The neurotic individual’s idealized self image, as Karen Horney M.D. describes as “a permanent condition of being unreal to oneself,” may have no place to persist within an experience of communitas, a shared experience that Robert L. Moore describes as creating “cracks in the structural system” which “open up sources of healing for a person, for the culture, and for the world” (OIC, Page 111) (TAOI, Page 43). If an experience of communitas brings about the relinquishing of certain self characteristics in service of a shared moment, then may the neurotic individual submit control of this image and feel their conflicts be transformed by the truer desires of the self?

Horney conceptualizes that neurotic individuals unconsciously create self images that negate the individual’s experience of internal conflict. These images are “what the neurotic believes himself to be” and “in large degree removed from reality” (OIC, Page 96-97). Individuals believe that they are this idealized version of themselves, thus distant from a “real self” underneath. Through the image, they avoid feeling anxiety and inner turmoil over their contradictory parts, including uncomfortable aspects of the human psyche and system. Ultimately, these images or self-beliefs have been created to maintain a sense of internal safety and cohesion, but they also prevent the individual from experiencing life in a way that is not driven by anxiety and neurotic fear.

What if an experience breaks through the walls of this image, though, thereby fracturing its control over the individual and creating an entryway for the “real self” to emerge?

In moments of communitas, Moore elaborates, a degree of non-judgmentalism and others-acceptance happens. Individuals become socially equal and stripped down to their common humanity. He says communitas is when human beings are “in it together, all on an equal footing” (TAOI, Page 42). At a music concert, for example, individuals stand packed shoulder to shoulder in service of the shared experience of seeing a beloved artist perform live. Within the moments whereby a singer carries a certain gravitas—when their message, their sound, their power ripples through the crowd—individuals unites behind a shared feeling.

In a moment like this, is there room still for those self-images to be jockeying around, neurotically defending control over the self, or is there enough self-submission amongst the crowd that individuals can experience the moment as their true selves?

Moore would suggest that people long to submit themselves to something greater. He says that “beneath the surface… there is often a desire to engage in a ritual submission… a deep longing to submit. The person who must always be in control and autonomous will not be able to access healing and transformative process” (TAOI, Page 47). However, the image is a protective mechanism that saves the individual from being laden with internal contradictions. The individual may be at odds with the experience, so the self stays within the image as its protective shell. In other words, the concert’s “divine energy” may not be felt.

Perhaps the truest experience of communitas is too overwhelming to the neurotic individual. Horney says that “if he allows it [the image] to be undermined, he is immediately threatened with the prospect of facing all his weaknesses, with no title to special claims, a comparatively insignificant figure” (OIC, Page 109). For example, his sense of status and self-power held within the idealized image may not deem it acceptable to “go out and lie on the ground in mud to listen to music.” It may be that this experience is too humiliating to fit into his self-view, so he will not submit. In this case, he will not relinquish the control needed to feel the “archetypally religious” experience of the live music, and the self-image will pervade (TAOI, Page 95).

It may, however, be that he can surrender to communitas and experience image-relinquishment, letting in the moment where the “real self” can emerge. If so, he might be able to feel that he is “equal before God… before the Sacred,” where the “spiritual energy in the air [is] so thick you could cut it with a knife” and embody “the religious power of those moments” (TAOI, Page 94-95). In this experience of sharing on common ground, perhaps inherently any form of self-image is vanquished in a sea of selflessness. As long as the individual submits to being transformed—allowing the magic of the space to take him over—the image will fall away, and what remains will be the self amongst many other selves all sharing in the same moment.

So, individuals may have entirely different experiences at concerts—standing in their image stronghold or sharing in the communitas—depending on the degree to which their neuroticism wins out over what the underlying self wants. Within the context of deep transformation in sacred spaces, like a spiritually-energized live show, the power for the neurotic individual to experience a ritualistic submission amongst communitas depends on 1) willingness to submit, 2) containment of the space to be sufficiently held, and 3) freedom to enact the true self.

For the real self to triumph over idealized image and an experience of religiosity to occur in communitas, one must allow themselves to be moved by the experience. Deep transformation arrives at a moment when the individual relinquishes control of the image, their unconscious perceptions of who they are and how they’re supposed to be falling away. In this moment, the idealized self image, like a medieval stronghold, lets go of its power and surrenders its walls, revealing its truest nature and submitting to the spiritual air and transformative power of communitas.