Psyche

Concept of ‘Soul’

1. The designation psyché (Gk., ‘breath’ ‘life breath’; cf. Lat. anima) is first found in the opening lines of the Iliad. According to Homer (eighth century BCE), the psyche appears only after a person's death: thus, psyché denotes the soul of someone who has died, not that of a living being. The life processes of the body are managed by the thymós (in Lat., animus), the principle of the vitality of the body and at the same time of its consciousness. In antiquity, the psyché is personified as a winged female being; in Apuleius's Metamorphoses (c. 170 CE), she is the beloved of Amor. The English word ‘soul’ is of unclear derivation. It is akin to the word ‘sea,’ whence souls were supposed to originate, and whither they were to return. Today, in European languages, ‘psyche’ denotes the totality of the conscious and unconscious—especially emotional—events, but mainly a person's spiritual and intellectual (cognitive) functions, located in the brain: processing of information through → perception and storage, by way of → memory and recall, → dream, → fantasy, motivation, and behavior. From a perspective of religious history, conceptions of ‘spirit’ or → soul stand for a (metaphysical) spiritual life-principle that distinguishes living beings from inorganic matter. In religions, therefore, the psyche—in various configurations—can be thought of as the immortal transitional element between the material and the spiritual, the earthly and the divine. From its concept as well as from its content, something unspecific, transitory, and unstable is inherent in the psyche. This aspect makes it seem describable only in pictures, metaphors, allegories, symbols, and so on. While ‘psyche’ is one of the key words of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and is found in numerous complex words as the syllable ‘psych-,’ this presence scarcely renders the concept more apprehensible scientifically. As early as 1866, precisely the discipline of psychology was characterized as ‘psychology without a soul’ (F. A. Lange), on the basis of the nineteenth-century decision in favor of an empirical, experimental, and thereby measurable practice. Indeed, it is not only psychology that divides the soul into consciousness, unconscious, ego, self, person, and identity. Due to this development, the psyche has lost its importance as central principle of individual self-organization; and what is more, its historicity and ‘culturality’ have met with the same fate. Human beings are subject to changes that can be grasped in terms of (religious) history. In corresponding fashion, those changes are yet to be differentiated culturally. A (religious) history of the soul that would attend to humanity's cultural multiplicity is still pending.

The Brain as ‘Organ of the Soul’

2. The question, “Do we have a soul?” is no longer posed to religious experts; it is now the neuro-scientists who are asked the question, inasmuch as the soul has long since been localized in the brain rather than in the bodily organs. Meanwhile, encephalology has won the function of judge when it comes to the question of the soul, however intensive may have been its debate in religious discourse up until now. In the research that has so speedily developed since 1860, the brain as ‘organ of the soul’ has come to be seen as determined symbolically in many ways, and, in keeping with the Zeitgeist of the nineteenth century, has been divided into higher and lower, civilized and primitive, regions. Comparisons of the brain with the newest technological accomplishments of information transmittal and processing—the current example is the paradigm of the computer—are as common as they are beside the point. An early climax in the investigation of the brain must have been the localization of ‘morality neurons’ in the pre-frontal cortex (cerebral lobe); these were supposed to have regulated the perceptibility of normative systems, and thereby to be required for the capacity for moral behavior (Damasio 1999). The human brain contains between one hundred billion and one trillion nerve cells (neurons), and weighs some 1300–1500 grams. A striking feature of today's human being is the great increase in the volume of the outer layer of the brain (cortex). The neo-cortex is generally regarded as the seat of the ‘higher’ cerebral functions, such as consciousness, → perception, thinking, and conceptualization; however, such functions are simultaneously exercised by many centers, lying throughout the brain. The central nervous system of each individual is isolated from its environment, inasmuch as the neurons of the brain are insensitive to environmental stimulation. Therefore the sensory cells must translate all that transpires in the environment into the ‘language of the brain.’ The neuro-biological consequence is that reality is a construct of the brain! According to this epistemological constructivism, ‘reality’ is completely inaccessible. But not only the question of cognition, but also that of the spirit–matter or soul–body relationship, is a compelling result of brain research. Since consciousness is tied to the integrity and activity of cortical fields, brain and spirit are obviously closely connected. The establishment of a “strict parallel between mental and neuronal” (G. Roth) has led to altogether contradictory interpretations. While for many scholars consciousness is nothing but an epiphenomenon of neuronal processes, encephalologist John Eccles (1903–1997) holds that, in order to realize itself, the spirit utilizes the brain processes that seem to it to be appropriate. But Nobel laureate Eccles goes even further: the uniqueness of the individual soul compels the conclusion of a supernatural reality.1 To the contrary, it is maintained in panpsychism that matter possesses ‘protopsychic’ qualities, which, through the complex material structures and functions, become spirit automatically ‘by itself.’ Modern conclusions of encephalology, as well, still stand in the tradition of the Western body-soul dualism, whose (religious) history begins in Greek antiquity. Without knowledge of this conceptual history of the psyche, modern conceptualizations of the soul cannot be understood.

