The tremendous power of the Roman Catholic Church is even to-day due to the fact that it enables its members to confess their most secret sufferings from time to time and to be absolved. Dr. Muthmann calls attention to the fact that suicides are most frequent in Protestant countries, and least frequent among Roman-Catholic peoples, and he thinks that this is to be attributed to the influence of the confessional, one of the greatest blessings for numberless people.
The psycho-analytic method of treating nervous diseases has not only made the incalculable benefit of confession its own but has united with it the individual’s spiritual education inasmuch as it teaches him how to know himself and to turn his eyes into the darkest depths of his soul. But there is also a kind of speaking out that is almost equivalent to confession--self-communion. That is, one’s communings with oneself. For, as Grillparzer says, every heart has its secrets that it anxiously hides even from itself. Not all of us know how to detect such secrets. The poet has this gift. As Ibsen beautifully says: “To live is to master the dark forces within us; to write is to sit in judgment on ourselves.” But only a poet is able to sit in judgment on his own soul. Not every person has the capacity for self-communion. Most of the diseases of the soul depend upon the peculiar mechanism that Freud has called “repression.” This “repression” is a semi-forgetting of displeasing impressions and ideas. But only a half-forgetting. For a part of the repressed idea establishes itself in some disguised form as a symptom or as some form of nervous disease. In these cases the psychotherapeutist must apply his art and teach the invalid to know himself.
Goethe knew the value of confession. He reports that he once cured a Lady Herder by confession. On September 25th, 1811, he wrote to Mrs. Stein: “Last night I wrought a truly remarkable miracle. Lady Herder was still in a hypochondriacal mood in consequence of the unpleasantnesses she had experienced in Carlsbad, especially at the hands of her family. I had her confess and tell me everything, her own shortcomings as well as that of the others, in all their minutest details and consequences, and at last I absolved her and jestingly made her understand that by this ritual these things had now been disposed of and cast into the deeps of the sea. Thereupon she became merry and is really cured.” Here we have the basic principles of modern psychotherapy. Unconsciously, by virtue of the hidden power of his genius, the poet accomplished what modern therapeutists also attempt.