The Concept of “Cratism” and “Heteropathic Feelings” in the Psychobiography of Jesus from Nazareth (Psychobiography in Lvov-Warsaw School)

Abstract

At the beginning of the 20th century, the philosophical-logical Lvov-Warsaw School was also a psychological school in which several interesting psychological theories were developed. This includes the theory of actions and products of Kazimierz Twardowski and the theory of cratism (the theory of power) of Wladyslaw Witwicki. Based on the cratism theory, the assumptions of which are very similar or an alternative to the Individualpsychologie of Alfred Adler, Witwicki created two original psychobiographies: of the Greek philosopher Socrates and Jesus from Nazareth. The origins of Socrates’ psychobiography date back to 1909, so it is one of the oldest psychobiographies in the world, and certainly the oldest non-psychoanalytical world psychobiography. Witwicki’s psychobiographies are distinguished by a few interesting elements, but two of them seem particularly important: (a) a cratic motivation (or the pursuit of a sense of power) was the main motivational mechanism for life, teaching and activities of Socrates and Jesus Christ; (b) the concept of heteropathic feelings, i.e. social feelings, whose constellation in the society and life of the individuum depends, among others, on the intensity of their cratic desires. However, these psychobiographies were quite free and sometimes controversial, without empirical verification. The psychological assumptions developed in the school of Kazimierz Twardowski seem to me, however, to be of great importance for a better understanding of the dominant feelings and psychological motivation in ancient times, and therefore also particularly important when we try to create a historical/ancient psychobiography. In the proposed Sects. 21.1 and 21.2 will briefly present the basic assumptions of cratism theory in light of the psychological Lvov-Warsaw School, and then I’ll focus on the cratic psychobiography of Christ. I will not refer to it in detail here, because it was discussed in the available literature (Citlak, 2015, 2016a; Rzepa and Stachowski, 1993). I would like to take a step forward, namely to make a certain verification of Witwicki’s assumptions: did the cratic motivation play an important role in the life of Jesus of Nazareth? what kind of heteropathic feelings (social feelings) can be attributed to the founder of Christianity? The oldest image of Christ available to us is present in the four canonical Gospels, so we will reconstruct the abovementioned variables based on psycholinguistic (mainly quantitative) analysis of the original (Greek) text of the Gospels.