After Freud: A Gifted Cacophony of Quasi-Humanistic Approaches . Freud formulated his new science in biological terms, and sought a rigid orthodoxy in theory among his followers. He attracted a collection of brilliant young physicians and lay persons to his movement, then proceeded to alienate many of the brightest. Many of the dissenters from Freudian orthodoxy contributed to the emerging humanistic understanding of human nature. Alfred Adler: Individual Psychology . Adler developed a psychology emphasizing that each individual creates a style of life reflecting the central "fiction" or goal around which the person organizes his or her life. Human beings are socially embedded, and the development of a sense of social interest and community feeling is critical to human development. Human behavior is purposeful and future oriented, not merely driven by instinct and mechanism (Adler, 1969). Carl Gustav Jung: Archetypal Psychology . Jung insisted on the validity of spiritual experience, and explored the symbols and archetypes of human experience found in primitive peoples and the world's religions. He described the human life as a lifelong, never-completed process of psychological and spiritual individuation and integration (Jung, 1961). He described the self as a deeper and less rational structure than the ego, and advocated that human beings come to trust and accept the wisdom that emerges spontaneously from the self in dreams, images, and intuitions. Otto Rank: The Psychology of the Will . Otto Rank formulated a psychology of the will, which mirrored many of Nietzsche's themes (Rank, 1936, 1941). He studied the process of artistic creation, and concluded that all of human life, including neurosis, is a process of self-creation. Rank defined human heroism in terms of the larger and riskier stage upon which one risks creating oneself. The neurotic makes other persons into a god, and creates an individual life guaranteed to please others. Most human beings at times engage in such neurotic solutions to life, "tranquillizing" themselves with the trivial (Becker, 1973, p. 178-179). The heroic human reaches for the broadest horizon, however, unfamiliar, and lives more boldly (Rank, 1941; Becker, 1973). Like Jung, Rank affirmed spirituality as one of the broadest stages upon which the human being can unfold an existence. Rank affirmed that the human being is a "theological being" (Becker, 1973).

Sigmund Freud

Medard Boss (1903-1991), a second Swiss psychiatrist, was initially trained in psychoanalysis. After World War II, he sought out the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and organized regular seminars with Heidegger and Swiss physicians seeking to apply the phenomenological perspective to rethink the foundations of both medicine and psychology (Boss, 1979). Boss defined health as the total "haleness and wholeness" of the human being. Health is characterized by an openness and flexible responsiveness to the world. In turn he defined unhealthiness in human existence as "nothing but the privation, blocking, impairment or constriction of this original openness and freedom" (Boss, 1988). He investigated psychosomatic illness as a means of jamming or blocking one's openness to the world and to specific threatening situations (Boss, 1979; Moss, 1978).

Human beings are also truly metaphysical beings; they are the only being which takes its own being as a question to be pondered (Heidegger, 1962).

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): Existentialism and the Superman. Writing a generation later, Nietzsche repeated Kierkegaard's emphasis upon the individual. However, he saw Western civilization as degraded to the core, and castigated Christianity as a distortion in humanity. He called for a "doctor of the soul" to tap his hammer and discover where the edifice of culture was rotten, so that the wrecking process could begin. He called for a transformation in all values, and created an image of a new individual, a superman (Ubermensch), who would create authentic values (Nietzsche, 1966, 1892/1954). The superman would realize to a higher degree the human capacity to create the shape of one's own life. "Such a person, one might say, lives courageously by overcoming illusions and taking responsibility for his or her life" (Halling and Carroll, 1998, pp. 96-97).

"Was this your consolation that you said: One does what one can? Was this not precisely the reason for your disquietude, that you did not know within yourself how much it is a man can do? … no earnest doubt, no really deep concern, is put to rest by saying that one does what one can" (Kierkegaard, 1959, pp. 347-348; Moss, 1998, pp. 223-224).

Marx also labeled Christianity as an "opium for the masses;" that is, he asserted that faith was a tool used by the wealthy to pacify and exploit the working class. Workers were promised a reward in the next world, thereby reducing their rebellion and discontent in this world.

