In the elements of these psychological pictures we readily can recognize the elements of the two contrasting types of our Sulphur personality and constitution: the stagnating, congested, earthy side and the restless, driving, burning, itching, ragged philosopher with all possible blendings and combinations of the individual elements in one particular person.
Beyond these superficial aspects, however, the polarity of life and light of nature and the cause of corruption at the same time, seems to allude to the mysterious and intricate intertwining of good and evil in the creative elements of existence which we experience as a moral problem in our soul.
This is touched upon in the symbolism of the identity of illness, medicine and healer as well as of the tempter and the redeemer, which looms in the background as a transcendent archetypal principle that encompasses and transcends good and evil, life and death, earth and spirit, and forces upon us the almost impossible task of being a dweller in two words, rendering unto Caesar what is Caesars and unto God what is Gods.
Unconsciously, this may loom as a background problem wherever the conflict situation is brought forth that manifests the “force field” that homoeopaths or alchemists call Sulphur.
What is to be gained by considering the above psychological symbolism which surely must strike as fanciful, mysterious and far-fetched anyone not familiar with it? It is hoped that this approach which brings together Homoeopathy and depth psychology may help us make a few first stumbling steps towards clarifying some of our bewildering problems, such as the relationship of life and personality problems to illness, of illness and symptoms to the similar remedy, etc.
In the synchronistic, causeless, a priori arrangement, the “bundle” of phenomena that we associate with Sulphur-outside events, psychic, somatic, biologic and chemical dynamisms-they all seem to express, each in its own fashion, a transcendental meaning that, with our human limitation of comprehension, we can but describe as a conflict tension between the above and the below, spirit and instinct, intuition and physical reality, the flame of creative impulsiveness and the inertia of dense matter, the catabolic processes of oxidation, combustion and decomposition and the anabolic life process of quiet synthesis and reconstruction.
When, in a predominantly extroverted, object- oriented individual, the tension of the conflict exceeds his ability to integrate it by finding a point of balance within that would satisfy the demands of both sides-whenever this integrative ability fails-then either the forces of egotistic instinct gratification, inertia, stand-still, corruption, putrefaction and stagnation prevail or the opposite ones of flighty intuition, conceit, exaggerated spirituality which loses the ground from under its feet with restless, burning overactivity mentally and physically.
Whether this disturbance expresses itself physical illness or as a personality trait, an analogous pattern underlies the somatic illness or the psychopathology; the same “field” brings itself to expression on different levels.
Obviously, the conflict thus described is a general human one and does not apply to some individuals only. Yet this would be no more in contradiction to our assumption than the fact that Sulphur is a chemical constituent of all living tissue maintaining cellular respiration (cystin-cystein transfer) and yet the clinical Sulphur disorder which calls for it as a remedy affects only certain people. Similarly, the “meaning” that express itself through the “force field” is, in its widest sense, valid for everyone. But only for certain individuals does that “field become activated in such a way that phenomena of a manifest disturbance are called forth in soul or body.
To the psychologist this peculiar dynamism is well-known. To give an example merely by analogy: we all have fathers and mothers and may or may not have encountered difficulties in our relation to them; yet only for some individuals does the parent-child relationship actually engender manifest pathology by activating a conflict. The “field” may be ever present. In order to be manifest, it has to become “constellated,” as the analytical psychologist calls its activation, comparable to the “causeless” discharge of an energy quantum.
Psychologically interesting is the fact that Hahnemann supposedly called Sulphur the “king of antipsorics,” psora being considered by him the universal illness of mankind. Similarly, Kent equates psora to the sinful state of mankind.9 Evidently, we meet here with an example of how the preoccupation with the same object-matter called forth the same symbolic representations as a spontaneous creation of the collective unconscious.
The alchemists spoke of Sulphur as the prima materia oaf the “king” sol and as the medicina and the medicus who receives as well as heals the sickness, meaning the divine medicine, the panacea for the universal illness of mankind. In spite of Hahnemanns, as well as Kents, conscious commitment to the principle of individualization which is the backbone of homoeotherapeutics we find that out of their unconscious arises spontaneously the archetypal symbol of the panacea, the divine medicine which is to heal the universal illness of mankind, namely, the split between the above and below.
Yet, the divine medicine is an attribute of the “Self,” which is the synthesis and totality of existence; this, however, the alchemists already projected upon Sulphur. Thus, even in our contemporary pioneer workers, the preoccupation with that same “force field” constellates in their soul the “meaning” in the form of the identical mythologem that we find documented already in the antique and medieval times.
In may still appear rather fanciful and far-fetched, indeed, to consider such “abstract” and purely philosophical considerations as having a legitimate place in the clinical approach. What actual relation to illness do questions of philosophy and “Weltanschang” have? Only recently a psychiatrist working in a State Hospital remarked to the writer that the material produced by schizophrenic patients is almost invariably of either sexual or religious nature.
C.G. Jung express himself even more poignantly on this issue. He says:
Among all my patients in the second half of life-that is to say over thirty-five-there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that everyone of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook. This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership in a church.10.
The problem of neurosis extends from the disturbed sphere of the instincts to the ultimate questions and decisions of our whole approach to existence (Weltanschang).11.
This, we must admit, if it is true of neurosis and psychosis, is likely to be equally true of the corresponding “organic” manifestations of endogenous pathology, once we accept them as partial manifestations of the same psychosomatic unit of happening.
For no outer reasons-as non-causal, discontinuous, spontaneous occurrences-life confronts us with ever new problems and events from outside, as well as from within. Our human comprehension can grasp and understand only the cause and effect chain of our daily conscious life. The non-causal manifestations of creative pure energy through the quanta of the subatomic realm, as well as through the synchronistic cycles of the unconscious which includes psychic, somatic and outside events, ate lastly incomprehensible to us; we can merely describe and enumerate them.
They differ in no way, as far as our ability to grasp them is concerned, from the ever incomprehensible manifestations of the hand of God. Throughout all these manifestations we discover law and order at every step. Whether we prefer to speak of laws of nature or of the hand of God, as scientists as well as human beings we must admit that we are confronted with directed and meaningful entities that constantly are creatively active in our lives, though ever transcending our comprehension. While offering our best efforts towards consciousness and understanding co-operation we have to bow in awe and reverence before the eternal majesty of the Guiding Power of existence.
DISCUSSION.
DR. ELIZABETH WRIGHT HUBBARD (New York, N. Y.): Browning, the poet, when he wrote one of his more abstruse poems, said that he understood it and God understood it, but that after he wrote it, he forgot why he had written it. I am sure that is the way some people feel about this paper, but I feel that if I had come from California and had heard nothing but this paper, I would go away rejoicing.
This is a great paper and most appropriate, and most difficult. I practically have a headache trying to follow it. I have not as yet studied Jung as much as I should, which makes it a sin; but if we could hear a paper like this every second Tuesday, we would all be different people.
