Psychology is the soul's worst enemy, because in creating its own consolation for death it becomes compelled by the self-knowledge it creates to prove that the soul does not exist. Thus it becomes both a scientific "psychology without a soul" and a kind of overburdening of the inner spiritual self which, with no support from an inherent belief in immortality, goes to pieces in a way the neuroses show so well.
In a materialistic age which suffered from self-awareness and threatened to forfeit its belief not only in immortality but also in religion, as the exoteric representative of such belief, psychoanalysis signified a new attempt to save the spiritual in man. The most remarkable feature of this attempt was the fact of its occurrence within the mentality of our time, for it not only provided an exoteric symbolization and social concretion for the soul concept of earlier epochs, but it also tried to establish this concept in the manner of a natural science. Yet this kind of realistic psychology could only mean death of the soul, whose origin, being, and worth inhered necessarily in the abstract, the ineffable, and the esoteric. The initial appeal of psychoanalysis to man may be explained by its attempt to prove that his lost soul existed again; but man's final resistance to it is explained by its attempt to develop such proof by a scientific method. This kind of proof had to fail, because all it could do was to show that it could no more prove the existence of the soul scientifically than it could similarly prove the existence of God, with whom the soul is identified. In all scientific attempts to prove its existence, the soul has evaporated just like the noble metals in the alchemist's retort, which finally held not the substance hoped for, but only the residues of baser elements. Even in psychoanalysis man has tried to hold fast to that which he really needed and wanted, for he has looked to this "psychology without a soul" for a doctrine of salvation which it could never provide, even though its therapy echoed the idea of salvation. After all, therapy works only as long as it can sustain man's ancient illusory belief in the soul, and only when it can offer him a soul without psychology.