Epileptic Traits in Paul of Tarsus

The psychoanalytic study of Paul's career has confirmed the Nietzschean estimate of the morbid elements in the Apostle's character and creed. Pfister, for example, holds Paul's conversion to be a neurotic manifestation, and Paul's new theology to be a reaction-formation against his repressed desires.1 The Apostle felt like a new man when Christ saved him from his obsessive ceremonialism and morbid scrupulosity. After his conversion Paul's Hebrew ideas were but cast into a Christian mold. Pfister's study of many phantasies of hate, followed by feelings of reconciliation, prepared him to find in Paul the Christian new affects about old ideas rather than a radical change of belief. Paul the Pharisee was full of morbid anxiety, which he later attributed to unsatisfied desire; and the Mosaic rules which formed a defense against the desires of his “flesh” were at the same time a cause of perpetual doubt and wretchedness. Before his conversion Paul consciously hated Jesus, who put the freedom of love in place of the bondage of law. Unconsciously Paul felt attracted to the preacher of divine love, who opened a way for the sublimation of Paul's repressed desires. At the moment of conversion the unconscious forces broke through the defenses of his anxious scrupulosity and compulsive ritualism. Henceforth his hatred for Christ disappears and is replaced by a passionate love; and his fear of God's wrath becomes a feeling of reconciliation with the Father through identification with the Son.

Paul's Christian letters are written in a loose and rambling style that indicates quick changes of attention and dominance of emotion over thought. The Epistles show his legalism, rabbinical pedantry, and fanatical narrowness of view to have been but little influenced by his affective crisis. The neuropathic temperament of Paul is obvious in his words and deeds. Though the records of his life are too scanty for a certain diagnosis of his bodily symptoms and attacks, the