From Lipot Szondi, Ich-Analyse [Ego Analysis Inflation]- Translated by By Arthur C. Johnston, PhD © 2008 Please Observe: The copyright of this article (in German or in English) belongs to the Szondi Institute and to Dr. Arthur C. Johnston. This means you may not duplicate this article without their permissions. [DIV IV] [Book Chapter XII] Inflation. Doubling and Possession* [*Editor: Also Obsession: both from Besessenheit]. Conception and Forms of Inflation One can understand an elementary ego function correctly only if one first has settled two basic questions. First of all: How does the ego with this function solve the problem of mental opposite structures? Secondly: Which final goal is set up by the ego with this manner of solution? With primordial projection, i.e. with participation, the ego solves the oppositeness by the means that it transfers out [hinausverlegt] both parts of the pair of opposites into the outer object (total projection). Through this separation the outer object becomes “both.” -- that is, everything and consequently omnipotent. The subject becomes therefore not completely powerless because through the mystic or real participation, it has obtained an indirect part in the out-shifted omnipotence. Therefore, we say that the ego with primordial projection strives after being related, being the same and being one with the object. In this way, the ego succeeds in canceling the opposites and participates indirectly in the omnipotence of the outer objects. The ego becomes indirectly related to the omnipotence. This primitive original relation between the subject and the object is still possible with a primitive culture; it becomes intolerable in the long run however on a higher stage of culture. Internal development factors and outer social events disturb this paradise-like being one with the world and its objects in any form of a dual union. The subject is then compelled to draw back the double power of the opposites from the object. The ego is able to carry out this drawing back in two ways. The first way leads to inflation and to greatness delusion [megalomania]; the second is to secondary projection and to persecution delusion. The first way of inflation is thus that the ego does not return the double power withdrawn from the outside to the unconscious but keeps it for itself. The result of this unconscious ego machination is that from now on the ego becomes itself both and thus is everything. We say: The ego doubles itself. C. G. Jung calls this doubling of the ego “psychic inflation.” The word inflation means in general language usage “puffed up currency [money]” -- that is, the depreciation of gold and indeed through that the state means of accounting brings into circulation lots of currency without gold reserves. Something similar happens also with the doubling of the ego. Psychic inflation should mean, according to C. G. Jung, the “puffing up of the person” -- that is to say, an expansion of the personality exceeding the individual boundaries through dissolution of the opposites. Inflation is the original elementary striving of the ego to be both itself and to be everything itself. Briefly, after being complete [perfect] itself. If however someone wants to carry out both fate possibilities of his own opposite structures in his own being, then he can only do it if he doubles his ego. Inflation and ego doubling include the same mental process. In the doubled ego the opposites stand no longer arranged against each other but are set next to one another. Man and woman, humans and animal, lord and servant, emperor and subject, Christ and Antichrist, angel and devil, God and humans, and all other opposites basic pairs do not become separated any more through resistance, but by means of inflated doubling are placed side by side, as if here scarcely no contradiction existed between the opposites. The solution of contrary opposites with inflation is thus that in which the ego does not feel any contradiction in the opposite pairs. The ego simply dissolves the antinomian and exempts itself through that of the laborious work of complementariness and wholeness. The inflative ego is consequently a dangerous and often a sick ego, since it is indeed incapable really to take up the task of the pontifex oppositorum (the bridge between opposites). We see in inflation also a defense mechanism of the ego. The danger threatening and defensive situation -- namely the tension of the opposites pushing out of the unconscious -- becomes conscious to the ego (p+). It can however not bear consciously these opposites as being different -- thus it simply dissolves the immanent contradiction. Henceforth the ego behaves as if it could be both. Through the abolishment and the denial of the opposites structure of the unconscious, it becomes possible for the ego -- even in doubling -- to expand itself without limits and at the same time to be itself both and consequently to be everything. * Inflation follows thus historically after the process of primordial projection, participation. The restitution of the shifted-out double power of the pairs of opposites leads to doubling and to doubling of one’s own ego. On the basis of psychopathology we assume that inflation represents the “natural” first consequence of the restitution of the double power to one's own ego. On the Basis of Ego Analysis We Assume: 1. Primordial projection (thus participation), inflation and secondary projection are three successive phases of the same process, which we call uniformly ego expansion and ego diastole. 2. The term “ego diastole” is the generic term, which covers the two phases and forms of projection as well as inflation. 