Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 1.djvu/98

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COLLECTIVE REVIEWS

is in its main thesis already recognised by and has been described under the thecjry of the sublimating processes. The resulting retro- grade tendency of the works of the Jungian school on the science of religion is evidenced by the central significance and use of the concept "introversion" in their analytical researches (Morel, Jung Riklin and Silberer). A comparison of Freud's theory of sacrifice with that of Jung shows that the conception of the latter, which incidentally overestimates in a curious way the heterosexual im- pulse in this connection, takes the uppermost psychic layer as the ultimate, and gives value to the primary tendencies only as a symbolic method of expression; the sacrifice would seem to be as though reprisals were exacted from the beast in man — thus too says theology, "although in somewhat other words". The tendency is observable to allow the religious-ethical element to penetrate the analysis instead of the reverse process. To what reactionary and pseudo-scientific results such a theologising outlook may lead may be seen in the explanation given by Riklin of the sin of Adam (62): to him this is "tlic backwards-striving principle repre- sented in the incest motif and its symbolism reversed. And if the punishment of the sin of Adam is work the motive for the sin is thereby clear: it was the horror of the deliberate undertaking of cultural performances". As we see, such an inteipretation has no longer anything analytic about it, but represents a modern recrudes- cence of scholasticism and its symbolic intcrjiretations with the aid of psychology called in. The processes of .sublimation and transformation of the sexual and grossly egoistic impulses nowhere shape themselves more clearly than in the world outlook of the mystics and the immense piety of the middle ages. The strong interest which has been taken in the mystics by individual Swiss analysts and those investigators who are influenced by their views may find its explanation very largely in this fact; Morel, Riklin, Silberer, Pfister, Kielholz have for this reason brought personalities and phenomena belonging to the mythical province of religion into the central forces of their analysis (35, 63, 68, 43, 27).

Among the spheres of historical culture to which analysis has been directed one of the most recent is religion. The analytical psychology of religion has thus, it may be noted, from the first effected a junction with the investigation of myths, where already the traces of folk-psychology have been examined by analytic methods. In the writings of Abraham (fl] Prometheussage) and