S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 4 1 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos According to mainstream therapies, psychological health has been defined as “a state of mind characterized by emotional well-being, good behavioral adjustment, relative freedom from anxiety and disabling symptoms, and a capacity to establish constructive relationships and cope with the ordinary demands and stresses of life” (American Psychological Association 2020). Some may recall the following passage from Sigmund Freud and might think that he took into account ecological and even transpersonal considerations: “Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive – indeed, an all-embracing – feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the Ego and the world about it” (1989a, 15). Yet this notion is not only flawed but also problematic because the Freudian system is vehemently anti-metaphysical and anti-spiritual in essence the very foundations on which contemporary psychology is founded. In fact, a series of lectures that Freud delivered in 1901 – titled The Psychopathology of Everyday Life – reveals the collective illness of the human soul in our time, to which Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) may be added as an expression of the psyche’s gradual flight from the natural world. The full-scale assault of the psychoanalytic revolution is clearly evident in Freud’s parable of the “three blows”, when he attacks what he diagnosed as “human narcissism” or the traditional belief that we are “made in the image of God” (Genesis 1:27). Human beings were traditionally recognized as a reflection of divine reality, being inseparable from the world of Spirit: “And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Philip Sherrard (1922–1995) explains why this decisive attack was detrimental to both humanity and the planet: “Our understanding of man is intimately related to our understanding of nature. Indeed, so much is this the case that our failure to perceive the divine in man has gone hand in hand with a failure to perceive the divine in nature. As we have dehumanized man, so we have desanctified nature” (1991, 90). The first is the cosmological blow, more commonly known as the Copernican revolution attributed to Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), which unmoored the human being from traditional understandings of the cosmos: in particular, from a conception of the person as a microcosm: “Man is a little cosmos, and the cosmos is like a big man” (Ibn ‘Arabī 1975, 11). The second is the biological blow, or what has been dubbed the Darwinian revolution attributed to Charles Darwin (1809–1882), which reduced humanity to mere animality. The following statement by Skinner (1965, 7) situates the theoretical ground from which behavioristic psychology, not unlike psychoanalysis, was able to solidify the worldview of modernity: Primitive beliefs about man and his place in nature are usually flattering. It has been the unfortunate responsibility of [note: modern] science to paint more realistic pictures. The Copernican theory of the solar system displaced man from his pre-eminent position at the center of things. Today we accept this theory without emotion, but originally it met with enormous resistance. Darwin challenged a practice of segregation in which man set himself firmly apart from the animals, and the bitter struggle which arose is not yet ended. But… Darwin put man in his biological place… The third is the psychological blow – the Psychoanalytic revolution attributed to Sigmund Freud, who attacked traditional modes of knowing. He undermined the traditional distinction between “reason” (Lat. ratio) and the “intellect” (Lat. intellectus), thus proclaiming that human beings are governed by unconscious or instinctual forces that exist beyond the normal reaches of our awareness. Freud writes: “Man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life” (1989b, 68). This subverts the notion of the Intellect or “eye of the heart” as a transcendent faculty that directly apprehends “the Ego is not master in its own house” (Freud 1955, 143). This served to further undermine the metaphysical symbolism of our kinship with the cosmos. It was not only behaviorism and psychoanalysis (the two key pillars of modern Western psychology) that eroded the spiritual foundations of the human psyche. Starting with the first European psychological laboratory established by Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) in 1879 at the University of Leipzig, the soul has steadily lost its centrality in psychology. Wundt’s “new psychology” announced the death of the soul as follows: “The… soul can no longer exist in the face of our present-day physiological knowledge” (1924, 192). Nevertheless, across the Atlantic, William James (1842–1910) had set up a laboratory, four years prior to Wundt, at Harvard University in 1875. While James was a pioneer of transpersonal psychology, which attempts to reclaim the role of spirituality in psychology, he wanted to appeal to the secular mindset within the field by emphasizing the following: “The Soul-theory is, then, a complete superfluity, so far as accounting for the actually verified facts of conscious experience goes. So far, no one can be compelled to subscribe to it for definite scientific reasons” (1913, 348). James thus defined psychology by including the
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