Søren Kierkegaard: The Dawning of Existentialism. The Danish thinker Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote passionately about the existence of each human individual. He criticized both the established church, philosophy, and society as lulling human beings to sleep with a false security. Kierkegaard believed that too many individual humans did not see any need to struggle with the direction of their personal existence. They assumed that they were already Christian and modern by birthright. He compared the average human being's condition throughout life to that of a peasant who falls asleep in his cart while the horse pulls him home. Kierkegaard believed that philosophy should act like a mosquito and sting the complacent individual awake, to direct and experience the course of his or her own life, or to awaken the individual and "oblige him to judge" (Kierkegaard, 1962b, p 35). Throughout his work Kierkegaard confronted a myriad of self-soothing defenses by which individuals preserve their sleepy complacency:

Desiderius Erasmus (ca. 1469-1536). For Erasmus, the human being is the center of creation. The measure of God's goodness is that he created a rich world to unfold the nature of the human being. Man is a "noble animal, for whose sake alone God fashioned this marvelous contrivance of the world; he is the fellow citizen of the angels, son of god, heir of immortality" (The Enchiridion, LB v 55C, cited in Augustijn, 1991, p. 53). Erasmus anticipated Kierkegaard in his emphasis upon the human individual: "Man stands before God as an individual and takes counsel only of God and his own conscience. Man's responsibility and ability to live his own life receives all the emphasis" (p. 55). Erasmus' heated debate with Luther was triggered by Luther's critique of Erasmus essay on The Free Will. Erasmus insisted on a role for the human will and personal responsibility, as well as God's grace, in achieving salvation. Luther in turn argued that grace alone provides salvation for the human.

In northern Europe the Renaissance took the direction of a humanism, exemplified by the Dutch scholar Erasmus. At the same time, the breech with medieval tradition and authority took the form of the Protestant Reformation of the Christian church, nurtured by a return to the original scriptural texts

Ficino's (1985) de Amore was written in the form of a commentary on Plato's symposium on love, and highlights one of the essential shifts in thinking which influenced Renaissance art and learning. Ficino described love as fundamentally a longing for beauty. This is a marked difference from the traditional Christian definition of love in terms of selfless altruism. In neo-Platonic terms all things, including human beings, emanate from the original One, wherein lies beauty and truth and goodness. Humans, in this framework, are attracted to their primordial origin in the One, and drawn by beauty and truth. Ficino suggested that earthly love, including attraction to sensual beauty, participates in metaphysical and divine love.

Today's authors are perhaps accurate when they point to the history of Christian thought and the diversity of Christian theologies, as showing that each generation interprets the historical phenomenon of Jesus in light of its own cosmology, ideologies, and need. Riley (1997) suggested that the initial gentile reception of Jesus was in terms of one more classical hero, like Odysseus, wandering the earth and performing great feats. Riley showed that each age creates its own new image of Christ. The original scriptural message is filtered through the needs and understandings of the present age.

Some Christian authors, such as Kierkegaard (1962a), saw the historical figure of Christ as symbolizing that the divine principle entered the human, elevating and glorifying the human (1962). Saint Paul wrote of hearing creation groan in the process of giving birth to a new glorified human being, liberated from enslavement to the law, and made perfect in Christ (Romans 8). The early Church father Irenaeus wrote that the glory of God is a fully alive human being (Roberts & Donaldson, 1953). Two and a half centuries after Aristides, in the time of Augustine, the neo-Platonic world-view was so pervasive as to redraw the Christian faith into a search for a return to one's Origins. In his Confessions, Augustine expressed his deep yearning: "Our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee"

