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Appendix IV 305
expressions.” Notice that May does not deny the existence of the ego-id-superego; he simply sees them as expressions of a deeper unity or deeper self, the total being . . . . The total organism encompassed the ego-id-superego, but not vice versa. I therefore began calling this deeper level by the name “centaur” (a mythological term first used by Benoit, 1955, to indicate a total unity of human-mind and animal-body).
If, then, we had to state the general aim of humanistic- existential therapies in one sentence, it might be: They aim at resurrecting and fully actualizing the centauric self. As James Broughton’s study disclosed, the most fully developed personalities viewed “both mind and body as experiences of an integrated self,” and that integrated self, the centaur, was precisely the paradigm of humanistic-existential therapies (Loevinger, 1977). I would later subdivide these therapies into two classes, noetic and somatic, depending on whether they approached the centaur predominantly through the mind (Rollo May, Binswanger) or through the body (yoga, Rolfìng). But the essential point remained: Unite the ego-mind and body-soma so as to resurrect a total identity with the centaur. As Perls (1951) put it, “The aim is to extend the boundary of what you accept as yourself to include all organic activities.” The equation here was: ego + body = centaur.
These, of course, were the simplest of generalizations; nonetheless, as generalizations go, they were extremely useful. For example, I could already see the difference between neurotic guilt-anxiety and existential guilt-anxiety; the former was caused by an apprehension of the shadow, the latter, by an apprehension of the general otherness of the world. The former was caused by a split within the subject, the latter, by the prior split between the subject and the object. (And thus, to finish our account with Freud, both views are partially correct: Primary anxiety is existential and given, and it is this primal anxiety that ultimately causes the repression of the shadow—but the repression of the shadow then leads to excess anxiety, surplus anxiety, or neurotic anxiety per se.) Further, these simple generalizations had also given me within the personal sphere alone, three major levels of being or consciousness: the persona level, the ego level, and the centaur/existential level.
From that point, it was a very small step to realize how the mystical traditions fit into the overall scheme. Psychoanalysis aimed at uniting persona and shadow to reveal a whole and healthy ego; going deeper, humanistic therapies aimed at uniting the ego and the body to reveal the total centaur. Just so, the