ABSTRACT
The account of historical development runs broadly as follows. Religion helps the primitive by objectifying such psychic contents; in viewing them as demons, spirits of the dead, etc., he separates them from his ego and is able to cope with them more easily. The break-up of a dogmatic system which adjusted the inner and the outer worlds has serious consequences. The conscious mind becomes severed from its roots in the instincts; at the same time the energy which was formerly projected on to outer forms comes streaming back, ‘the waters rise, and inundating catastrophes burst upon mankind’. The essential religious experience is a numinous one, in Rudolf Otto’s term. The experience of the God-imago seems identical with the coming into being of the self: ‘It is as though, at the culmination of the illness, the destructive powers were converted into healing forces.
