QUAKERISM AND ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY1
ELINED PRYS KOTSCHNIG
In the Spring 1942 issue of “Inward Light” the Editor, Erminie Lantero (then Huntress) wrote that several members of “the Analytical Psychology Club of New York City met…to study what relationship might be found to exist between Quakerism and analytical psychology. Three of these were Friends, several…had contacts with Friends, all had been analyzed…(by) Dr. Jung or (one of) his students. They had in common a belief in ‘analytical introversion’ which they had learned was in itself a religious technique.”
And she continued: “It is religious, because it is not a mere burrowing into one’s own ego as casual observers are tempted to suppose. It is a process of discovery that the self is continuous with the whole of human life, dynamically in touch with the manifold religious images and motivations which have conditioned the race. The worldwide conflicts of light and darkness in which we participate are found to be creative: we become aware of a new center of life emerging from them which Jung calls ‘the Self’ and which gives us our individuality, but which is at the same time far beyond the ego and tentatively identified with ‘the inward Christ.’ The individual’s obligation and deepest happiness consists in living out from this center, in his personal history, his own microcosmic version of universal truth and love. ”
In our group study the first question we went into was the silent worship of Friends as a means of reaching the inmost Reality of life. We compared it with introversion as practiced in analysis2 and with meditation and prayer as usually understood. We tried to get a picture of what a Friends’ Meeting is, by descriptions of experience drawn from different Friends of Quaker history, and from writings of Quaker leaders today. One such example must suffice, and if it seems a long one it was chosen because it covers so many points brought out in our discussions. It is the description of her first introduction to Friends’ worship by an Englishwoman of fifty years ago, Caroline Stephen. We read that, in the midst of her perplexities due to the influence of the naturalistic movement of which her brother Leslie Stephen was one of the leaders, she attended a Friends’ meeting. She writes: “On one never-to-be-for-gotten Sunday morning I found myself one of a small company of silent worshippers who were content to sit down together without words, that each one might feel after and draw near to the Divine Presence, unhindered at least, if not helped, by any human utterance. Utterance I knew was free, should the words be given; and before the meeting was over, a sentence or two were uttered in great simplicity by an old and apparently untaught man, rising in his place amongst the rest of us.” She felt “the unutterable peace of the undisturbed opportunity for communion with God, with the sense that at last I had found a place where I might, without the faintest suggestion of insincerity, join with others in simply seeking His presence.” She found thereafter that the Friends’ form of worship helped her to increasingly deep, “soul-subduing” and srengthening communion.
She felt that one could not forget current theological controversies while listening to the language of the Book of Common Prayer; only silence could heal the spirit tormented by these. Silence attracted her at first simply because it enabled her to seek help in her own way; later she found that the cumulative effect of these silent meetings was “strongly subduing and softening.… There used, after a while, to come upon me a deep sense of awe as we sat together and waited—for what? In my heart of hearts I knew in Whose Name we were met together, and Who was truly in the midst of us.”3
These quotations illustrate admirably the points of resemblance and difference which we tentatively established between Friends’ worship and analytic introversion. I can do no more than summarize them briefly.
(1) Both, as to technique, require an attitude of alert passivity, an opening of the whole being in stillness and waiting, without pre-deciding of what is to emerge. Elias Hicks wrote: “I felt nothing when I came into this meeting, nor had I a desire after anything, but to centre down into abasement and nothingness, and in this situation I remained for a while, till I found something was stirring and rising in my spirit.”
(2) Secondly, both experiences, at their full development, involve awareness of an autonomous Reality, which becomes active within consciousness, and yet is distinct from the ego, giving it strength, and direction towards ends which the ego only dimly and gradually apprehends. Jung calls this autonomous Reality the Self. Friends have called it the Inner Light, the Seed, the Christ within. Isaac Penington in the early rise of Quakerism wrote: “When I came (into the meetings) I felt the presence and power of the Most High among them, and words of truth from the spirit of truth… opening my state… I felt the dead quickened, the seed raised…and in this sense…was I given up to the Lord…in waiting for the further revealing of His seed in me, and to serve Him in the life and power of His seed.”
