The Inquisition A Forerunner of Psychoanalysis Part 1

An Essay on the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition

Prologue

The following essay was recently returned to me after being accepted for publication a few years ago.  When asked if it had ever been printed, the editor first said he thought it had appeared a number of years ago; and then said he couldn't find it.  He subsequently sent the text back to me with no further comments.  This is something that has happened to me before.  In all my years as an editor, going back to the early 1970s, I would never have treated a contributor this way.  An acceptance is precisely that, though there are all sorts of reasons for legitimate delays, delays the editor should inform the author about.  In any case, since I am not up to playing games with other scholarly editors an y longer, I present it here in a number of installments, and will add some footnoted comments to bring it up to date and to explain technical complexities to the general reader. To begin with, let me say that my argument does not at all follow the line that psychoanalysis is a form of mental illness in itself and that institutions create more problems than they solve.  

Introduction

Repugnant and insidious as the Inquisition really was, modern apologists to the contrary, an institution that, by its persistence and organizational skills, along with its analytical acumen, way ahead of its time in regard to the concepts of the mind we associate with Freud and psychoanalysis.  Established both to root out heresy from the bosom of the Church and to help cure the sick souls of those lost lambs caught in the throes of uncontrollable and secret sins, the Holy Office probed deeply into the motivations and ramifications of what we would today call the powers of the id.  Inquisitors acted on behalf of God the Father and Mother Church to rescue their children from the clutches of Satan, assuming an evil counterpart both to the Suffering Son of Righteousness and the creative energies of the Holy Spirit.  In reality, as we know, it was an all too human institution run by fallible, ambitious and often sadistic officials, and on the Iberian Peninsular and the conquered and colonized territories of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchs served very worldly political ends.  Like other Kafkaesque bureaucracies to which it proved the first full-scale predecessor, the Inquisition continued for five hundred years thanks to the meticulous and dutiful service of trained lawyers and clerks, that is, to a banality of evil and an arrogance of power.  Nevertheless, this state-run organization—for unlike its own namesake in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Holy Office reported not to the Pope but to the ruling monarchs—developed a concept of sickness of the soul (mental illness), a diagnostic regimen, and a programme of treatment that, stripped of its overt moralism, prefigures modern psychoanalysis.