For Plato, this earthly life is but a dim likeness of the real and eternal life. The human being lives as though in a cave without light and by philosophical reflection gains a glimpse of the true Eidos, the transcendent essence of things as they are in truth (Plato, 1941). Plato's philosophy conveys a sense of values which we associate with Greek culture and with today's humanistic ideal. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful were elevated to the status of ends in themselves. The concept of an Eidos (or essence) reappeared in German phenomenological psychology when Erwin Straus (1982) conceived of the essence of the person - the true self -- as an "Eidos" which one sees actualized only in glimpses, in the course of existence, like glimpses of light through a prism. Platonism survived many centuries after Plato himself, especially in the form of neo-Platonism. Plotinus (205-270 CE) and Proclus (410-485 CE) stand out as central neo-Platonists. Neo-Platonism portrayed each individual human life as a kind of falling from an eternal origin in Divine Oneness, into earthly multiplicity. The task of human existence became a journey of inward reintegration, recovering lost Oneness. This metaphysical schema of existence, in which the eternal Origin is the true reality and all of life seeks for restoration, lingered in the background through the early centuries of the Christian era, and resurfaced to influence medieval and Renaissance views of life. For the neo-Platonists, philosophy remained a pathway for personal renewal, through moral and intellectual self-discipline. The pathway of renewal took a mystical turn as an awakening from the normal human alienated state, toward a mystical union with the One and the Good. Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Aristotle developed his own ethics and psychology, systematically defining the soul and its attributes. Most important for psychological theory, however, Aristotle developed a systematic empirical approach to natural science. In combination with Christianity, this Aristotelian philosophy served as the framework for most of medieval scholastic philosophy, for example in the works of Boethius and Thomas Aquinas. The empirical framework of scientific research in psychology reflects this Aristotelian heritage.

The early Christian image of the human being places less emphasis on reason and self-sufficiency than did Greek philosophy, and placed more on an altruistic love for God, neighbor, and community. One early Christian philosopher, Aristides, writing about 125 CE, described the Christian way of life in terms which still sound familiar today: "They walk in all humility and kindness, and falsehood is not found among them, and they love one another. They despise not the widow, and grieve not the orphan. He that hath distributeth liberally to him that hath not" (cited in Foster, 1971, p. 69).

Socratic discourse perfects character and instills virtue through knowledge. Knowledge leads to good, and wrong-doing is involuntary, based on ignorance. In Socrates' view, no human being would wish for anything less than true good and true happiness, but many individuals miscarry in their actions for lack of knowledge of the true good.

We feel justified in regarding "emotion" as a quantity which may become increased, derived and displaced. So we are forced to the conclusion that the patient fell ill because the emotion developed in the pathogenic situation was prevented from escaping normally, and that the essence of the sickness lies in the fact that these "imprisoned" (dingeklemmt) emotions undergo a series of abnormal changes. In part they are preserved as a lasting charge and as a source of constant disturbance in psycbical life; in part they undergo a change into unusual bodily innervations [sic] and inhibitions, which present themselves as the physical symptoms of the case.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you will permit me to generalize, as is indispensable in so brief a presentation, we may express our results up to this point in the formula: Our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are the remnants and the memory symbols of certain (traumatic) experiences.

When the memory of this scene was revived in hypnosis the paralysis of .the right arm, which had existed since the beginning of the illness, was cured and the treatment ended.

You will of course want to hear me speak of other examples of the causation of hysterical symptoms beside this of inability to drink on account of the disgust caused by the dog drinking from the glass. I must, however, if I hold to my programme, limit myself to very few examples. Breuer relates, for instance, that his patient's visual disturbances could be traced back to external causes, in the following way. "The patient, with tears in her eyes, was sitting by the sick-bed when her father suddenly asked her what time it was. She could not see distinctly, strained her eyes to see, brought the watch near her eyes so that the dial seemed very large (macropia and strabismus conv.), or else she tried hard to suppress her tears, so that the sick man might not see them."

Only one variation from what might be expected must be mentioned. It was not always a single experience which occasioned the symptom, but usually several, perhaps many similar, repeated traumata cooperated in this effect. It was necessary to repeat the whole series of pathogenic memories in chronological sequence, and of course in reverse order, the last first and the first last. It was quite impossible to reach the first and often most essential trauma directly, without first clearing away those coming later.