The Japanese language uses various words for ‘soul’—tama, tamashii, reikon, goryô, nakitama—also for ‘spirit,’ the soul of someone departed, an ancestral soul, and the immortal soul as opposed to the mortal body. All are applied synonymously and are not clearly distinguished from one another in content. Neither in modern nor in ancient Japan is there an unequivocally definable concept of the soul. In the religious ideas of early times, tama designated impersonal spiritual forces present in all living beings, as well as in lifeless objects and phenomena of nature. They had regularly to be renewed, through rituals of adjuration (tamafuri). The loss of tama effected death, although what happened with tama afterward remained shrouded in mystery. Religious influences from the Chinese mainland, such as shamanistic concepts and ancestor reverence altered the tama concept. Beginning in the ninth century, the spirits of vengeance gained a special position—the souls of those who had died violently or in childbirth. They brought human beings sickness, resentment, and natural catastrophes, and could be mollified only by sacrifice. Today, in the Buddhist home altar, a memorial tablet is kept of someone departed, as the seat of the dead person's soul. Memorial tablets can also be preserved together, however, in a temple, as in the illustration here, where the tablets appear in a Buddhist Zenrinji temple. The ancestral souls watch over the destinies of their descendants and periodically return home to their relatives—once a year, in the summertime, at the Bon Festival. 

Plato

3. With Homer, human particularities are still ordered to the organs, and the (shadow) soul is understood as a bodiless ‘copy’ (eídolon) of the deceased. But since around the sixth century BCE, the psyche has been conceptualized as an ‘interior correlate’ of the body (sóma). In spite of foundational differences between body and soul, the two are bound up with each other. To the psyche as a component of life, Heraclitus (c. 550–480 BCE) appropriates a spatial depth-dimension, whose bounds he declares to be indiscoverable. The idea of the soul as the person's interior space, together with that of one soul as the whole of a person that continues to exist even after death, was to become programmatic for the European tradition. Plato (c. 428–347 BCE) gave the soul the function of an intermediary. On the one hand, the psyché belongs to the transitory world; but at the same time it belongs to the eternal world of the Ideas, which is knowable only by virtue of the two-way connection provided by the soul (→ Platonism). According to Plato, the cosmos needs the soul for its own perfection, which, as ‘world soul,’ is to be found both within and without the world. In this structure, the macrocosm, the world, corresponds to the microcosm, the human being. It is not only in Plato that, in view of its connection to the divine, the soul is considered to be sullied and stained in the body—indeed, seen as the body's prisoner. To be sure, even in its earthly life the immortal soul can be delivered from the body by way of certain techniques of purification (kátharsis and áskesis).

Aristotle

This liberation of the soul during one's lifetime is also the aim of the mystery cults (→ Mysteries). Aristotle (384–322 BCE) contradicted such a ‘prison theory,’ and stressed the ‘entelechy’ as the inner ‘formation power’ of an organic living being. For him, in the microcosmic human being, the vegetative and the animal soul are joined, together with the ‘divine element of reason,’ and are necessarily assigned to the corporeal organism for their development. Consequently, for Aristotle the soul is not eternal. With this alternative, two fundamentally distinct Western traditions of thought address the soul, and both have continued to be present, in multitudinous reception.

Gnosis and Christianity

As distinguished from earlier Hellenic thought, Gnosticism and Christianity tend to degrade the body vis-à-vis the soul (→ Gnosticism; Hermetism/Hermeticism). In Gnosticism, the genuine human person is formed by the inner-directedness of the soul toward the divine light. In Christianity, according to → Augustine (354–430), only the soul can ascend to God, to unite itself with him. It is not to its own body, but to God that the soul points. The divine image (in Lat., imago Dei) characterizes the human spirit as the highest of the levels of soul. In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, the soul is conceptualized rather in bodily form, but remains more important than the body itself. Having been created by God, the soul trundles toward death, except it return to God, thwarting damnation, in illumined purity, and received by angels.

