On Psychiatry

GA 314 — 26 March 1920, Dornach

On Psychiatry

It is of course no longer possible to talk about this topic, which would require an exhaustive treatment if one wanted to go into it at all, in any other way than with a few hints at most, because the study of psychiatry, especially in our time, certainly requires the most far-reaching reforms. If we consider how it is actually impossible today to formulate the right questions that need to be asked in psychiatry, we will realize how necessary such a reform of psychiatric studies is. However, such a reform will not be able to take place – for me, this seemed to emerge from Dr. Husemann's lecture itself – unless spiritual science first truly enriches the individual specialist sciences. For the development that Dr. Husemann has so beautifully described today, which began around the time of Galileo and culminated in the 19th century, has actually driven the whole of human thought life apart into two sharply opposing currents of thought. On the one hand, there are the ideas we have about material things and their processes; on the other hand, there is the life of thought itself, which, I would say, has increasingly taken on a purely abstract character. So that, since abstractions cannot be forces in the world, and therefore cannot be forces in man either, which bring about something, there is also no possibility for man to understand the material, the physical, from the soul, to build some kind of bridge from the psychic to the material.

Today, at best, when we speak of the soul, we have an idea of a sum of abstractions or of abstract feelings themselves and the like. This sum of abstractions, of course, cannot set an organism in motion, cannot somehow build a bridge to the organism. Therefore, one cannot speak of being able to influence the external physical, real organism in some way by acting on the soul life, which is only a sum of abstractions. On the other hand, there is what has been gained through science about the physical organism; for it has been invented that soul phenomena are only parallel phenomena or even effects of the physical organism. The concrete ideas that are formed about the physical organism are not such as to allow anything to be pressed out of them about the psychic.

And so today we actually have two parallel views of the soul life – regardless of whether one is more or less of a materialist – one that only looks at abstractions and one that cannot be used to extract anything spiritual.

It is therefore fairly obvious that it is difficult to find a method that could be used in psychiatry. That is why in recent times people have begun to refrain from talking about the connection between the physical organic in man and the psychological, which takes place as a process in consciousness.

And since in reality, between these two stools, between the physical-material and the abstract-psychological, one is actually constantly in danger of sitting down on the ground, it is necessary to invent a completely unconscious world, a strange and unconscious world. And that has now been amply done in psychoanalysis, in analytical psychology, a scientific object that is actually extraordinarily interesting. This scientific object, once it has led to a reform of psychiatry, so that we will once again have a proper psychiatry, will have to be properly examined, above all, from this new psychiatric point of view, because it is actually an object for psychiatry.

So they have tried to imagine an unconscious world so as not to be completely grounded between these two chairs. I am not saying anything against the unconscious world, of course, but it must be researched, it must be really recognized through that which spiritual science introduces as vision, it cannot be fantasized in the way that the Freudians or similar people fantasize it.

Spiritual science will bring about a reform of psychiatry by leading from mere abstract concepts, which have no inner life, to concepts that are in line with reality, to concepts that already live in the world as concepts, that have been gained by immersing oneself in reality with one's methods. Then, by ascending to such spiritual methods, which in turn provide realistic concepts, one will find the transition from such concepts, which are not mere abstractions, to what is real. That is to say, one will be able to build a bridge between the psychic and the physical in man. The psychic and the physical must appear differently in our minds than they do today, if we seriously want a psychiatry.

The sum of abstractions today, including those that comprise the abstract laws of nature – they are becoming more and more filtered and filtered these laws of nature – this sum of abstractions is not capable of being immersed in a real process.

Just imagine how, with the abstractions that figure in science today, one could find something like the two important facts – for I can say they are facts – that I mentioned in the first lecture of this series of lectures: the spiritual-scientific heart teaching and the spiritual-scientific teaching of the reverse biogenetic law for the historical course of earthly events.

From such examples you can see that spiritual scientific methods are capable of finding the way out of the inner life of the soul and into the world of facts, of building a bridge between the so-called spiritual and the so-called physical.

Above all, this is necessary for psychiatry, because only when we are able to observe the corresponding facts correctly will we get on the right track. And the facts of psychiatry are actually even more difficult to observe because they require greater impartiality than the facts of physical laws. For in human life, as soon as one moves from the so-called healthy, relatively healthy, to the relatively sick, there is actually almost no possibility of completely isolating the person. The human being certainly develops into a complete individuality, into an isolated life. He does this precisely through his psyche, but through that which deviates in the psyche from the straight line of development. What deviates in the physical from the so-called normal development is not so. I can only hint at this, of course; one would otherwise have to make hours of explanations if one wanted to prove it in detail. It is not the case that one can look at it in isolation; the human being is much more of a social being, even in the deeper sense, than one usually thinks. And in particular, mental illnesses can actually only rarely be assessed on the basis of, say, the biography of the individual, the isolated individual. That is almost completely impossible.

I would rather use a hypothetical example than theories to suggest what I actually mean. You see, it is possible, for example, that in any community, be it a family or any other community, two people live side by side. One of them has the misfortune after some time to have an attack, and so he is transferred to a psychiatric institution. Now, of course, one can treat this person in isolation. But if one does so, especially if one forms one's view from the isolated observation of this person, then in many cases one will actually only fall prey to a thought-mask. For the case may well be, and in numerous cases is, that another person, who lives with the person who has become ill, or who has become mentally ill, let us say in a family or in some other community, actually has within himself, let us say, a complex of forces that has led to mental illness in his fellow human being. So, we start with these two people: one person, A, has the attack, from a psychiatric point of view; person B has a complex of forces within them, of a psychically organic nature, which perhaps, if you were to look at it in isolation, shows what is called the cause of the illness in individual A to a much greater extent. That is to say, B, who is not mentally ill at all, actually has this cause of mental illness within him to a much greater extent than A, who had to be taken to a sanatorium.