No one had ever cured an hysterical symptom by such means before, or had come so near understanding its cause. This would be a pregnant discovery if the expectation could be confirmed that still other, perhaps the majority of symptoms, originated in this way and could be removed by the same method

Now, after she had given energetic expression to her restrained anger, she asked for a drink, drank a large quantity of water without trouble, and woke from hypnosis with the glass at her lips. The symptom thereupon vanished permanently

how that lady's little dog, that she abhorred, had drunk out of a glass.

His sympathetic observation soon found the means which made the first help possible. It had been noticed that the patient, in her states of "absence," of psychic alteration, usually mumbled over several words to herself. These seemed to spring from associations with which her thoughts were busy. The doctor, who was able to get these words, put her in a sort of hypnosis and repeated them to her over and over, in order to bring up any associations that they might have. The patient yielded to his suggestion and reproduced for him those psychic creations which controlled her thoughts during her "absences," and which betrayed themselves in these single spoken words. These were fancies, deeply sad, often poetically beautiful, day dreams, we might call them, which commonly took as their starting point the situation of a girl beside the sick-bed of her father. Whenever she had related a number of such fancies, she was, as it were, freed and restored to her normal mental life. This state of health would last for several hours, and then give place on the next day to a new "absence," which was removed in the same way by relating the newly-created fancies. It was impossible not to get the impression that the psychic alteration which was expressed in the "absence" was a consequence of the excitations originating from these intensely emotional fancy-images. The patient herself, who at this time of her illness strangely enough understood and spoke only English, gave this new kind of treatment the name "talking cure," or jokingly designated it as "chimney sweeping."

Now Dr. Breuer did not deserve this reproach in this case; he gave his patient sympathy and interest, although at first be did not understand how to help her. Probably this was easier for him on account of those superior qualities of the patient's mind and character, to which he bears witness in his account of the case.

he considers them persons who overstep the laws of his science, as the orthodox regard heretics; he ascribes to them all possible evils, blames them for exaggeration and intentional deceit, "simulation," and be punishes them by withdrawing his interest.

but there is a great change in the attitude of the doctor. We can observe that he acts quite differently toward hystericals than toward patients suffering from organic diseases. He will not bring the same interest to the former as to the latter, since their suffering is much less serious and yet seems to set up the claim to be valued just as seriously.

So far it has seemed I best to go with the doctors, but we shall soon part company with them. You must not think that the outlook of a patient with regard to medical aid is essentially bettered when the diagnosis points to hysteria rather than to organic disease of the brain. Against the serious brain diseases medical skill is in most cases powerless, but also in the case of hysterical affections the doctor can do nothing. He must leave it to benign nature, when and how his hopeful prognosis will be realized.

Greek physicians as hysteria, which can simulate a whole series of symptoms of various diseases

Dr. Breuer's patient was a girl of twenty-one, of a high degree of intelligence. She had developed in the course of her two years' illness a series of physical and mental disturbances which well deserved to be taken seriously. She had a severe paralysis of both right extremities, with anasthesia [sic], and at times the same affection of the members of the left side of the body; disturbance of eye-movements, and much impairment of vision; difficulty in maintaining the position of the head, an intense Tussis nervosa, nausea when she attempted to take nourishment, and at one time for several weeks a loss of the power to drink, in spite of tormenting thirst. Her power of speech was also diminished, and this progressed so far that she could neither speak nor understand her mother tongue; and, finally, she was subject to states of "absence," of confusion, delirium, alteration of her whole personality. These states will later claim our attention.

But first one word. I have noticed, with considerable satisfaction, that the majority of my hearers do not belong to the medical profession. Now do not fear that a medical education is necessary to follow what I shall have to say. We shall now accompany the doctors a little way, but soon we shall take leave of them and follow Dr. Breuer on a way which is quite his own.

Vienna, Dr. Joseph Breuer,[2] made the first application of, this method to the case of an hysterical girl (1880-82).

psychoanalysis

"I am sure," he continues, "that everybody who is able to concentrate thought and will, and to eliminate superfluous emotions, sooner or later becomes a master of his body and can overcome every kind of illness. This is the truth at the bottom of all mind-cures. Our thoughts have a plastic power over the body."

