Schicksalsanalyse and Religion Studies

Author(s): Richard A. Hughes
Source: The Journal of Religion, Vol. 87, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 59-78
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Schicksalsanalyse and Religion Studies
Richard A. Hughes / Lycoming College

i. schicksalsanalyse and religion studies

The contemporary study of religion has benefited greatly from dia-
logues with depth psychology and psychiatry. In this study I consider
the work of the Hungarian-born Swiss psychiatrist Leopold Szondi
(1893–1986) as a major resource for the study of religion. While not
well known in the English-speaking world, Szondi was an eminent med-
ical scholar who produced, under conditions of political persecution,
war, and exile, a large, magisterial body of literature known as the Anal-
ysis of Destiny (Schicksalsanalyse), which remains largely untranslated.
The aim of this essay is (1) to present Szondi’s theory of religion
in its biographical and historical context and (2) to discuss specific
concepts in his theory, namely, those of the familial unconscious,
Cain-Moses polarity, and pontifical ego. These three themes are cho-
sen because they reflect Szondi’s pioneering pedigree studies, his
clarification of the psychiatric aspects of epilepsy, and his transper-
sonal synthesis of depth psychology. The familial unconscious is pre-
sented in terms of his concept of genotropism and applied to the sym-
bolic forms of tribal religion. The Cain-Moses polarity is addressed
as a paroxysmal-epileptoid ground of evil and justice within the psy-
chology of monotheism. The pontifical ego, representing religious
experience at the highest level of relatedness and symbolized by the
bridge, is evaluated on the bases of the Indo-Persian and Latin
traditions of the sacred bridge.
As a systematic psychiatry bearing a religious depth psychology,
Szondi’s work has both historical significance and relevance to the con-
temporary study of religion. He has developed a wide-ranging ap-
proach to understanding the psychological, metaphysical, and theolog-
ical aspects of religious experience.

䉷 2007 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

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The Journal of Religion

ii. szondi’s personal faith

Leopold Szondi was born in Nyitra, Hungary, on March 11, 1893, but
at the time the family name was Sonnenschein. He was the twelfth son
of his father, Abraham, and the eighth of his mother, Theresa Kohn
Sonnenschein. Theresa, the second wife of Abraham, was illiterate and
frequently ill, and the family lived in poverty. Abraham was a shoe-
maker who tended to neglect his work in order to study the Talmud
and Hasidic writings, and the son once described his father as a pro-
gressive or “neologe” Jew but not Orthodox.1 His godfather was Rabbi
Mordechai Vorhand of Nyitra, which had had a thriving Jewish com-
munity since 1750 and was the home of a rabbinate dynasty. At his bar
mitzvah, Leopold Sonnenschein chose two chapters from Exodus as
his scriptural passages, one on the ordination of priests (Exodus 29)
and the other on the episode of the golden calf (Exodus 32).2 He also
faithfully attended Torah readings with his father at the synagogue.
In 1911, his father died, and Leopold observed shivah and sheloshim.
He was the only son to recite the Kaddish prayer, morning and eve-
ning, in the synagogue in the year of mourning following the death.
After his father’s death, Leopold Sonnenschein changed his name to
Szondi in order to become an assimilated Jew within Christian Magyar
Hungary. In an autobiographical essay he states that in the year of
mourning he introjected his father into his ego and that the image of
his father sustained him, even after giving up the dogmatic rituals of
Judaism.3 He also says he remained a Jew and a believer.
Szondi’s medical studies were interrupted in 1914, when he was
drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army as a “battalion doctor.” He
served mainly at the Russian and Italian fronts for nearly the entire
war and was decorated twice for displaying extraordinary courage un-
der fire. While in combat, he came to terms with death but neverthe-
less thought that only killing and living existed.4 Out of the trench
warfare, the problem of killing would become a lifelong issue for his
theory of religion.
After the war, Szondi received the MD degree in 1919, amid the Bela
Kun uprising, and he decided to specialize in neurology, internal med-

1
Karl Bürgi-Meyer, Leopold Szondi: Eine biographische Skizze (Zurich: Szondi, 2000), 17–18.
Further biographical information may be found online at http://www.leopold-szondi.ch and
http://www.szondiforum.org.
2
Zulu Lakner-Faingold, “Leopold Szondi: Der Mensch, die Lehre und die Ahnenquelle”
(unpublished lecture, University of Zurich, March 13–14, 1993), 3–4.
3
Ludwig Pongratz, ed., “Leopold Szondi,” in Psychotherapie in Selbstdarstellungen (Bern:
Huber, 1973), 414.
4
Dino Larese, Leopold Szondi: Eine Lebenskizze (Geneva: Amriswiler Bücherei, 1976), 16; Bürgi-
Meyer, Leopold Szondi, 29.

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 Schicksalsanalyse and Religion Studies

icine, and psychiatry; but he would always be concerned primarily with

genetics.5 Married to Lili Radvanyi in 1926, he became the father of a
daughter, Vera, in 1928 and a son, Peter, in 1929. Vera would convert
to Roman Catholicism in 1970, but Peter would remain Jewish. In 1927
Szondi was appointed professor and director of the Royal Hungarian
Laboratory for Pathology and Therapy in Budapest. From the time of
his dual appointments until 1941, Szondi conducted many pedigree
studies and posed the following question: why did seemingly normal
and healthy couples fall in love, marry, and give birth to defective off-
spring? He theorized that deleterious latent recessive genes condi-
tioned the attraction and became manifest in the offspring. Szondi also
made a major contribution to psychiatry by demonstrating that epi-
lepsy, migraines, and stuttering were genetically related.
At the laboratory Szondi labored intensely under a heavy workload,
while in the background hostile political forces were becoming increas-
ingly dangerous. Since 1919, clandestine paramilitary bands had been
waging an ethnic cleansing against assimilated Jews in the Hungarian
White Terror. In 1935 Szondi became the target of political attacks as
the preeminent Jewish doctor of the nation, and after 1939 he could
not publish his books but only circulate them in mimeograph form. In
1941 the pro-Nazi state stripped Szondi of his titles and positions,
thereby ending his teaching and research. On March 19, 1944, German
Nazi troops invaded Budapest with eleven divisions, under orders of
Adolf Hitler, to destroy Hungarian Jewry. Consequently, Szondi lost his
home and, wearing the yellow Star of David, was forced into a Jewish
ghetto along with his family.
The American Red Cross and the Jewish community arranged for
1,683 Jews, including the Szondi family, to emigrate to Israel. On June
29, 1944, the Szondis left Budapest by train, believing they were begin-
ning the long trip to Israel, but instead after ten days arrived at the
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. In an essay on camp life, Lili
Szondi-Radvanyi reports that her husband stayed in separate men’s bar-
racks—dark, dirty, and unheated—with about one hundred men, and
he conducted seminars at night, essentially working as a caregiver. She
taught Hebrew to the children, led them in singing to cope with the
extreme hunger, and practiced a meditation technique of contemplat-
ing a better world without falling into a delusion.6
The Szondis became extremely emaciated but, facing death by star-