3. Ego diastole means in the ego theory of fate psychology [Schicksalspsychology] each striving of the ego to expand its internal boundaries and thus to make bearable the discomfort from the opposites structure. (a) In participation – that is to say, with primordial projection, the double power of the opposites are shifted out of the unconscious into the outer object. Not the subject itself but the environmental object becomes both and everything and thus omnipotent. Here we speak of allodiastole [Greek allos = other; Greek diastole = expansion]. The ego however has nevertheless a part in this object made all powerful. It feels related, the same, and one with the object in that it participates in it in a mystic or a real form. Finally the ego -- through the participation and through the most intimate sharing with the other object -- has become in any case a partner of the omnipotence. Since the ego is related to the all powerful object, it feels itself also indirectly all powerful. (b) Then a disturbance of the mystic or real dual union occurs. The double power is withdrawn from the object and given to its own ego. Through the restitution of the out-shifted double power the ego doubles itself. We speak now of an “inflation.” The ego strives “to be both itself” and “to be everything itself.” Briefly it becomes now directly perfect (greatness delusion). The ego in the phase of primordial projection was only indirectly -- through its relationship to the object -- omnipotent, thus the ego now has become directly omnipotent in the phase of inflation. This direct omnipotence of the ego we call autodiastole [Greek auto = self; Greek diastole = expansion]. It is however still more difficult for the ego to bear than the illusion of being one with the object made omnipotent by the primordial projection and thus by the participation. (c) There appears the third phase of ego diastole: Secondary projection, with which the allodiastole now becomes completed. Only the object becomes all powerful through projection; the subject on the other hand becomes completely powerless. Despite this powerlessness, the ego nevertheless has a hidden feeling of its power: It becomes persecuted by the other person because it is “greater” than the persecutor. The person feels himself hated, harmed, and persecuted by the object made all powerful, precisely because he is powerful. Allodiastole without participation is called in psychiatry “persecution delusion.” 4. Ego diastole is consequently the essence of any expansion. It is the generic term, which includes together within it projection and inflation. We call the functional antipode of ego diastole ego contraction and ego systole. It strives towards the inner against the expansion of the ego. We will speak about this comprehensive term in our discussion of introjection and negation. 5. The clinical experience agrees most often with the above discussed process sequence of ego diastole. Differences are therefore possible for each individual case. Thus can be found cases where a paranoid after the participation love phase does not fall first into the inflative but immediately into the secondary projective persecuted phase and only after that becomes inflative -- that is, develops greatness delusion ideas. Thus, for example in the classic case of Schreber, whom Freud described. On the other hand, however, it must be emphasized that the inflated and projective phases of the paranoid -- as well in the clinical and in the observations with the test -- quite often may alternate several times successively. This circumstance makes it difficult in the individual case to specify accurately if after the participating primary phase appears inflation or secondary projection as the first result of libido and power restoration. * We have up to this point discussed the psychological and ontogenetic relationship of ego inflation to ego projection. Now we must still examine the relationship of the concept “inflation” to two other psychopathological concepts. These are: (1) possession [Besessenheit] and (2) ambitendency. Inflation as Possession By “possession” in psychopathology one understands the condition in which “the person appears to transform himself or herself into another person; voice and behavior, facial expression, and content of speech manifest another personality.”1 This change of the personality disappears again suddenly. Jaspers writes the following: “In the most narrow and real sense, however, one speaks of possession, when the ill person himself experiences that he is at the same time two essences and is performing with two egos and two completely heterogeneous ways of feeling.”2 To the condition of possession belongs, according to Jaspers, the experience of a strange and hallucinating personality, who speak to the ill person, and furthermore distant compulsive phenomenon and everything as feeling strange. The possessed person gives up therefore the wholeness of the ego. With possession occurs an actual “doubling experience,” the splitting of one's own ego into two egos. With these two egos, two successions of mental processes and two different personalities develop themselves at the same time so that both stand as strangers to one another, that “both” experience in individual ways, and that both sides insist on feeling connections, which do not flow together with those of the other side; many times they stand opposite one another feeling strange.”3 The most well-known example of possession is always a condition in which a spirit, as demon and angel or devil and God, takes control of the man who is gripped by its possession. It is not to be misunderstood that C. G. Jung actually called this condition of possession “psychic inflation” developed in his theory that this condition occurs through the dissolution of the opposite pair “the personal psyche and the collective psyche.” Inflation as Ambitendency Next to the designations “possession” and “psychic inflation,” there is in psychopathology still another term for this interesting condition, and indeed that of the expression “ambitendency” coined by Eugen Bleuler. Under ambitendency, E. Bleuler understood the simultaneous presence of such opposite tendencies, which exclude one another in reality. The patient wants, says E. Bleuler, at the same time to eat and not to eat. He is at the same time like all other men, but at the same time he is quite different than his fellow men. He is at the same time King and subject, Lord and servant, God and devil, Christ and Antichrist, man and woman, the gardener named Hans Muller and Napoleon or King of China. And so on. Experimental ego analysis interprets all these so far "described" pure representative clinical pictures like possession, ambitendency, psychic inflation, and doubling of the person as illnesses of ego diastole, the ego function "p." Inflation as a defense technique indeed is based on the function of ego diastole; it represents the prototype of a "p" defense mechanism. * We point to the well-known self description of Paters Surin from the work of Ideler as an example of the psychopathology of possession and ambitendency.4 So much about the general definition of inflation. Now we can turn to the discussion of the forms of inflation. On the basis of the origins of inflation contents we distinguish -- similarly as with the projection process -- three forms of inflation: (1) personal, (2) collective, and (3) familial inflation. 