parents said about angels speaking through him becomes a reality for the insane man."
Hitschmann also said there were homosexual components in Swedenborg's love of God, while Lagerborg considers his references to innocence and childhood in heaven as proof of the regression theory. Lagerborg, however, is also willing to consider it a case of Jungian regression, to primitive man's mythomania. Physically, Lagerborg says, one must remember that Swedenborg was oversexed [no evidence for this] and that fear of impotence caused the tension of the crisis, the ecstasy, the hallucinations, the desire for self-improvement and "erotomania."
Lagerborg's final dictum is that "all mysticism regresses to mankind's irrational attempts. A mental disease starts this off, and we return to the crutches of our ancestors."
Von Winterstein, another psychoanalyst, confirms and elaborates Hitschmann's diagnosis.14 According to Von Winterstein, Swedenborg had an unsolved inverted Œdipus complex. Instead of hating his father for being the husband of his mother (as he apparently "normally" should) he had, mainly owing to the early death of his mother, a repressed and unconscious homosexual attachment for his father. The evidence for this, as Von Winterstein sees it, is, for one thing, that Swedenborg quarreled with his father about money (presumably to dissemble his love), but chiefly that Swedenborg emphasized the significance of "God," which is a "father-symbol," both before and after his "conversion." .
Swedenborg, according to Von Winterstein, in changing from science to religion, "accepted the purport of his homosexual attachment, and developed paranoia as a kind of psychological penalty for his perversity. The turning to God is merely a symbol for accepting and condoning, at least in a disguised form, the implied relation to the father."
Evidently it is not for the uninitiated to try to penetrate such clever disguises.
In regard to Swedenborg, as has been stated, the present study is not meant to be an attempt to explain in psychoanalytical terms of how Swedenborg came to have those experiences which seemed to him to come from another world than this. Whether such an