5
Paul Harmat, Freud, Ferenczi und ungarische Psychoanalyse (Tübingen: Edition Diskord, 1988),
220–24.
6
Lili Szondi-Radvanyi, “Ein Tag in Bergen-Belsen,” Sonderheft der Szondiana: Leopold Szondi
zum 100. Geburtstag 1993, 54.

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vation, were unexpectedly released on December 6, 1944. On leaving

the camp a Nazi S.S. officer seized four book manuscripts from Szondi,
ripped out the pages with penciled notes, assuming they might be com-
ments about camp life, and threw them on the ground. When Szondi
protested, the officer returned them to him. This humane gesture en-
abled Szondi to publish the manuscripts after the war. Many years later,
in an interview, Szondi recalled that “even in the bloodiest Cain there
is a touch of Abel, a touch of humanity: that all hope isn’t lost after
all. It’s that perhaps which kept me alive, despite everything.”7
The Szondis were taken to the Caux refugee camp at St. Gallen,
Switzerland, and quarantined from December 10, 1944, until final lib-
eration on January 26, 1945. At the invitation of Oscar Forel, medical
director of a hospital in Prangins near Nyon, Szondi became the chief
physician of the children’s clinic.8 He spent thirteen months at the
clinic, working with disturbed emigrant children. Deciding neither to
return to Hungary nor to emigrate to the United States, he chose in
March 1946 to settle in Zurich. He had hoped to work at the Bürgholzli
Hospital in Zurich, but Swiss law forbade foreign doctors from practic-
ing medicine in Switzerland. Consequently, his work was restricted to
a private practice of psychotherapy, and his personal life was one of
social isolation.
After settling in Zurich, Szondi published the second edition of his
major work of family studies, Analysis of Destiny. The first edition al-
ready had been published in Switzerland at the time of the Nazi in-
vasion of Hungary in 1944. In the second edition he stated that his
work shattered two infantile illusions of humankind. One is the illusion
of absolute independence from (Freiseins von) God and heredity, and
the other is that of total normality or the illusion that behind every
healthy phenotype lies a fully healthy genotype.9 He also explains that
since we are not independent from God or heredity, we exist in rela-
tionship with one another, in love, friendship, and the mystical union
of faith. The relation is that of the “between” (das Zwischen), as taught
by Martin Buber.
In the postwar period Szondi delivered lectures to increasingly larger
audiences, and one student remembered his saying that “when I speak
of the Spirit I mean God’s Holy Spirit, and when I say God I under-

7
Alexandre Szombati, “A Touch of Abel,” Guardian, May 9, 1982.
8
Karl Bürgi-Meyer, “Leopold Szondi als Flüchtling in der Schweiz,” Szondiana 15 (1995):
72.
9
Leopold Szondi, Schicksalsanalyse, 2nd ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1948), 18–19.

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 Schicksalsanalyse and Religion Studies

stand the God of the Bible.”10 From the same source we learn that, for
Szondi, human existence has a transcendent, nonrational ground of
being, which may be known only by negation. God is the ground of
being, from which humanity has no independence.
In a 1954 lecture, published posthumously, Szondi explores faith as
the “royal road” to humanization, and he explains that humans have
a fundamental “need for faith” that must be satisfied.11 The need for
faith is just as basic as any other human need, such as aggression or
attachment, and it is grounded in the ego. Szondi defines the ego as
the primal drive for participation in social and metaphysical reality,
and he points out that the participatory ego arises in infancy by means
of projection, unfolds dialectically by transcending and adapting, and
strives to achieve an essential wholeness throughout the life span. Bio-
graphically, Szondi’s need for faith was closely related to the mystical
incorporation of his father.
Failure to satisfy the need for faith results in death anxiety, hypo-
chondria, various phobias, and mental delusions. Human existence is
a constant struggle against loneliness and the threats of death, and in
that struggle the ego cannot stand alone as an omnipotent being.
Speaking as a physician, Szondi prescribes a transfer of one’s power of
being onto a transcendent spiritual dimension, wherein one becomes
fully humanized. Atheism signifies either an inflated state of omnipo-
tence or projection of one’s own power onto the laws of nature or
society. Only with the spiritual transference, culminating in a partici-
pation with God, may one resolve the anxiety of death, overcome ex-
istential loneliness, and assume moral responsibility. Szondi concludes
his lecture by defining faith as the “eternal, mystical, transcendent par-
ticipation with the Spirit.”12 Hence, faith is a mystical union not in the
sense of the absorption of the ego, but as an “I-Thou” encounter, as
Buber also taught.
Two years later, Szondi published his ego psychology, attempting to
lay a foundation for the integration of the schools of depth psychology.
He uncovers the Indo-Germanic root of Glaube, which may be rendered
as “faith” or “belief,” namely, *leubh-, or “to praise,” and Szondi ex-
plains that the meaning is futuristic.13 Thus, faith as a projective spir-

10
Maria Egg-Benes and Louise Rossier-Benes, “Erinnerungen an die Familie Szondi,” Son-
derheft der Szondiana: Leopold Szondi zum 100. Geburtstag 1993, 78.
11
Leopold Szondi, “Glaube als Schicksal,” Szondiana 9 (1989): 53.
12
Ibid., 54.
13
Leopold Szondi, Ich-Analyse (Bern: Huber, 1956), 514.

