Psychoheresy and Inner Healing, 3

by Psychoheresy Awareness Ministries

The Past

Just as there is a huge difference between the usual use of the term unconscious and that of the Freudian or deterministic unconscious, so too with the use of the past in inner healing. For inner healers, the past is not merely your early life experiences, but rather you early life experiences causing, determining, or driving your behavior.

Freud postulated that a newborn will go through several "psychosexual stages of development." He named them the oral (0-18 months), anal (18-36 months), phallic (3-5 years), and genital (through puberty). Freud believed that the first five years of life and how a person maneuvered through these stages determined the person's life. Outdoing Freud, the Sandfords go further back into the prenatal period, as we shall show shortly.


Biblical Basis for the Use of the Past?

There is no biblical basis for the use of the past (or past determinants of behavior). The Bible includes the past works of God in history, because we are to remember the works of God both individually and corporately. But, regarding the Christian walk, the cross took care of the past. The walk of the believer is to be according to the new life and is therefore present and future oriented.

In Phillipians 3 Paul gives his religious and personal background, on which he had depended for righteousness before God. But when confronted by Jesus he saw his wretched sinfulness, not only that he had persecuted the church, but that he was sinful to the core. He knew he could not make himself righteous by going back into the past.

Therefore, he declared: "This one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 3:13, 14).

This does not mean an inability to recall the past; it means that the past now has a different significance. Biblically speaking, attempting to fix the past is purely a fleshly activity, which when indulged in wars against the spirit.

A person need not be trapped in negative patterns of behavior established in the early years of life, for the Bible offers a new way of life. Put off the old man; put on the new. Jesus said to Nicodemus, "Ye must be born again," and He said elsewhere that new wine could not be put into old wineskins. Jesus offers new life and new beginnings.

One who is born again has the spiritual capacity to overcome old ways and develop new ones through the action of the Holy Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, and the sanctification of the believer. One wonders why so many have given up the hope of Christianity for the hopelessness of past determinism.

Scientific Basis for the Use of the Past?

There is no predictive validity to the relationship between early life circumstances and present life. If you want to test it out, examine 100, 200, 500 kids in preschool or at whatever point in early life. Give all the tests you want and then predict what the children will be like as adults. Even Freud knew better than this.

He could be postdictive (look back to connect one's early life with one's present adult life), but never predictive (look ahead from a child's present life to tell how his future life as an adult will be). Given an adult with a problem, a Freudian will then interview the person and tell him how his childhood determined his present life. It is obvious that there is no science involved in this, only guess work.

Orville Brim, Jr., of the Foundation for Child Development in New York, studied this question. "Most of Brim's career has been devoted to charting the course of child development and its relation to adult personality; recently he has become convinced that 'far from being programmed permanently by the age of 5, people are virtually reprogrammable throughout life.'" Brim says: "Hundreds and hundreds of studies now document the fact of personality change in adulthood."

Jerome Kagen of Harvard and co-researcher Howard Moss say they "could find little relation between psychological qualities during the first three years of life - fearfulness, irritability, or activity - and any aspect of behavior in adulthood."

Victor and Mildred Goertzel investigated this fallacy of early life determinants. In their book, Cradles of Eminence, they report on the early environments of over four hundred eminent men and women of the twentieth century who had experienced a wide variety of trials and tribulations during their childhood.

It is surprising and even shocking to discover the environmental handicaps that have been overcome by individuals who should have been psychically determined failures according to Freudian formulas. Instead of being harmed by unfortunate early circumstances, they became outstanding in many different fields of endeavor and contributed much to mankind. What might have been environmental curses seemed to act, rather, as catalysts to spawn genius and creativity. This study is not an argument for poor upbringing; it is an argument against psychic determinism.