Abreaction in
Romanticism and Evangelism

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

In addition, in another article I show that the direction of love flow between two people who are relating to each other is either from jealousy (love mode) in one person to jealousy (self-pity mode) in the other person, or from narcissism (love mode) in one person to narcissism (vanity mode) in the other person. [²]

In the situation between teacher and disciple, the major emotional dynamic is a flow of jealous love from the teacher to that disciple : the teacher and disciple link together through jealousy.

Whilst Wesley might have believed that he was propagating belief in god, in actuality he was the focus of his audiences’ blind faith. Belief in god requires an emotional dynamic of guilt, whereas congregational dynamics centre on jealousy. Within the devoted members of the congregation, the teacher is more important than the doctrine that he teaches. The negative side to this fact is that a charismatic teacher can often persuade his followers to believe whatever he wants them to believe, even if it is improbable.

The psychiatrist William Sargant, who studied religious practices, mentions that the conversion results obtained by Wesley were similar to those obtained by Hitler’s oratory and Nazi crowd rituals. In my view, the various techniques aimed at similar consequences, the induction of blind faith. People acquired blind faith in the preacher or the leader. [³]

The major differences in the results obtained by different teachers or leaders depend on the values of the preachers or the leaders – these are the values that the new convert adheres to. [4]

However, Sargant was confused in his analysis of Wesley’s technique : he lumped together all the effects on the audience as conversion, whereas there are at least three clear differences. To understand these we need to look at the dynamics of evangelism, as well as at Wesley and the psychological background of his times.

Romanticism and Evangelism

My understanding of romanticism helped me to understand evangelism. So I look first at romanticism and the concept that life is an heroic task.

Romanticism is in my blood. I admire the heroic in life. I am also an idealist (of the non-materialistic, or ‘spiritual ’ kind). How do these ideas link together ?  When I am reading about the life of heroes I produce two different emotional responses. When the hero was engulfed by sorrow and tragedy I generated an emotional upheaval of self-pity. Whereas when the hero battled to victory I experienced a different emotional flood – and this came from my inferiority complex. [5]. This second response is the genuine romantic feeling. The hero had overcome some mode of inferiority, some kind of disparagement. So my romanticism has its roots in the inferiority complex. My romanticism arises when the inferiority complex shapes my idealism.

The factors of romanticism are :

Romanticism = Idealism + inferiority complex.

Most, if not all, dreams of the noble life and conceptions of an harmonious Utopia arise as compensations to the inferiority complex. It is always a person’s sense of individuality which conceptualises his /her ideal portrayal of social relations. A sense of individuality usually arises as a response to restrictive social mores. In a society centred on material and moral values alone, social conditioning produces the social control of behaviour. But such control (viewed as unchosen social relationships) constrains and mis-shapes a person’s individuality. Hence the idealist romanticises a conception of Utopia where the person’s genuine, unwarped individuality will produce noble and ideal social relations. However, people that are evolved enough to inhabit the Utopia are thin on the ground.

The inferiority complex is binary, or complementary, to the need for social approval. [6]. So romanticism is binary to something. What is it?  What is the effect when a noble idealism is shaped by the need for social approval ?  This need generates a conception of the good life that is traditional and inflexible. Such idealism produces social crusading, or more specifically, either religious or secular proselytising. The evangelist seeks members for his exclusive heaven.

The factors of evangelism are :

Evangelism = Idealism + need for social approval.

Perhaps the ideal arrangement that the mind can produce is for the inferiority complex to set up the Utopia and the need for social approval to populate it with converts. Romanticism has its roots in narcissism, and evangelism has its roots in jealousy. Romanticism and evangelism are binary states of mind. [7]

These ideals are moderated by the love modes of narcissism and jealousy. Narcissism motivates the desire to be an holistic teacher (who does not have a crusading mentality), whilst jealousy motivates the desire to create a caring society.

I tabulate the ways that idealism is channelled by the four main emotions that are involved in abreaction.

If resentment and bitterness are not resolved then they will compromise and destroy the person’s idealism and his /her faith. If they are resolved then the idealism facilitates the rooting out of weakness in the person’s character. [8]

If romanticism and evangelism are not moderated by love modes, then they too compromise and distort the person's spiritual idealism.

Idealism and Evangelism

I return to a consideration of evangelical techniques of persuasion.

The Puritan mentality of seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain was an austere and narrow one. Such bleakness provides a fertile breeding ground for mania as a compensation. John Bunyan’s autobiography paints a picture of the times from the Puritan’s viewpoint. And he himself appears to have been a manic depressive. [9]

In this setting, a few evangelists such as George Whitefield and John Wesley developed a spectacular method of preaching. As they breathed out hell-fire and eternal damnation for sinners so several people in the audience would collapse into temporary unconsciousness. When these people returned to consciousness they appeared to be instant converts to the preacher’s ideals. Other members of the audience might be converted but without undergoing a collapse.