Thus I decided to follow Vivekananda's advice: "Practise hard: whether you live or die by it doesn't matter." My improvised chela and I began with starvation. I do not know whether you did try it ever * * * but voluntary starvation is very different from involuntary, and implies more temptations. We reduced first our meals to twice a day and then to once a day. The best authorities agree that in order to control the body fasting is essential, and even in the Gospel the worst spirits are said to obey only those who fast and pray. We reduced very much the amount of food, disregarding chemical theories about the need of albumen, sometimes living on olive oil and bread; or on fruits alone; or on milk and rice; in very small quantities -- much less than I formerly ate at one meal. I began to get lighter every day, and lost 20 pounds in a few weeks; but this could not stop such a desperate undertaking * * * rather starve than live as a slaver Then besides we practised asana or postures, breaking almost our limbs. Try to sit down on the floor and to kiss your knees without bending them, or to join your hands on the usually unapproachable upper part of your back, or to bring the toe of your right foot to your left ear without bending the knees * * * these are easy samples of posture for a Yogi.

saying 'no' to some habitual temptation, or performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level of energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power.

Morbid cases, here as elsewhere, lay the normal machinery bare. In the first number of Dr. Morton Prince's Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Janet has discussed five cages of morbid impulse, with an explanation that is precious for my present point of view. One is a girl who eats, eats, eats, all day. Another walks, walks, walks, and gets her food from an automobile that escorts her. Another is a dipsomaniac. A fourth pulls out her hair. A fifth wounds her flesh and burns her skin. Hitherto such freaks of impulse have received Greek names (as bulimia, dromomania, etc.) and been scientifically disposed of as 'episodic syndromata of hereditary degeneration.' But it turns out that Janet's cases are all what he calls psychasthenics, or victims of a chronic sense of weakness, torpor, lethargy, fatigue, insufficiency, impossibility, unreality, and powerlessness of will; and that in each and all of them the particular activity pursued, deleterious though it be, has the temporary result of raising the sense of vitality and making the patient feel alive again. These things reanimate; they [p. 326] would reanimate us; but it happens that in each patient the particular freak-activity chosen is the only thing that does reanimate; and therein lies the morbid state. The way to treat such persons is to discover to them more usual and useful ways of throwing their stores of vital energy into gear.

Such experiences show how profound is the alteration in the manner in which, under excitement, our organism will sometimes perform its physiological work. The metabolisms become different when the reserves have to be used, and for weeks and months the deeper use may go on

I broke down without delay and discovered that it I wished to live I must continue no longer the system that had kept me up until the crisis was past. With it passed away as it in a moment all desire to stimulate, and a perfect loathing of my late staff of life took possession of me.

My poor wife had some reason to think that war and disease between them had left very little of a husband to take under nursing when she got him again. An attack of camp-scurvy had filled my mouth with sores, shaken every joint in my body, and covered me all over with sores and livid spots so that I was marvelously unlovely to look upon. A smart knock on the ankle-joint from the splinter of a shell that burst in my face, in itself a mere bagatelle of a wound, had been of necessity neglected under the pressing and incessant calls upon me, and had grown worse and worse till the whole foot below the ankle became a black mass and seemed to threaten mortification. I insisted however on being allowed to use it till the place was taken, mortification or no; and though the pain was sometimes horrible, I carried my point and kept up to the last. On the day after the assault I had an unlucky fall on some bad ground; and it was an open question for a day or two whether I hadn't broken my arm at the elbow. Fortunately it turned out to be only a very severe sprain, but I am still conscious of the wrench it gave me. To crown the whole pleasant catalogue, I was worn to a shadow by a constant diarrhœa, and consumed as much opium as would have done credit to my father-in-law.