(3) Thirdly, both are agreed that the “something stirring and rising” within leads to new understanding, new sensitiveness, to integration and transformation of personality.
The main points of difference we found were the following:
(1) In a meeting for worship the attention is more on the central, autonomous Principle, whose presence Friends intuit and whose action they expect; while in analytic introversion the attention is more upon the streams of consciousness, their variation and their growth—the appearance of a centering Principle being one of the evolutions that take place. It is as if of two sunbathers, one should be absorbed in watching the sun, and only later observe that it has turned him brown while the other was occupied chiefly in watching his skin change color, and only at the end discovered that it was the sun that had done the work.
Thus, while the introversion experience is common to both and produces dynamic changes, Friends are less able to give an account of what goes on than are analyzants who are trained to observe and report on the inner process. There have been periods when it was otherwise. In the Quietest period, Professor Rufus Jones writes, “The focus of attention was turned upon inner states, and the mind in its long periods of withdrawal from objective happenings was likely to be occupied with an eager examination of all the inner ‘states’ passing before the footlights of consciousness, to discover which ones bore the mark and brand of ownself and which ones appeared to be from beyond the regions of self, and so divinely given.” Friends today are not “introspective experts”4 as Rufus Jones calls their ancestors. They introvert, and they bring up the results in true insights and deepened living, but they are shy of examining or discussing the process itself.
(2) A second difference is that while those who undergo analysis are by and large those who have been forced out of traditional moulds of experience, Quakerism sprang right out and was the spearhead of a progressive and dynamic movement of the Christianity of the Spirit. Hence introversion for most Jungians is a discovery of dynamic elements which are essential to Reality, but have been undervalued or denied by traditional Western Christianity. It, therefore, dons oftentimes non-Christian garb. The introversion of Friends brings back its jewels built into more Christian settings as a rule, though the variations are great from one region to another and one age to another. There are, for example, some Friends today who interpret Quakerism as a religion that can and should include adherents of any of the higher religions who have experiences analogous to that of the Inner Light. And the Quietist period of Quakerism habitually used language that has the greatest affinity with mystical thinking of many races and times. Abstract phrases such as “to comply with the motions of Life” come more easily to their lips than more personal terms for experience of the Divine.
(3) The third point of difference between Friends’ meditation and worship and analytic introversion was that while analysis was almost entirely a solitary act, or at most an activity to which one is helped by the analyst, Friends engage in both a solitary and a group activity, each form of it completing and enhancing the other.
At our second seminar meeting we took up the question of what Friends do about the dark side of personality. This was confessedly the point in our discussions on which we obtained least clarity, but I believe we can present a few findings.
(1) The first arises out of the discussion of the two types of sunbathers. The one whose attention is on the sun, which tans him almost without his noticing it, loses the pale sickliness of an unhealthy body without ever being as vividly aware of its defects as his companion is. In Friends the dark side is often transmuted by an unconscious life-process, the natural result of a steady, lifelong direction of attention upon that central Reality which in turn works upon him. Those of us who are Friends and have also undergone analysis believe, of course, that to make this process more conscious would be of benefit to many and is absolutely necessary for some. But we see the force of the fears so many Friends entertain, that concentrating attention on inner processes easily leads to ego-centricity and morbid self-preoccupation.
(2) A second point was that the sensitiveness and gentle consideration that are on the whole a hallmark of Quakerism tend of themselves to depotentiate evil. Where the valves are kept open, pent-up steam is not there to be blown off! The power devil, which is one of the chief incarnations of the dark side in our western world, has less chance of growing to his full dimensions when he is met with understanding and disarming courtesy and if he continues to offend, is “tenderly admonished…in a spirit of restoring love,” as the Book of Discipline recommends. “Tender” is a word that recurs all through the Discipline, and is like balm in Gilead to those who have suffered under the Sinai thunders of a Puritan conscience!