Wesley himself underwent religious conversion as the prelude to the development of his effective preaching style (before his conversion he had little results with his preaching). Now religious conversion is a low-key affair, and results from the abreaction of jealousy. The conversion experience does not automatically turn a person into an evangelist. Converts are usually content to remain followers. Whereas an evangelist of Wesley’s kind has to be propelled by a consuming idealism.

Therefore to undertake evangelism requires an additional input of intense vanity as the carrier of the person’s idealism. [10]. These requirements are met by the factors of evangelism, which are idealism plus jealousy (mode of self-pity). This mode of jealousy leads to an emphasis on morality ; when taken to an extreme it favours the ‘hell fire and damnation’ approach to teaching.

Wesley was in the tradition of preachers who believe in inducting a sense of guilt and despair in the audience. This tradition continues into present times, and so the results of this preaching continue to be seen as Wesley saw them.

His Results

His results on his audience can be grouped into three categories.

a). Mania

Mania is the escape from depression. The preacher’s style is simple. First he preaches dominant hatred for those who are ‘guilty’, then he ends by offering forgiveness in the love of Jesus. If there are depressive personalities in the audience then the preacher’s hatred will precipitate depression and horror. Then the offer of love switches them into the joy of mania. In this manner depressive personalities are changed into manic depressives !

Hence, if initially the person is feeling depressed, then he may flip to the mania stage of manic depression. Now he may be willing to help other guilty ‘victims’.

b). Jealousy

Religious conversion enhances jealousy, and so the teacher can instil blind faith in receptive members of his audience. For this to happen, a suitable member of the audience must have a sense of degradation that is caused by social factors ; he will be hating the world or hating some aspect of society. The teacher’s rhetoric dissolves this feeling of social degradation, thus initiating the abreaction of jealousy. This pattern of teacher - audience interaction is the most important one from the perspective of needing to spread an ideology, especially a religious one. The converted person will now feel a sense of commitment to spreading his new religious values.

Hence, if a person starts from a sense of social degradation, then he may graduate to conversion.

c). Catatonia

The most spectacular effects of Wesley’s preaching style was exhibited in the frequent occurrence of members of the audience collapsing with shock into a short period of unconsciousness, followed by the arising of euphoria when they regained normal consciousness. In my view, the preaching of god’s hatred for sinners had the effect on susceptible people of stimulating their guilt (in the mode of self-pity) sufficiently for them to replay infancy trauma. [11]. The shock indicates intense fear. This fear then combines with the sense of guilt to cause a collapse into a transient attack of catatonia. This state was followed, on re-awakening, by identification with Wesley and his values. The euphoria is an intensification of jealous love and the joy of being ‘saved’. The ‘sinner ’ now has a new model of authority transference, fashioned around the personal stature of the teacher. [12]

Hence, if the person falls to the ground, immersed in ‘the pains of hell ’, then transient catatonia is being experienced as his social identity temporarily disintegrates. [13]

Wesley’s teachings produced a mixed bag of results. Some converts stayed converted, while others gradually slipped back into their old ways. Perhaps those whose ‘conversion’ was only short-lived were those affected by mania. But even true converts need regular support in order to maintain their enthusiasm. Here lies the importance of Wesley’s innovation in holding regular group meetings and discussions – these group meetings produced mutual support and sustained the maintenance of blind faith, as well as that of spiritual development.

Transference of Healers and Teachers

Religious teachers, and some non-religious ones, can be charismatic in their relations to pupils. This is an over-emphasis on a trait that is commonly found, but not recognised, in the sphere of psychic healing (otherwise known as ‘spiritual healing’). And it involves transference.

Transference can crop up in the most unlikely situations. Consider the spectacle of psychic healing. The rationale of the process is that the healer transmits beneficial energies from astral spirits or ‘guides’ to the client. [These are beings residing in heaven who help people on Earth]. Then hopefully these energies stimulate and help repair whichever part of the body is not functioning properly. In what way does the healer’s ego come into the process?  It seemed to me that the general opinion was that any faults in the ego of the healer did not matter. So long as the healer attuned to the healing spirit, or went into a trance, then that spirit would bypass his faults (the same rationale governs orthodox church rituals such as the Catholic mass). I do not believe this view. If it were so, then why are the results of healing so often minimal, so often quite poor ?  Why are the results of the Catholic mass so often poor as well ?

For a short time in my late 30s I was interested in psychic healing, though I never became any good at it. One day I derived by accident what I consider to be the primary rule of psychic healing, the rule which psychologically limits the effectiveness of psychic energy transmission.