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The Journal of Religion

itual participation looks forward to a state of joy, whose transcendence

embraces both nature and spirit in a complementary whole.
Szondi expanded his theory of religion further in his two biblical
studies. The first was a book on the Cain and Abel story (Genesis 4),
in which he presents Cain as a symbol of evil, whose ego is driven by
pent-up emotion and boundless greed.14 As a sequel to Cain, Szondi
published a book on Moses. He admits with great difficulty that, as a
Jew, he places Cain at the center of Moses’s experience and tries to
show empirically how killing leads through guilt to restitution, justice,
and God.15 Szondi finds a close relationship between killing and reli-
gion, and one of the central tasks of faith is to resolve the former
through the formation of conscience. Szondi’s study of Moses estab-
lishes a second need for faith, that of making restitution or conscience,
and this facilitates the primary need for a projective participation with
God.
In summary, Szondi’s personal experience and theory of faith arose
in the contexts of his father’s death, trench warfare, homelessness,
persecution, and exile. These occurred as shock events, revealing dra-
matic patterns of irony and tragic reversal. Toward the end of his life,
Szondi suffered two more shocks of terrible irony. His son Peter, pro-
fessor of comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin, died
by suicide in 1971. Even though he did not advocate his father’s the-
ories, Peter Szondi wrote about the profound themes of the Szondi
family story. In his letters he refers to himself as a homeless person
who lives in exile and who travels from place to place in search of a
home.16 Apparently, his death was evidence of his inability to be at
home after the Holocaust, particularly as a Jew in postwar Germany.
In 1978 Szondi’s daughter Vera, a physician, died at home by un-
certain natural causes.17 She had written a book on suicide in light of
her brother’s death.18 Just as his adult life began with grief work for
his father, through the recitation of the kaddish, so it came to an end
with deep, unresolved sorrow for his children. Szondi died on January

14
Leopold Szondi, Kain: Gestalten des Bösen (Bern: Huber, 1969), 8. See Szondi’s classic
profile of Adolf Eichmann as a psychopathic Cain-murderer, in connection with his 1961 trial
in Jerusalem (62–67).
15
Leopold Szondi, Moses: Antwort auf Kain (Bern: Huber, 1973), 8. Szondi suggests that
Freud’s Moses and Monotheism reads like a novel and is historically untenable because it pre-
sumes two Moses figures (25–26).
16
Peter Szondi, Briefe, ed. C. König and T. Sparr (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 82, 267. See
also Martin Meyer, “ . . . weil ich es verlernt habe, zu Hause zu sein . . . ,” Neue Zürcher
Zeitung, November 20–21, 1993.
17
Richard Hughes, “The Tragedy of the Szondis,” Szondiana 18 (1998): 38, 47–48.
18
Vera Szondi, Selbstmord (Bern: Huber, 1975).

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24, 1986, without benefit of a kaddish said for him by his son, and Lili
Szondi-Radvanyi died on August 18, 1986, after a short illness.

iii. the familial unconscious

In this and the following two sections, I discuss the principal motifs of
Szondi’s theory of religion. The first reflects his concept of genotro-
pism, which took shape in the 1930s on the basis of more than one
thousand pedigree studies and fifteen thousand relatives. He inquired
as to why married couples bore retarded, epileptic, and schizophrenic
children. He proposed the idea of genotropism and defined it as the
reciprocal attraction between carriers of the same or related latent re-
cessive genes.19
He presented this concept at a conference in Geneva, Switzerland,
in light of the Nazi sterilization policy in Germany. Szondi opposed the
sterilization of carriers of recessive genes, because it would virtually
destroy large segments of populations. He had calculated that, in a
population of 10 million, 1.8 million would be carriers of psychiatric
disorders inherited recessively.
Genotropism functions as the working principle of the familial un-
conscious (das familiäre Unbewusste), which appears in his major work
on the family.20 As indicated in the German term (familiäre), “familial”
refers to “familiarity,” which means the quantitative sharing of the
genes across the generations of the family. Some members may inherit
several genes from both parents and acquire the trait coded by these
genes, while others might receive fewer genes and exhibit equivalents
or spectrum conditions. For example, one sibling may suffer epilepsy,
while the other has migraines, fits of rage, or intermittent outbursts of
anger. The former would be homozygous for the trait, the latter a “sin-
gle-dosage,” heterozygous carrier of the genes for epilepsy.
The familial unconscious also works with a biological polarity. In a
1955 lecture on the “three languages of the unconscious,” published
posthumously, Szondi observed that whenever a family transmits genes
for specific diseases, the same family transmits defenses against those
disorders.21 Typically, the defenses take the form of corresponding vo-
cational selections. For example, carriers of genes for schizophrenia

19
Leopold Szondi, “Heilpädagogik in der Prophylaxe der Nerven- und Geisteskrankeiten,”
Sonderdrück aus dem Bericht über den 1. Internationalen Kongress für Heilpädagogik 1939, 40.
20
Leopold Szondi, Schicksalsanalyse, 4th ed. (Basel: Schwabe, 1987), 82, 122. Hereafter, the
4th ed. is cited.
21
Leopold Szondi, “Die Sprachen des Unbewussten: Symptom, Symbol, und Wahl,” Szon-
diana 12 (1992): 23.

