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This author has studied the personality and writings of Saint Teresa, a Spanish mystic of the sixteenth century referred to by commentators as 'the geographer of the soul'. Dr. Reich claims to have discovered in one of her works, The Mansions, a remarkable analogy to Freud's theory of the unconscious. He further suggests that the saint not only anticipated Freud's discoveries, but that in the special technic she employed to approach the divinity through prayer, she divined the therapeutic method of free association used in psychoanalysis. It is called Psychoanalytic Self-Observation because the saint's writings were purported to be set down in a trance-like state which the author compares to self-induced hypnotism.1 This condition suggests a comparison with Freud's early work which made use of hypnotism.
In The Mansions (Spanish, Morados) Saint Teresa compares the human soul to a castle 'made of a diamond, consisting of many rooms which form seven mansions'. The soul's wanderings through this mansion in its attempt to find god and communicate with him are described. Dr. Reich gives a short synopsis of the work, which appears to us confused. Reich himself directs attention to this by remarking that if the castle is the soul one 'might as well tell someone to go into a room he is already in'.
The author then goes on to say, 'Saint Teresa has, in my opinion, given us in terms common to all mystics, a marvelous description of the human conscious and unconscious mind, or to express it more cautiously, of her mind, although I hope to show that this picture has a more general validity. This discovery of the unconscious mind would be an enormous achievement for itself; but Teresa goes farther. She found that the unconscious is not anything uniform, but that it is divided into different spheres, which correspond to different depths. The conscious and unconscious are separated from each other, there is a complete split between them, so that the soul is divided…'
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