1. Personal Inflation Inflation is personal, when the doubling of the ego is being carried out through contents that have been previously repressed into the personal unconscious. Although Freud has never used the term "inflation," he has still represented the process of personal inflation completely under "doubling" and "greatness delusion" in the case of Schreber.5 On the basis of this analysis we can reconstruct the stages of the soul with personal inflation as follows: (a) The man fluctuates his whole life between heterosexual and homosexual feelings. Disillusionment and failure can drive him from one side to another. (b) Psychic, however, and also somatic factors -- like the climacteric -- can lurk in the background with the woman as well as with the man and push the not-lived same sexual stirrings into the foreground. The ego however does resist and represses the homosexual strivings pushing into the foreground. (c) Through the repression, the ego brings about libido detachment from a person, who is taboo to love because the person is of the same sexuality. Now the person seeks, first by means of projection to cancel the repression and to lead back the libido to the person abandoned by him. This can happen only in the well-known paranoid form. The person feels himself persecuted by the same sex person formerly loved by him. This consists of the negative ego diastolic p- phase of persecution delusions. Therein the first transformation consists of the homosexuality redeemed out of repression. Some persons remain perpetually in this phase of defense conflict against homosexuality. There are however some who can establish a second transformation which then leads then to greatness delusions and to possession [Besessenheit], in a word, exactly to inflation. This phase in our nomenclature is the positive ego diastole p+ phase. (d) As one of these transformations, Freud explains the following: The patient sets up the persecutor through a higher court. He no longer insults the earthly projection object that was first loved and then hated, for the object becomes an overly powerful greater cosmic court, for example the sun, God, and so forth. Everything happens now henceforth "on a world order scale." In our everyday speech, this means that from the personal dual union is made a "cosmodal" union [union with the universe] through the ego diastole.6 Through the greatness delusion, the ego, according to Freud, is compensated: "Conflict and illness can stop." Often the paranoid splits also his own ego into more persons, by which the one can be frequently a god-like court. Freud writes: "There is doubling of the same significant relationships, as Otto Rank has recognized in myth formations."7 "The cosmic relations were replaced, however, according to Freud, not through the collective psyche relations but through the personal and infantile relationship to the real father." The illusionary relationship to God, according to Freud, originates on the basis of the "father complex" through substitute formations and transferences.8 The doubling of the ego occurs consequently through the early infantile and until then repressed love and hate relationship to the father and indeed through the placing next to one another of the two egos, of one's own ego and of that of the God-father, or through the splitting of the soul into one's own ego and the God-father. The patient now becomes both. He doubles, consequently, his ego. (e) Freud developed the theory that with the paranoid the libido withdrawn from the object strikes the ego and is employed for ego enlargement. Consequently, the stage of narcissism, well-known from the development of libido, is again reached in which one's own ego was one's own sexual object. "Because of this clinical statement, we assume" Freud writes further “that the paranoia brings with it a fixation in narcissism and, we state, that the regression from the sublimated homosexuality to narcissism gives the carrier the regression characteristic of paranoia."9 Freud still mentions here the old interpretation of school psychiatry of the origin of greatness delusions out of the persecution idea. This means: "The sick person who has been primarily struck by the delusion to be the object of the persecution on the part of the strongest powers feels the need himself to explain the persecution, and to do so on the assumption that he is himself a grand personality, worthy of such a persecution."10 What Freud may have added to the old interpretation on the basis of psychoanalysis was, until then, an invisible process, which was divided by him into the following steps: (1) same sexual love for one of the parents, (2) libido withdrawal through repression, (3) driving back the libido to the beloved person or to its substitute figure through the help of projection, (4) transformation of projection into doubling through splitting of the person into more ego existences of which one is a higher court (God). * Inflation uses, consequently, in these cases a personal coinage that is the object on which the personal repressed sexual wish is attached and may appear in consciousness as a particular ego existence next to one's own ego. Thus the doubling through the dissolution of repression after the first projection phase occurs as the second transformation. We indicated that the sequence of projective and inflative phases can also be reversed. * On the question of the relationship between persecution and greatness delusion Freud remarks: "It remains not without significance for other parts of paranoia knowledge that an addition of greatness delusion is confirmed in most other forms of paranoia illness. We have the right to assume that megalomania is chiefly infantile and that it in the later development of society is sacrificed, as it becomes intensely repressed through no other influence than through an individual being powerfully seized when falling in love."11 Falling in love is however again only an ego diastolic ego stage, and indeed the condition of mystic participation, the being one of the subject with the object. The infantile and all-human greatness delusion -- as a particular phase of ego diastolic processes -- is consequently quasi "healed" through a "regression" to the first, original stage of ego diastole of the participative primordial projection stage of being one with the object through falling in love. It is to be regretted that the dangerous inflations and greatness delusions particularly in those that reached this level could not be cured by means of falling in love, and these thus become the most tragic chapters in the history of mankind. 