A SHORT HISTORY OF THE SOUL Pt.1

The birth of psychology as a branch of modern science is often attributed to Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology who theorised that much of humanity’s inner misery came not from the Devil’s temptations, but from the monstrous natural urges that we unconsciously repress. 

After studying neurology, Freud, had the insight that much of human behaviour appears to be out of a person’s conscious control. This view marked a major shift in power from the Christian tradition, from which our views of the self as a soul came, to the scientific secular establishment, for which now the discovery of the unconscious signified an important way forward. 

Nonetheless, for all its power, Freud’s view of the human animal constituted more a shift in language, than a real paradigm shift away from western cultural views. Humans were still bad, they still needed to be fixed, and the cure still remained a familiar eternal war with an inner part of ourselves that should be extinguished. Patients went through therapy to become whole again by redeeming their savage impulses not unlike church goers went through confession to regain sanctity. We had the church and one soul then, and now we have the medical establishment and one Self.

The West now regards the Self with the same religious fervour as it regarded the soul some centuries ago.  Proof of this is that the Bible and the Self-improvement market are equally worth billions of dollars. There is a reason for this, a reason rooted in a story that began more or less ten thousand years ago, and I am going to try to tell it as briefly as I can. 

Ten thousand years ago, as far as we can gather from archeological findings, people were animistic, and saw spirits and gods everywhere, in plants, animals, rocks and rivers, celestial events and much more. Small tribes had their localised gods, like bisons in the plains of North America, giraffes in the Savannah, baboons and cats in the Nile region of Egypt, snakes in India, but realised that they agreed on at least one God, the Sun God. 

This overall agreement was a big deal, because as the historian Yuval Harari explains, it created the mythological glue necessary to make thousands of tribal people coordinate their actions to build the first big architectural structures of this world. The idea of a hierarchy of powerful psychic entities became part and parcel of the new social fabric of the time, creating new economical forces. People were asked to leave behind their cat Gods and snake Goddesses, and embrace more abstract conceptions of power, nature, and the psyche. The levels of wealth and social safety that came with this cognitive leap went hand in hand with new technological inventions. 

Several millennia later an underground group of people began imagining that the God who had created it all, had also sent his own son to awaken us to the truth of his power. This evolution in narrative, allowed a very important shift. If God was the supreme spirit, and humans its supreme creation, then humans were a f%!#ing big deal! and I guess I don’t have to explain why this idea sticked around for fifteen more centuries.

In the 15th century coinciding with the fall of the centralised power of the Church state, this unitary authority bound view of God began to crumble. Many philosophers began to argue that the love between a human and God, was not dependent on, nor needed to be interceded upon, third parties like priests, popes and cathedrals. Each one of us enjoyed a personal and direct relationship to God, and could find him just as easily while pissing on a tree, as while kneeling on the main altar of the Vatican.

When Darwin showed us that we are the product of many evolutionary transformations, a bundle of genetic mixes and matches that linked us all to the worm in our soils, the truism of a soul began to be seriously questioned. The view of the individual and his unitary psyche remained stubbornly in place until later in the 20th century, but lately studies in developmental, cultural, and social psychology have begun  showing that environments have a very strong influence on our cognitions and morality, and so our destinies are more tied to human doings than God given pre-determined qualities or sins.

Why we are who we are and what lies beyond our ignorance and death remains a mystery, but the history of the soul as it is described and understood by humans has a clear history in time, one that finds its roots in scientifically verifiable processes. To the extent that we claim to know what the soul is, we also know that those claims are historically derived, and contextual to Western cultures.

Wishing you Well, 

Your Shrink in Bansko