From Psychoanalysis to Psychosynthesis

Nervous disorders take the most varying forms in individual cases. There is one thing, however, which invariably strikes us as their most outstanding and universal characteristic, viz., a certain dissociation of the mentality, a disruption of the personality, a breaking off of natural connections. In obsessions this occurs with schematic simplicity—groups of thoughts and emotions have, so to say, been severed from the ego and intrude upon the patient as foreign invaders. With this in mind we can understand how nervous diseases, at a primitive stage of science, could be interpreted as possession by evil powers. How often do we not hear the patient complaining that he no longer feels like a human being but like a cluster of impulses, emotions, volitional efforts and idle thoughts moving in a chaotic struggle of everything against everything else. The permanent state of uneasiness and discomfort he lives in is but an equivalent emotional reaction against this state of things—the unrest which impels him hither and thither and never leaves him in peace is but the unconscious search for a way from chaos to a tolerable form of life—and anxiety, the symptom which most often prompts him to consult a physician, is the organism's danger signal warning him that he is moving downwards to perdition—towards a disintegration which makes adaptation to life impossible.

When this psychic disintegration is being projected on to the nervous system, it gives rise to obsessional nervous phenomena of the most varied kinds. The normal coordination between the will and the nervous system, as well as that between the different spheres