Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/97

 THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION 89

theories (23). Whenever a religious problem is involved the Jungian treatment approaches the psychological work of certain theological schools: in spite of the "liberal-mindedness" of their author they represent rather a religious and ethical dissertation on analysis than a real analysis of religion and ethics. The expansion of the libido concept and the immense significance ascribed by Jung to this force, which becomes with him mystical and vague, proves un- attainable in the psychology of religion and out of proportion to the phenomena. Like Freud, Jung aimed at bringing into relation with each other neurotic, religious, and mythological phantasies, but this undoubtedly interesting and often fruitful attempt to elucidate individual experiences by folk-psychology fails in this instance. Just as in the practical analysis of the individual so in the analytic in- vestigations of religious problems Jung omits to probe the earliest processes of development and thus frequently runs the risk of con- sidering theproducts of culture as primary psychic elements. In the inter- pretation of re-birth phantasies which play so large a r6Ie in the puberty- rites thepresent writer claims to have shown that Jung who views them as the embodiment of highly sublimated ethical and religious strivings only reveals the conscious surface layers of the psychic dynamics or, to put it more simply, alters the significance of the deeper- lying and primarily active tendencies into what is thus ideally directed. The same thing holds good of Silberer, who sees "anagogic" symbols in the tribal initiation ceremonies relating to death and resurrection (69). Undoubtedly the revolting and egoistic side of the human sex-impulses becomes sublimated in the course of a long and eventful development, but they nevertheless show their origin and their peculiar nature in the very act of coming to light as the driving force in the highest moral and religious concepts. Psycho-analysis has an interest in proving the inheritance of animal impulse as operative in the cultural structure by which the social end is served: we have thus gradually exposed to our view the psychic forces from which this culture .has arisen and the psychic bases on which it ultimately rests. The belief of Jung and his school is that ethics and religion undeniably arise from these deeply buried roots, that there is however an innate tendency in these roots to strive upwards, that therefore — to drop metaphor — these egoistic and sexual complexes, one and all, possess a higher anagogical significance. That the anagogic theory admits of partial confirmation has never been doubted by psycho-analysis; what of it is sound,