The Dogma of Christ: And Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture

I

Foreword

While most of the essays in this volume have been written during the last ten years, the longest paper, The Dogma of Christ, first appeared in German in 1930. Professor James Luther Adams of the Harvard Divinity School made a translation many years ago and suggested that I publish it together with other papers in one volume. He did so in spite of the fact that he was not in agreement with many of my conclusions. He felt, however, that the method and the argument were sufficiently interesting to warrant publication in English. I myself was very hesitant to reissue this early example of my thought. The reasons are obvious.

First of all, it was written in a period when I was a strict Freudian. In the meantime my psychoanalytic views have [VIII] undergone enough of a change so that many formulations in this essay would be different if I wrote them today. Furthermore, I one-sidedly stressed in this work the social function of religion as a substitute for real satisfaction and as a means for social control. While I have not changed my views in this regard, today I would also emphasize the view (which I held then, as now) that the history of religion reflects the history of man’s spiritual evolution. A second reason lies in the fact that it is impossible for me today to restudy the whole of the rather complex historical material which is analyzed in this work. In addition, a great number of books on the history of early Christianity have been published since 1930, and any revision of The Dogma of Christ would have to take them into account. I have read much of the literature in, the intervening years and some, like Martin Werner’s The Formation of Christian Dogma, seemed to give some indirect support to my approach; but a thorough rewriting would go beyond my powers. I agreed to the publication of the paper in its original form when Arthur A. Cohen of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, a scholar of theology and philosophy in his own right, urged me again, together with Professor Adams, to offer it to an English-reading audience. Needless to say, the responsibility for this decision lies with me and not with them.

As far as I know, this is the first work in which the attempt was made to transcend the psychologistic approach to historical and social phenomena so customary in psychoanalytic literature. I had been stimulated by the paper on the same subject written by one of my teachers at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin, Dr. Theodor Reik, who had employed the traditional method. I tried to show that we cannot understand people by their ideas and ideologies; that we can understand ideas and ideologies only by understanding the people who created them and believed in them. In doing this we have to transcend individual psychology and enter the field of psychoanalytic-social psychology. Thus, in dealing with ideologies, we have to study the social and economic conditions of the people who accept them, and try to recognize what I later called their social character.

The main emphasis of this study is the analysis of the socioeconomic situation of the social groups which accepted and transmitted Christian teaching; it is only on the basis of this analysis that a psychoanalytic interpretation is attempted. Whatever the merits of this interpretation, the method of the application of psychoanalysis to historical phenomena is the one which has been developed in my subsequent books. While it has since been refined in many ways, its nucleus is contained in The Dogma of Christ in a way which, I hope, is still interesting.

I have gone over Professor Adams’ translation and sympathize with the difficulty of translating my rather heavy, academic German into English. Here and there I have made minor changes in wording, but have consistently resisted the temptation to change the contents. Even though many times I would have liked to substitute my present point of view for the older one, a partial revision, I felt, would not have been fair to the reader.

The other essays do not need any comment. In Medicine and the Ethical Problem of Modern Man and The Revolutionary Character, which were originally delivered as addresses, minor changes have been made to prepare them for publication for a general audience. In Sex and Character I have simply eliminated what seemed to me needless repetition.

I am greatly indebted to Professor James Luther Adams for his labor of love in translating The Dogma of Christ, and to Arthur A. Cohen and Joseph Cunneen for their editorial assistance.

E. F.

New York, 1963

II

The Dogma of Christ

I          Methodology and the Nature of the Problem

It is one of the essential accomplishments of psychoanalysis that it has done away with the false distinction between social psychology and individual psychology. On the one hand, Freud emphasized that there is no individual psychology of man isolated from his social environment, because an isolated man does not exist. Freud knew no homo psychologicus, no psychological Robinson Crusoe, like the economic man of classical economic theory. On the contrary, one of Freud’s most important discoveries was the understanding of the psychological development of the individual’s earliest social relations—those with his parents, brothers, and sisters.

