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Pilgrim's Progress and other writings of John Bunyan provide a surprising insight into the depth psychology of British Puritanism. John Bunyan lived
in the first half of the seventeenth century and his works 'are the most thorough attempt at religion introspection that we possess in the English language'.
Religious conversion, according to the author, usually follows the pattern: vision, conviction of sin, absolution, sense of mission. All four stages are different in the Puritan than in other confessions. Puritanism is characterized by intense ambivalence toward the father. While the Puritans are rebelling against church authorities, their God (their superego) becomes all the more a rigid and strict authority. A split of the father image into an absolutely good and an absolutely bad force—into God and Devil—and the fact that those two forces are fighting each other within the believer's bosom, is discernible in all stages of Bunyan's development. This was already true when Bunyan was a child ('Protestantism rests upon an early parent-child situation, where the child is alternately scolded and cajoled') and his subsequent marriage is less characterized by his relation to his wife than by his ambivalent relation to his father-in-law. The constant inner anal-sadistic attitude is counteracted by an equally constant extreme feeling of guilt. Obsessive thoughts which tell Bunyan that he would have to repeat the sin of Judas are finally overcome by a 'salvation' which is based on an identification with Christ. However, 'the convert can never rest in the certain knowledge that the conflict is over and that victory is his'. The struggle goes on, and Evans summarizes: 'The Puritan character may be regarded as an integrated system of reaction-formations'. It is regrettable that the specific structurization of the father conflict as reflected in Puritanism is not brought into sufficiently specific connection with the special social conditions at the time of its o