Maurice Nicoll: Forgotten Teacher of the Fourth Way
Gary Lachman
Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2024. 453 pp., hardcover, $35.
Gary Lachman’s description of Dr. Maurice Nicoll extols a man caught up in a time of intellectual and spiritual ferment. Freudianism, psychoanalysis, spiritualism, freethinker communes, and New Thought were all blossoming in his era: the early twentieth century.
Born in 1884, active through World War II up to his death in 1953, Nicoll was a Scottish neurologist and Jungian therapist who became an advocate of G.I. Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. Nicoll eventually evolved his own brand of mysticism, tooled of equal parts Fourth Way, the Hermetica, Jacob Boehme, Greek philosophy, William Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, and owing something to Theosophy. He taught with eloquence and insight at institute centers inspired by Gurdjieff’s Prieuré and P.D. Ouspensky’s country house. Not only was Nicoll afflicted with “institute-itis,” as Lachman likes to call it, he wrote extensively over the years, including fiction for The Strand Magazine and a successful novel. More significantly, he penned his five-volume Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
Lachman emphasizes the inner disquiet—a sense that something important is missing—that prompts seekers to pursue the rather arduous Gurdjieffian path, and he sees many levels of disquiet in Maurice Nicoll. A neurologist and psychoanalyst, he could have prospered as a Harley Street physician and whiled away his life in middle-class ease. But Nicoll was forever searching for a way into the next level, an escape from the trapped routine that characterizes adult life. Lachman suggests that Nicoll may have had a kind of puer aeternus—eternal child—syndrome. He certainly had other psychological peculiarities, which drove him into the world of psychoanalysis, dream interpretation, and self-study.
A principal problem for Nicoll was his curious sexual fixation. As Lachman discovered (having gotten permission from the estate to slog through Nicoll’s multivolume private diary), this gentlemanly, portly, snooty physician struggled with compulsively envisioning the sexual degradation of women and an equally obsessive regimen of masturbation. As a psychologist, he knew the fantasies were unhealthy, and he agonized over them. For a time, he attempted to use the energy of his sessions of intense onanism for contacting higher spiritual powers. All this he kept secret, and we’re not aware of his having shared it with his own analyst, Carl Jung. Lachman offers no evidence that Nicoll ever acted on his fantasies.
One of the most rewarding parts of the Nicoll biography is his extensive association with the famous quasi-mystic and theorist of archetypes Carl Jung, who was godfather to Nicoll’s only child. Lachman details Jung’s break with Sigmund Freud, and Nicoll was apparently swept in the slipstream of Jung’s departure from Freudian psychoanalysis. Nicoll introduced Jung to London society, and for a time shared a house with him. Lachman suggests Nicoll had fallen victim to projection, turning Jung into a father figure: Nicoll’s relationship with his staid pastor of a father was iffy.
Jung’s overly sardonic presence led to a breakup between the two men. Left rudderless, Nicoll searched for another teacher, encountering Ouspensky’s lectures on the fourth dimension and his systemization of the Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way. Both Nicoll and his wife, Catherine, were struck by the Gurdjieffian ideas of humankind’s sleep, even though we suppose we’re awake—our utter mechanical reactivity and lack of inward unity. After steeping in Ouspensky for a time, Nicoll spent several seasons with Gurdjieff in the rigors of his institute outside Paris, an experience he found both taxing and transformative. On returning to England, Nicoll dealt with his father’s estate and began piecing together his own institute.
Lachman takes us through Nicoll’s dizzying hammering-together of a country institute for the study of the Fourth Way, onward through the advent of World War II and the Blitz, and how Nicoll and his followers worked in something like communality to survive together. As Nicoll aged, he seems to have drifted into something more syncretistic and less purely Gurdjieffian. As Lachman tells it, the sunnier spiritual climes of Swedenborg’s visions drew him, and by the end of his life he was perhaps more Swedenborgian than Gurdjieffian.
Nicoll could be a snob: he does not seem to have encouraged working-class persons or people of color into his spiritual school. While he left an indelible mark with his esoteric interpretations of the New Testament in The New Man and The Mark, his powerful classic Living Time, and his Psychological Commentaries, some present-day Nicoll enthusiasts may be annoyed by Lachman’s feet-of-clay revelations: Nicoll’s classism, sexual obsessions, and alcoholism might put off some readers. We see in Lachman the influence of Colin Wilson, and there is a certain tendency to sensationalism here. Gurdjieffians might be annoyed with Lachman’s repeating of some canards—for example, the mistaken notion that Gurdjieff did not successfully help anyone transform themselves. But Lachman’s impressive notating, his extensive background as a chronicler of esoteric spirituality, and his insights into his subject’s character carries the book. It is more than worthwhile, if one does not expect complete and total accuracy in every regard. The esoteric is, after all, mysterious.
John Shirley
John Shirley is the author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas, as well as numerous works of fiction.