It is true, Freud wrote, …that individual psychology is concerned with the individual man and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instinctual impulses; but only rarely and under certain exceptional conditions is individual psychology in a position to disregard the relations of this individual to others. In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first, individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well.¹

On the other hand, Freud broke radically with the illusion of a social psychology whose object was the group. For him, social instinct was not the object of psychology any more than isolated man was, since it was not an original and elemental instinct; rather, he saw the beginning of the psyche’s formation in a narrower circle, such as the family. He has shown that the psychological phenomena operative in the group are to be understood on the basis of the psychic mechanisms operative in the individual, not on the basis of a group mind as such.²

The difference between individual and social psychology is revealed to be a quantitative and not a qualitative one. Individual psychology takes into account all determinants that have affected the lot of the individual, and in this way arrives at a maximally complete picture of the individual’s psychic structure. The more we extend the sphere of psychological investigation—that is, the greater the number of men whose common traits permit them to be grouped—the more we must reduce the extent of our examination of the total psychic structure of the individual members of the group.

The greater, therefore, the number of subjects of an investigation in social psychology, the narrower the insight into the total psychic structure of any individual within the group being studied. If this is not recognized, misunderstandings will easily arise in the evaluation of the results of such investigations. One expects to hear something about the psychic structure of the individual member of a group, but the social-psychological investigation can study only the character matrix common to all members of the group, and does not take into account the total character structure of a particular individual. The latter can never be the task of social psychology, and is possible only if an extensive knowledge of the individual’s development is available. If, for example, in a social-psychological investigation it is asserted that a group changes from an aggressive-hostile attitude toward the father figure to a passive-submissive attitude, this assertion means something different from the same statement when made of an individual in an individual-psychological investigation. In the latter case, it means that this change is true of the individual’s total attitude; in the former, it means that it represents an average characteristic common to all the members of the group, which does not necessarily play a central role in the character structure of each individual. The value of social-psychological investigation, therefore, cannot lie in the fact that we acquire from it a full insight into the psychic peculiarities of the individual members, but only in the fact that we can establish those common psychic tendencies that play a decisive role in their social development.

The overcoming of the theoretical opposition between individual and social psychology accomplished by psychoanalysis leads to the judgment that the method of a social-psychological investigation can be essentially the same as the method which psychoanalysis applies in the investigation of the individual psyche. It will, therefore, be wise to consider briefly the essential features of this method, since it is of significance in the present study.

Freud proceeds from the view that in the causes producing neuroses—and the same holds for the instinctual structure of the healthy—an inherited sexual constitution and the events that have been experienced form a complementary series:

At one end of the series stand those extreme cases concerning which you may say with confidence: These people would have fallen ill whatever happened, whatever they experienced, however merciful life had been to them because of their anomalous libido-development. At the other end stand cases which call forth the opposite verdict—they would undoubtedly have escaped illness if life had not put such and such burdens upon them. In the intermediate cases in the series, more or less of the disposing factor (the sexual constitution) is combined with less or more of the injurious impositions of life. Their sexual constitution would not have brought about their neurosis if they had not gone through such and such experiences, and life’s vicissitudes would not have worked traumatically upon them if the libido had been otherwise constituted.³

For psychoanalysis, the constitutional element in the psychic structure of the healthy or of the ill person is a factor that must be observed in the psychological investigation of individuals, but it remains intangible. What psychoanalysis is concerned with is experience; the investigation of its influence on emotional development is its primary purpose. Psychoanalysis is aware, of course, that the emotional development of the individual is determined more or less by his constitution; this insight is a presupposition of psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis itself is concerned exclusively with the investigation of the influence of the individual’s life-situation on his emotional development. In practice this means that for the psychoanalytic method a maximum knowledge of the individual’s history—mainly of his early childhood experiences but certainly not limited to them—is an essential prerequisite. It studies the relation between a person’s life pattern and the specific aspects of his emotional development. Without extensive information concerning the individual’s life pattern, analysis is impossible. General observation reveals, of course, that certain typical expressions of behavior will indicate typical life patterns. One could surmise corresponding patterns by analogy, but all such inferences would contain an element of uncertainty and would have limited scientific validity. The method of individual psychoanalysis is therefore a delicately historical method: the understanding of emotional development on the basis of knowledge of the individual’s life history.

The method of applying psychoanalysis to groups cannot be different. The common psychic attitudes of the group members are to be understood only on the basis of their common patterns. Just as individual psychoanalytic psychology seeks to understand the individual emotional constellation, so social psychology can acquire an insight into the emotional structure of a group only by an exact knowledge of its life pattern. Social psychology can make assertions only concerning the psychic attitudes common to all; it therefore requires the knowledge of life situations common to all and characteristic for all.

