In this paper, I shall describe the concept of “imagination” and the concept of the “I” in Rudolf Steiner’s thought, and examine the possible contribution of these concepts to psychoanalytical thought and practice. This examination is based on my doctoral dissertation, which, for the first time, creates a dialogue between Steiner’s thinking and psychoanalytical thought. My research brings together various psychoanalytical schools and Steiner’s philosophical and anthroposophical thinking and examines the possibilities this dialogue offers for enriching the field of psychotherapy.
Rudolf Steiner is known as the father of Anthroposophy, which is known today mainly for the educational method based upon it. Steiner’s body of work, however, is much wider, and includes – along with his spiritual thinking – extensive philosophical project. At the foundation of this project lies a philosophical interpretation of the scientific writings of the renowned thinker Johann Wolfgang Goethe. It examines the question of human knowledge and establishes a theory of consciousness asserting that people can know the world in its essence. This theory offers an alternative to the Kantian theory of consciousness—which is the "taken for granted" of modern western thinking—wherein human consciousness cannot know the world as it really is, but only its representations.
In contrast to Kant, Steiner argues that the essential nature of things is revealed to human beings through thinking. In his article “Individualism in Philosophy”, he writes:
The thoughts I make for myself about the things […] belong to the things […]. The essential being of the things does not […] come to me from them, but rather from me. My content is their essential being (Steiner, 1899).
From this it transpires that “I have the essential being of the world within myself” (ibid.). These words express the unitary approach established by Steiner’s philosophical system on the basis of his theory of consciousness. This approach describes the relationship between human beings and the world in terms of unity between them and constitutes an alternative to dualism, which delineates a separation and rupture between “I” and “world”, “spirit” and “matter”, “subject” and “object”, and contrasts the “spiritual” dimension with the “real” one.
Steiner’s unitary-monistic system stands out from other monistic systems due to his unique perception of the “I”. The human “I” is established in Steiner’s philosophical system as the dimension of the human being that is not satisfied by what is given to it through sensory perception: The “I” is what feels the need to discover in the world more than is given to it directly and to constitute a complete world view by unifying the dimension subject to sensory perception with the essence revealed by thinking (Steiner, 1981, p. 73).
In the anthroposophical contexts of his thinking, Steiner describes the “I” as an individual spiritual being in which the particular nature of each human being is anchored. People’s capacity for self-consciousness and for experiencing themselves as an “I” expresses the fact that in addition to physical and psychological existence, people also have aspiritual existence. The “I” is the very essence of the person, according to Steiner (1994, p. 48); this is each person’s unique spirit-form, expressed in that person’s biography, and due to it each person constitutes a separate genus (ibid., p. 73).
In contrast to animals, whose characteristics derive from their species,
What a human individual signifies […], only begins where he or she stops being merely a member of a genus and species and becomes an individual being. I certainly cannot grasp the essential nature of Mr. John Doe by describing his son or his father—I have to know his own personal biography. If we think about the nature of biography, we will realize that with regard to the spirit, each human being is his or her individual genus (ibid.).
Steiner’s thinking is composed of a philosophical system and a spiritual theory based on this philosophy. I now wish to discuss the encounter of psychoanalytical thought with these two areas, philosophy and spiritual thinking. Psychoanalysis has conducted a dialogue with philosophy since its very inception. This dialogue’s origin is imbued with love-hate relations resulting from Freud’s ambivalent attitude to philosophy (Herzog, 1988, pp. 182-184), and it continues with writing that acknowledges the importance of the fertilization of psychoanalytical thinking by philosophy. In her book, Thinking for Clinicians, Donna Orange (2010) writes the following:
In short, here is the thesis of this book: Thoughtful psychoanalysts and other humanistic clinicians are practicing philosophers. Doing philosophy every day, we always have to think more about what we are unconsciously doing. Engaging in dialogue with great philosophers can help us keep thinking and questioning. If we clinicians do not engage, we remain captives in an unexamined life, in the grip of philosophical assumptions we notice neither in our theory nor in our practice. (p. 2).
In recent decades, psychoanalytical thinking has been conducting a dialogue with a wide range of spiritual, religious, and mystical schools of thought. Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Kabbalah are only a few examples of the spiritual schools and practices with which such a dialogue is taking place. The researcher Gideon Lev (2012) describes the change that has been occurring regarding the attitude of psychoanalytical thinking toward religion, faith, and spirituality in recent years: After close to a century, during which the psychoanalytical establishment has viewed them critically and reductively or ignored them, since the end of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis has been undergoing a process that makes it, he argues, “sensitive to the spiritual” (p. 74).