2. Collective Inflation Collective is each form of inflation by which the doubling of the ego occurs through the collective unconscious and not through the personal repressed contents of the unconscious. The most important trait of the collective psyche is: The allness [Allheit]. It expresses itself in omnipresence, all responsibility, all guilt, etc. The simplest form in which this inflative allness manifests itself is the double being and the simultaneous presence in two or more places, thus the "double presence" (bi-présence according to Lévy-Bruhl) or the multi presence. We find this manner of inflation both in the thinking of primitives and also in that of the different forms of paranoia. (a) The Idea of Doubling in the Thinking of Primitives [1] Doubling of Man and Animal The following report comes from Nelson about the Eskimos of the Bering Straits: “One believes that once all organisms led a double existence and by its own will could appear as either human or animal in its current shape…. ” 12 Here we find the prototype of collective inflation in form of a legend. The double being becomes the werewolf (Lycanthropy) with the Naga (in the northeast India), with the Toradjas on Celebes, the leopard men, and panther men in areas spread out in west Africa between Sierra Leone and the Congo and in earlier times in the 16th Century with the Indians of Peru, and furthermore attributed to sorcerers and witches, and even to animals, lifeless objects and the dead. Lévy-Bruhl remarked on the fact that in this “superstition,” which is widespread nearly over the whole world, a person and an animal are constantly in reality one and the same being. Not the soul of a person leaves one’s body in order to travel as a wolf, leopard, or tiger, but the person and the animal are only one being with a double existence and a double presence.13 Since these primitives consider that the collective descent of their tribe or their humanity is mostly from these animals, it appears to be correct that we understand the mental process of these ideas of double being and double presence as collective inflation. It will suffice if we demonstrate from the rich collection of Lévy–Bruhl some examples here for the representation of these phenomena: J. H. Hutton reports: "On one occasion the elders of a large Ao village came to me for permission to tie up a certain man in the village, while they hunted a leopard that had already caused a great deal of damage. The man in question, who was, by the way, a Christian convert, also appeared to protest against the action of the village elders. He said passionately that he was very sorry that he was a leopard man; he did not want to be one, and that it was not his fault, but seeing that he was one, he supposed that his leopard body must kill to eat, and if it did not, both the leopard and he would die. He said that if he were tied up the leopard would certainly be killed, and he would die. To tie him up and hunt the leopard was, he said, sheer murder. In the end, I gave leave to the elders to tie the man up and hunt the leopard, but told them that if the man died as a result of their killing the leopard, whoever had speared the leopard would of course be tried, and no doubt hanged, for murder, and the elders committed for abetment of the same. On this, the elders unanimously refused to take advantage of my permission to tie up the man." It would be difficult to imagine a more conclusive fact. Everybody is so convinced that the man and the leopard are the same individual in two bodies that the European administrator is obliged to make his verdict conform to the common belief.” Lévy-Bruhl remarks on this: “It would be difficult to furnish a more complete factual proof for the faith in the double being of the leopard men. Everyone in the village is perfectly convinced that the man and the leopard are the same being in two different bodies; consequently, the European government official is forced to adapt his decision to the common superstition.”14 What concerns us here indeed is a possession [Besessenheit] by doubling. This becomes clear from the description of the “fits” that tend to accompany these doubling transformations. Thus J. H. Hutton describes a fit of lycanthropy possession with the Naga in the northeast of India as follows: "‘The possession is accompanied by very severe pain swellings in the knees, elbows and small of the back in the person both during and after the possession. These pains are said to be such as would result from a continuous marching or from remaining long periods in an unaccustomed position. During sleep at the time of possession the limbs move convulsively, as the legs of a dog move when it is dreaming. A leopard man of the Tizu valley, in paroxysm at such a time, bit one of his wife's breasts off. When the leopard is being hunted by men, the human body behaves like a lunatic, leaping and throwing itself about in its efforts to escape. Under these circumstances the relatives of the leopard man feed him with ginger as fast as possible in order to make him more active, so that the leopard body, on which his life depends, may have the agility to escape its pursuers. The body of the man and that of ‘his’ leopard thus both experience the same sensations at the same time. In order that the leopard may escape, new strength is procured for the man. They are in reality but one being, present in two places. That is the belief of those chiefly interested: The neighborhood, the pursuers, and himself.” The deadly action at a distance of the charm curse -- according to Lévy-Bruhl -- conditioned ikewise “a double existence and a double presence of material objects, which causes death.”15 The double presence is presented with some primitives on the basis of “two egos” or “tamaniu.” With many primitive peoples one finds the belief that the dead person is at the same time present and absent or is present at two places. In order to make this double presence impossible for the dead person, some tribes make use of actions, which our culture calls funeral rites for violators. Thus reports W. E. Roth from the district of Brisbane in Australia: "In the case of adults, immediately after death, some old medicine man, not necessarily a relative, would cut off the whole genitalia of a male, the clitoris only of a female, wrap it in grass, and place it high up in the fork of a tree: This was to be significant for the sexual instinct being finished with and to prevent the spirit (nguru) of the dead entering into sexual relations with the living." Lévy-Bruhl writes, “Thus the mutilation of the corpse reacts upon the dead, just as the wound inflicted on the leopard appears upon the body of the leopard man. In both cases individuality is consistent with double being and double presence.”16 Often the dead, particularly in the first days after their dying, appear in animal forms.17 Thus many Bantu