protected him against losing his equilibrium short of organic psychosis as long as he could believe in the practices of the group and participate in them wholeheartedly.
But when the old groups were physically broken up and their members were scattered in the factories of the cities, or when, for any of many reasons, the faith in
their teachings was gone, the individual was left unprotected.
He could no longer have recourse to the spiritual past of his people.
He was isolated and cut adrift in life; and it is this situation of the lone individual no longer sustained by die cultural resources of his ancestors that is a main root of the
psychological problems that have arisen in modern times.
There is considerable significance in the fact that neither pre-Freudian psychiatry nor psychoanalysis took this cultural background into account in studying the modern personality.
They did not approach psychological problems with a social, historical perspective, but proceeded almost exclusively from a medical point of view; and inevitably, their orientation
limited the kind of facts that they could see.
Even Freud himself, who approached the psychology of neurotics with the open mind of a pioneer, was restricted in his vision because the habits and capacities to which his mind had been trained predisposed him to think medically in terms of pathology and diagnosis.
The mental difficulties that late-nineteenth centuxy psychiatry was called upon to treat had a large historical background, since they were ultimately derived from the cultural transformations of the time; but only their medical aspects, the specific pathologic eruptions of personality, could be discussed and diagnosed in the clinics and consultation rooms.
The larger aspects of the problem remained in the background and could be taken into account only later in the twentieth century when psychology began to widen
its spiritual vistas.
Because the new era of technology began there, Europe was the first to feel the
psychological effects of the modern way of life.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, in France and Germany and Austria, one could see throughout the population that the flux in social classes and the intense
changes in the values of life were leaving their marks on the individual personality.
It was becoming increasingly difficult for people to fulfill the requirements of family morality in the previously accepted ways.
To do what had seemed natural in carrying out the traditional patterns of birth and
marriage and death was becoming a matter of question, of tribulation, and often of severe moral conflict.
The consequences of the social ferment of the time were felt with particular
intimacy and with the greatest psychological force in the changes affecting the habits and desires of sexual contact.
Individuals were torn between the traditional teachings they had received in their childhood and the new sexual vogues Psychology as a search for meaning 7 of modern city life.
The changing attitudes toward sexual experience became the hub of the wide ranging transformation in European culture, for the question of sexual expression
crystallized in a direct and personal way the larger issues of social freedom then coming to the fore of history.
The loosening of the old class system, the spiritual emancipation of women, the opening of higher education and the arts to large segments of the population were part of the cultural liberation taking place throughout nineteenth-century Europe.
All the fixed social forms that hindered change were brought under heavy pressure, and particularly the rigid institution of the father-dominated family came under
the heaviest attack.
The temper of the time called the traditional structure of the family into question, weakened it at its core by doubt and disaffection, and led eventually to the new tradition of the rebellion of the children that has become in diverse forms the initiation of the modern personality to life.
By the turn of the century in Europe, the relationship of children to parents lay under a heavy shadow of vague unconscious fears, largely because of the shifting
sexual patterns.
The confusions surrounding family life and the uncertainty regarding the social forms of sexual expression were at the center of the serious problems arising in an
age of psychological transition.
Practicing in Vienna, Sigmund Freud saw from the dreams of his patients how large
a part sexual and family conflicts played in the neurotic disturbances he had to treat; and from those observations he generalized a theory that became the starting point for modern depth psychology. ~Ira Progoff, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology, Page 3-7
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