It is at least conceivable that what Mesmer was discovering was a different kind of mentality that, given a proper locale, a special education in childhood, a surrounding belief system, and isolation from the rest of us, possibly could have sustained itself as a society not based on ordinary consciousness, where metaphors of energy and irresistible control would assume some of the functions of consciousness. How is this even possible? As I have mentioned already, I think Mesmer was clumsily stumbling into a new way of engaging that neurological patterning I have called the general bicameral paradigm with its four aspects: collective cognitive imperative, induction, trance, and archaic authorization. I shall take up each in turn.

• society
• isolation
• education
• consciousness
• control
• functions
• collective
• energy
• authorization
• belief
• mesmer

This is Rank’s devastating Kierkegaardian conclusion: if neurosis is sin, and not disease, then the only thing which can “cure” it is a world-view, some kind of affirmative collective ideology in which the person can perform the living drama of his acceptance as a creature. Only in this way can the neurotic come out of his isolation to become part of such a larger and higher wholeness as religion has always represented. In anthropology we called these the myth-ritual complexes of traditional society. Does the neurotic lack something outside him to absorb his need for perfection? Does he eat himself up with obsessions? The myth-ritual complex is a social form for the channelling of obsessions. We might say that it places creative obsession within the reach of everyman, which is precisely the function of ritual. This function is what Freud saw when he talked about the obsessive quality of primitive religion and compared it to neurotic obsession. But he didn’t see how natural this was, how all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control in one way or another. It automatically engineers safety and banishes despair by keeping people focussed on the noses in front of their faces.

• rank
• kierkegaard
• neurosis
• sin
• disease
• ideology
• collective
• humanity
• isolation
• integration
• religion
• culture
• anthropology
• myth
• ritual
• rites
• society
• obsession
• creativity
• freud
• control
• magick
• belief
• authorization
• life
• complexes

The hero, as the vehicle of this effort at compensation, becomes alienated from the normal human situation and from the collective.  This decollectivization entails suffering, and he suffers at the same time because, in his struggle for freedom, he is also the victim and representative of the obsolete, old order and is forced to bear the burden of it in his own soul.\n\n '...Jung puts it that the danger to which the hero is exposed 'isolation in himself.'  The suffering entailed by the very fact of being an ego and an individual is implicit in the hero's situation of having to distinguish himself psychologically from his fellows.  He sees things they do not see, does not fall for the things they fall for - but that means that he is a different type of human being and therefore necessarily alone.  The loneliness of Prometheus on the rock or of Christ on the cross is the sacrifice they have to endure for having brought fire and redemption to mankind.

• the hero
• collective
• ego
• freedom
• humanity
• individuation
• jung
• loneliness
• redemption
• sacrifice
• suffering
• soul
• isolation
• time
• danger
• christ
• struggle
• fall
• situation