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have an innate inclination toward psychiatry or related vocations re-

quiring highly abstract thought.22 Since schizophrenic genes are dele-
terious, and schizophrenics tend not to marry, then the genetic trait
must have a selective advantage in order to survive in populations. The
vocational choices function as the evolutionary advantage. This func-
tion, known to Szondi and the older geneticists as “heterosis,” is cur-
rently called “balancing selection.”
Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of gene selection in his pop-
ular book The Selfish Gene, now regarded as “textbook orthodoxy.” He
argued that the purpose of genes, as replicas of bits of DNA, is to make
themselves more numerous in populations. A recessive gene can en-
sure its own survival by conferring its trait upon carriers and then con-
ditioning them to be attracted to one another. Genes can recognize
copies of themselves in others and motivate their carriers to fall in love,
marry, and produce offspring bearing the same genetic traits.23 Szondi
already saw that, in times of war and revolution, families were sepa-
rated, with the siblings raised apart from one another; then, many
years later, these siblings would meet and fall in love.24
The German biologist Wolfgang Wickler stated that Dawkins’s idea
of gene selection was not new and that it had been introduced “by the
Hungarian psychiatrist Leopold Szondi in 1937. . . . Well versed in
genetics, Szondi . . . arrived at the theory of ‘Genotropism’ (1944),
claiming that similar genes which by common descent come to inhabit
different individuals induce, among other things, cooperation of those
individuals.”25
With the concept of familiarity, Szondi also anticipated the critique of
Dawkins’s notion of the “selfish gene,” as currently argued by Holmes
Rolston, who contends that genes survive because they are shared
among kin and are not selfish.26 Recessives are stored in populations,
duplicated, and maintained heterozygously until environments become
appropriate, and then they come into dominance. Recessives are resil-
ient and wait for an environmental adaptation.
In his theory of religion Szondi amplified his genetics metaphori-
cally. He suggested that totemism in tribal religions contained presci-
entific, symbolic insights into the transmission of recessive genes. Sig-
mund Freud had defined the totem as the “common ancestor” of the

22
Szondi, Schicksalsanalyse, 51.
23
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 95–97.
24
Szondi, Schicksalsanalyse, 146–47.
25
Wolfgang Wickler, “Pre-Wilsonian Sociobiology,” Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 49 (1979):
433.
26
Holmes Rolston, Genes, Genesis, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),
68.

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clan, and he said that the totem correlated with the incest taboo, de-
fined as “a law against persons of the same totem having sexual rela-
tions with one another and consequently against their marrying.”27
Szondi pointed out that the incest taboo in tribal religion was uni-
lateral. For example, in a matriarchy the mother and her children were
considered “blood relatives” and descendants of the same totemic an-
cestor. While incest between them would be banned, it could occur
between the daughter and the father or son and the father’s sister,
since the father was not “blood related.” The sexual desire inherent in
these incestuous possibilities would exemplify a hidden attraction
based upon a common sharing of latent recessives genes.28
Szondi distinguished, further, between blood relatives and gene rel-
atives. Modern civilized societies ban incest between blood relatives in
terms of a bilateral taboo. The concept of genotropism, however, iden-
tifies carriers of the same or similar recessive genes as gene relatives,
and they are attracted to one another along the lines of the unilateral
taboo in tribal religion. Hence, genotropic marriages are genetically
incestuous.
Similarly, Szondi interpreted ancient transmigration doctrines in
terms of the familial unconscious. In his Moses, he cites a medieval
kabbalah text stating that Moses was a transmigrated form of Abel.29
When Abel brought his offering to God (Gen. 4:4), he tried to look
into the face of God, which was forbidden. Therefore, Cain struck
down Abel for his sin, and to expiate the sin, the soul of Abel had to
transmigrate for three lifetimes, until becoming purified as Moses.
Likewise, the soul of Cain transmigrated into Jethro, Moses’s father-in-
law and a Midianite priest (Exod. 3:1).
Even though Szondi was not a kabbalist, he thought that the story
symbolized the unconscious flow of recessive genes through three gen-
erations of kinship groups, until their traits became dominant. In the
same familial transmission the soul of the good person defends against
the soul of the evil person in a symbolic heterosis or balancing selec-
tion. Consequently, the mythic Cain and Abel are not “pure blood”
homozygous figures, neither purely evil nor purely good, but they are
morally mixed or heterozygous carriers of both good and evil tenden-
cies. In every Cain there is an Abel and in every Abel a Cain. By anal-
ogy, all humans are morally heterozygous, and these traits are stored,

27
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London: Hogarth, 1957), 24.
28
Leopold Szondi, “Contributions to ‘Fate Analysis’: An Attempt at a Theory of Choice in
Love,” Acta Psychologica 3 (1937): 67, and Ich-Analyse, 226.
29
Szondi, Moses, 150. The English translation is in Gershom Scholem, On the Mystical Shape
of the Godhead, ed. J. Chipman, trans. J. Neugroschel (New York: Schocken, 1991), 213.

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duplicated, and transmitted unconsciously and recessively until they

emerge under favorable environmental conditions as moral tendencies
in human experience.

iv. the cain-moses polarity

In a 1971 dialogue with a Dutch neurologist, Szondi explains that he
does not speak of good and evil, as such, but of evil and the just.30 Evil
has two aspects. One is the buildup and release of crude affects against
a target, and the other is a movement toward restitution in the future.
The future change in the sense of restitution or restoration is the
meaning of the good. All evildoers seek God in the future, and in the
Bible these dynamics are expressed by the mythic Cain and the histor-
ical Moses, respectively.
Szondi acknowledges that the Hebrew root of Cain is kana, which
means “created by God” or “acquired through a purchase” and that
the root derives from the Kenite tribe, which claimed Cain as its an-
cestor in ancient Israel.31 From the church fathers, Szondi amplifies
the name of Cain further to mean the “son of wrath” (Tertullian), as
well as “jealousy,” “envy,” and “violent bodily movements” (Eusebius,
Clement). Elsewhere, I have explained that the church fathers consid-
ered Cain an epileptic, but Szondi failed to make that connection ex-
plicit.32 From the Haggadah, Szondi finds that Cain and Abel are mar-
ried to their twin-sisters, as an exception to the incest taboo conferred
by divine grace.
After God’s rejection of his offering (Gen. 4:5), Cain seethes with
anger. Szondi examines several haggadic and rabbinic commentaries
and deduces a composite set of crude affects: anger and rage, envy and
jealousy, hatred and vengeance. These are the “Cain emotions,” re-
leased in acts of evil, and in pre-Kantian classical philosophy they com-
prise the irascible.33 Through a convulsive discharge of these pent-up
emotions, Cain murders his brother, seeking to vindicate himself in
the face of God.
Citing Jewish, Christian, and Islamic commentaries, Szondi says that
the monotheistic religions recognize a universal need to kill the
brother. Everyone is capable of fratricide, and historically, therefore,
Cain rules the world. Szondi’s Cain is like that of St. Augustine, the

30
Cornelis van Rhyn, “Gespräch mit Leopold Szondi,” Szondiana 18 (1998): 64.
31
Szondi, Kain, 23.
32
See my Cain’s Lament: A Christian Moral Psychology (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 182–93.
33
Szondi, Kain, 35. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pts. 1–2, Quest. 23, Arts. 1–3.

