When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 1 - Waldorf Research Institute

I hope that this broad overview serves to indicate how anthroposophy
spans so many aspects of the realm of psychiatry, opening up new
possibilities of understanding, of diagnosis and also of therapy. I have also
tried to point out the extent to which the realm of psychiatry and the realm
of inner development or initiation are intimately connected. I have often
had the feeling that much that is met in the realm of psychiatry may be a
kind of result or expression of an uncompleted process of initiation in a
former life. I would certainly not suggest that this is so in every case, but an
insufficiently prepared initiation may be the result of an attempt to cross
the threshold into the spiritual world too soon. We see the same gesture
becoming manifest when our etheric body in the one or other of our organs
wishes to become released too quickly. Thoughts such as this are sometimes
helpful in those cases of mental illness in which it is not possible to discern
their origin in this life on earth, and with which a person may have to live
for a whole incarnation.
It is, however, often possible to understand a great deal of mental
illness or psychological disturbance in relation to childhood development.
Nowadays childhood development is under threat and it is very difficult
for most people to go through childhood in such a way that they achieve a
healthy soul-spiritual penetration of the body. Many things are responsible
for this, including poor nutrition, an education that has no respect for
phases of bodily development and which already draws organic processes too
soon from the body into the realm of soul; through a general deprivation of
what Steiner has called the bodily senses—that is to say, the senses of touch,
life, movement and balance. When the life processes withdraw from these
senses too quickly, the astral body is not able to create a sufficiently strong
resonance chamber or imprint for itself within the physical and etheric
bodies. This may show itself in later life in the form of soul insecurities,
anxieties, hyperactivity and so on. Childhood is also threatened through the
general dissolution of society. Conventional securities, accepted modes of
behavior, and so on, are rightly falling to one side, but all too often parents
are not able to replace them from their own individual resources. We
continually find ourselves thrown back upon ourselves, needing to rely on
personal judgments too soon before the organic basis of our body has been
properly equipped to fulfill this task. This crumbling of the social and moral
fabric of society throws the developing child all too easily into a state of
turmoil. At an increasingly early age the adolescent has often to encounter
the sense of inner void, meaninglessness, the realm of inner darkness.
Existential questions to do with self-identity confront the adolescent nowadays
almost as a normal phenomenon, whereas even 30 years ago the
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