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Jung's basic metaphysical assumptions have been incorporated into a more recent and rigorous school of religious psychology. Transpersonal psychology is

the study of human nature and development, which proceeds on the assumption that humans possess potentialities that surpass the limits of the maturely developed ego. It is an inquiry that presupposes that the ego, as ordinarily constituted, can be transcended and that a higher transegoic plane or stage of life is possible.(24)

This plane entails the existence of a metaphysical reality called "Dynamic Ground"--a primordial being out of which ego emerges and with which it seeks ultimately to unite. In short, "Dynamic Ground" is very much a Brahman or a Tao, and transpersonal psychology takes it for granted as an a priori. To reach this level of reality, certain obstacles, usually associated with desires and attachments, must be removed. Pain is the test, in the strict sense a purifier. The tortures of mystics, saints, and heroes are landmarks in their journey to salvation. Unfortunately, transegoic passage depends on a metaphysical entity that underlies the empirical self. This necessity does not render the discipline wrong, only tautological, very much like Mircea Eliade's History of Religions, or Jung's depth psychology, which drew on similar metaphysical presuppositions. In either case, the starting point is the place one seeks to find.

Jungian and transpersonal reductions are both metaphysical and cultural. The experience of the mystic is often reduced to the cultural symbolism that defines his or her action, or else to a metaphysical entity, which also happens to be culture-bound. The cost to the theory is enormous, and, at the very least, it would fail to explain the pathological and the sacred in one scope.

Freudian theory, in contrast, is more comprehensive and rigorous in its reduction. It promises to explain both the mystic and the neurotic teenager, reducing both to biological as well as social factors. Psychoanalysis is the most promising and incisive tool that we can bring to the discussion of self-hurt, but it must be applied with caution and without recourse to such clinical concepts as hysteria and masochism.

* The Faults of Masochism

The nineteenth-century science of psychology went beyond distinguishing true spirituality from mental illness. For Freud and his immediate followers all forms of religious activity--from simple rituals to self-mutilation--were expressions of deep underlying psychic causes, ranging from neurosis to clinical masochism. Freudian psychoanalytical theory would regard Maria Maddalena's self-flagellation as the ego's response to guilt induced by factors embedded in the superego's relation to the ego.(25) Voluntary pain is a form of self-punishment that subdues such guilty voices by suppressing the effects of instinctual drives, especially sex, which conflict with broader social constraints.

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