If the method of social psychology is basically no different from that of individual psychology, there is, nevertheless, a difference which must be pointed out.

Whereas psychoanalytic research is concerned primarily with neurotic individuals, social-psychological research is concerned with groups of normal people.

The neurotic person is characterized by the fact that he has not succeeded in adjusting himself psychically to his real environment. Through the fixation of certain emotional impulses, of certain psychic mechanisms which at one time were appropriate and adequate, he comes into conflict with reality. The psychic structure of the neurotic is therefore almost entirely unintelligible without the knowledge of his early childhood experiences, for, due to his neurosis—an expression of his lack of adjustment or of the particular range of infantile fixations—even his position as an adult is determined essentially by that childhood situation. Even for the normal person the experiences of early childhood are of decisive significance. His character, in the broadest sense, is determined by them and without them it is unintelligible in its totality. But because he has adjusted himself psychically to reality in a higher degree than the neurotic, a much greater part of his psychic structure is understandable than in the case of the neurotic. Social psychology is concerned with normal people, upon whose psychic situation reality has an incomparably greater influence than upon the neurotic. Thus it can forgo even the knowledge of the individual childhood experiences of the various members of the group under investigation; from the knowledge of the socially conditioned life pattern in which these people were situated after the early years of childhood, it can acquire an understanding of the psychic attitudes common to them.

Social psychology wishes to investigate how certain psychic attitudes common to members of a group are related to their common life experiences. It is no more an accident in the case of an individual whether this or that libido direction dominates, whether the Oedipus complex finds ‘this or that outlet, than it is an accident if changes in psychic characteristics occur in the psychic situation of a group, either in the same class of people over a period of time or simultaneously among different classes. It is the task of social psychology to indicate why such changes occur and how they are to be understood on the basis of the experience common to the members of the group.

The present investigation is concerned with a narrowly limited problem of social psychology, namely, the question concerning the motives conditioning the evolution of concepts about the relation of God the Father to Jesus from the beginning of Christianity to the formulation of the Nicene Creed in the fourth century. In accordance with the theoretical principles just set forth, this investigation aims to determine the extent to which the change in certain religious ideas is an expression of the psychic change of the people involved and the extent to which these changes are conditioned by their conditions of life. It will attempt to understand the ideas in terms of men and their life patterns, and to show that the evolution of dogma can be understood only through knowledge of the unconscious, upon which external reality works and which determines the content of consciousness.

The method of this work necessitates that relatively large space be devoted to the presentation of the life situation of the people investigated, to their spiritual, economic, social, and political situation—in short, to their psychic surfaces. If this seems to involve a disproportionate emphasis, the reader should bear in mind that even in the psychoanalytic case study of an ill person, great space is given to the presentation of the external circumstances surrounding the person. In the present work the description of the total cultural situation of the masses of people being investigated and the presentation of their external environment are more decisive than the description of the actual situation in a case study. The reason for this is that in the nature of things the historical reconstruction, even though it is supposed to be offered only to a certain extent in detail, is incomparably more complicated and more extensive than the report of simple facts as they occur in the life of an individual. We believe, however, that this disadvantage must be tolerated, because only in this way can an analytical understanding of historical phenomena be achieved.

The present study is concerned with a subject that has been treated by one of the most prominent representatives of the analytic study of religion, Theodor Reik.⁴ The difference in content, which necessarily results from the different methodology, will, like the methodological differences themselves, be considered briefly at the end of this essay.

Our purpose here is to understand the change in certain contents of consciousness as expressed in theological ideas as the result of a change in unconscious processes. Accordingly, just as we have done with regard to the methodological problem, we propose to deal briefly with the most important findings of psychoanalysis as they touch upon our question.

II          The Social-Psychological Function of Religion

Psychoanalysis is a psychology of drives or impulses. It sees human behavior as conditioned and defined by emotional drives, which it interprets as an outflow of certain physiologically rooted impulses, themselves not subject to immediate observation. Consistent with the popular classifications of hunger drives and love drives, from the beginning, Freud distinguished between the ego, or self-preservation, drives and the sexual drives.