Paradise Lost as a Psychological Exploration
Since the Enlightenment of the 1700s, Western culture has experienced an increased separation between science and religion. While there are many epistemic and philosophical reasons science and religion should be treated as different bodies of knowledge, our societies have lost some value that religion has long provided in its secretly psychological nature. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst, spent much of his career attempting to understand the psychological nature of religion. Much of his work centered around understanding the different types of consciousness within the mind, with a particular focus on the unconscious. Within the unconscious lie the archetypes, which are universal archaic symbols that are shared across all of human cognition that manifest through dreams and mythology. With a Jungian point of view in mind, we have a useful tool to understand and recontextualize many of the classics of Western civilization, such as John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. In fact, using Jung’s theories we can extract psychological truths from Paradise Lost that find themselves reflected in modern trauma therapy within clinical psychology which allow us to better understand the psychological nature of religion from a non-spiritual perspective.
Paradise Lost details Satan’s experience after the war in Heaven and his constructing the downfall of humanity by tempting Eve into eating the fruit of knowledge that God explicitly stated not to eat. In order to start the mapping between religion and clinical psychology, we start at the mythological beginning of human suffering - the moment Adam and Eve had both eaten the fruit. After the two had eaten the fruit and had sex, they begin to quarrel. Specifically, Adam says to Eve, “Is this the Love, is this the recompence/Of mine to thee, ungrateful Eve, exprest/Immutable when thou wert lost…” [11.1163-1165]. Milton ends this chapter by writing “Thus they in mutual accusation spent/The fruitless hours, but neither self-condemning,/And of thir vain contest appear’d no end” [11.1187-1189]. After eating the apple, Adam and Eve experience immense pleasure and knowledge but then begin to quibble amongst themselves. This shows that instead of being in their state of equanimity, they now are in a state of desire that stems from their own “knowledge” and instead of taking responsibility for their own reactivity, they indulge in the reactivity and hurt each other. This is a significant change from the dynamic between the two before they had eaten the fruit. This shift is precisely the creation of the shadow in Jung’s framework. In page 8 of Aion, Jung writes “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.” The shadow is an archetype of the unconscious that must be integrated, where integration requires a lifetime of work. It houses the aspects of ourselves that we have abandoned, often because these are aspects of ourselves that we are ashamed of. The shadow causes us suffering when its contents are projected. In the context of Paradise Lost, both Adam and Eve were in a state of complete integration before eating the fruit, where they had no shadow. However, the knowledge contained in the fruit of knowledge doomed them to the creation of a shadow and the task of integrating that shadow. So how does this abstract notion of integrating the shadow, which we have shown to be reflected in religion, find its place within clinical psychology? We refer to internal family systems (IFS) therapy’s concept of fragmentation to explain the creation of the shadow and what happened to Adam and Eve when they ate the fruit of knowledge. IFS therapy is a form of trauma therapy that views the mind as a mosaic of different parts that attempt to keep the person alive. These different parts were created through trauma and caused psychological fragmentation - the split into consciousness and unconsciousness. Every fragment of the mosaic serves a purpose, though these purposes often manifest in dysfunctional manners that may be useful for the individual’s survival in the context that created the fragment but detrimental in the long run. For example, a child who is forced to do well at school by their parents under the threat of physical abuse will feel so overwhelmed that its psyche will split, and the child will not even be conscious of the split. The child will abandon the parts of itself that require safety, autonomy, and love so that it may succeed in school and avoid abuse. IFS provides a psychodynamic model to reharmonize these parts and bring the individual out of dissociation, which is effectively shadow integration. If we are to send this finding back up the chain of abstraction, clinical psychology essentially suggests that in doing the work of healing the psyche, integrating the shadow, we are undoing the damage done by Adam and Eve first eating the fruit of knowledge.
If eating the fruit of knowledge caused the creation of the shadow and the fragmentation of the psyche, we must ask why Satan was motivated to have the two humans eat the fruit of knowledge in the first place. In order to do this, we psychoanalyze Satan and contextualize him within Jung’s works and relate the psychology of Satan to trauma recovery. The most striking portrait of Satan’s internal workings comes at the beginning of book 4 of Paradise Lost. At the beginning of his soliloquy, he states “I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;/Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down/Warring in Heav’n against Heav’ns matchless King” [4.39-41]. In this instance, Satan recounts on his fall from Heaven and how much of a loss he endured. What should have been his moment of realization was tarnished by his statement, “Thou hadst: whom hast thou then or what to accuse,/But Heav’ns free Love dealt equally to all?” [4.67-4.68]. He ultimately chooses not to change himself but to blame God and spread evil. This action of Satan is called the unforgivable sin, which is blasphemy against the holy spirit. In Aion, Jung created the duality between the Self and the shadow, which are represented by Christ, agent of God, and the antichrist, agent of Satan, respectively. The shadow thrives on repression, and repression is what prevents integration, so it is no wonder that Satan’s psychology is built on repression of self-awareness. It’s almost as though Milton had the psychological view in mind when he decides to create Satan in such a way that Hell is Satan’s psychological state and is what Satan creates in the world. This repression is paralleled in IFS with the concept of blending. In IFS, the leadership self is the aspect of the psyche that harmonizes all of the fragments and contains wisdom. The leadership self can be seen as corresponding to the higher self archetype in Jung’s system. Blending occurs when the patient is unable to separate the malignant fragment of the psyche that needs to be integrated from the leadership self, and this manifests as a belief that the fragment of the psyche is actually fundamental to the patient. This is a more concrete version of Jung’s notion of repression of the shadow, so perhaps it elucidates what Hell truly is - when one is in denial of their own suffering, and thereby doomed to perpetuate their own misery. Denial is the first stage in the Kubler-Ross grief cycle, which makes sense given that trauma recovery is fundamentally a form of grieving traumas that have happened and positive experiences that are lost. True recovery can only happen once when one is able to realize that their worldview is distorted due to trauma and that they are merely experiencing subjective reality as opposed to complete objective reality. At the core of this relation lies the lesson that if one is experiencing psychological hell, it is best to look inwards to come out of denial and integrate their shadow. Within the universe created by Paradise Lost, God is fundamentally good and the source of all that is good, so Satan chooses to perpetuate his own misery by refusing to admit his wrongdoing. His statement that it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” highlights the insanity of the shadow, which refuses to let go of its own misery in the process of integration.