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founder of the earthly city who slew his brother Abel out of envy.34 The
need to kill the brother, in order to vindicate oneself before “God the
Father,” is the Cain complex, and it stands at the center of monothe-
ism. The monotheistic religions cannot be interpreted psychoanalyti-
cally, whereby evil originates in a primal patricide in accord with the
Oedipus complex, because in the Bible the father is not the enemy.
Nearly every biblical figure has a brother or sister, and the struggle
between siblings is a decisive factor in the narrative succession of the
generations.35
After the murder, God asks about Abel, but Cain replies deceptively:
“I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” (Gen. 4:9b). Cain, cursed
by his deed, faces an unknown future and fears he will be killed, but
God declares: “Not so!” God places a sign on Cain, which Szondi in-
terprets as an ethical imperative against any more killing. He accepts
the haggadic image of the sign as a horn on the forehead and believes
the sign is sacred due to its usage in the ordination of the priesthood
(Exod. 27:2, 29:12) and to the Judaic tradition of the horned Moses.36
Cain enters exile, fathers a son Enoch, builds the first city, and
names it after his son (Gen. 4:17). Building the first city is a vocational
decision that socializes the innate homicidal tendency and shapes civ-
ilization as the arena of fratricide. The genealogy of Cain’s descen-
dants, known as the Cainites (Gen. 4:18), reveals the return of the
killing intent in Lamech of the seventh generation. Szondi reviews the
legend of Lamech, the blind hunter who inadvertently kills what he
thinks is a horned animal in the distance, but which turns out to be
the horned Cain. Generally, Jewish exegetes interpret the sign of Cain
as a protection lasting through seven generations (Gen. 4:15). Szondi
prefers this view of the death of Cain, because it illustrates the fact
that paroxysmal-epileptoid persons are vulnerable to sudden death by
accidents and that the homicidal intent is transmitted unconsciously
and recessively through the generations, until it becomes dominant.
In his commentary on Moses, Szondi examines Moses’s birth in light
of the ancient Near Eastern legends of miracle births and interprets
these to mean that Moses is portrayed, via projection, as a heroic and

34
Augustine, City of God, 15.5 (trans. P. Levine, Loeb Classical Library 414 [Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1966], 429).
35
Frederick Greenspahn, When Brothers Dwell Together (New York: Oxford University Press,
1994), 3–5.
36
Szondi, Kain, 36. Szondi does not cite a specific source of the horned Moses, but the
title page of his book has a picture of the horned Moses receiving the Torah, which compares
to medieval portrayals. See the discussion of these issues in Ruth Mellinkoff, The Horned Moses
in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), and The Mark of
Cain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

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just man. Nevertheless, despite Moses’s deliverance from the water

(Exod. 2:10) and upbringing in the house of pharaoh, the story actu-
ally begins when Moses slays the Egyptian for beating up a Hebrew and
then secretly hides the body in the sand (Exod. 2:12). Moses kills out
of righteous rage, and his burying the corpse signifies his guilt and
moral anxiety. At issue is the recognition, by ancient peoples, that a
religious founder has discharged the gross affects and violence of a
“Cain personality.”
When the murder becomes known, Moses flees in fear to the desert,
joins Jethro and the Midianites, and works as a shepherd in the tra-
dition of Abel. In the episode of the burning bush, Moses has an au-
ditory vision of Yahweh and hides his face because he is afraid to look
at God (Exod. 3:6). In light of the kabbalah text, cited by Szondi to
symbolize the recurrence of recessive genes, Moses’s fear of looking at
God is an unconscious recollection of his former life as Abel, when he
was slain for attempting to see God.
Yahweh commissions Moses to liberate the Hebrews from captivity in
Egypt, but Moses reacts with a series of evasions, particularly with the
claim that he is “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exod. 4:10).
Szondi interprets this to mean stuttering, which, as an “attack sickness,”
functions as an equivalent of epilepsy. Moses’s stuttering identifies him
as a turbulent paroxysmal personality, or Anfallsmensch. The central
question, posed by Szondi, is why God chooses a stutterer, a visionary,
and a murderer as his prophet. He answers that in the biblical tradition
a lawgiver is close to a lawbreaker.37 Moses is permanently changed by
his killing the Egyptian and, driven by guilt and moral anxiety, he seeks
God to make restitution and achieve justice.
The structure of justice will be established in the Exodus, as Moses
struggles against pharaoh through the ten plagues. Szondi interprets
these as surcharged natural phenomena, experienced as shock events
within the projective-participatory acts of corporate faith. The climax
arrives in the tenth plague, the night of terror, as Yahweh passes over
Egypt, striking down the Egyptian firstborn. God does not actually kill,
but through their collective faith the people project their “Cain ho-
micidal intent” onto God for vindication.
After the Exodus, Moses returns to Mt. Sinai and receives the Torah.
The sixth commandment states: “You shall not murder” (Exod. 20:13),
forbidding the Cain homicidal intent. Despite the promulgation of the
commandment, however, Moses’s paroxysmal-epileptoid nature neither
recedes nor changes. For example, in the episodes of the golden calf

