DR. KENT AND THE TWO YETZERS

(This entry technically originates in the waters of my Judaica section, but in fact it ends up on the high seas of general human experience, particularly religious experience, where it truly belongs.)

There is an old Jewish allegory, so subtle that many modern-day Jews are eager and even proud to announce that they are taking it literally. It boils down to the permanent presence in the life of every practicing Jew of two supernatural advisers, Yetzer Hatov, the good angel, and Yetzer Hara, the bad angel, or demon, who sit, each on one of the man’s shoulders, and whisper, each in one of his ears, what course they might recommend for him to take, at each of the life’s crossroads. It’s fair to say that Yetzer Hatov is giving him a consistently good advice, while Yetzer Hara offers him the opposite course of action.

In my personal experience I have found that not only the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are expected to be more religious and more prone to literal interpretations than the rest, but, surprisingly, secular Reform Jews, have testified to the literal competing presence of an angel and a demon, promoting their opposite agendas every day of their life, particularly, when they are supposed to come up with some kind of decision. I have been inclined to attribute this literalness of the secular types to a desire to compensate for their lack of religiosity otherwise. But what if those Reform secularists, who had conveyed this conviction to me, were quite serious and meant what they told me literally?

Mind you, I am a strong believer in the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, and I find the fundamentalists of all sorts unreasonable at best and mentally unbalanced at worst, when they insist on literal interpretations of the Scriptures. The story of the two Yetzers is obviously non-Scriptural and there is literally no justification, even for the religious zealots, to take it literally. I repeat that I am almost convinced that a large majority of those persons who have given a literal meaning to the story, may not have done it with a straight face, but I also suspect a certain part of them of actually believing what they said.

Without pronouncing an expert judgment on their disingenuousness, in case they were pulling everybody’s leg, or mental condition, in case they were telling the literal truth, I shall appeal to the illustrious authority of the American Dr. James Tyler Kent, MD, (1849-1916), one of the foremost homeopathic practitioners and theoreticians in the history of homeopathy, an amazingly interesting branch of medicine, created by Dr. Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Dr. Kent, like every outstanding homeopath, is a psychologist extraordinaire. In his discussions of various remedies he has prescribed to patients with different ailments, he develops psychological profiles of each patient type corresponding to the constitutional remedies prescribed. Here is what he says about the remedy Anacardium Orientale, and the psychological patient profile corresponding to it:

“This remedy is full of strange notions and ideas; the mind appears feeble, almost if not complete imbecility; seems as if in a dream; everything is strange; slow to comprehend; cursing; marked irritability, disturbed by everything. Weak memory. Forgetful of things in his mind but a moment ago. All his senses seem to vanish and he gropes around, as if in a dream. Change of states; after states. Dullness and sluggishness of the mind prevail. He is in a continuous controversy with himself. Irresolution marks his character. He cannot settle between doing this and that, he hesitates, and often does nothing. He cannot decide especially in an action of good or evil.

“He hears voices, commanding him to do this or that, and seems to be between a good and an evil will. He is persuaded by his evil will to do acts of violence and injustice, but is withheld and restrained by a good will. So, there is a controversy between two wills, between two impulses; when this is really analyzed by one who knows something of the nature of man, it will be seen that the man is disturbed in his external will, but the internal will cannot be affected by medicine. His external voluntary is excited by external influences, but his real will in which is his conscience, restrains that and keeps him from carrying the impulses into effect. This can only be observed when its action is on a really good man. He has a controversy when his external will is aroused, but in an evil man there is no restraint and be will not have this symptom.

“Hallucinations: a demon sits on one shoulder and an angel on the other. (Nota bene!!!)

He is disposed to malice and has an irresistible desire to curse and swear; laughs when he should be serious. So it is carried on until all things in the external will are inverted. Internal anxiety, i. e., the internal will is in a turmoil over this external disturbance.

“‘Contradiction between will and reason’ is an attempt to express what the individual knew nothing about.

“‘Feels as though he had two wills.’ That is better. It finally destroys or paralyzes the external will and when a man is naturally evil and is under the paralyzing influence of Anacardium, he will do acts of violence. A wicked man is restrained, not by his conscience, but by fear of the law. Anacardium paralyzes the external will arid places him in a position of imbecility, and he does acts of violence from his own natural perverted self It has so acted on a portion of the mind that it teaches a great deal.

"Ideas as if nothing were real, all seems to be a dream. Fixed ideas. He thinks he is double. This comes from a vague consciousness that there is a difference between the external and internal will, a consciousness that one will is the body and another is the mind.

"…Dwells on thoughts about salvation. That a stranger is by his side, is another recognition of the two wills. That strange forms accompany him, one to his right side and one to his left. This mental state drives him to madness.

"Alternation of his moods and understanding. One moment he sees a thing, and another moment he does not understand it. One moment she sees it is her child, and another that it is not. One moment it is a delusion, and next moment it is an illusion. One moment thinks it is so, and next moment has enough reason left that it is not so. Delusion is an advanced stage of illusion."

(Taken from Dr. Kent’s Lectures on Homoeopathic Materia Medica: Anacardium Orientale.)

…Well, I’ve long been on record with a conspicuously disrespectful treatment of a large number of fellow-Christians, particularly those whose practice of “healing the crippled,” or “speaking in tongues,” etc., which is a “normal” regular occurrence at the multi-million dollar mega-churches in America today, looks to me as blasphemous on the part of the preachers and the “sane” part of their flocks, while anybody who is really serious about this sham ought to be declared clinically insane and receive psychiatric treatment.

Having no intention of offending anyone’s, and particularly Jewish sensibilities, I have quoted Dr. Kent, in the earlier extended segment, only to make a larger point. I wonder if all esoteric exercises in the occult, the supernatural, the transcendent, and so on, produced in the course of intense religious experiences and associated with the literal interpretation of religious allegories, may have a devastatingly negative impact on the religious practitioner’s mental state, or whether the fact that these allegories have been taken literally may in itself be a telltale sign of a preexistent abnormality?

As the reader must realize, this question goes well beyond a specific religion: Christianity, Judaism, or any other, relating first and foremost to human psychology and states of an induced mass hypnosis. It is merely a coincidence and a pretext, that my subject matter here is rooted in a Judaic legend, for which I am certainly grateful to the fruitful source of this entry’s inspiration.