One the most interesting, profound and important challenges to depth-psychology and psychology in general is the question concerning what conscience actually is, particularly a guilty conscience. It claims dominion over the whole of a person’s experience. Its power plays a vastly important role in one’s life. The phenomenon mystifies the researcher, yet is patently obvious to anyone with a troubled conscience. In some people it is evinced as a horrible dread, driving them farther and farther away in flight, and leading them to perceive all other people as a threat. In other people it reigns as an unspeakable shame, leaving in them the desire to sink into utter oblivion. In others it works as an infinite grief and loving sorrow, producing acts of redemptive and consoling repentance. In still others it works as an electro-magnetic sensor for detecting the presence of a dangerous electric current, warning and restraining them from committing an irrevocable and irreversible evil act. What we glimpse in the dread and contrition of conscience is no trivial or superficial matter, but touches us in our deepest core, and seems to bring us into immediate proximity with the higher principles of personal justice and love by which we feel ourselves to be governed. In no way is this a vague, imperceptible, mystical, or incomprehensible experience, but rather a phenomenon whose movement in us is felt concretely, individually, personally, intensely, powerfully and with complete clarity.
Nevertheless, psychology has hitherto treated this phenomenon in an all-too-negligent and perfunctory way. When one consults the table of contents of any psychological works or hand-books on this subject, it is astonishing how few observations and acknowledgements may be found directly bearing on the phenomenon. Why is this? Perhaps it could be said that psychology is still a young science and has had to tackle the more superficial problems of the inner life and to work through these first, before it could begin to plumb the depths of the inner life and take on the more fundamental problems. Perhaps it could also be said that psychology in its beginnings has stood directly under the spell and influence of the mathematical sciences and the scientific method of the past century and could not yet break free of their mathematical ideals and atomistic hypotheses. Perhaps also, since conscience and the problems related to it do not lie in the foremost line of interest for researchers in psychology, it may also be said that this negligence is a matter related to the particular outlook of our times, and that a positivistic scientific orientation must inevitably turn its back on the deepest essence and meaning of this type of phenomenon.
Today one sees everywhere an awakening to new questions of greater human significance. Psychology has recently entered a new phase, with phenomenological investigations, such as those by Max Scheler, F. J. J. Buytendijk, Alexander Pfänder, etc.; works of gestalt-psychology, such as those by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka; the endeavors of Eduard Spranger in psychology of culture; the psychoanalytic studies of Sigmund Freud; the works of William McDougall in behavioral psychology – to mention only a few new movements in psychology. All of these, regardless of how they may differ, are united by their common desire to overcome the older natural-scientific orientation of atomistic psychology (Elementenpsychologie) and the earlier school of associationist psychology, and their conviction that the proper subject for psychological investigation is not to be found in discrete atomistic data, but in the whole “nature,” the Gestalt, the “complex,” and the “structural-unity” of the mind as a “totality,” and that the realities signified by these words form the fundamental basis of psychology. This turning point – this crisis – within the discipline of psychology today has yielded a resurgence of interest in deeper, more fundamental problems, which, it may be hoped, may soon give conscience the attention it properly deserves.
While precious little has been said about the subject of conscience by those in psychology before now, the subject has managed to garner considerably more attention in theological as well as philosophical ethics. Unfortunately, however, within those disciplines the psychological point of view is usually subordinated to philosophical and theological interests – which are quite lethal for the problem of conscience itself, as well as for the other theories in question. As a result, a complete chaos prevails in ethics concerning the problem of conscience – a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) – and, at the same time, a consummate labyrinth of ambiguous concepts. One need only consult miscellaneous definitions in miscellaneous works of ethics to see this.
Conscience may be regarded as a divine oracle, as the highest court of reason, as human judgment, as feeling, as will, as a compulsion, or as an instinct. It may be identified with our general moral nature, or with syllogistic logic. It may be seen as infallible or, contrariwise, as “untrustworthy,” as grounded in convention, as the voice of the community, or individual subjectivity. It may be seen as something divine in the person, or as a bio-genetically predisposed experience of “guilt” found even in animals – as a condition, a function, an organ, an act, etc.
When we venture into the problem of conscience under such circumstances, therefore, it is imperative that we do not let such theories of conscience and the history of the problem prejudice our judgment. It is important, instead, to take as our starting point the objective reality – the actual experience of conscience as such – and to let this objective reality alone have the last word over the truth of the theories. This is what we intend in the present work – to endeavor to understand conscience, not as abstractly or theoretically conceived, but to grasp it descriptively in its concrete and actual existential depth, and to strive thus to understand its significance.
(excerpted from chapter 1)