37
Szondi, Moses, 79.

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(Exodus 32) and the wandering in the wilderness (Numbers 14), Moses
faces rebellions and orders the destruction of the rebels, who are
brothers, friends, and relatives, in divinely sanctioned killing. Psycho-
logically, therefore, Moses transfers his “Cain unconscious” (kainitische
Urgrund) onto God and creates a projective-participatory union, which
establishes the structure of justice through the law. Szondi summarizes
Mosaic faith with a Talmudic saying of the Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of
Bratslav: “One can serve God with the evil drive, when one directs
one’s violent and covetous passion to God, and without the evil drive
there is no perfect service.”38
Moses fulfills the need for faith in an unbroken spiritual bond with
God that is so intense as to exclude other gods. Here is the psycho-
logical origin of monotheism; but in the absence of the definition
given by Szondi, I understand it to mean the affirmation of the one
transcendent God and the rejection of other gods.39 The rejection of
other gods raises the Cain homicidal intent to an ultimate level that,
if not integrated in a projective participation with God, becomes holy
terrorism.

v. the pontifical ego

In his Moses, Szondi discusses crossing a bridge between killing and
faith, or Cain and Moses, and states that the human task is to construct
a bridge between the two, even though the crossing may require a
superhuman effort. Recognition of guilt and conscience provides the
means for spanning killing and faith, and only one who has made res-
titution can actually cross the bridge.40 I believe that this idea reflects
the influence of Hasidic Judaism, since Rabbi Nachman also spoke of
the bridge: “The entire world is a very narrow bridge; the main thing
is to have no fear.”41
The ego stands at the center of religious experience and is symbol-
ized by the bridge. Szondi interprets the ego as a “bridge-builder” or
span that embraces all mental antitheses, a pontifical union of the op-
posites. The term “pontifical” derives from two Latin words—pons,
which means “bridge” or “way,” and facere, “to make.” Hence, the pon-
tifical ego (Pontifex Ich) represents a transpersonal state of being

38
Ibid., 120.
39
Raffaele Pettazzoni, “La Formation du Monothéisme,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 88
(1923): 196.
40
Szondi, Moses, 9, 118.
41
Cited in Eliezer Witztum, David Greenberg, and Jacob T. Buchbinder, “A Very Narrow
Bridge,” Psychotherapy 27 (1990): 125.

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achieved with the participatory faith function. The pontifical ego goes
beyond the bodily ego but remains grounded in the biological needs
of the organism, including the genes and familial unconscious; and
this is why Szondi prefers the term ego (Ich) to that for self (Selbst).
The pontifical ego has two biographical sources. Magda Kerenyi re-
ports that Szondi’s bridge symbol was modeled after the chain bridge
spanning the Danube River in Budapest.42 In the view of one scholar,
the dynamics of the pontifical ego arose in the concentration camp,
when Lili Szondi-Radvanyi contemplated a better world without falling
into a delusion.43 Both reports imply that for Szondi the bridge symbol
provided a transcendent unifying principle of meaning during his years
of homelessness, persecution, and exile.
As attested by his Zurich research assistant, Szondi’s primary intel-
lectual source of the pontifical ego was the Hindu mystical tradition
of the Upanishads.44 Szondi quotes several passages from the Brihad-
aranyaka Upanishad, and with one (1.4.1) he clarifies the origin of the
pontifical ego as a primal reality: “In the beginning was this world
alone an ego in the form of a man. It looked around itself, and it saw
nothing other than itself. Thereupon it cried out at the beginning: It
is I. From this originated the name I.”45 Szondi uses Paul Deussen’s
translation and Heinrich Gomperz’s commentary, the former translat-
ing atman as Selbst and the latter as Ich.
In Szondi’s reading of the Upanishads, the pontifical ego is like at-
man, and he describes it in terms of the “negative theology,” or neti,
neti: “The pontifical ego is neither almighty God nor helpless humanity
but the bond between God and humanity. . . . Neither spirit nor na-
ture but the bridge between spirit and nature. . . . Neither waking nor
dreaming but the bridge between waking and dreaming.”46 The pon-
tifical ego transcends the ordinary realm of metrical space, linear time,
and causality—even the body and the ancestral images—all of which
comprise immanent consciousness. Surpassing the latter occurs ecstat-
ically in shock events and reveals the psychological phases of partici-
pation, transcendence, and integration.
In cases of psychopathology, the ego expands as an end in itself,
boundlessly, and without authentic relatedness or spirituality. This
would be a paranoid delusion, the opposite of the pontifical ego, and

42
Magda Kerenyi, “Erinnerungen an die Familie Szondi: Interview von Karl Bürgi-Meyer,”
Szondiana 14 (1994): 44.
43
Beatrice Kronenberg, “Szondi, die Schicksalsanalyse und des Jüdische,” Sonderheft der
Szondiana: Leopold Szondi zum 100. Geburtstag 1993, 83.
44
Karl Bürgi-Meyer, “Die Lehre vom Pontifex-Ich,” Szondiana 8 (1988): 12.
45
Szondi, Ich-Analyse, 114.
46
Ibid., 156.

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 Schicksalsanalyse and Religion Studies

is compared by Szondi to the Hindu notion of the ahamkara. Similarly,

an introjective delusion, a narcissistic desire to possess everything, cor-
responds to the Hindu maha-atman. An illusion is a substitute partici-
pation in social and metaphysical reality, a failure to achieve genuine
relatedness, and an active belief state rather than an error.
The bridge between the transcendent and immanent dimensions of
consciousness includes not only the unification of all subject-object
antitheses but also that of the Cain and Moses tendencies. The union
of the Cain and the Moses manifests conscience, and generally Szondi
defines it as the restitution of the Cain intent. This definition grows
out of the recognition of guilt as one function of the need for resti-
tution. In his Moses, Szondi acknowledges that biblical Hebrew lacks
an explicit term for conscience but that the Bible represents its mean-
ing through the imagery of the inner life, particularly in the Wisdom
literature (e.g., Psalms 139) and medieval Judaism through the meta-
phor of the heart. Psychologically, conscience is an introjection of the
voice of God, and it comprises four components: (1) a need for moral
value, which includes a capacity for personal renunciation; (2) a need
for restitution, based upon the prohibition against murder; (3) critical
reality testing by the bodily ego as a responsible moral agent; and (4)
the exalted projective-participatory power of being in the pontifical
ego.47 Altogether, these four functions are the same as the basic needs
for faith.

vi. a critical assessment

In a lecture in Zurich, commemorating the centennial of Szondi’s
birth, I explained that every religion in the world has the bridge sym-
bol.48 Not only does the bridge inform myth and symbol, but it also
appears in dreams. The bridge is a multiple-meaning idea; therefore,
Szondi’s decision to place it at the center of religious experience in-
vites a critical examination of his theory.