This is something that is absolutely within the realm of reality, not just possibility. For it rests on the fact that man A, apart from the complex of weakness which is designated as the cause of his mental illness, has a weak constitution and cannot bear this complex of weakness. The other, B, who also has the complex of weakness within him, perhaps even more strongly, has, apart from this complex of weakness, a considerably stronger constitution than the other; it does not harm him. B can bear it, A cannot. A would not have contracted the disease at all if he had not been constantly psychically influenced by the influence of man B, who lives next to him and who, in this case, can be extraordinarily considerable because B is more robust than A.

There you have an example that is a reality in numerous cases, from which you can see how important the psychiatric approach is if it is to seriously address realities, if it is not to play games, as is often the case in this field today. The point is really not to look at the person in isolation, but to look at them in their entire social environment.

However, what I mean here will have to be put on a fairly broad basis. After all, it is also the case for the rest of the disease that there is a big difference between a weak individual being affected by some complex or a strong, robust individual. Let us assume that two people live next to each other from a certain age onwards and interact. However, one of them still has a robust, rural nature from his youth and background, while the other descends from three generations of city dwellers. The one who has the healthy farmer's nature and can tolerate some internal damage may, under certain circumstances, have a much more severe complex within himself, but he can tolerate it and does not become ill. The other one, who actually only has it through a psychic infection, through an imitation, through whatever is present from person to person, cannot tolerate the effect.

Here you can see what needs to be taken into account if you want to talk about psychiatry not from a theoretical and programmatic point of view but from a realistic one, as is indeed the case today, when we are already turning to the seriousness that arises from insight, when we realize how, basically, our scientists have become so one-sided, especially since the time of Galileo, and how it is necessary to take in new ideas in a fruitful way in all fields. Otherwise, human knowledge, especially in those fields that are supposed to lead into practice, into the practice of life, will come to complete decadence.

So I could say: Basically, the same applies in psychiatry as we say about the art of education when we talk about Waldorf schools: one should not just come up with some new formulations of a theoretical nature, but one should bring the living spiritual science itself into this field. What one has to say from the pedagogical field, one also has to say from the psychiatric field. It will never be possible to approach the matter one-sidedly and say: this or that can be improved in the field of psychiatry. Rather, one must familiarize oneself with the idea that Either one assumes the spiritual-scientific basis in the field of knowledge in general, then this spiritual-scientific basis will already transform psychiatry, then it will make something out of psychiatry in particular, which is actually longed for by many people today, but which cannot be achieved at all by the latest scientific methods, which have of course been sufficiently discussed with you yesterday and today.

You see, the main thing that must come out of a — let me use the trivial word — popularization of spiritual science is a much, much better knowledge of human nature than you can find today. People face each other today in such a way that there can be no question of any knowledge of human nature. People pass each other by, each living only in himself. Spiritual science will open people up to each other. And then, above all, much of what is perhaps still believed today to lie in the field of psychic pathology will be carried over into the field of psychic hygiene. For the facts are just such that, I might say, straight lines can be drawn from the symptom complexes of disturbed psychic life to the ideas that are so common in public life today that they are not even considered pathological, but are generally accepted. And if one were to follow up some of the very generally accepted concepts, one would find that, although more slowly, the same path is taken after all that can be seen in the pursuit of a psychologically abnormal symptom complex, which, however, progresses rapidly in the case of someone who is found to be mentally abnormal today.

All these things show that ultimately all the talk about details in the reforms of the individual sciences does not lead to much, but that if one decides – although today souls, many souls, are too sleepy – to in the sense of spiritual science, then the most diverse fields of science, but especially that field of science that deals with the various deviations from normal psychic life, psychiatric medicine, will undergo a necessary, I would say self-evident, reform as a result. Even if these cases go as far as extreme rebellion, raving madness, feeble-mindedness, and so on: only then will it be found what these psychic aberrations actually mean in terms of normal life in the context of normal development. And in many respects we shall find that the more and more healthy our world view becomes, the more that will be cured which shines out from public error into the pathological aberrations of the mentally ill.

For it is indeed quite remarkable how difficult it is to draw the right line between so-called normal life and mentally abnormal life. For example, it is difficult to say whether a person is mentally normal in the case of an event that occurred not too long ago in Basel, not far from here, in which a man left a large sum of money in his will for someone to lock themselves away in complete solitude until they had succeeded in truly proving the immortality of the soul. This was the will of a man in Basel, and I don't know what happened to it. I believe the heirs objected to it and tried to decide – not psychiatrically, but legally – to what extent it was related to psychiatry. But if you now really, each and every one of you, set out to examine whether it should be assessed psychiatrically or whether it is a mental illness or whether it is really an exaggerated religiosity or whatever, you will hardly be able to manage in full accuracy.

The point is that our concepts have gradually become weak in the face of reality; they must become strong again. But they will only become strong through spiritual science. And among many other things, psychiatry in particular will feel the effects of this.