Negroes of southern Africa prefer the shape of serpents.18 With the reading of these collective possessions of the primitives, one is struck that the “second ego" appears mostly as an animal and is able to carry out the cruelest sadistic actions. The cruel acts of the secret societies, thus the so-called leopard men and panther men in West Africa and also in other places supply today still sufficient proof for the fact that the original collective need of the two egos is the impulse to kill, to have the thirst for blood, and to eat people (cannibalism). The opposite pair, which here conditioned the doubling, is man and animal. Both stand next to one another as "ego existences" as if there were no contradiction between them. This opposite pair is almost as old as that of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which according to Freud, is connected with personal doubling with the paranoids. On the basis of fate analysis [Schicksalsanalysen] with paranoids we have come to the conclusion that the paranoids do not always try to solve the opposition of "heterosexuality homosexuality" emphasized by Freud in the form of doubling delusion, but that they double themselves most frequently also through a different opposite pair, and indeed through the antinomy "Cain-Able," "animal-man," "cannibalism-humanism." These paranoids descend mostly from families, according to our research, in which next to paranoids are also to be found chiefly epileptics. (Case 1 in this book supplies a model example for this fact.) One therefore can not accordingly verify absolutely the Freudian thesis that in the background of the paranoid stands the repressed homosexuality. [2] The Doubling of Man and Woman Despite this qualified criticism of this Freudian interpretation we must emphasize that inflation, the doubling of man and woman in the case of culture poor tribes, plays an outstanding role, in particular in their legends, cults, songs, and cult devices. The leading role of sexual doubling, the sexual collective inflation, with primitives is illuminated out of the book of collections of J. Winthuis on "The Two Sexual Being."19 This Ethnologist had the opportunity to work with the most diverse South Seas tribes on New Pommern in the center of the former German New Guinea Colony and also with the Melanesian tribes: With Vitjians, Salomons islanders and Admiralty Islanders, Polynesians as well as Samoans. His statements have a special importance also through the circumstance that he learned the difficult Gunantuna language; thus, his translation of legends and songs of these tribes are authentic. The legend of the Aranda tells that man and woman in the beginning were grown together.20 The Aranda explained to Strehlow, “That a man nevertheless married one of those alknarintja women, whom they were not allowed to marry. The punishment for it was that the woman did not love him. There he drew her picture on the soil and threw at it continuously with spears (virile membrane). Then he hurled the woman’s picture burning at all sides towards the sky. There it became transformed into the body of a comet and the spear into its tail. And now the woman loved him passionately. Thus the opinion of the Aranda that the comet became a two sexual being, a man woman, which there with its female body, which is inflamed with love, is always connected with the tail = virile membrane.”21 According to the legends of the Aranda rainbows and stars are also two sexual beings. Thus Strehlow tells the following legend: Two girls hiding in the bushes looked at the solemn initiations for two boys to whom they were promised. “After completion of the celebration they came out from their hiding place, loaded the two circumcised boys on their shoulders and climbed with them to the sky, where they together with the young men were transformed into two brilliant stars. According to the main role, which the girls played here, the stars are man woman.”22 Double being, man woman, is also the rain. “With the rain cult the actor carries “a rain bearing mother”; on a cord (membrane) it hangs out over his belly.”23 Also in the thinking of the Aranda and Loritja, the trees and rocks are two sexual beings. Many cult songs and cult behaviors prove how strongly this doubling inflation of man and woman prevails in the thinking of primitives. (See Strehlow’s reports on Emu cult behaviors and singing.)24 Winthuis writes: “To become a two sexual being is the great longing of the Aranda and Loritja. Formerly, then they believed humans, man and woman, were connected to one another. But they were helpless. Then a totem God, Mangarkunjerkunja, gave them the use of their limbs. However they were separated. Since then man and woman themselves long again for constant union. Therefore their pitying totem Gods brought the cult, by which the sign of the two sexual union was through tooth eruption,25 sub-incision etc., and thus can initiate again the union as a two sexual being. Also the magic wands, which they brought with them there in stone or wood transformed bodies (tjurunga) should keep them holy as two sexual beings; for the same purpose, they would rub them with fat (female) and ocher (male), and in the holy cave, the symbol of the coupling, they carefully preserved them; thus with the help of these holy magic wands, they became two sexual beings…. “26 The initiation into manhood ceremonies is in any case a cult behavior in the sense of making the boy a man woman. Therefore the small operation of the sub-incision. A. Van Gennep27 refers to the similarity of the initiations ceremonies in Australia, Asia, Africa etc. with the Eleusinian mysteries. “How is one to explain the complete similarity of the Greek, Egyptian and Asiatic rites with those of the Australian, the Bantu Negroes or Guinea Negroes and the Indian of northwest America?” On this question the author gives the answer, “That all these mysteries are the basis of a common thought, the thought of the transformation of the initiate into a new double sexual nature.”28 If indeed these mysteries and initiation rites mean the will of a man and woman to be a double being and to be God-like perfection (completion) -- as J. Winthuis believes -- “We are concerned here with the central secret of the religions of most peoples of the earth…. ”29 The alchemical material on the double being and on the hermaphroditism collected by C. G. Jung and its role in the history of culture is represented in a magnificent and unique way. We cannot even bring briefly here this enormous material of C. G. Jung. We refer here only to his books.30 The demand to double oneself sexually appears to be consequently