A. The Bridge
As stated above, Szondi conceptualized the pontifical ego in light of
the Upanishads, and it is certainly true that the bridge symbolizes the
brahman-atman relation in specific texts (Brihadaranyaka 4.4.22: Chan-
dogya 8.4.1; Mundaka 2.2.5; Svetasvatara 6.19; Katha 3.2). Szondi

47
Szondi, Moses, 152–53.
48
Richard Hughes, “The Symbolism of the Bridge,” Szondiana 13 (1993): 46–58.

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worked with the view of atman as the essential human identity and
oneness with the creative, divine, and primal power of the universe, in
order to clarify the universal and nondifferentiated ground of the psy-
che.49 The problem is that the brahman-atman identity, particularly in
Vedanta, entails a monism, which conflicts with Szondi’s commitment
to a dialectical and relational metaphysics.
Curiously, Szondi neglected the Chinvat bridge, which originated in
the pre-Zoroastrian period of Persian religion and evolved into Zoro-
astrianism. The Chinvat bridge spans this world and the next and is
explicitly linked to conscience (daena), which is activated in all persons
at initiation.50 In the crossing at death, the Chinvat bridge becomes
wide for the righteous and narrow for the wicked. The soul of the
deceased righteous is met by an attractive fifteen-year-old being of the
opposite sex and that of the wicked by an unattractive fifteen-year-old
being of the opposite sex. These beings represent one’s conscience, as
shaped by a good or evil destiny, respectively, after one’s initiation at
age fifteen.
I believe that the Chinvat bridge fits Szondi’s theory of religion more
precisely than the Hindu bridge, because the latter lacks a clear ethical
conception of conscience. By recognizing the historical primacy of the
Chinvat bridge, therefore, we may relocate the origins of the pontifical
ego in the broad Indo-Persian heritage between 5000 and 2000 BCE.51
Consequently, we may understand Szondi’s pontifical ego as historically
conditioned and as a major archetypal form within the monotheistic
religions. Some specific symbolic variations would be that of the al-
Sirat bridge in Islamic eschatology; the Christian test bridge, beginning
with the classical form of Gregory the Great (Diag. 4.37); and the pen-
itential bridge of the Latin vision literature.52 In the Latin tradition,
the “bridge builder” (Pontifex) was the one who made a way to God,
defending against dangers along the way.53

49
Bürgi-Meyer, “Die Lehre vom Pontifex-Ich,” 15.
50
M. Molé, “Daena, le pont Cinvat et l’initiation dans le Mazdéisme,” Revue de l’histoire des
religions 157 (1960): 156–58.
51
Mary Boyce, ed. and trans., Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1990), 8.
52
See Howard Patch, The Other World (New York: Octagon, 1980), 8–9, 15–16, 95–97. In
Schicksalsanalyse, Szondi points out that Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (New
York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1927) expresses his psychology precisely (214).
53
C. J. Bleeker, “Die Religiöse Bedeutung der Brücke,” in The Sacred Bridge (Leiden: Brill,
1963), 184.

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B. Cain and Moses

In Szondi’s theory Moses is the “bridge builder” who synthesizes Cain
and Abel or the evil and just impulses, respectively, of Rabbinic Juda-
ism. The Cain-Moses polarity is, admittedly, speculative, but it corre-
sponds to a similar view in Philo, who links Cain with evil and Moses
with justice in the search for God as a transcendent being.54 Szondi’s
notion of faith as a “royal road” to humanization, which includes the
Cain-Moses union, also reflects Philo’s motif of the “royal road” as a
path toward wholeness with God.55 While Szondi’s sources are eclectic,
his theory reflects primarily the traditions of Philo and Hellenistic Ju-
daism, but with one exception. Philo points out that the Bible does
not explicitly say that Cain died, but it implies that he lives forever in
exile. In contrast, Szondi favors the view that Cain is murdered by
Lamech, in accord with paroxysmal family tragedy and the return of
the evil impulse through the generations.
The Cain-Moses polarity also symbolizes the psychiatric aspects of
epilepsy, a neglected area of psychiatry that Szondi has clarified con-
clusively.56 Cain represents a buildup of hostile affects and convulsive
discharge, and Moses a hyperethical and hyperreligious search for res-
titution. This threefold sequence of (1) pent-up emotion, such as ir-
ritability, anger, and fury; (2) convulsive attack; and (3) need for res-
titution activates an instinctually driven (Trieb), paroxysmal-epileptoid
pattern in human nature. Everyone inherits a capacity to be startled,
as confirmed by electroconvulsive treatment, but it becomes manifest
especially in those religious figures who face danger and try to reverse
or resolve it. Consequently, they become vulnerable to the hereditary
“attack sickness,” whether epilepsy, migraines, stuttering, fits of homi-
cidal rage, angry outbursts, or spiritual ecstasy. Paroxysmal-epileptoid
persons are alternately angry and just.
Typically, the paroxysmal-epileptoid personality manifests the Cain

54
Philo, On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile, 4.12, 5.16 (in Philo, Vol. II, trans. F. Colson
and G. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library 227 [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1958]). In paragraph 169 of the same work, Philo presents the “negative theology.”
55
Philo, On the Giants, 14.64, in Colson and Whitaker, Philo. Szondi may have paraphrased
Freud’s famous remark about dreams as the “royal road” to the unconscious, but the idea
appeared earlier with Philo.
56
For a clinical confirmation of Szondi’s understanding of epilepsy, see Dietrich Blumer,
“Dysphoric Disorders and Paroxysmal Affects,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 8 (2000): 10, 15,
and “The Biological Basis of Hysteria and Its Polarity to Epilepsy,” Szondiana 5 (2005): 19. In
a letter to the author (December 8, 1978), Szondi clarified the genetic basis of this idea: “The
Cain-Moses polarity with respect to religion has been my favorite theme for a long time. (No
wonder: I have two nephews and one niece who are epileptic.)”

