Freud's Transference and the Four States of Bahá'u'lláh

by Wolfgang A. Klebel

Abstract: As in several previous contribution of this writer in the “Lights of ‘Irfán,” the understanding of a central Verse from the “Valley of Unity” of Bahá’u’lláh’s Seven Valleys is at the core of this article. In this verse Bahá’u’lláh talked about something that is fundamentally True of Thyself and developed a structure that was called tetrarchic by this writer. Bahá'u'lláh wrote "Firstness and lastness, outwardness and inwardness are, in the sense referred to, true of thyself, that in these four states conferred upon thee thou shouldst comprehend the four divine states." Tetrarchic is a term that was coined to describe this structure and the Wilberian concepts of "I," "we," "it," and "its," and the opposites of Spirit versus Body and Unity versus Diversity. These are related to what Freud termed transferences, which are "impulses or fantasies of the past, which are experienced as present and as related to the analyst." See also the author's Tetrarchic Self: Correlating Freud’s Transference with the Four States of Bahá’u’lláh.