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“efforts of souls in distress to find moorings in some maternal soil; thus psychoanalysis also considers the origin of religions to be nothing but what (in its opinion) causes the “illnesses�� of the individual. Nowadays, of course, we generally lack a sense of religious community; the sects are countless and confined to single individuals—though perhaps it only appears so to the eye coloured by the present.

Such moorings, however, which really take hold of solid ground, are after all not an isolated, interchangeable property of man, rather they are pre-existing in his nature and continue to form his nature (as well as his body) in this direction. And it’s here they hope to cure?

In my case one should imagine three circles, an innermost one A, then B, then C. The centre A explains to B why this man has to torture and to distrust himself, why he has to renounce (it’s no renunciation, that would be very difficult, it’s only a having-to-renounce), why he may not live. (Wasn’t Diogenes, for instance, severely ill in this sense? Who of us would not have been happy if at last Alexander’s eye had shone down on us? But Diogenes begged him, desperate, to let him have the sun—this terrible, Greek, interminably burning, mad-driving sun. That tub was full of ghosts.) To C, the acting person, nothing is any longer explained, it only takes orders from B. C acts under most severe pressure, in cold sweat of fear (is there any other sweat that breaks out on the forehead, cheek, temple, scalp—in short, all round the whole skull? This is what it’s like for C.) Thus C acts more from fear than from understanding; he trusts, he believes that A has explained everything to B and that B has understood and handed on everything correctly.��