an original human eternal and archaic collective need, which however -- apart from the rare cases of somatic hermaphrodites and androgynous persons -- is never realized in fact. The "culture-poor" primitive is however also relatively more fortunate than the present "culture-rich" person. While the primitive with the help of his cult devices and cult actions and through his mysteries from time to time therefore may live out the god-like perfection in the archaic heroic world of two sexual beings without running any danger, the person in our culture can in fact experience the original old collective inflation of man woman doubling only in dreams or in delusion formations. (Compare this to the hermaphroditic dream numbers 6, 7, and 8 in the third part of this book.) Modern persons have become poorer therefore in their need experiences through their higher culture than the so-called culture poor peoples of Australia, Africa, Asia, and northwest America. The culture stage of present "culture-rich" people excludes completely the doubling mysteries of cult behavior from religion. There remains for the man in the present consequently no other way to make himself feel god-like -- that is, to make himself a two sexual being -- other than by dreaming or by becoming insane. [3] Collective Inflation as the Idea of Doubling in the Case of Cultured People Jung separates a normal form of inflation from a pathological one. When, for example, an official identifies completely with his office and thus behaves as if he were the office and completes all the intricate social functions that actually do not belong to him but to the office, then this man acts in the condition of inflation.31 This form of puffing up of the person is however still not pathological. The pathological form of inflation rests according to Jung on "a mostly inborn weakness of the personality vis-à-vis contents of the autonomous collective unconscious."32 As is well known an opposition between the personal and the collective universal tendencies of the unconscious exists in the human soul according to Jung. The collective psyche embraces -- as Jung writes -- the "parties inférieures" [inferior parts] in the sense of P. Janet -- thus "the well established, as it were automatically hackneyed, recognized and existing everywhere and thus beyond the personal or impersonal part of the individual psyche." The personal unconscious and consciousness includes, on the other hand, the "parties supérieures" [superior parts] of mental activity. That means the personal, ontogenetic, acquired and developed part of the soul. A pathological form of inflation occurs therefore when the person "annexes the collective psyche given to him a priori and unconsciously as his ontogenetic acquired own property as if it were a part of the same."33 In other words, the person acts in the condition of a pathological "inflation," when he expands the range of his personality with "beyond the personal" and "beyond human" contents of the unconscious collective psyche. On the one hand this "inflation" is burdened with collective "beyond the personal" strivings of the personality; on the other hand it depreciates it and indeed at one time through the pathological "ego expansion" of the person through "omnipotence" and god-likeness"; at another time through the "crushing" of self-feelings through beyond human strivings present at the same time. Jung perceives this making one ill in this form of inflation in the dissolution of the personality into its opposite pairs. Opposites such as the personal and the beyond the personal, the satanic-like and the god-like, the individual man and the collective beyond men, and related opposites are dissolved with the inflation. The dissolution of the opposition between the personal and collective psyche occurs in that the person has taken the contents and tendencies of the collective psyche into the inventory of his personal psychic functions. As a result of this puffing up, the person behaves henceforth as if the strivings of the collective psyche -- like omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscient, being responsible for everything and further god-likeness and holiness -- belonged to his own personal and individual possession. Naturally all the above mentioned beyond the personal "all" [omni] tendencies belong to the universal and collective property of mankind. If, however, a normal man is made conscious of these "beyond man" and "god-likeness" demands, then he represses them henceforth. "The repression of the collective psyche" -- Jung writes -- "was simply a necessity for personal development.34 A man becomes sick when he can not repress the making conscious of the collective all-tendency to be like God because of weakness of his personality and when he expands and puffs up himself with the collective contents. For the normal development of the personality, according to Jung, the strong differentiation of the personal soul from the collective psyche is an absolute requirement. As an example of the “God-like” inflation C. G. Jung mentions the case of Maeder. The patient “stood with the mother of God and similar gods in ‘telephonic’ connection. In his human reality he had been an unsuccessful locksmith apprentice, who already for approximately 19 years had been incurably mentally ill.” (Paranoid dementia with greatness dellusion.) Further Jung writes: “He had discovered the grandiose idea however among other things that the world was his picture book, through which he can leaf for his favorites. The proof for it is very simple: He needs to only to turn, and then he sees a new page.”35 For the evaluation of this case Jung draws upon Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation for a comparison here and remarks the following: The difference between this paranoid and the philosopher consists in the fact that for the paranoid the view of the world as a picture book remained in the stage of merely a spontaneous growth, while Schopenhauer abstracted and, in generally accepted language, expressed the same opinion. “It had from its underground initial beginning thereby been raised up into the bright daylight of collective consciousness.”36 We say that Schopenhauer with his p function and with his position taking and reality testing k function of his ego was able to produce the idea. Another example from the collection of G. Elsässer: A 25-year old woman, whose husband became mentally ill one year before, found a job in a monastery, where she helped with the housework. “In connection with religious practices, she became ill…. She believed herself to be the mother of God, and further that people