Inquisition & Psychoanalysis Part 5

Creativity through Paranoia and Projection

Psychoanalysis has certain presuppositions that need to be shown as already inherent in the textures of the way the Inquisition identifies the New Christians it suspects of heretical beliefs and behaviour, then subjects them to sustained interrogations, and inadvertently and unconsciously often creates a form of Crypto-Judaism or Marranism—two related but not identical variations on rabbinical Judaism—so convincing and powerful that many arrested persons adopt it and pass it on to their families where it continues to evolve over many generations, and thus internalizes both the paranoia of the Holy Office and the defensive mechanisms of the victims: 

• 1.     that the human personality is developed in the course of evolution, both as a species as an individual within an historical community;
• 2.     that self-conscious awareness is a product of long, complex and incomplete development; that the articulate mind is not fully articulate and cannot remember or recognize all that it has experienced during its development;
• 3.     that many stages of this evolutionary development are precariously related to one another and may overlap, confuse and seem to block one another;
• 4.     that memories, rather than being stored for retrieval, have to be restructured, and therefore reappear with the residue, reinterpretations and gaps encoded into strategic hallucinatory illusions of coherence and logic;
• 5.     that not only do tensions and anxieties manifest in terms of neurotic symptoms and are susceptible to seeming relief when talked away in analysis, the underlying gaps and misconnections caused by individual trauma and multi-generational misfiring continue in new guises.

What the Inquisitions in Spain and Portugal came to realize was that a vast proportion of the population could not be trusted to be what they claimed to be, that is, faithful sons and daughters of the Catholic Church.  This happened especially in Portugal where all the Sephardim in the national boundaries were declared baptized at once and yet were given a generation in which they were not subject to formal scrutiny but also where during this period the future Inquisitors became familiar with the various strategies, ploys and techniques of Secret Judaizing,  In other words, a condition developed in which children were socialized in such a way that they did not experience coherence between what they were supposed to be at home in the domestic privacy of their homes, in the streets in the intimacy of friendships and communal activities, and in various civil and ecclesiastical organizations where they were to profess their loyalties, perform their public duties, and thus affirm their national identities.  The development of individuals, families and communities could no longer be taken as transparent actions supported by parental, traditional and legal structures.

            Hence, a mode self-consciousness appeared to exist—recognized by everyone at all levels of society—wherein, in addition to the usual modes of cognition and affectivity based on common sense, formal logic and revealed dogma, there emerged new and subtle modes of cunning, duplicity and dissimulation, that is, self-censoring, continuous sensitivity to environmental conditions, and reflexive questioning of all perceptions, thoughts and actions.  The construction of knowledge, the formation of feelings, the preservation of memories and the integration into on-going and supportive social groups all become fraught with anxiety, tension, pain and fear when a child can neither trust his or her instincts or find a steady role model in the family or the community.

Just as the maturing members of a family already burdened with guilt, distrust and insecurity cannot anticipate what sort of a marital, business or civil group they will live in throughout life—as they marry out of one identity into another, move from one geographical location to another, and need to ensure ways of escape or strategies of dissimulation—the surrounding cultures regard them with increasing suspicions, and thus the whole society becomes neurotic.  In fact, more than economic or ethnic differences, the so-called psycho-classes (based on child-=rearing practices, educational models and social monitoring) define the times: people can then move forward and backwards in emotional maturity and cognitive certainty.

Memories in such circumstances tend to be painful and humiliating because they contain at their core incidents of submission and persecution, and individuals and families, as well as communities, attempt to change them into more successful events, exaggerate or invent new episodes of heroic resistance and defiance, and generate a sense of continuity to replace the fragmented and lost fabric of life.  At the same time, a series of imaginary constructs are also manufactured to provide a public version of history and to rationalize away the gaps and embarrassments.  However, under the layers of deliberate fantasizing and denial, there are areas of unconscious energies seething through the somatic and psychological mechanisms of recollecting, seemingly represented by trivial, incidental and irrelevant images, sounds and other sensory knots, places of discomfort and doubts that when stimulated by external actions or unperceived short-circuits of memory, trigger associative trains of thought (Pathosformulen or energizing nodules)—from whence momentary flashes of insight occur; and these sparks, even as they quickly fade away into the dark oblivion of unawareness,  manifest themselves into apparently new ideas, where they can fixed and articulated as part of the Nachleben (afterlife or survival) of the original experiences.  If these ephemeral flashes can be gathered together and woven into patterns of argument, narrative or poetic conceits, there can be some relief to the aggravating anxieties and humiliations thsat distort the play of ordinary living.  Then, instead of the Inquisition’s stated goal of bringing olost souls back into communication with God’s salvific presence in the sacramental system of the Mother Church, the psychoanalyst seeks to ameliorate the individual’s neurotic alienation and allow him or her to enjoy intimate, domestic and social relationships.