There is an opinion among religious people: they say, any illness is God's punishment for sins. But is the mechanism of any disease really that primitive?
This question was asked by a group of Orthodox psychologists from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto (USA), starting to study the mechanism of retribution, which turns into a variety of diseases. After all, any punishment from above is still carried out through quite real levers: material or psychological. In the lectures on psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud such a case is given.
“A young girl from a friendly, decent family suddenly fell in love with her son-in-law, the husband of an older sister,” says a psychologist, author of the book “Great mystical secrets and riddles” Vladimir Potapov. - Realizing how destructive and inappropriate this feeling was, she did her best to disguise it, including in front of herself, posing as a usual family affection. After some time, her sister became seriously ill and died. And although for the youngest it was a real grief, she, going up to the bed of the deceased, suddenly caught herself thinking: "Now he is free and can marry me." This was followed by a flash of horror and a desperate attempt to drive away the shameful cruel thought. But to drive away where? Such thoughts settle in the subconscious. A thought that does not coincide with its own principles can go away completely only if the principles are firm enough. But where does such firmness come from in a young and in love girl?
Freud's diagnosis
Almost immediately after the funeral of her sister, she fell seriously ill, and the doctors were unable to make any diagnosis. Her legs were paralyzed for no physiological reason. It was then that they turned to the then famous Doctor Freud. After long interviews with the patient, he confidently determined the cause of what had happened: an unconsciously repressed desire, driven deep into the soul, or, as psychologists say, into the subconscious, remained unsatisfied and as a result began to send signals into consciousness, in response to which the body put up a new bastion in front of him satisfaction is disease. Over time, the doctor managed to lift the patient to her feet, at the same time relieving the need to satisfy a desire that did not coincide with her life principles.
- There are diseases with a tendency to which we are born, - explains Potapov. - But whether we get sick in the end or not - it already depends on upbringing, and in the future from our way of life. In this sense, the example described by Freud is very striking. Some quality of nature or upbringing prevented the principles by which the family lived from truly rooting in the girl's soul. And here's the result: the girl found herself "between two chairs", and this, as you know, never ends well.
Today, not only Orthodox psychologists, but in general the majority of physicians admit that diseases such as asthma, duodenal ulcers and even allergies are a consequence of a person's inner “sitting” “between two chairs”. On the one hand, such a person adheres to the principles that he considers his own, but in fact they are not firm enough. On the other hand, he experiences desires that contradict these principles, and he still wants to satisfy them, although he “injects”. So it turns out that truly principled people are not only more confident, and therefore more successful in life, and even healthier.
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Do not do things that make you feel bad
Father Peter, Moscow Patriarchate:
- To date, no one has figured out all the algorithms by which our soul affects the body - they are so diverse and complex. Of course, some aspects of this connection are obvious even at the level of everyday life: for example, we will never reach out to food, from which, as "from the heart". In the same way, he “turns his back on the soul” in relation to some, even familiar people. However, religious truth testifies that the connection between soul and body is all-encompassing. It is not the brain that “thinks” and “feels”, as the materialists claim, but the soul, which reacts to the world around it with the help of the brain and heart. This statement has recently found more and more confirmation, even in orthodox medicine. An increasing number of our diseases are classified by physicians as psychosomatic, that is, their causes should be sought not in physiology, but in the psyche. And this word,derived from the Greek "psycho", and translated as "soul."