Country people and city people, as a class, illustrate this difference. The rapid rate of life, the number of decisions in an hour, the many things to keep account of, in a busy city man's or woman's life, seem monstrous to a country brother. He doesn't see how we live at all. But settle him in town; and in a year or two, if not too old, he will have trained himself to keep the pace as well as any of us, getting more out of himself in any week then he ever did in ten weeks at home. The physiologists show how one can be in nutritive equilibrium, neither losing nor gaining weight, on astonishingly different quantities of food. So one can be in what I might call 'efficiency-equilibrium' (neither gaining nor losing power when once the equilibrium is reached), on astonishingly different quantities of work, no matter in what dimension the work may be measured. It may be physical work, intellectual work, moral work, or spiritual work

The existence of reservoirs of energy that habitually are not tapped is most familiar to us in the phenomenon of 'second wind.' Ordinarily we stop when we meet the first effective layer, so to call it, of fatigue. We have then walked, played, or worked 'enough,' and desist. That amount of fatigue is an efficacious obstruction, on this side of which our usual life is cast. But if an unusual necessity forces us to press onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, when gradually or suddenly it passes away, and we are fresher than before. We have evidently tapped a level of new energy, masked until then by the fatigue-obstacle usually obeyed. There may be layer after layer of this experience. A third and a fourth 'wind' may supervene. Mental activity shows the phenomenon as well as physical, and in exceptional cases we may find, beyond the very extremity of fatigue-distress, amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all, because habitually we never push through the obstruction, never pass those early critical points.

In few of us are functions not tied-up by the exercise of other functions. G. T. Fechner is an extraordinary exception that proves the rule. He could use his mystical faculties while being scientific. He could be both critically keen and devout. Few scientific men can pray, I imagine. Few can carry on any living commerce with 'God.' Yet many of us are well aware how much freer in many directions and abler our lives would be, were such important forms of energizing not sealed up. There are in everyone potential forms of activity that actually are shunted out from use.

If we are doctors, our mind-cure sympathies, if we are mind-curists, our medical sympathies, are tied up. We all know persons who are models of excellence, but who belong to the extreme philistine type of mind. So deadly is their intellectual respectability that we can't converse about certain subjects at all, can't let our minds play over them, can't even mention them in their presence. I have numbered among my dearest friends persons thus inhibited intellectually, with whom I would gladly have been able to talk freely about certain interests of mine, certain authors, say, as Bernard Shaw, Chesterton, Edward Carpenter, H. G. Wells, but it wouldn't do, it made them too uncomfortable, they wouldn't play, I had to be silent. An intellect thus tied down by literality and decorum makes on one the same sort of impression that an able-bodied man would who should habituate himself to do his work with only one of his fingers, locking up the rest of his organism and leaving it unused.

This vagueness is probably the reason why our scientific psychologists ignore the conception altogether. It undoubtedly connects itself with the energies of the nervous system, but it presents fluctuations that can not easily be translated into neural terms. It offers itself as the notion of a quantity, but its ebbs and floods produce extraordinary qualitative results. To have its level raised is the most important thing that can happen to a man, yet in all my reading I know of no single page or paragraph of a scientific psychology book in which it receives mention -- the psychologists have left it to be treated by the moralists and mind-curers and doctors exclusively.

I do not vouch for Janet's conceptions being valid, and I do not say that the two ways of looking at the mind contradict each other or are mutually incongruous; I simply say that they are incongruent [sic]. Each covers so little of our total mental life that they do not even interfere or jostle. Meanwhile the clinical conceptions, though they may be vaguer than the analytic ones, are certainly more adequate, give the concreter picture of the way the whole mind works, and are of far more urgent practical importance. So the 'physician's attitude,' the 'functional psychology,' is assuredly the thing most worthy of general study to-day.

Ask a scientific psychologist to predict what symptoms a patient must have when his 'supply of mental energy' diminishes, and he can utter only the word 'fatigue.' He could never predict such consequences as Janet subsumes under his one term 'psychasthenia' -- the most bizarre obsessions and agitations, the most complete distortions of the relation between the self and the world.

Professor Sanford, in a recently published 'Sketch of a Beginner's Course in Psychology,' recommended 'the physician's attitude' in that subject as the thing the teacher should first of all try to impart to the pupil.

structural and functional psychology. I am not sure that I understand the difference, but it probably has something to do with what I have privately been accustomed to distinguish as the analytical and the clinical points of view in psychological observation