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complex psychosomatically (e.g., hypertension) or by moral conflicts,

which reenact historical patterns of fratricide. The psychoanalytic
scholar Yosef Yerushalmi has acknowledged the Cain complex and ad-
mitted that Freud neglected it.57 He interprets early Christianity in
terms of the Cain complex and states that Christian fratricidal guilt
has been repressed and denied. This presumes that Christianity was a
religion of the younger brother, which displaced Judaism as that of the
elder brother.
The psychoanalytic argument overlooks the fact that Paul’s “Cain
complex” is neither repressed nor denied but clearly expressed in his
epistles (Gal. 1:13–14, Phil. 3:5–6, 1 Cor. 15:9).58 The New Testament
does not define Jesus as the younger brother but as the firstborn
among his siblings (Luke 2:23, Mark 6:3, Rom. 8:29). The New Testa-
ment also interprets Cain as a figure of evil ( John 8:44, 1 John 3:12,
Jude 11) and Abel as the righteous one whose sacrificial death prefig-
ured the martyrdom of Jesus (Matt. 23:35, Heb. 11:4, 12:24). Thus, the
New Testament moved away from the Hebrew Bible by defining Cain
as evil and Abel as good and by making Cain’s slaying of Abel a foun-
dation sacrifice.

C. The Unconscious
In 1956 Szondi set out to unify the schools of depth psychology with
his tripartite model of the unconscious. The task of depth psychology
is to know the “unknowable” unconscious, and this knowledge requires
three languages.59
The first is that of the symptom, as derived from the repression of
an early childhood trauma in the Freudian personal unconscious, and
it informs psychoanalytic interpretations of archaic traditions as a “re-
turn of the repressed.” Szondi accepted the fact that deeply shuddering
experiences could return as memory traces in the ego, but he argued
that traumas became neuroses only by gene selection in the family.60
The second is that of the symbol, which erupts from the archetypes
of the Jungian collective unconscious; in Szondi’s experience, symbols
return mainly in dreams. In an early lecture, Jung pointed out that

57
Yosef Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 92. I intro-
duced Szondi’s theory into psychoanalysis with my essay “Szondi’s Theory of the Cain Com-
plex,” American Imago 36 (1979): 260–74.
58
See my essay “The Cain Complex and the Apostle Paul,” Soundings 65 (1982): 5–22.
59
Szondi, Ich-Analyse, 61.
60
Szondi, Moses, 36–37, and Schicksalsanalyse, 58.

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ancestral traits become buried in the unconscious and are passed down
the generations as “Mendelian units.”61 Later, in his autobiography he
refers to such traits as an “impersonal karma within a family,” and he
explains “that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my
forefathers, and which had not yet been answered.”62 His personal re-
flections were those of the familial unconscious, which he failed to
differentiate clearly from the personal and collective dimensions.
The third is the language of choice, specifically, the selection of ex-
istential possibilities inherited from the familial unconscious. Genetic
traits confer needs and tendencies that shape decision making. Genetic
tendencies may be decoded by constructing genealogies, indicating re-
current patterns of marriage, friendship, and vocational choices in re-
lation to types of illness and modes of death. Destiny comprises all of
the hereditary tendencies in the familial unconscious, which we ex-
press primarily through marriage and vocational selections.
Freud interpreted existential decision making in terms of the Oe-
dipus complex and, in his 1937 letter to Szondi, published posthu-
mously, insisted that such decisions were narcissistic and anaclitic.63
While Szondi accepted the Oedipus complex, he found that it existed
only under the following conditions: when the mother sees her father
or brother represented in her son, or when the father sees his mother
or sister in his daughter.64 Hence, the son takes after the maternal
grandfather or uncle, and the daughter takes after the paternal grand-
mother or aunt.
Familial decision making reflects the sharing of genetic traits across
at least three generations. Szondi presents the case of a Protestant pas-
tor who has an epileptic daughter. She marries a “Cain personality”
and gives birth to two sons, who become theologians like their grand-
father.65 This was an early Budapest case, by which Szondi argued
against sterilizing epileptics, since they produced theologians. The case
illustrates the fact that in paroxysmal families, whose members carry
epileptic genes, religious professions serve as both defenses and con-
structive social outlets and that decision making reveals a rhythmic flow
pattern of “Cain” and “Moses” tendencies across the generations.

61
C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology, ed. W. McGuire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1989), 37.
62
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New
York: Random House, 1961), 233.
63
Leopold Szondi, Freiheit und Zwang im Schicksal des Einzelnen (Bern: Huber, 1968), 57.
64
Szondi, Schicksalsanalyse, 149–50.
65
Ibid., 273. Statistical percentages of epilepsy and its equivalents in clergy families are
presented on 436.

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vii. conclusion
Szondi’s analysis of destiny is a systematic psychiatry, containing a re-
ligious depth psychology with an epic scope. This type of psychology,
known in Europe as Seelenkunde, narrates the unfolding of the psyche
throughout the generations of the family, from the absolute freedom
of the unconscious (Urgrund) to the relative freedom of humanization
in the faith function. Only persons who have resolved the Cain com-
plex are able to say that destiny guides their lives and that they have
become truly free.66 This epic psychology is governed by the vision of
the “return of the ancestor,” and it means that hereditary patterns may
erupt in our lives as shock events, even many years after the cessation
of conventional therapy.
While grounded in Hellenistic and Hasidic Judaism, Szondi’s psy-
chology contains a creative dialogue with the religions of the world,
particularly Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. This dialogue was facil-
itated by his working with the “negative theology,” and his conception
of faith as a need for spiritual participation grew out of his interests
in the mystical traditions. Within the monotheistic religions the found-
er bears a close relationship with the problem of killing and the figure
of Cain. Therefore, a central task of monotheism is to make restitution
for the Cain homicidal intent and to promote restorative justice. This
occurs with the pontifical ego, as the religious leader becomes a bridge
in order to lead the way from Cain to Moses.

66
Leopold Szondi, letter to the author, September 26, 1979.

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