SCP 11-2

A Royal Road to the Christian Unconscious?

V. ELLSWORTH LEWIS, PH.D.

T ransversing the Holy Roman Empire, roughly in the form of a cross borne eastward, were the Via Regia and the Via Imperii . Regia ran from coastal Spain to Moscow. Imperii ran from the Baltic Sea southward to Rome. During the Dark Ages, the emperor assured voyagers safe passage over these routes through vast stretches of chaos. When Freud published his seminal work on dream interpretation, he called dreams the via regia to the unconscious. Dream interpretation is not in itself unbiblical. Joseph and Daniel interpreted dreams that Pharoah and Nebuchadnezzar could not understand. On the other hand, dream interpretation in the Bible appears to be unique and prophetic, not general and psychoanalytic. More broadly, it is doubtful whether the Scriptures supply us with an explicit concept of the unconscious in the modern

sense. Christians may be reluctant to travel any royal road (be it paved with dreams or other cobblestone) into psychic territory that they find categorically suspect. And yet, some notion of an unconscious is sneakily omnipresent in the Scriptures: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” We see in a mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13:12), with hardened hearts (Heb. 3:8) and constricted bowels (2 Cor. 6:12). We are lost (Luke 19:10) and living in darkness (Luke 1:79). If all that were not enough, “whoever finds his life (psyche) will lose it” (Matt. 10:39). If the psychotherapeutic journey over the via regia is to be a Christian pilgrimage, we must begin with the unconscious. Yet, the very notion of the Un -conscious is less like a North Star than a black hole—less a matter of what is visible than a matter of what is gravitational. The unconscious is that which, while completely out of

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