I was considering the feasibility for me to become involved in telephone counselling. I decided against it because I could not transmit healing over a telephone. So I wrote in my notebook ‘Avoid telephone counselling, as I cannot transference healing’. When I re-read my notes I saw the Freudian slip. I had written ‘transference’ instead of ‘transmit ’. The question immediately arose: ‘ Is psychic healing governed by transference?’  I had no doubt about it ; it was obvious to me that it was.

The transmission of healing energies is tied to the psychological mentality of the healer. Psychic energy is just the carrier wave for psychological energy. A person can only transmit in healing, without distortion, what he himself has experienced and assimilated. Whatever states of mind he has problems with, he will not be able to transmit undistorted psychic energy to others who have similar problems ; his problems will always effect the transmission. To have beneficial effects the healer has to establish in himself a beneficent state of mind.

Primary Rule of Healing

I formulate this primary rule of healing as :

A healer transmits his transference.

States of mind in the healer produce complementary or even antagonistic states of mind in the client. Complementary states occur, for example, when jealousy in love mode in the healer draws out jealousy in self-pity mode in the members of the audience. This is how a charismatic teacher operates. Such teachers can radiate jealousy in love mode. The way that jealous love flows in an harmonious manner is from love mode (in the teacher) to the self-pity mode (in the pupil).

However, healing is also a source of power. If a healer is using healing as his route to power then he usually stimulates an attitude of dependency in the appreciative recipient. But antagonism is likely to result in the recipient if he senses and rejects the use of healing as power.

Healing can never be separated from psychology, since descent into illness and then recovery from it always affects the state of mind of the person. So it is the change of mind in the client that is of greatest importance, never simply an increase in bodily welfare. And this change of mind is heavily influenced by the healer’s state of mind.

Unfortunately, the spiritual healers that I met, and sometimes worked with, had little or no knowledge of dynamic psychology.

They could not address the states of mind of the client because
they had little understanding of their own states of mind.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. There is an article about conversion, called The Conversion Experience, on my websites Patterns of Spirituality and  The Strange World of Emotion. The same article also describes the abreactions of narcissism and jealousy.

There is an article on Faith on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind and Patterns of Spirituality. [1]

[²]. The patterns in which love flows in relationships that are harmonious is described in the article Structure of Sexual Response, on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind.

A summary of the factors of some important emotions is :
Guilt = self-pity + self-hate.
Pride = vanity + hatred of other people.
Narcissism = love + vanity.
Jealousy = love + self-pity.
Anxiety = fear + vanity.

My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See Basic Ideas page. [2]

[³]. Sargant, William. The Battle for the Mind. Heinemann, 1957. [3]

[4]. The audience's receptivity to the values of the preacher applies even to secular phenomena such as music festivals. See note on the Woodstock festival of 1969 in the previous article Drugs & Dancing & Conversion, section Conversion Experiences. [4]

[5]. The inferiority complex is described in the article Social Approval & Inferiority, on my website  The Subconscious Mind ; or in the article Approval & Inferiority & Power, on my website Discover Your Mind. [5]

[6]. The need for social approval is described in the same articles as in footnote 5. [6]

[7]. States of mind become binary, or complementary, to each other when they are based on binary emotions. In this case, narcissism is binary to jealousy. The binary nature of emotions is described in the first article on Emotion. [7]

[8]. See the article Resentment and Bitterness. [8]

[9]. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. An autobiography. [9]

[10]. Vanity is the emotional basis of idealism. The reason is that idealism is the sublimation of vanity. See the article Sublimation on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion and Discover Your Mind. [10]

[11]. Infancy trauma is my name for psychological trauma that occurs in the first years of childhood. This distress occurs when the stresses and negative states of mind of the parents’ own lives are transmitted to the fledgling ego of the infant.

An article on Bonding focuses on some problems of a sensitive child and explains an unintentional source of infancy trauma. This is on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion, or  The Subconscious Mind, or Discover Your Mind.

In more detail, infancy trauma is explained in two articles. The first article, Vulnerability of the Ego, focuses on the origins of violence. And the second one, Guilt & Meaning - part 2, centres on why trauma can occur unintentionally. [11]

[12]. Authority transference is mentioned in the article Transference, on my websites  The Strange World of Emotion, or  The Subconscious Mind, or Discover Your Mind. [12]

[13]. For a different setting of the same catatonic phenomena, see the article Drugs & Dancing & Conversion.

The idea of having two identities, a social identity and an individual identity, is introduced in the article, Confusion and Identity. A more detailed analysis is given in the article Two Identities, on my website  The Subconscious Mind. [13]

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