QUESTION: Do you think that the society in which we are living, the historical community whose members we are , has reached a sort of adulthood that permits it to do without spiritual directors?3
ANSWER: The individual who today enjoys the sweet pleasures of a demo cratic morality would not want, under any circumstance , to miss an opportunity
liable to make him forget its distinctive reality . The fear of finding himself per manently decided on something or committed to something , inspires in him such a phobia for any spiritual authority that the least principle that might establish in ner constraints seems to him a psychological agent of some external despotism. Today all individuals are tenified of discovering that they are guilty for the sit uation in the midst of which they are living. This terror is ambiguous: It is the pure and simple terror of being, all the while desiring to be .
To be guilty or not to be at all, that is the dilemma contemporary man has felt so profoundly that he had to invent psychoanalysis in order to compel himself to lead a guilty existence, all the while giving himself the illusion of having scien tifically eliminated guilt. The psychoanalyst will teach him that this feeling is only a dangerous nightmare , only an autosuggestion under whose influence he could not live .
In fact , psychoanalysis is only a secularization of the Chdstian examination of conscience . But whereas the spiritual director establishes a transcendental de pendency of the soul in relation to God , psychoanalysts are doing their best to destroy not this dependency , which would be impossible, but the organ that is aware of it, which they call the superego .
This superego -this is the most usual clinical situation -has prevented the subject's being alive to enjoy the living conditions of his sunoundings . In the course of his neurosis the subject has developed an interpretative system that he is no longer able to escape unless one comes to free him from it. But what we are accustomed to call here " neurosis" is really the diversion of fervor from its real goal . In the midst of a basically skeptical world , the subject's fervor, finding no justifying reference , is enclosed in an asocial and incommunicable state. Then , by his very nature incapable of finding a place for the superego in a world of ref erences that he , on the contrary is only seeking to refute, the psychoanalyst dis locates the superego in order to allow the subject to live in a world that has no reference that will justify him.
By establishing the Oedipus complex , orthodox psychoanalysts believe they are able to eradicate original sin which, in their view , constitutes the basic neu rosis of our humanity . All life ' s inhibitions are reduced to this complex . If, in deed, virility is the criterion of psychic health and if the representation of pater nal anger has inhibited this virility , the psychoanalyst, on the pretext of destroying paternal censorship within the subject, must take care not to destroy
INQUI R Y : ON SPIRITUAL DIRECTORS 0 55
infinitely more: piety. Perhaps the objection will be made that the true goal of psychoanalysis is to make the subject become aware of the responsibility that the reality of others imposes on him, particularly in those cases of paranoia that make the subject tend to project onto others what he censors within himself.
Now , if psychoanalysts themselves are explained according to the theory of projection , they in turn could not help seeming to be the e,\ponents of the collec tive paranoia of a given social order. In effect, the community has no other cti terion than an instinct for what is injurious to its norm. In relation to that norm , the health of individuals cannot be recognized, insofar as their discriminatory in stincts coincide with the community' s , except by their faculty of discerning the enemy . Today , while it is true that psychoanalysts fulfill a social function , it is only to the extent that they cultivate, on the ruins of guilt, the discriminatory in stinct of the individual; and the cure they are able to achieve will only be an ad aptation of the subject's soul to the given forms of the collective paranoia.
Far from attesting to its adulthood, the fact that our modern humanity dis penses with spi1itual directors and puts itself in the hands of psychoanalysts proves that it dreads being adult; for moral recognition of guilt, or the conscious shouldering of it, has always coincided with complete maturity . B ut there are sit uations in which it can seem preferable to humanity to postpone sine die the mo ment at which it will have to pronounce its own sentence . To the same extent that spiritual directors were needed by generations of mature men for whom self-accusation , an appeal for pardon and humility , entered into the structure of a virile character, psychoanalysts are needed by a civilization of pubescents , that is , prisoners of a senile adolescence , in which individuals have become incapa ble of opposing to the multiple solicitations of modern life the resistance that is necessary for a conclusive orientation of character and existence . That is why those who seem to lead the masses are not really in charge but rather are agents of discharge for guilt, whether they take on the accomplishment of certain dan gerous or criminal acts (agitators , dictators , and in certain cases great criminals) , sensationalize reality Uournalists , popular writers) , or provide the support of a scientific method to reduce the feeling of loss (psychoanalysts) or to abolish the apparently economic grounds for social unrest (Marxist sociologists) .
Georges Duthuit
A few men, free from any commitment to the institutions and past dogmas re sponsible in differing degrees for the present bankruptcy , and equally uncommit ted to any fraudulent, economicocpolitical ventures of renovation operating on beings who are either fictional or almost completely drained of substance; a handful of adepts , outraged in the same way by morals that are in the process of being compromised, bargained over, evaded, morals that are either eternally or provisionally secure , either material or spiritual , and by " future" systems based