were behind her, who in a truck would fetch and execute her.”37 Her inflation was thus of a collective nature. About a paranoid female patient of his, W. Weygandt stated, “She had seen the sky open and on a tree were shapes, lions and cows, and the Lord spoke to her”… “You are blessed, God is your beloved papa and the priest is your healer.”38 The “being God-like” penetrated into consciousness from out of the collective unconscious as signs of power and mightiness manifested itself in these examples once therein when the patient was able -- like God -- to look at the world as a picture book, at another time when the patient was the mother of God, and at a third time when her father was “Papa God,” with Whom she is able to speak, and when the sky stands open for her. These profound personality changes, according to C. G. Jung, are based on “the attraction of a collective picture.” In the case cited by W. Weygandt the hallucinating picture of the open sky and lions and cows in the trees works indeed like a painting from the early Renaissance. The eruption of such collective pictures into consciousness dissolves the personality. She becomes “mad.” Therefore the statement of Jung that the hallucinations and the pathological illusion world of racially different schizophrenics with archaic original pictures of representations and interpretations, thus with archetypes of mankind and with collective mythologies, indicate a profound connection.39 In a supplement to the Schreber case Freud drew attention to the fact that so many delusion fantasies are not only based on the “father complex” but also may indicate mythological connections. Schreber maintained that the sun speaks to him in human speech and verified “that its rays pale before him, when he spoke, and turned toward him.” Freud at first explained the relationship of the patient to the sun as a sublimated “father symbol.” In a supplement he however completed this interpretation, based on S. Reinach, with the fact that only eagles -- as inhabitants of the highest air layers in the sky -- had the good fortune to be able to look into the sun unblinking and without being blinded and thus had been entitled as eagles to examine their young objectively with this test before they recognized their young as legitimate. Due to similar examples derived from primitives (as with the tribe of the Psyllen), Freud felt compelled to express the following: “We are here concerned with things that appear to compel me to make possible a psychoanalytical understanding for the origins of religion.” He continues: “This small addition for the analysis of a paranoid may do that since the well-founded interpretation of Jung that the myth forming forces of mankind have not expired but today still are producing in the neuroses the same psychological products as in the oldest times …. And I mean, it will soon be the time to add a proposition, which we psychoanalyists have already expressed for a long time, which is to expand from its individual and ontological understood contents to the anthropological and phylogenetical contents that can add to the comprehended amendment. We have said: In dreams and in neurosis we find the child again with the characteristics of his ways of thinking and his affect life. We will complete this with also the savages and primitives, as has been shown us in the light of antiquity science and the research on primitives.”40 Thus Freud himself has bridged the gulf between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, an act that the Jungian school quite often is inclined to forget. 3. Familial Inflation Familial inflation originates when the person expands the boundary of his personality with contents, functions, honors, and possessions, which belong to the stock of the family and not to the person. The person puffs himself up with the not personally acquired characteristics but with the power belonging to the family in total or to another family member. In circumstances of familial inflation, the person, consequently, sees no more or not yet any distinction between the opposition between the individual and the family. The boundary between daughter, son, father, sister, brother, grandfather, grandmother, etc. becomes indefinite. The individual acts thus as if he himself were the family and collects all physical and mental and spiritual and material "accessories" of his whole family. The person doubles or expands himself with his relatives. This definition of familial inflation elucidates how generally this kind of inflation is to be found among people. And still more: There are many places, even state mechanisms, that determine and legally protect precisely this familial inflation. Thus, for example, the hereditary family titles of duke, count, baron, the titles of "von" and "zu" and so on. The hereditary parliamentarian functions and offices of certain families are all in this class. The word family stems recognizably from the Latin famulus and the relationship of bond servants (= famulus) to their lord (= dominus). The authority of the family father rules over the power of the family. The patriarchal family is based first on the household community, second on the providing community, and third on the operating community.41 In general, the concept of the family signifies the degree of blood relatedness and the social unit of parents and children. This concept given here stems historically from the fact that the Romans consequently consider their own children as "serfs" or "bond servants." Here is revealed the original form of familial inflation. The parents expand -- as in the case of the Romans -- their personal power over the children as if their children were their physical property. This familial inflation of the parents, who thus are incapable to consider and to respect the "physical" boundary and opposition between "parents and children" is today still to be found quite often. Thus many incest bindings are prolonged and maintained throughout decades in the first place by the familial inflation of the parents, in particular the mother. We give some examples of it: Case 2. A lesbian inclined mother brought home her daughter, who was bound to her and who had just acquired her diploma. The reaction of the “familial inflated” mother was: “Now, the diploma belongs to me. You, you go into your room. So there.” This mother will thus be herself a doctor, something that her daughter had personally attained. Case 3. A sexually unrestrained mother gave the consent to two of her daughters to marry on the condition that she can take their suitor for the time being to herself in bed. An inflation, which reminds us of the jus