At the end of the day, we circle back to the question of why God bestowed us the capability to suffer in the first place. If loving God is the path to bliss, why can’t we simply integrate our shadows and end the torment? Why was Hell a possibility in the first place? The answer lies in the fact that God gave mankind free will so that he may have a proper loving relationship with man, within the context of Paradise Lost. Throughout Paradise Lost, God appears to be contradictory in his making man in an image of himself and also allowing man to fall. In fact, God himself acknowledges that he gave mankind the ability to fall yet does not claim that he is responsible for the fall when he speaks, “I told ye then he should prevail and speed/On his bad Errand, Man should be seduc’t/And flatter’d out of all, believing lies/Against his Maker; no Decree of mine/Concurring to necessitate his Fall,/ Or touch with lightest moment of impulse/His free Will, to her own inclining left/In eevn scale” [10.40-47]. The reason God gave man the ability to reject him is that he could not form a truly loving relationship with mankind unless man had the free will to choose him. In the context of Jung, this is seen through Jung’s characterizing the ego as a locus of awareness that is forced to pick between acting based on the higher self or the shadow. The fundamental nature of this split is required for any notion of choice to exist. Choosing to act based on the higher self, the god archetype, requires one to see through the illusions the shadow weaves and act on morals. This task is precisely what IFS aims to allow an individual to do better. In the clinical setting, an IFS practitioner aims to put the patient in touch with the leadership self, which we’ve previously mapped to the higher self in Jung’s terminology, and harmonize the fragments so that the traumatized aspects do not hijack the individual’s decision making. This frees the patient from patterns of unconscious reactivity that deny them free will and thus allows more flexibility in thinking. Of particular interest is noting that unconscious patterns of reactivity follow very clear if-then behavioral patterns encoded in the fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses that trauma patients exhibit. In this manner, human behavior simplifies to the point where it can be modeled by a simple algorithm, which robs the individual of any transcendent nature to do complicated decision making based on morality. Of particular interest is the research linking faith and spirituality to PTSD symptoms. Several researchers have found that spiritual support is associated with greater post-traumatic growth and more positive attitudes among trauma survivors, while more severe PTSD often causes a loss in faith and higher risk for suicide [Harris et al., 2008]. This can be viewed as the patient being so overwhelmed by the shadow that encompasses their trauma that they are no longer able to access the higher self, cutting their link to anything spiritual. Thus if the end goal of trauma therapy is to heal trauma and fragmentation, to integrate the shadow, one could find deep spiritual value in the healing process in that it brings them closer to God, whether it be Milton’s God from Paradise Lost or any personal notion of God.
A reasonable argument to make against this thesis relating clinical psychology to the theological lies in the biological nature of trauma. From The Body Keeps the Score, we learn that trauma is stored within the body and PTSD is largely a disorder of nervous system dysregulation. Suddenly, our mapping of psyche fragmentation to Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge is reduced to nothing more than a haywire nervous system response, and the spiritual nature of healing begins to seem dubious. But to answer this dilemma, we return to Jung, specifically in what the notion of an archetype even is. The mystic Robert Anton Wilson writes in his treatise on human consciousness Prometheus Rising that the collective unconscious from which the archetypes arise from are part of the “neurogenetic” circuit of consciousness that stems from evolution. In this sense, the shadow can be seen as the archetype corresponding to the hellish nature of severe nervous system dysregulation characteristic of trauma. Wilson makes sure to characterize the evolutionary nature of the circuit corresponding to the archetypes in an anthropomorphic manner by relating it to mother Gaia as in Greek mythology, or Brahman as in Hindu philosophy. In bringing this back to Christianity and Paradise Lost, we can see that the idea of God creating man in his image relates to the panpsychist attitude that the universe conspired to create conscious beings, thus giving the archetypes a more spiritual aspect to them. Therefore the reduction of the shadow to nervous system dysregulation does not necessitate that any divine nature to the healing of trauma is nullified since the evolution of a species that houses consciousness in of itself is an aspect of divinity. Perhaps this evolutionary trend towards increasing intelligence and consciousness is what Christians refer to when they speak of intelligent design, though the Bible and Christian doctrine neglects any potential of integrating science into the religious world view.
The ultimate goal of this essay is to suggest that healing work is spiritual work, and is the purpose of life. Religion has been a cornerstone of civilization due to its ability to provide meaning and purpose in an existential void. While there are many in the modern day who still cling to organized religion for purpose, the increasing secularization of the world has left a vacuum in meaning. This vacuum often gets silently filled by ideologies such as materialism, hedonism, and other nihilistic belief systems which ultimately cause suffering. By linking the notion of free will and the fall of man in Paradise Lost to clinical psychology through Jung, we ultimately have created a new meaning of life that revolves around healing our own emotional wounding and becoming more virtuous individuals. And while the existence of a God or a higher power is something that remains up for debate, we can be assured that there is deep meaning in healing our pain, for that healing paves the way to a better society and a better vision of the future.
Sources:
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self by Carl Jung
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
Effectiveness of a trauma focused spiritually integrated intervention for veterans exposed to trauma, Harris et. al., 2008