Steiner’s thinking has been absent from both the list of philosophical theories and the list of spiritual schools with which psychoanalytical thinking has been conducting a dialogue. This is surprising, particularly against the background of the shared chronological, geographical, and cultural setting in which both psychoanalysis and Steiner's thinking emerged: Steiner and Freud moved in close circles in late nineteenth-century Vienna, shared a special relationship with the philosopher Franz Brentano, with whom they both studied (Herzog, 1988, p. 181; Steiner, 2006, p. 28), and a close connection with a well-known common acquaintance – Joseph Breuer.
I argue that the dialogue of psychoanalysis with Steiner’s philosophical thinking, as well as with his spiritual thought, has significant potential for enriching therapeutic thinking and practice. In what follows, I will describe briefly one possibility among the many I consider to be potentially embedded in this dialogue. The possibility I shall describe relates to the perception of human consciousness suggested by Steiner’s thinking, the role of imagination in it, and the connection it establishes between imagination and the concept of the “I” and the perception of human selfhood.
In his article from 2013, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Thoughts on Imagination and the Lived Unconscious”, based on his lecture at the Tenth IARPP Conference, entitled “The Legacy of Stephen Mitchell: Sustaining Creativity in our Psychoanalytical Work”, Philip Bromberg (2013) describes “the process of creatively expanding selfhood” as a process of “internal self-other dialogue that takes place while ‘standing in the spaces’ between one’s own self-states and those of an ‘other’ who is reciprocally doing the same” (p. 6). In his opinion, an analyst and a patient take part in “the inherent mystery of negotiating and renegotiating otherness between and within them”, and through this process, “each person’s selfhood—their individual self-otherness—becomes larger and more whole than before” (ibid.).
Bromberg (ibid.) argues that “It is in the process of negotiation and renegotiation that imagination and creativity are most clearly demonstrated as not belonging to either partner alone” (ibid.). He argues that relational psychoanalysis “is especially powerful in freeing imagination because it provides the context that most facilitates it” (ibid.). The ability to imagine “is enhanced by a relational context in which the experience of uncertainty has a life of its own—it exists for both partners, links them together” (ibid.). In the therapeutic setting, the analyst and the patient exist together in the creative space of imagination, described by Bromberg (ibid.) – following Winnicott’s (2005) distinction between imagination and fantasy (p. 35) – as a space in which “the person is experiencing the self as it now exists, projected into the future” (p. 12).
The topics discussed in Bromberg’s article – “otherness” being an integral part of human selfhood, the expansion of this selfhood through the relational context and human encounter, and the connection of imagination to the development and expansion of selfhood—are central issues in Steiner’s thinking and constitute dimensions of the perception that this thinking forms in relation to spiritual development. Earlier, I referred to Steiner’s philosophical argument regarding the ability of human consciousness to know things in their essence. Steiner believes, however, that knowing the essence is not given to human beings in their ordinary consciousness but requires a process of spiritual development. He describes this process as a process of expanding of consciousness toward knowing the world and knowing the self, more broadly and more deeply (Steiner, 1994).
Steiner refers to the spiritual process of the development of consciousness both in essentialist terms—in other words, as a process that a given spiritual “I” undergoes—and in relational terms, whereby encountering another person is essential for this development. The development of a person’s self-knowledge is the development of the ability of the person’s “I” to be in contact with his or her self-essence, and this development inseparably involves contact with the “world”, that is with another “I”-essence. Self-knowledge, world-knowledge, and knowledge of an “other” are not separate from each other, in Steiner’s opinion, and involve encountering the “I” of an “other”.
From this, we can infer the duality in the perception of the “I” that arises from Steiner’s writings. On the one hand, the “I” is described as a spiritual being constituting the very essence of the person, in which his or her individuality in anchored. This given essence constitutes the object of self-knowledge, and this is what is revealed or discovered as this knowledge grows during the person’s spiritual development. On the other hand, this self-knowledge is not possible, in Steiner’s opinion (Steiner, 1984, pp. 69-70) without the relational process of encountering another person. The “other” described here is an “I”-being and a unique essence in itself, of course, and is also undergoing a developmental process of knowing itself and knowing the other during the encounter between them.
A unique individual being and inseparable unity with other “I’s”—this is the human “I” in Steiner’s opinion. The process of its development is perceived as a process of deepening its knowledge of itself as a specific “I”, and also of recognizing its unity with the world of “others”. This process of the broadening of consciousness entails the development of forms of awareness beyond those of ordinary consciousness which relies on sensory perception. These modes of consciousness maintain a higher degree of contact with spiritual essence than that prevalent in ordinary consciousness.
The first of these forms of consciousness Steiner (1997) calls “imagination” (p. 297). Imaginative consciousness is characterized by visual images expressing the spiritual dimensions of being. According to Steiner (ibid.), “imaginative means something that is real in a different sense than the realities and beings of sensory, physical perception” (p. 298). Developmental processes enable imagination to be formulated as a mode of knowledge and self-knowledge and as a way for increasing contact with the essence of being and selfhood.