primae noctis of the lord of property over the women of his bond servants. In these two examples the mothers wanted not only to be everything but also to have everything that their daughters respectively were or had. Another psychopath, an advanced-in-age manufacturer who lived with her son in an actual incest marriage, consented to the marriage of her son only on the condition that she will accompany the newlyweds on the their wedding journey and that also in the future the right to determine “temporally” the coition of the spouses. She could not do without power over her son also after the marriage. Here we must therefore accept a coupling of familial inflation and introjection. Most frequently the phenomenon is that sons inflate themselves with the power of their fathers. The son of a landowner treats the builders as if he were the lord and landowner. The son of a Prime Minister seized the presidency over his school comrades. The son of the world-famous poet behaves at school and later also in life in a manner as if he were a famous poet. This is a harmless form of familial puffing up [Aufgeblasenheit] and is naturally mostly not pathological. The pathological form of inflation of a familial nature begins first with doubling, with which somebody at the same time is the person, who he is in reality, and also his own mother, grandmother, or some figure of his ancestor line. Most frequently these ancestors, with whom the sick person has doubled or expanded himself, appear in the hallucinations of paranoids. If a deep analysis of these hallucinations are successfully carried out, one, thus, quite often comes to understand that the patients in their mental reality have expanded or doubled themselves with their relations and at the same time are mother and daughter, daughter and father, grandparent and daughter, etc. As a model example we bring in the third part of this book a succession of visions of a highly gifted school principal, who during the day or at night in bed produced rich daydreams in a waking condition without loss of consciousness; these daydreams she tried to interpret and to write up. Certainly she was not mentally disturbed. She had however the capability -- something like a poet -- to experience consciously her visions, to abstract them and to interpret them herself. In these daydreams, we find quite often the typical inflations of a familial nature. There appear figures that are, at the same time, father and child or mother and child. [See Part Three: Autogenous Participation with Relatives. Example 10. Visions 1 to 5.] END NOTES 1 JASPERS, K.: Allgemeine Psychopathologie [General Psychopathology]. Springer, Berlin-Heidelberg. p. 615. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 104. 4 IDELER: Versuch einer Theorie des religiösen Wahnsinns [Attempt at a Theory of Religious Madness], Bd. I, p. 392 ff [in footnote]. Cited in. JASPERS: p. 104. 5 FREUD, S.: Ober einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia [About an Autobiographical Case of Paranoia]. Ges. Sehr., Bd. VIII, p. 399 in footnote. 6 SZONDI, L.: Experimentelle Triebdiagnostik [Experimental Drive Diagnostic]. Huber, Bern 1947. p. 155 ff. 7 RANK, 0.: Der Mythus von der Geburt der Helden [The Myth of the Birth of the Hero]. Schriften z. ang. Seelenkunde, V 1909. Zit. n. FREUD: Ges. Schr., Bd. VIII, p. 400. 8 Später hat FREUD diese Auffassung korrigiert [Later, Freud has corrected this interpretation]. (Siehe später [See previous].) 9 FREUD, S.: Ges. Schr., Bd.VIII, S. 424/425. 10 Ibid., p. 399. 11 FREUD, S.: Ges. Schr., Bd. VIII, p. 417. 12 LÉVY-BRUHL: Die Seele der Primitiven [The Soul of Primitives]. W. Braumüller, 1930. p. 176. 13 Ibid., p. 159. 14 HUTTON, J. H.: Leopard-men in the Naga hills. Zit. n. LÉVY-BRUHL: p. 160/161. [English translation (slightly modified by the editor) is from the English version of the book published by Henry Regnery Company (a Gateway Edition), 1971] 15 LÉVY-BRUHL: Die Seele der Primitiven, p. 181.. [English translation (slightly modified by the editor) is from the English version of the book published by Henry Regnery Company (a Gateway Edition), 1971] 16 Ibid., p. 270. 17 Ibid., p. 293. 18 Ibid., p. 303. 19 WINTHUIS, J.: Das Zweigeschlechterwesen [The Two Sexual Being]. Hirschfeld, Leipzig 1928. Forschungen zur Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie [Researches on the People’s Psychology and Sociology], Bd. 5. Hrg. v. R. THURNWALD. 20 Compare this to PLATO’S “Symposium,” where it is told that “before time superhumans lived, who actually bore in themselves the characteristics of both sexes as double beings. Since meanwhile these superhumans appeared dangerous to the Gods, these double beings were divided. And since then there are here women and there men, and everyone seeks now the half of the other sex, its partner, from whom it was separated.” 21 WINTHUIS, J.: pp. 45-47. 22 Ibid., p. 49. 23 Ibid., p. 49. 24 Ibid., p. 54 in footnote. 25 Der Sinn des Zahnausschlgaens [The Meaning of the Tooth Eruption] as an inauguration rite is that that the Weihling becomes now a double being. “The gap resulted from the deflected tooth is to suggest that from now on the virile membrane, symbolized by the tongue that has admission to the vagina (gap), and/or with it is to be always connected!” Ibid., pp. 38/39. 26 WINTHUIS, J.: p. 81. 27 VAN GENNEP, A.: Les rites de Passage, p. 130. Cited in note in WINTHUIS, J.: p. 132. 28 Ibid., p. 132. 29 Ibid., p. 134. 30 JUNG, C. G.: a) Psychologie und Alchemie. 1944. b) Symbole der Wandlung [Symbols of Transformation], p. 374, p. 497 ff. 31 JUNG, C. G.: Die Beziehungen zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewußten [The Relationships Between the Ego and the Unconscious]. Rascher, Zürich 1928. p. 38. 32 Ibid., p. 44 f [footnote]. 33 Ibid., p. 46 f. 34 Ibid., p. 50. 35 Ibid., p. 39. 36 Ibid., p. 40. 37 ELSÄSSER, G.: Die Nachkommen geisteskranker Elternpaare [The Descendents of Mentally Ill Pairs of Parents]. Thieme, Stuttgart 1952. p. 60. 38 WEYGANDT, W.: Atlas und Grundriß der Psychiatrie [Atlas and Outline of Psychiatry]. Lehmann, Munich 1902. p. 436. 39 JUNG, C. G.: Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido [Transformations and Symbols of Libido]. Rascher, Zürich. Compare to Triebpathologie, Book. I, p. 24 footnote. 40 FREUD, S.: Nachtrag zu [Supplement to] “Über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia.” Ges. Schr., Bd. VIII, p. 434 ff. 41 Autorität und Familie. Studien aus dem Institut für Sozialforschung [Studies out of the Institute for Social Research], Bd. V. Librairie F. Alcan, Paris 1936. p. 523. |
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