(3) Thirdly, this highly developed capacity for relatedness makes Friends acutely sensitive to those things that interfere with it, both in their own lives and in society. In their own lives first they are remarkably free from the reformer’s zeal which projects on to society the undealt-with conflicts of the reformer’s own soul. Their historic testimonies, work and sufferings on behalf of religious freedom, peace, abolition of slavery, simplicity of life, prison reform, and humane treatment of the insane were first of all a purging of themselves and their meetings of all share in these evils, and then only an effort to convince society at large. The Inner Light, according to George Fox, was “that which shows a man evil and leads into unity.” Mostly the light that shows us evil throws us into jangling disunity with ourselves or our fellows or both. If on the other hand we stress unity it is too apt to get us all “mushy,” thinking that everyone and everything is as good as everyone and everything else. To ponder the Light as that which both “shows a man evil and leads into unity” is to see what a centrifugal pair of opposites is here held together.
(4) The last point we established was that the long line of intuitives who for generations constituted so much of the leadership of the Society of Friends were familiar with those experiences of the dark side which arise from the collective unconscious and from unconscious evil in individuals and groups. George Fox wrote of the visions that came to him: “I was still under great temptations sometimes and my inward sufferings were heavy…the Lord showed me that the natures of those things which were hurtful without, were within, in the hearts and minds of wicked men. I cried to the Lord, saying, ‘Why should I be thus, seeing I was never addicted to commit those evils?’ and the Lord answered that it was needful I should have a sense of all conditions, how else should I speak to all conditions, and in this I saw the infinite love of God… I saw also that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love which flowed over the ocean of darkness. In that also I saw the infinite love of God; and I had great openings.”5
They wrestled with these principalities and powers not only in solitude but in the meetings, when in a later day they felt that the people were becoming traditional Quakers merely, and the silence a “dead silence.” They felt, as Rufus Jones describes it, “called to it in silence with a meeting until they had worked their way down, ‘centred down’ where they could feel out and discover ‘the state and condition’ of the meeting or of individuals in it, and then they believed that in silence they could ‘travail in birth pains’ for the ‘suffering seed’ and through divine assistance raise it into life and power and victory… As Sarah Tuke Grubb wrote: ‘In Penrith we had two Suffering Meetings: in both of which I had a greater unwillingness to submit to a necessary wading of spirit than I can describe; for really the spring of life requires much digging for, in places where the substance of religion is departed from and only the image retained. In this exercise I frequently felt ready to faint, and always engage in it with great dread.’”6
With this example we reach the problem taken up in our third seminar, that of the group life and its compatibility with individuation. Where so keen a group consciousness exists, is it a sign that the members have sunk into a collective identity, where the lines of unique individuality are lost? I believe that the contrary is the truth, and that in the measure that the group attains its true end, in that same measure its members are helped to individual growth. And vice versa. There can be no vital group experience unless the members have a vital experience of their own, cultivated by each in solitude. Preparation for Meeting has always been stressed among Friends. Sarah Grubb would not have had such agonies of travail with the suffering seed had she not been almost the only one in the Meeting who was living an intense inner life of her own, while the rest were living apathetically or casually in hopes of getting something from each other without contributing anything. They were living an unconscious collective life, and she was obliged to take up the burden of consciousness for them and herself. Such a burden can become more than can be borne by one or two only, and then the Meeting deteriorates or dies.
But in a healthy Meeting the majority at least of the members take seriously the priesthood of all believers, which is a cardinal belief of Friends (for they claimed to have abolished not the priesthood but the laity). The resulting experience of worship, and of sharing the messages that come to one or another with that glow of significance and conviction which Friends call being “moved by the Spirit,” does actually bring about increase of understanding, increase of sensitiveness, increase of relatedness, not as a mere temporary feeling, but as a regularly renewed process which deepens and expands through life. It is actually a heightening of the individual’s consciousness, an individuation process, carried further in and through the group than any of its members could achieve outside of or without the group.
