Religious Figures in delusions

About 80% of my "delusions" involved religious figures such as Jesus Christ, Satan, and God. The question here is I'm not religious. My psychiatrist says that religious delusions are common in Bipolar mania but my mood has been relatively stable. Diagnosis is at this point irrelevant. It could be Bipolar, Schizoaffective whatever. Why am I having these religious figures in my delusions? This is mainly a question for spiritual_emergency, who is knowledgeable in this sort of thing, but others are welcome to answer of course.

No one?

Considering how no one has posted I'll just make it a PM.

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Hello Phil:
I hope you won't mind me responding to your question in this thread -- this was where the question was asked, the thread's not been officially closed, and others may benefit from the discussion.

You asked: About 80% of my "delusions" involved religious figures such as Jesus Christ, Satan, and God. The question here is I'm not religious. My psychiatrist says that religious delusions are common in Bipolar mania but my mood has been relatively stable. Diagnosis is at this point irrelevant. It could be Bipolar, Schizoaffective whatever. Why am I having these religious figures in my delusions?

Before I offer up a response I'm going to remind you that I speak from the position of someone who has gone through a schizophrenic break -- that is, I speak as a peer, not as any kind of expert. Anything that I do share is based on the research I've done since my experience in order to understand my experience.

Like you, religious figures featured in my experience -- God, the devil, Jesus Christ. Like you, I also was not a religious person, however I am a person of this culture and within this culture it's understood that these figures represent certain things. I suspect that in order to understand why they feature in our experiences we need to explore what those figures symbolize and where those themes fit into our personal experience.

It's also worth noting that an individual in the midst of "psychosis" lacks the usual protective ego barriers. As a result, they tend to self-identify very strongly with whatever has captured their attention. Bearing that in mind, let's explore some possible interpretations of these figures.
[*] Jesus Christ is associated with compassion, suffering, universal love, brotherhood, redemption and forgiveness.
[*] Satan is associated with guilt, sin, tempation, fear, irredemption.
[*] God is associated with creation and all that is. According to culture or belief structure we may also associate God with being a specific gender; of serving in a parental role; of being both a protector and a tyrant capable of accepting us in Heaven or banishing us to Hell.

I've noted before that the language of schizophrenia is metaophor. When someone says to me that they are Jesus Christ, I don't interpret that literally -- I interpret it metaphorically. To me, what they are saying is that they are self-identifying in that period of time with something that Christ represents or symbolizes. This may not be expressed as, "I feel as if I've been cruxified" or "I feel I'm redeemable," but more commonly is expressed in symbolic, metaphorical form.

In it's opposing form, we can see self-identification with the devil which symbolizes negative aspects of our self. Satan can represent our fear, terror, personal judgement, sense of sinfulness, etc.

I'm going to drag a few other voices in here for the sake of taking these interpretations further. They are drawn from the work of the Jungians...

<blockquote>Archetypes

Archetypes are essentially quasi autonomous functions which give rise to specific motifs, as common in all mythology as in any individual's life. They are often discussed in terms of personifications which appear in dreams, but they can also be seen in themes of stories, mythological or lived. They are very potent as patterns of action. Another reason I prefer to consider them functionally is that they perform discrete functions as will be seen below. They are more than just different flavours of the same thing.

Another advantage of starting with a rather broader definition to avoid a common confusion of archetype with personified image. While the Self may give rise to an image of Jesus Christ for example, it is also the archetype behind the most abstract of mandalas.

Source: Major Archetypes and the Individuation Process</blockquote>

In this quote we see a psychologist being perfectly at ease with the idea that people will self-identify at times with the image of Jesus Christ. He doesn't feel a need to cast it as a delusion because he recognizes it as a symbol of the totality of the psyche.

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This next excerpt is a bit more lengthy but pay attention to the religious imagery...

<blockquote>PERRY: Yes. Now the symbolic expression of this is falling into a death - not only a death state, but also a death space - the "afterlife," the "realm of the ancestors," the "land of the dead," the "spirit world." The common experience here is for the person to look about and think that half the people around him are dead too. While in this condition, it's very hard for one to tell if one is really alive or not.

