The Spiritual Exercises and Psychoanalytic Therapy

A COMPARISON between the systems for the transformation of attitudes, feelings, and behaviour developed by two men so apparently disparate in outlook as St Ignatius of Loyola and Sigmund Freud might be expected to reveal nothing but contrasts. But we are so steeped in the, details of the religious and philosophical controversies of the last few centuries, that we are likely to overlook the common substrate of the divergent positions. It is the occidental model of man which is strongly characterized by individualism, and is in sharp contrast to the socio-centric models which prevail in the or ien t : One cannot imagine the thought either of Freud or St Ignatius arising out of an oriental cultural matrix. The decisive articulation of the occidental model is to be found in St Augustine. For thelast seventeenhundred years, nearly all descriptions of man's desperate plight and suggestions for its remedy have derived ultimately from his work. While at the metaphysical level he was a monist, he subscribed to an ethical dualism of good and. evil. Furthermore, by him man is held responsible even for those sins which he does not personally commit ; and it is easy to see that nearly all moral and social progress depends on this idea. His intellectual power was unsurpassed. In his writing he combined so many strands, answered so many different human needs, that he has been used as a springboard for almost every major theological development since his time. In this way he was the intellectual ancestor not only of all the theological developments of.the middle ages but also of the heresies, and all modern philosophy stems ultimately from his work. One can attribute the diversity and even the contradictions o f the resulting positions to Augustine's ability and willingness to balance both sides of numerous paradoxes in a creative tension, while followers have usually tended to emphasize one point to the exclusion of o thers :