MAURICE NICOLL: Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way

When the legendary nineteenth century confessor, the Abbe Huvelin died, this remarkable comforter and healer of souls left a journal that revealed that his interior life had been gripped by a sense of worthlessness, a repeated self-negation, of his ‘nothingness’, he was a genuinely wounded healer that, paradoxically, gave abundantly from what he himself perceived to lack. There is no obvious linkage between wholeness and holiness.

Maurice Nicoll was not only an actual doctor, a neurologist, but emerges from the memories of those who knew him likewise as a gifted healer of souls and spiritual guide. If, however you wanted to know more of this doctor and follower of remarkable men, we had, apart from his works, only two memoirs penned by faithful followers, illuminating, but understandably skewed to presenting their teacher in the best possible light.

Now, however, Gary Lachman has provided a comprehensive, nuanced and highly intelligent study of the man, assisted by his revealing access to Nicoll’s diaries and papers.

What is revealed?

First, that he was, as was possibly suspected, not a wholly orthodox follower of the Work as Gurdjieff’s teachings came to be known. For example, he continued to be concerned with dreams, an area of our lives that Gurdjieff had deemed not worthy of attention, and, his range of intellectual influences from the Neo-Platonism through Swedenborg to a continuing evident interest in Jung made their way into his Psychological Commentaries, the work for which he is best known, often in unacknowledged disguise. This may convince the holders of the Work flame to say “we told you so” but each of us must judge such additions on their own merits: creative innovation or heresy!

Second, and more surprisingly, for one so distinguished, Nicoll was haunted by a sense of the incomplete, a lack of self-esteem, and that this was mirrored externally in a strange inability to complete projects, especially written ones. This was, in part, a tendency to compare himself with his father, an accomplished man of letters, as famous for his friendships as for his work. It was a comparison that accompanied Nicoll seemingly throughout his life, never letting go.

Thirdly, and most revelatory, was that Nicoll was obsessed with sex in multiple ways. There is the familiar dimension of a struggle to find its place in a healthy pattern of relationship, especially at a time of repression, when people often advanced into adulthood with inadequate emotional or practical knowledge, and where the language of sin and transgression waited to entrap you at the turn of even the most modest ‘unclean’ thought. Nicoll bore all the hallmarks of these challenges - idealising women and imagining them as debasing temptresses at one at the same time rather than meeting actual women in all their complexities. Indeed, he will marry one of his patients, who in the course of treatment admitted to having very little interest in sex, a choice that strikes one as a trifle odd for a man so obsessed!

Then there is the less familiar dimension of Nicoll’s apparent experiments with sex as a form of spiritual illumination following in the footsteps, as recent research has argued, of Swedenborg who experimented likewise. What these practices consisted in remains tantalisingly unclear - but there are resonances of Swedenborg and his explorations in the Western esoteric tradition, experiences of hypnagogia, Jung’s active imagination and practical exercises. Nicoll had a doctor’s handwriting so deciphering his personal jottings is handicapped but so too does his actual reticence - that one is obsessed does not mean that you can be fully transparent, on paper, or in mind, even to oneself. Nor is there any evidence that any of this spilled over into the outside world, or indeed anyone else knew of it at all.

So does any of this matter to understanding Nicoll as a spiritual guide?

To which the answer, I think, is yes, for it reminds us that the work of spiritual transformation is hard, an unremitting task, and that the path is not straight, nor touches all of oneself, in every dimension, and that sharing illumination with others, may be both wholly genuine, and yet may lie unapplied to ourselves. To imagine perfection in our teachers is to expect too much, may leave us exposed, vulnerable to future disappointment, and leaves no space either in them or ourselves for a grounding humility or any sparks of humour. Like any struggle it may have helpful resonances with our own and shed insight on the way.

Though these revelations form an important part of the book, they leave copious room for what Nicoll will be most remembered for: as Jung’s first English interlocutor whose book, Dream Psychology, introduced Jung to a wider English-speaking audience. And as a follower of Gurdjieff’s, and a friend of Ouspensky’s, a witness to their as yet under-explored impact on the spiritual and cultural life of the twentieth century. And, finally, as an author of the compendious Psychological Commentaries, of erudite and captivating explorations of the meaning of time, and the revealing accounts of an inner, esoteric form of Christianity. All these dimensions of this myriad-minded man are explored, with the accomplished clarity that Lachman customarily brings to his subjects: balanced accounts of clear exposition and judicious critique.

Nicoll emerges from this exemplary biography undoubtedly as a more complex, challenging person, but that complexity is a reminder that we are all, even the most apparently accomplished, carriers of wounds, and maybe even they are also sometimes blessings in disguise.