I've been told, by people looking back on the experience, that one thing that stands out most of all, beyond the feeling of isolation, is the perception that everything that comes up is divided into opposites: Good and Bad, God and the Devil, Us and Them, or whatever. It's confusing, it's bewildering, it causes tremendous indecision and a total arrest in motivation in which everything is cancelled by its opposite.

So both these things are very distressing: the fear that you have died and dropped away from the world of the living, and the fear of conflicting powers, conflicting values and thoughts. It's a very aggravating feeling. This experience of opposites very quickly takes on a rather paranoid form.

I think this is really what the paranoid content is based on. It takes the form of experiencing the world as caught in the grip of opposing forces, whether they be political, spiritual, cultural, ideological, or even racial. In recent years I've noticed it's "those who might destroy the planet" versus "those who are ecologically minded." The prevailing idiom of the decade seems to shape the particular form in which these opposites arise. The main thing here is a great clash of forces; and this clash is usually of rather cosmic proportions, not just a local affair at all.

Right away at the beginning, the death experience is accompanied by the feeling that you've gone back to the beginning of time. This involves a regression, a return to the state of infancy in one's personal life history. But hand in hand with this is the feeling of slipping back into the world of the primordial parents, into a Garden of Eden. For example, it's a very common experience to feel one is the child of Adam and Eve, say, at the beginning of time. This is very symbolic, obviously. It's pretty much a representation of the psyche at the start of one's individual career after birth.

So these are the outstanding features. All kinds of imagery comes tumbling across the field of awareness. It's like the mythological image in a perfect stained-glass window being smashed, and all the bits and pieces being scattered. The effect is very colourful, but it's very hard to discern how the pieces belong to each other. Any attempt to make sense of it is an exercise in abstraction from the actual experience. The important thing is to find the process running through it all.

The thing that I'm particularly interested in here is the clash of opposites. The individual usually has a feeling of intense fear, as he contemplates what seem to him to be the forces of disruption, of chaos, of the Antichrist, of the Communists - whatever the ideology happens to portray as "evil." In any case, these forces are seen as tending to destroy the world, and the "good guys" are those who would try to preserve it. This is the element I try in particular to explore, because it connects to all kinds of other general cultural and political phenomena that we could talk about! What makes this visionary state appear so very psychotic, is that an individual with a paranoid ideology or ideation tends to identify with everything that comes up from below, and one is very apt to get confused. A woman who identifies with the Virgin Mary, for example, may then believe she's about to give birth to a redeemer. Actually, there's many a pregnancy test that we do in these emergency situations, you know, because you can never be sure! And the men are very apt to feel they're specially elected to be the second coming of the Messiah; or, if they're very paranoid, a great political of military leader such as Napoleon or Hitler. The delusions of grandeur become very evident, for as soon as one's identity gets hung up on such archetypal identifications, there immediately arises the "enemy out there" who is trying to undo what the supreme power has brought about. There is a deeply-felt fear of being toppled, a feeling of immense danger. This again has many cultural connotations...

O'C: So if the person experiences himself as God, might he then also feel the Devil is out to get him?

PERRY: Yes, that's pretty much adequate. If one is Christ, the Anti-Christ is around somewhere at work; and if one is in a supreme position of political rule, then there is sure to be a disruptive revolutionary political party on the other side of the planet which is trying to topple you! It's rather scary, when you consider that the collective unconscious projects such huge shadows upon whole nations or superpowers...

Source: Mental Breakdown as Healing

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In the aftermath of my own experience I turned to my husband and said, "I think I'm Jesus Christ and I just killed the devil." It was a very apt statement and entirely fitting to my personal circumstance. There are various ways of interpreting such a statement. The first is to interpret it literally and declare me wrong, insane or delusional. Yet another way of interpretation is that of metaphor, which recognizes that I am speaking symbolically, i.e., I have just used love to conquer fear," or "I have just redeemed myself."

