The Cry for Myth

by May, Rollo

  THE CRY FOR MYTH

  By the same author

  LOVE AND WILL

  THE MEANING OF ANXIETY

  MAN’S SEARCH FOR HIMSELF

  POWER AND INNOCENCE

  THE COURAGE TO CREATE

  PSYCHOLOGY AND THE HUMAN DILEMMA

  FREEDOM AND DESTINY

  THE DISCOVERY OF BEING

  Contents

  Foreword

  Part I: THE FUNCTION OF MYTHS

  ONE What Is a Myth?

  “I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN”

  CULTS AND MYTHS

  THE DENIAL OF MYTHS

  MYTH AS OUR GLIMPSE OF INFINITY

  TWO Our Personal Crises in Myths

  SATAN AND CHARLES

  A PATIENT’S DREAM OF ATHENA

  SARTRE AND The Flies

  DRAMAS EXPRESSING MYTHS

  THREE In Search of Our Roots

  THE PASSION TO FIND OUR HOME

  MYTHS AS CELEBRATIONS

  WHERE HAVE ALL OUR HEROES GONE?

  MYTHS AND MORALS: MURDER IN CENTRAL PARK

  FOUR Myth and Memory

  MEMORY NEEDS MYTH

  ADLER AND EARLY MEMORIES

  FIVE Freud and the Mystery of Myths

  OEDIPUS----MYTH OF SELF-DISCOVERY

  MYTHS OF LOVE AND DEATH

  THE TRAGEDY OF TRUTH ABOUT ONESELF

  RESPONSIBILITY NOT GUILT

  THE HEALING POWER OF MYTH

  Part II: MYTHS IN AMERICA

  SIX The Great Myth of the New Land

  THE MYTH OF THE FRONTIER

  LONELINESS IN AMERICA

  VIOLENCE AND LONELINESS

  THE SEDUCTION OF THE NEW

  THE MYTH OF PROTEUS

  SEVEN Individualism and Our Age of Narcissism

  THE MYTH AND NEUROSIS OF NARCISSUS

  THE NEUROSIS OF OUR TIME

  THE HORATIO ALGER MYTH

  CONTEMPORARY EVIL IN PARADISE

  THE AGE OF MELANCHOLY

  NARCISSISM, DRUGS, AND MONEY

  EIGHT Gatsby and the American Dream

  THE JAZZ AGE

  TRAGIC SUCCESS

  THE INABILITY TO CARE

  THE AMERICAN-STYLE GOD

  CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICA

  THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

  Part III: MYTHS OF THE WESTERN WORLD

  NINE The Therapist and the Journey Into Hell

  DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY

  VIRGIL AND TRANSFERENCE

  THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL

  THE FREEDOM TO LOVE

  TEN Peer Gynt: A Man’s Problem in Loving

  THE LOSS OF ONE’S SELF

  THE MEANING OF TROLLDOM

  THE VALUE OF DESPAIR

  THE STRANGE PASSENGER

  LOVE AND RESTORATION

  ELEVEN Briar Rose Revisited

  FAIRY TALE AND MYTH

  CREATIVE PRESENCE

  REVISITING BRIAR ROSE

  TWELVE Faust: The Myth of Patriarchal Power

  THE FAUST STORY

  MARLOW’S FAUST—GRANDEUR AND TRAGEDY

  THE HARDENED HEART

  THE CATHARSIS OF MYTH

  THIRTEEN Goethe’s Faust and the Enlightenment

  GOD AND MEPHISTOPHELES

  MYTHIC AGONY

  CULTURAL CREATIVITY

  THE SALVATION OF FAUST

  FOURTEEN Faust in the Twentieth Century

  CONVERSATION WITH THE DEVIL

  THE LAMENTATION OF DR. FAUSTUS

  PSYCHOTHERAPY AS FAUSTIAN

  FIFTEEN The Devil and Creativity

  THE SOURCES OF CREATIVITY

  POE’S “RAVEN”

  MOBY DICK AND THE MYTH OF CAPTAIN AHAB

  CATHARSIS IN THE STRUGGLE WITH EVIL

  Part IV: MYTHS FOR SURVIVAL

  SIXTEEN The Great Circle of Love

  LIBERATION OF WOMEN

  THE CHARM OF MORTALITY

  PLANETISM AND HUMANHOOD

  Index

  Copyright

  Foreword

  As A PRACTICING PSYCHOANALYST I find that contemporary therapy is almost entirely concerned, when all is surveyed, with the problems of the individual’s search for myths. The fact that Western society has all but lost its myths was the main reason for the birth and development of psychoanalysis in the first place. Freud and the divergent therapists made it clear that myths are the essential language in psychoanalysis.

  The great interest in Joseph Campbell’s television talks on myth is the most obvious demonstration of the profound need throughout Western countries for myth. But whereas Campbell’s talks were almost exclusively about myths in India, Asia, China, and Asia Minor, this book is about myths as they are immediately present in the consciousness and unconsciousness of contemporary living people in the West.