The Individualization of the Soul

One of the most decisive changes of early modernity was the individualization of the soul, which occurred under the decisive influence of the → Renaissance—and the investigations of the → Inquisition, which, compelling its victims, probed the pressure of outer demonic powers on a person's interior. The way was paved for this development through the ‘discovery of the individual’ in the twelfth century. The medieval process of individualization was also fostered by the introduction of individual → confession (1215), as well as, for example, by Thomas Aquinas (1225/26–1274), according to whose teaching a spiritual soul as formal principle is created by God for each body. The Christian ‘cure of souls’ or pastoral care, which was intensified by all confessions after the Reformation, as well as an ultra-rigorous formation of conscience, effected the forms of individual self-control and self-discipline that still prevail today. → Conscience is now understood as a garment of the soul, founded in the body and fostered through a pedagogy of pain. Descartes (1596–1650) took the giant step from the individualization to the subjectivization of the soul. Vis-à-vis the body, he posited a center of the psyche. Intuitively, the soul possesses a knowledge concerning itself (Cogito ergo sum—Lat., “I think, therefore I am”). According to Descartes, the thinking soul and the body influence each other, mutually and causally, through the ‘pineal gland’ (epiphysis cerebri) in the brain. Out of the medieval divine rays emerges subjective reason as the warrant of social happiness.

Romanticism

In the further course of things, by way of rationalistic and empiricist directions—although constantly accompanied by an underground of contrary hermetic and Neoplatonic currents—there arises the ‘de-substantializing’ of the soul. In → Romanticism, then, the psyche once again becomes a key concept—especially in relation to the irrational—in which the connections among sleep, → dream, rationality, and unconscious are central. Carl Gustav Carus (Psyche. Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele—Ger., “Psyche: On the History of the Development of the Soul”; 1846) claims to find the key to consciousness in the unconscious life of the soul.

Empiricism

In the course of the nineteenth century, successful processes of division are accomplished. The natural sciences detach from the humanities; toward the end of the century, newly founded ‘psychology’ splits into a pure psychology of consciousness and a depth psychology of the unconscious (→ Psychoanalysis). The soul no longer seems the transitional principle between matter and spirit, the terrestrial and the divine, and has also served its term as imperishable substance. Empiricism makes it the totality of psychic functions, which are adopted by psychology as sensation, perception, conceptualization, thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul loses its transcendence and is now ordered to the immanence of the body. Around 1900, there also occurs the founding of an empirical psychology of religion (William James, Edwin D. Starbuck), marked to our day by a powerful division within psychological investigation, as well as frequent oscillation between reductionism and apologetics in relation to its object.

Positions in Religious Studies: Animism and Dynamism

4. The increasingly dominant position of the natural and experimental sciences in Europe since the nineteenth century manifests the ‘dissolution of the soul.’ True, the attendant thrust to modernization was experienced not only as deliverance, but also as alienation. A newly recognized relevance and right to exist on the part of the ‘religious,’ forced early → academic study of religion to inquire into the other, officially ignored side of society, and thereby as well, once more into conceptualizations of the soul. Religion's fundamental problem implicated the question of the soul. The ‘de-substantialized’ soul launched a quest for the conceptions of the soul—the ‘stuff of the soul’—throughout the world. In correspondence with → evolutionism, the question of the soul was to be explained through a determination of the origin of religion. Faithful to this direction of thought, E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) had already construed → animism as the first stage of humanity's religious development. In the phenomenology of religion (→ Eliade), which was likewise imprisoned in the evolutionistic schema, the concept of the soul once more received a key position. In his Phänomenologie der Religion (Ger., “Phenomenology of Religion”; 1933), G. van der Leeuw settled upon the experience of power (dynamism) as the foundational essence of religion. For him, the concept of power was a vox media (Lat., ‘middle voice’) between (sacred) substance and the Divine. According to this principle, soul always meant a mighty quality, bound to a vehicle or a substance (‘stuff of the soul’). Of course, the integration of divergent concepts of the soul in animism and dynamism could succeed only through a negation of the respective context of religious culture and history.

Problems of the Western Concept of the Soul in Religious History

5. Indeed, there is a problem in the application of the modern concept of the psyche, as well as of the corresponding body-soul dualism, to other religions of past and present. As numerous examples show, equivalents to the Western concept of soul, in their conception and history, often take some other, even an opposite, direction, and therefore ought not to be automatically translated ‘soul.’