Other possibilities for interpretation can be found when we examine other models, settings and cultures. For example, within more "primitive" cultures the shaman often serves in the role of the savior. An individual in that environment might self-identify with being an animal such as a thunderbird, but the thunderbird itself is a symbol of a powerful divine being -- a god. Within the model of transpersonal or depth psychology the same kind of experience might be interpreted as an encounter with the numinous, the mystery beyond being. Within a framework of Eastern mysticism such an experience might be interpreted as a state of consciousness that indicates a stage of spiritual growth. Often, these are profound and healing encounters in spite of whatever pain and difficulty accompanies them.

To anyone who is going through or has gone through such an experience, I would encourage them to explore what these symbols mean on both a cultural and personal level. When we do, we can often find a deeper meaning and rational into why they have appeared.

<center>"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."

Carl Gustav Jung</center>

See also: The Far Side of Madness: Psychosis as Purposive

Came across the following in my wanderings and thought it might be of interest...

<blockquote>Christ: A Symbol of the Self

Carl Jung’s ideas and writings about God, religion, Christ, Christianity, and the Christian Church are some of his most challenging, controversial, and fruitful. His approach was to take ancient “thought forms that have become historically fixed, try to melt them down again and pour them into moulds of immediate experience.” (CW:11ar.148) Jung’s own experience of the numinosum (holy) was a lifelong passion and most of his major written works in the last third of his life were devoted to some aspect of religious experience and religious symbols, with particular attention to the symbols of the Christian myth.

In Aion (Collected Works, Vol. 9,ll) Jung addresses Christianity’s central figure, Christ, and unpacks the meaning of Christ as a symbol of the Self. At the request of many of his readers who asked for a more comprehensive treatment of the Christ/Self relationship, and apparently inspired by a dream during a temporary illness, Jung worked on the project for several years, completing it in 1951. Aion remains a “sacred text” for many of us who are intrigued by the convergence of religion and analytical psychology.

One of the most significant insights of the project, which will be the main thrust of this brief article, is the differentiation between Jesus, the historical figure from Nazareth, and the archetypal Christ, the Redeemer. This distinction between the historical and the symbolical is essential if the Christian symbols are to retain their power to touch the inner depths of the modern person. As we know, Jung’s diagnosis of modern men and women was a spiritual malnutrition bought on by a starvation of symbols. He called for a recovery of the symbolic life which had been abandoned to a one-sided literal, rational approach to religious matters.

The Jewish rabbi and reformer, Jesus, lived a personal, concrete, historical life. However, it was the archetypal image of a Redeemer slumbering, so to speak, in the collective unconscious, which became attached to that unique life. This powerful collective image made itself visible, so to speak, in the man Jesus, so that seeing him people glimpsed the greater personality which seeks conscious realization in each person. Jung notes that it was not the man Jesus who created the myth of the “god-man.” Other Redeemer myths existed many centuries before his birth. Jesus himself was seized by this symbolic idea, which, as St. Mark tells us, lifted him out of the narrow life of the Nazarene carpenter. (Jung, Man And His Symbols, p.89)

Briefly stated, at an early stage Jesus became the collective figure whom the unconscious of his contemporaries expected to appear and Jesus took on those projections. In this way, Jesus’ life exemplifies the archetype of the Christ, or in Jung’s psychological language, the Self, which is a more inclusive word for the inner image of god, the imago Dei, which resides in every person.

Read the full article: Christ: An Image of the Self</blockquote>

heya. i started a thread in general entitled 'toxic psychiatry' that you guys might be interested in. it is a book that has been written by a psychiatrist who considers mental disorders to be 'psycho-spiritual crises'. he maintains that the experiences of people with mental illness often seem to have to do with trying to figure out meaning. meaning of life, meaning of events, meaning of suffering etc. he thinks that delusions / hallucination / mania / depression etc is part of the body prompting one to notice that there is a 'psycho-spiritual crisis'.