  We are concerned here with narratives which come up continuously in contemporary psychotherapy.

  I speak of the Cry for myths because I believe there is an urgency in the need for myth in our day. Many of the problems of our society, including cults and drug addiction, can be traced to the lack of myths which will give us as individuals the inner security we need in order to live adequately in our day. The sharp increase in suicide among young people and the surprising increase in depression among people of all ages are due, as I show in this book, to the confusion and the unavailability of adequate myths in modern society. This book will appeal, I hope, to people in America and similar countries as part of our endeavor to bring the problem of myths into open consciousness and to show how myths can be rediscovered as tools for understanding ourselves.

  This is especially urgent as we seek to give meaning to our lives—in our creativity, our loves, our challenges—since we stand on the threshold of a new century. The approach of a new period in history stimulates us to take stock of our past and to ask the question of the meaning we have made and are making in our lives. It is in that mood that I offer this book.

  Rollo May

  Here we have our present age … bent on the extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities.

  Friedrich Nietzsche,

  The Birth of Tragedy from

  the Spirit of Music

  It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology…. But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot the same be said today of your own Physics?

  Freud, in his correspondence

  with Einstein

  We hear the cry for myth, sometimes a silent cry, on the campuses of our day. Science and Humanism must join together to respond to this cry.

  Matthew Bronson, biologist,

  at a student conference at

  the University of California, San Diego

  PART I

  THE FUNCTION OF MYTHS

  ONE

  What Is a Myth?

  Studied alive, myth … is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings.

  Bronislaw Malinowski,

  Magic, Science and Religion

  AMYTH IS A WAY of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. Whether the meaning of existence is only what we put into life by our own individual fortitude, as Sartre would hold, or whether there is a meaning we need to discover, as Kierkegaard would state, the result is the same: myths are our way of finding this meaning and significance. Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.

  Myth making is essential in gaining mental health, and the
compassionate therapist will not discourage it. Indeed, the very birth and proliferation of psychotherapy in our contemporary age were called forth by the disintegration of our myths.

  Through its myths a healthy society gives its members relief from neurotic guilt and excessive anxiety. In ancient Greece, for example, when the myths were vital and strong, individuals in the society were able to meet the problems of existence without overwhelming anxiety or guilt feeling. Hence we find the philosophers in those times discussing beauty, truth, goodness, and courage as values in human life. The myths freed Plato and Aeschylus and Sophocles to create their great philosophic and literary works, which come down as treasures for us today.

  But when the myths of classical Greece broke down, as they did in the third and second centuries, Lucretius could see “aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage and forced to vent themselves in recalcitrant repining.”*

  We in the twentieth century are in a similar situation of “aching hearts” and “repining.” Our myths no longer serve their function of making sense of existence, the citizens of our day are left without direction or purpose in life, and people are at a loss to control their anxiety and excessive guilt feeling. People then flock to psychotherapists or their substitutes, or drugs or cults, to get help in holding themselves together. Hence the psychologist Jerome Bruner can write, “For when the prevailing myths fail to fit the varieties of man’s plight, frustration expresses itself first in mythoclasm and then in the lonely search for internal identity.”†

  This “lonely search for internal identity” is a widespread need which gives rise in our society to the development of psychoanalysis and the many forms and promises of psychotherapy and the multitude of cure-alls and cults, constructive or destructive as they may be.

  “I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN”

  This autobiographical novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, tells the experience of a young schizophrenic woman, Deborah, in her actual treatment with a psychiatrist. The stirring events in the treatment of this girl read like a contemporary extraterrestrial film. In her therapy we see a constant and gripping interplay of myths. Deborah (as she is called) lived with the mythic figures of Idat, Yr, Anterrabae, Lactamaen, the Collect, all of whom inhabited the Kingdom of Yr. Since Deborah could communicate with no one else in the world, she desperately needed these mythic figures. She writes, “the gods of Yr had been companions—secret, precisely sharers of her loneliness. “* She would flee to them when she was terrified or unbearably lonely in the so-called real world.

  On the way to the sanatorium, as Deborah tells us, she and her parents stayed overnight in adjacent rooms in a motel.

  On the other side of the wall, Deborah stretched to sleep. The kingdom of Yr had a kind of neutral place which was called the Fourth Level. It was achieved only by accident and could not be reached by formula or an act of will. At the Fourth Level there was no emotion to endure, no past or future to grind against.

  Now, in bed, achieving the Fourth Level, a future was of no concern to her. The people in the next room were supposed to be her parents. Very well. But that was part of a shadowy world that was dissolving, and now she was being flung unencumbered into a new one in which she had not the slightest concern. In moving from the old world, she was also moving from the intricacies of Yr’s kingdom, from the Collect of Others, the Censor, and the Yri gods. She rolled over and slept a deep, dreamless, and restful sleep.