Ancient Egypt

a) In Egypt, for example, ‘conceptualizations of the soul’ stand in an altogether different relationship to a human being's individual body, as well as to the ‘super-individual’ divine world; and it is in their own way that they bind together the worlds of here and beyond. In the Egyptian view, each individual consists of (1) body, (2) ba—‘personhood,’ (3) ka—‘power of life and generation,’ (4) name, and (5) shadow, all of which, after dismemberment by death (myth of Osiris), act together once more in the beyond. After death, a person is given the further option of joining ba and ka, and thereby becoming an akh, an imperishable being of light. It is especially ba, ka, and akh that are inappropriately translated ‘soul.’ It is not the brain, but, as Aristotle thought too, the heart that is the seat of perception, consciousness, and the recall of memory. The ba corresponds somewhat to the human personhood, which, after death, is free to undertake motion, but which, even then, still has material needs. As ba, deities, likewise, can manifest themselves in this world in physical shape and form. In order to continue existing in the beyond, the mummified body of the deceased must join the ba every night (→ Mummification). The human ba is represented as a bird with the head and arms of the deceased. The ka comprises the power of life and generation, in deities and human beings alike. With a person's birth, the ka begins its existence—as her or his double, as it were. After death, the ka, which can become incarnate in the burial statue, continues to be supplied with nourishment; its absorption of the life force of the sacrificial meals is immediate. The ka is shown with two uplifted arms. Finally, name and shadow function as an individual ‘soul vehicle,’ here and in the beyond.

The Fòn of Benin

b) With the Fòn (Benin), as in many other cultures, the ‘soul’ constitutes a connective medium between human being and the → ancestors, but is also present in the → breath, as breath of life, and in the shadow. The spirit of the ancestors (jòtó) is bound up with a person's destiny. In its heavenly portion, it is honored with regularity as a divinity. Accordingly, it receives sacrifices. Each human being's personal destiny (sé) is dealt with before birth by the highest being, Máwú, but after the birth is immediately forgotten. Sé manifests itself in the head. In the sé, as psycho-physical component of the human being, a piece of Máwú is fixed. A person's completely realized sé represents her or his personal Vodún (‘guardian spirit’). Breath, shadow, and ancestral spirit leave the body after death. The dead are now free of all earthly laws. With the Fòn, as in Egypt, there is a bond between the dead, and birds as ‘souls of the dead.’ The amount of ancestral souls in heaven is limited in principle; nevertheless, an ancestor can be partially reborn in a child of his or her clan.

Transmigration and Reincarnation

c) The application of the Western concept of the soul to the transmigration of souls, especially to the Asian conceptions of → reincarnation, does not seem unproblematic. The idea of the transmigration of souls (in Gk., metempsychosis), Christian dogmatics notwithstanding, has been present in Europe since Greek antiquity. Besides the simple conception of the → rebirth of an ancestor in a child, the spectrum of the transmigration of souls in religious history reaches all the way to the endless (in principle) reincarnations of → Hinduism, Jainism, and → Buddhism. In the center of the complex of conceptualizations of all three religions stands the cycle of births (samsāra) that has no beginning, in which Karma effects the constantly repeating reincarnations. In Hinduism, a kind of ‘individual soul’ (ātman) can be determined as the vehicle of rebirth, the element that attains ‘release’ or ‘liberation’ (moksha) from the cycle of rebirths through ultimate unification with Brahman. The → Buddha, meanwhile, in the ‘no self’ doctrine (anatta), fundamentally rejects the idea of a soul, and not only as principle of reincarnation. By way of Helena P. Blavatsky's nineteenth-century Theosophy (→ Theosophical/Anthroposophical Society), the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and the reception of Buddhism and the esoteric movement of the twentieth century, the concepts of reincarnation ultimately belong to the European tradition as well. In the → New Age environment, the conception of transmigration is even used therapeutically. Thus, in ‘reincarnation therapy,’ psychic healing of traumas is sought through hypnosis, in the recall of earlier existences—the (conscious) ‘return.’

Psychology versus Religion

6. It is true that the ‘I’ is but one of the possible realizations of cognition in the brain. But, by way of the dominant primacy of the psychiatric medical complex and psychology, the Western concept of the psyche is normative worldwide in the matter of the frontiers of normality, (psychic) disease, insanity, and health. At the same time, this promotes to universal validity a specific notion of reality. But precisely the religious phenomena of → trance, → ecstasy, and → possession demonstrate the limits of the Western scientific system of classification, as for example, the World Health Organization's “International Classification of Psychic Disorders” (ICD-10). To be sure, the power of definition of Western science has always been so great that, in a complicated give-and-take, (a) religious currents try to find ‘scientific proof’ for their data, (b) all kinds of exceptional psychic conditions in the religious context are ‘explained’ with the help of psychological methods and models, (c) religions make use of scientific psychological techniques and integrate them into their respective salvific systems, and (d) psychological techniques and methods are ‘exposed’ as actually religious.

