remember thinking about those events in particular and distinct locales as they were
taking place. Sometimes I can even smell and physically feel the things connected
with those events. I possess photographs of some of those events; I am a little boy
at kindergarten, then, bigger at primary school and then at high school, then I am a
young man in Greece and I srael and next, I am nearly as old as I am now. At any
point along that continuum of memory, in spite of the fact that I can nearly always
remember the emotions and sensations of the time, they are not me. Not the me
that I am now. They, each one of them, are a part of who I am now but they, or
the me then would have had no possible conception of the me that I am now. I n
fact, none of the people and places then, of which I had great certitude, exists now.
Where now are these very real fragments of me as I experienced them and what of
the places that I occupied? Have they too been extinguished by time? This of
course not only means that past personalities or fragments of them and the
memories of the places in which they existed, like the first house, are present within
me but also an anticipation of an aged me, of new others, places and experiences.
Jung notes this phenomenon in his own life (Jung, (MDR) 1961:33). What we
clearly have here is an example of a decentred-self and an elsewhere-place, aspects
of both the transcendent individual soul and the transcendent World Soul.
(a) Describing the Human Soul
Common usage of the word ‘soul’ has in the past generally been restricted to
the religious context and the soul is generally conceived of as insubstantial.
However, Sigmund Freud’s work, as Bettelheim points out was the study of the soul,
and he believed that the study and understanding of our dreams would help us to
comprehend the previously unrecognised enormous inner space of the soul
(Bettelheim, 1982:68). As early as 1905, in the opening passage of an article
entitled Psychical Treatment, Freud wrote, “ ... Psyche is a Greek word and its
German translation is soul. Psychical treatment hence means treatment of the soul”
(in Bettelheim, 1982:73). I n 1938, in An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud
emphasised that his life’s work had been devoted to trying to understand the world
of man’s soul and he concluded that the psyche and the life of the soul are the
same thing (Bettelheim, 1982:75).
That concept of soul includes the thinking, but inferior, reasoning ego as
well as the non-thinking ‘it’, the irrational world of the unconscious and the