Bromberg (2013) describes the therapeutic encounter as a space where “me” and “you” become included in an “individually expanded self-experience” (p. 1). The process, which can be described “as a journey in which two people must each loosen the rigidity of their dissociative ‘truths’ about self and other”, enables “‘imagination’ to find its shared place. By living together in the enacted shadow of what is visible but not perceived", Bromberg (ibid) further argues, "an opportunity is afforded to encounter what has been hidden in plain sight” (ibid.).
For Steiner, "what has been hidden in plain sight” is the spiritual essence of the person and the spiritual essence of every “other” and of the “world”. Through the development of imagination, a person can come into contact with these essences—which he calls, following Goethe, “the open secrets” of the world and of himself or herself (Steiner, 2000). Steiner’s approach, whereby the spiritual essence is revealed to imaginative consciousness as an “open secret”, sheds additional light on Bromberg’s (2013) following words, taken from a clinical vignette he describes in his article:
I had thought that I simply was offering to Dorothea a potential intervention that she could use with her patient, but slowly I recognized that I was being a certain way that Dorothea […] was responding to and might be able to take in and use for herself […]. We were embodying, in our relationship, a way of being with each other that wasn't simply giving and receiving help with her patient. I now felt that in my suggesting she say “I'll try” to her patient, it would become more possible for her to in fact try. I could imagine Dorothea doing this. What was important was not whether she did it but whether it was a step toward opening her own capacity to imagine it. (p. 12).
I wish to argue that the “open secret” of the therapeutic process—as it appears from the dialogue between relational psychoanalysis and Steiner’s thinking—is connected to its constituting a transitional space between “I”, “world”, “other”, and “imagination”. In this transitional space, the being of the “I” is revealed, and this is also where it is constructed through the encounter with the “other”; construction is the mode in which the given “I-beings” appear through the encounter between them in this space. The “I” appears in the therapeutic process as a unique individual being and as unity with another “I”, and self-knowledge is enabled in the transitional space of the intrapsychic, interpersonal, and intersubjective processes. The “I” and the “other” exist in this space in a process of development toward a deeper consciousness of the “I” that includes the “other”; this awareness expresses the development of consciousness that reveals this transitional space to those who are within it, and it is expressed in the images they share.
In the encounter and dialogue between relational thinking and Steiner’s thought, the possibility emerges to expand our consciousness in regard to the therapeutic process and the imaginative consciousness of it. This consciousness enables contact with the essence of this process as a spiritual process occurring within and through human encounter. The therapeutic encounter between “I” and “I” opens a space for imagination and for its development as a means of consciousness and knowledge. This knowledge reveals and constitutes – at one and the same time – the unique and unified essence of the partners to this
process.
מאמר זה מבוסס על הרצאה שנתתי ביוני 2019 בכנס Imagining with Eyes Wide Open: Relational Journeys של IARPP – האיגוד הבינלאומי לפסיכואנליזה ופסיכותרפיה התייחסותיות.
Bromberg, P. M. (2013). Hidden in Plain Sight: Thoughts on Imagination and the Lives Unconscious. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 23(1), 1–14.
Herzog, P. (1988). The Myth of Freud as Anti-philosopher. In P. E. Stepansky (Ed.), Freud – Appraisals and Reappraisals; Contributions to Freud Studies, Vol 2 (pp. 163–190). New York & London: Routledge.
Lev, G. (2012). Denigration, Indifference, Fascination: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Faith (Hebrew). Ma’arag: The Israel Annual of Psychoanalysis, 3, 53–90.
Orange, D. (2010). Thinking for Clinicians; Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies. New York & London: Routledge.
Steiner, R. (1899). Individualism in Philosophy ׂ(GA 30).
Steiner, R. (1981). Truth and Knowledge; Introduction to “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” (P. M. Allen, Ed., R. Stebbing, Trans.). Great Barrington: SteinerBooks.
Steiner, R. (1984). How Can Mankind Find the Christ Again? (Eight lectures delivered in Dornach, 22.12.1918 – 1.1.1919). (G. Hahn, Ed., O. Wannamaker, F. D. Dawson, & G. Hahn, Trans.) (2nd rev. e). New York: Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, R. (1994). Theosophy; An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos. (C. E. Creeger, Ed.). Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, R. (1997). An Outline of Esoteric Science. (C. Creeger, Trans.). Great Barrington: Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, R. (2000). Nature’s Open Secret; Introduction to Goethe’s Scientific Writings. (J. Barnes, Ed., M. Spiegler, Trans.). Great Barrington: Anthroposophic Press.
Steiner, R. (2006). Autobiography; Chapters in the Course of My Life 1861-1907. (P. M. Allen, Ed., R. Stebbing, Trans.). Great Barrington: Steiner Books.