‘Scientific Proof’ of Spirits and Souls of the Dead: Spiritism and Near-Death Experiences

With precursors like Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), and especially at the hands of Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), in the nineteenth century the → spiritism movement appeared, seeking scientific demonstrations of the existence of a spirit world. Contrariwise, the phenomena of spiritism are scientifically investigated from a critical point of view by → parapsychology. The common foundation of the spiritistic directions is the conceptualization that the material body of which the human being disposes contains an immaterial, indestructible spirit, which, in turn, is manifested in a ‘soul body.’ The principal practice of spiritism consists of interrogating the spirits of the departed, and meanwhile has degenerated into the Hollywood film cliché. In parallel, since the 1970s, ‘empirical’ near-death experiences transmit the same message: that the departed are still alive in the beyond, and that those still living today will be received in friendship after death.

Scientific Explanatory Models: From Possession to Personality Disturbance

b) The phenomenon of → possession, in which a spirit or god takes control over an individual, and usually found in a ritually induced condition of → trance, poses questions as to how the event in question can be explained in terms of, for example, brain physiology and of psychology, and as to what occurs in the trance with the actual personality who is then absent. An explanatory model applied since the 1950s has been the well-known disease concept known as ‘multiple personality disorder,’ which entered normative classification systems only in 1980, and against resistance (ICD 10: F 44.81). The determinative indication here consists in the presence of two or more personalities in one individual—where, however, only one personality is present at one time, and none of the personalities knows of the other(s). In a ritual context, possession is often experienced as a healing one; but this is not the case with demonic possession, which is supposed to end in the ‘therapeutic’ act of → exorcism. Less spectacular are the physiological and psychological (perceptual) investigations in various forms of → meditation. Especially, electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements of the processes transpiring in meditating subjects produced positive results with respect to stress relief and concentration. These experimental results were at once taken advantage of by the religious movement known as Transcendental Meditation (TM), and used as propaganda in support of their teaching.

Ritual Psycho-Techniques: Scientology

c) The disputed religion of the Church of → Scientology, founded by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986), has been marked from the beginning by the application of different psycho-techniques, and enters into all but direct competition with psychotherapy. The primer of Scientology itself, Hubbard's Dianetics (1950), as the ‘modern science of mental health,’ teaches liberation from ‘engrams,’ which rather correspond to traumas, in order to become ‘clear.’ ‘Clearing’ is a cathartic technique (→ Catharsis) that, through application of the ‘e-meter’—a variation of the lie detector—in ‘auditing,’ a composite form of therapeutic session and ritual of confession, reportedly produces the optimal human being, a person without neuroses, psychoses, compulsions, and so on. Only then can the ‘Thetan,’ the ‘spirit soul’ of Scientology, go into action. Without the twentieth-century developments of psychology and neurology, and the utilization of corresponding technological apparatus, Scientology is simply unthinkable. The introduction of ‘mind machines,’ which are supposed positively to influence the activities of the brain, continues this development.

Psychotherapy as Confession

If psychotherapy itself is to be understood universally as secularized ‘cure of souls’ or pastoral care, then the therapeutic session can be thought of as a secularized form of Christian → confession. In confession and therapy, as institutional forms of narration that render the soul available and accessible, a selection is made from the vast current of human experiences and actions, and a schematized → biography is generated. The latter becomes the medium of → meaning. Just as, in a religious context, biography acquires interest against the horizon of salvation, so also, in depth psychology, it becomes an aspect of concern for healing, which, in turn—especially in C. G. Jung's analytical psychology—is freighted with religious features. But parallels exist not only between psychotherapy and Christian pastoral care, but also between → Zen Buddhism and → psychoanalysis. Since the 1960s, in certain currents, psychotherapy and religion have developed an ever more intimate relationship. Transpersonal Psychology (Stanislav Grof, Ken Wilber) strives directly for a ‘re-enchantment of the world’ and integrates elements of Zen Buddhism, → Daoism, → Yoga, and → Sufism.

7. American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910), in his classic The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), addressed the fundamental and religious question of the knowledge of (psychic) realities, in a fashion that remains basic today. James reworked the psychological currents of his time and programmatically forestalled themes of a psychology of religion only then beginning. For James, the varieties of religious experience corresponded to the most varied conditions of consciousness. But, even after one hundred years of religious psychology, research into the ‘worlds of consciousness’ is only just under way.