Proof of this is to be found in the sphere of action, and the Friends meeting for business is the place to look for it. Business is carried on in the same spirit as worship, and all decisions are sought with the same religious dedication. It is assumed that a group which acts with this disinterested desire to carry out the Divine will can also discover that will, given forbearance and time for enlargement of vision through understanding of opposing viewpoints. Hence no votes are taken, but the clerk who has to register the decision does so when he feels he has “the sense of the meeting.” If unity cannot be reached, there is no coercion of a minority by a majority, but the issue is postponed in order that through further education and sharing of views a solution satisfactory to both sides may be reached. Nor is this solution thought of as a shallow compromise, satisfying neither, but as a more comprehensive and deeper thing than either side would have thought of without the corrective of the other. This is an active dialectic of the opposites which can be witnessed in any good meeting for business.
It works so well because it is at the same time a real balance of democracy and aristocracy. Every member is free to take part. Even committees are not hermetically closed against any member of the Society who wishes to be present; for opinions tell not by the number of those who hold them or the fervor with which they are advanced, but by the spiritual weight of the opinions themselves and of those who advance them. The mature and seasoned spirit carries more influence by unanimous consent than the immature, and decisions are reached in accordance with “the weight of the meeting.”
Naturally this system can work only as long as the spiritual life is actively maintained, and when it breaks down it is time to examine the life of the meeting for worship, and the life of the individuals who compose it.
We closed this last session with expressions of opinion as to what the most vital contributions were which Quakerism seemed to offer to those trained in analytical psychology. Among them were:
(1) The emphasis on the Autonomous Reality to be found within, a Reality which is supra-personal.
(2) The capacity for holding together the pairs of opposites in a fluid synthesis, without identifying with either.
(3) The hopeful method of adjustment between the individual and the group, avoiding authoritarianism and coercion, without falling into individualism and anarchy.
(4) The trained practice of silence, in order to get behind the barrenness of concepts and theories to the welling source of life. This seemed to meet our longing not for information but for transformation.
1. Reprinted from InwardLight, Nos. 15 and 16, November 1942 and Spring 1943.
2. Introversion, or “turninginwards, ” is used to denote that attitude which is aware of the world primarily as it appears to the subject, while extraversion or “turning outwards,” is concerned primarily with the object in itself, even to forgetting that objects can never be apprehended except through the modifying medium of a subject. Deliberate introversion, as practised in analysis, is a focusing of attention on the inner processes, in order thereby to deepen and widen the scope of the subject’s apprehension of the world, which has become so narrow and shallow as to dry up the sense of expansion, growth and sublimity.
3 Jones, Rufus M., Later Periods of Quakerism, London, Macmillan, 1921, Vol. I, pp. 967 ff.
4. “Introspective” is of course used in its general scientific sense of observa-tion of one’s mental contents, not in the restricted sense of morbid self-examination. Introspection must be clearly distinguished from introver-sion. The religious duty of self-examination falls under the former head, which is not of itself life-giving or energy-creating. Meditation, contemplation, worship fall rather into the category of introversion as a process of exposing oneself to and linking oneself with the dynamic realities of the inner life.
5. The Journal of George Fox: revised by Norman Penney, London, J.M. Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1924, p. 11.
6. Jones, op. cit., pp. 86-88.
In the course of 1943 individuals and small groups in widely separated parts of the world coalesced into conferences or summer schools to rediscover the inward and personal ways, thru neglect of which the outward ways of men in the mass end in disaster.
Elined Pys Kotschnig
Editor’s Note October 2004:
It was discovered recently that Elined Kotschnig first presented this paper at the February 1942 meeting of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. The paper remains the property of the Kristine Mann Library at the C.G. Jung Center of New York. The library has kindly granted permission to republish.