Enter Ghost – the spectre of narcissism has appeared once again. Our analyses of Bowie, Peterson and now Dürckheim suggest that it is indispensable to the liberal, fascist and ante-fascist positions. This observation does not reduce Dürckheim’s thought to mere pathology; elements of his philosophical system resist this interpretation.1 That being said, the presence of the narcissistic structure in his thought is no accident. Dürckheim’s post-war philosophy was born alongside a quintessentially narcissistic/schizoid withdrawal from reality. While this trauma cannot explain his ideas fully, this coeval psychic violence scars his thought.
Trauma, Dürckheim believed, is essential to spiritual life. Peril connects us to the transcendent. Violence remakes one as a ‘true man.’ In an interview with Alphonse Goettmann Dürckheim emphasised that near-death experiences can reunite us with Divine Being.2 Much like Camus, who wrote, ‘In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer,’ Dürckheim describes how ‘it is in the presence of death that we experience the premonition of something which cannot be destroyed.’3 There is ‘a moment between life and death,’ he says, at the instant of ‘ultimate terror,’ where we feel something that can become ‘the most sacred core of our lives’ – Divine Being.4 Against death’s midnight the radiant goodness of Divine Being becomes undeniable. Death, then, ‘is not the enemy but the friend.’5 The chiaroscuro of dark and light reveals life’s utmost meaning.
In the Goettmann interview Dürckheim provides a rationale for these views on death.6 It is unlikely, however, that he derived his position through logical deduction alone. As we know, Dürckheim’s ‘break-through’ to Divine Being occurred towards the end of his stay in Japan. The day of his ‘wedding with Being’7 came roughly when the Allies defeated the Nazis, when atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when he spent six months hiding in Karuizawa from American forces, and when he was locked in Sugamo Prison as a suspected Nazi war criminal. Dürckheim found Divine Being during these years he spent at the threshold of death – at a time when his circumstances all but demanded an ‘emotional reflex action’ to conserve the ‘mapping’ between his beliefs and world. If his theory matches his experiences he probably felt the ‘premonition of something which cannot be destroyed’ while he lived so close to death. Divine Being almost certainly blessed Dürckheim with its warmth in these months of terror.
Dürckheim uses a curious turn of phrase to describe these deathly encounters with Divine Being. In The Way of Transformation, he says man’s ‘ultimate condition’ is union ‘with the maternal oneness of Being.’8 Man’s ‘true nature,’ he writes, ‘is always striving towards this possibility’ where we reunite with the ‘Great mother’ and her ‘maternal ground.’9 Immersed in this ‘maternal oneness’ we experience an ego-death and rebirth. ‘Whatever is inimical to essential being,’ he says, ‘is melted down and recast’ so our ‘new ego may be born.’10 Divine Being has a unique power to remould and rebirth us. Dürckheim insists his ideas have ‘absolute validity for all men.’11 Not coincidentally, the central concept of this sexist system is a mothering force with powers of creation and destruction.
The utmost potential of human life to Dürckheim is an abstract experience of mothering and birth. Rather Oedipally—or, better, pre-Oedipally—he also implores us to matrimony with this maternal force. The ‘true man’ must have his ‘wedding’ with Divine Being.12 Whatever truth Dürckheim’s writing holds, his spiritual system brims with schizoid symptoms. Schizoid patients, says psychoanalyst Harry Guntrip, have a common habit of psychic regression and withdrawal. Confronted by a dangerous external world wherein violence, trauma or tragedy makes their object-relations untenable, the schizoid person effects a psychic regression where they try to deny or eliminate their need for others. They withdraw their attention and love objects into their minds. Ravaged by intolerable emotions they also engage in a pathological ‘splitting’ of their feelings and intellect, leading to an imbalance that favours the mind over the heart.13 Consequently they become self-absorbed and emotionally detached, and they often preoccupy themselves with abstractions, theories and philosophical ideas.14 Some then seek the ultimate regression, and yearn for a return to the mother’s womb, that warm, safe place hermetically sealed against the outside world and the dangers of relationships. Alongside this desire to flee wombward, they often share Bowie’s ‘extraordinary hope for transformation’ and wish that they will be reborn with greater strength and vitality.15 The schizoid person’s hope to escape an overwhelming, post-natal world therefore manifests in two distinctive ways: first as narcissistic withdrawal and self-enclosure, coupled with a suppression of affect with intellectual activity, and then as a desire to return to the ‘maternal oneness’ of the womb and to be reborn more powerful.16 To return as a ‘new man.’
‘Human beings are ruled by two conflicting instincts,’ Dürckheim once wrote, ‘the urge to escape the world and the urge to shape it.’17 Born in a moment of acute trauma and intellectual hyper-activity, Dürckheim’s philosophy betrays his schizoid desires for a revivifying union with the ‘maternal oneness of Being.’ Harry Guntrip once wrote that Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger’s writings were schizoid symptoms ‘rationalised into a philosophy.’18 Though we hesitate to pathologise Dürckheim’s work, we must surely add this ‘dispensary of live-giving wisdom’ to Guntrip’s list.
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Footnotes
See The Way of Transformation, pp.25–26, 35–36 & 76.
See Dialogue on the Path of Initiation; see also The Way of Transformation, p.23.
See ‘Return to Tipasa,’ in Personal Writings, p.182, and Dialogue on the Path of Initiation: The Life and Thought of Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, p.29.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.29, and Zen and Us, p.130.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.74.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, pp.29–38.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.74.
The Way of Transformation, p.77.
The Way of Transformation, pp.73-74 & 77.
The Way of Transformation, p.77.
The Way of Transformation, p.87.
Dialogue on the Path of Initiation, p.74.
Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, p.406.
Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, p.20.
Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, p.54, and On Bowie, pp.49 & 171. See also Male Fantasies, Vol. 2, p.231.
Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, pp.41-44 & 50-51.
Zen and Us, p.123.
Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self, p.48.