After all, the praxis of therapy has shown that even in cases in which religious motives could not be directly established as morbific agents, a cautious guidance to the experience of faith managed to bring excellent results; and whenever one could speak of a true state of possession, the results were magnificent, and nothing else could help but the correlative antidote, like the homeopathic principle simili curant similes. The demonic, you see, can be tackled with neither medication nor scalpels, although neurosurgery has made considerable advances thanks to the experiences gathered during the war in an agreeably large number of brain injuries; and modern pharmacology, which originated in alchemy, is now developing specifics that have an amazing and profound effect on the psyche—but here, in particular, extreme caution is advised, we shall have to observe very closely the effects of these on many, many patients . . . In short, in his discipline—namely, in the task of taking patients who tweet like canaries and leading them back to vital harmony—the most proven remedy has turned out on occasion—naturally, on the basis of a diagnosis founded on a psychological analysis attached to the previous thorough examination of the physical state of health of the patient—(my ears itched: I lost three precious minutes yielding to the temptation of checking the grammatical construction of the clause)—I (Hertzog was saying) have, as I have said, determined that careful and skillful guidance to new religious contents has turned out to be a proven method—but I already said that—as I have said: it has turned out that such guidance to new religious contents and thus to a new religious experience constitutes an effective therapy in regard to mental-spiritual disorders—

Period. Paragraph. A chance to clear one’s throat. Could I possibly interest you in another drop of, no, well please, really, many hearty—the schnapps is excellent, by the way (schnapps, come now, this is real scotch!)—anyway, as I have said, let us establish that when I utilize the concept of vital harmony—right?—then I do so from my point of view as a physician, after all, I am no lay preacher, I stick mostly to the relationship between body and soul, the good old saying mens sana in corpore sano must be understood as a reciprocal relationship: a sound soul also determines the physical well-being of the patient, as you know, we are now speaking of religion as a need of the healthy soul, but nevertheless its ambivalence still exists as far as I’m concerned—I mean: the immanent double-poled need, which is termed by the working hypothesis as both “positive” and “negative,” right? Thus, we know religion can heal, but it can also lead to critical spiritual crises, states of hysteria, and the like; we must reckon with that too, and thus we have to deal with the task of manipulating the bivalent notion with utmost caution, we shall thus find it now speaking for our hypothesis, now against it, and this is fully in keeping with the Marxist (originally, of course, Hegelian) dialectical method: analysis, thesis, antithesis, synthesis—right? Incidentally, this is at heart merely the ancient religious view of the polarity of Being—light and darkness, God and devil, good and evil—simply good old dualism, spirit and matter, faith and knowledge, subject and object, this world and the next world, physical necessity and freedom, and so forth, and so on; nothing but conceptual pairs designating the coexistence of two diverse and ununifiable states, principles, modes of thinking, kinds of worldviews, tendencies of will, epistemological axioms—and in intellectual history also the polarity of life and death, which is something idealism wants to overcome, you know, although it did not quite succeed, of great interest for psychology in this context are, of course, the teachings of Mach; the history of philosophy, alas, grants German positivism merely a subordinate role, but let us not forge too deeply into philosophy, we’ll leave that for later, we’ll have very different problems to resolve, the present-day intellectual situation simply demands a new theology, volunteers take a step forward! Germans to the front! We have an enormous mission precisely because of our defeat, but back to vital harmony: the equilibrium between opposites, the resolution of contradictions must be achieved, that is the definition of health: yin-yang, the tolling of bells at Easter, purely materialistic health, that is: conception of life, I mean: exclusively rational thinking excludes the world of emotions, which is rooted deep in the spiritual, and without that world man is inconceivable—or rather, conceivable, yes, but merely as an imperfect human being, a cripple, a mental amputee, our friend Nagel will agree with me here especially since he is an artist; the highest, most valuable expression of the equilibrium of mind and soul, as produced felicitously from tensions of opposites, is art, of course—and art, as a predominantly irrational expression of life (which Karl Marx personally foresaw, after all), is irreconcilable with materialistic thinking; it may be achievable in the gaps of the system but is actually an expression of resistance: metaphysical emigration, so to speak—