  Next morning, she tells us, she felt the great reassurance and comfort the myths had given her.

  … it occurred to Deborah, as the car pulled away from the motel and out into the sunny day, that the trip might last forever and that the calm and marvelous freedom she felt might be a new gift from the usually too demanding gods and offices of Yr.*

  Not only are these gods in Deborah’s scheme remarkable for their imaginative depth, but they are remarkable as well for their great similarity to what has been shown thirty years later in E. T., The Return of the Jedi, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the other extra-worldly films which attract millions of children and adults in our late twentieth century. Deborah was schizophrenic. But where one draws the line between schizophrenia and an intensely creative imagination is a perpetual puzzle. Again Hannah Green (her pen name) writes:

  She began to fall, going with Anterrabe through this fire-framed darkness into Yr. This time the fall was far. There was utter darkness for a long time and then a grayness, seen only in bands across the eye. The place was familiar; it was the Pit. In this place gods and Collect moaned and shouted, but even they were unintelligible. Human sounds came, too, but they came without meaning. The world intruded, but it was a shattered world and unrecognizable. †

  The psychiatrist who served as therapist for Deborah at Chestnut Lodge, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, wisely made clear to Deborah at the outset that she would not pull these gods away against Deborah’s will. Dr. Frieda, as she is called in the book, worked them into the treatment, suggesting sometimes to Deborah that she tell her gods such-and-such, or occasionally asking her what her gods say. What is most important is that Dr. Fromm-Reichmann respected Deborah’s need for these mythic figures, and she sought to help Deborah to see that she, Deborah, had her part in creating them. In one session,

  “Our time is over,” the doctor said gently, “You have done well to tell me about the secret world. I want you to go back and tell those gods and Collect and Censor that I will not be cowed by them and that neither of us is going to stop working because of their power.”*

  But when Dr. Frieda had to go to Europe for a summer, Deborah was temporarily assigned to a younger psychiatrist who was imbued with the new rationalism. This psychiatrist marched in to destroy the “delusions” of Deborah with no understanding whatever of Deborah’s need for her myths. The result was that Deborah, her whole system of gods and their extraterrestrial kingdom in shambles, deteriorated markedly. She regressed into a completely withdrawn world. She set fire to the sanatorium, burned and maimed herself, and behaved like a human being whose humanity is destroyed. For this is literally what had happened. Her soul—defined as the most intimate and fundamental function of her consciousness—was taken away, and she had literally nothing to hold on to.

  Deborah described this to Dr. Frieda when the latter returned from Europe. The other psychiatrist, she wept, “wanted only to prove how right he was and how smart.” Amid her flood of tears, she continued, “He might as well have said, ‘Come to your senses and stop the silliness.’… God curse me!” groaned Deborah. “God curse me! … for my truth the world gives only lies!”

  We may take the rationalistic psychiatrist’s behavior as an allegory of our modern age. When we in the twentieth century are so concerned about proving that our technical reason is right and we wipe away in one fell swoop the “silliness” of myths, we also rob our own souls and we threaten to destroy our society as part of the same deterioration.

  Deborah’s myths continued right up to the last page of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. But by then she had learned that her myths were also a product of her own rich creativity. Dr. Frieda had helped her understand that the form the myths took—allegedly schizophrenic to start with—was within her own power to mold.

  Though Deborah had her part in creating the myths, it is important to state that she did not create the need for them. This need is part of our destiny as human beings, part of our language and our way of understanding each other. At the end of the therapy Deborah’s creativity emerged in ways that genuinely contributed to herself and her society; she has written and published several excellent novels after completing her treatment at Chestnut Lodge, at least two of these novels about seriously handicapped persons.

  This present book is written not chiefly about schizophrenics as such but about the need of all of us for myths arising from our character as human beings. The form these myths take will vary. But the need for myths, indeed, the cry for myths, will b
e present wherever there are persons who call themselves human. We are all like Deborah in this sense: though we form our own myths in various collective and personal ways, the myths are necessary as ways of bridging the gap between our biological and our personal selves.

  Myths are our self-interpretation of our inner selves in relation to the outside world. They are narrations by which our society is unified.* Myths are essential to the process of keeping our souls alive and bringing us new meaning in a difficult and often meaningless world. Such aspects of eternity as beauty, love, great ideas, appear suddenly or gradually in the language of myth.

  Myth making thus is central in psychotherapy. It is of the essence that the therapist permit the client to take his or her myths seriously, whether the myths come up in dreams or in free association or in fantasy. Every individual who needs to bring order and coherence into the streams of her or his sensations, emotions, and ideas entering consciousness from within and without is forced to do deliberately for himself what in previous ages had been done for him by family, custom, church, and state. In the therapy myths may be a reaching out, a way of trying out new structures of life, or a desperate venture at rebuilding his or her broken way of life. Myths, as Hannah Green put it, are “sharers of our loneliness.”

  CULTS AND MYTHS

  There are frightening statistics of suicide by young people in the last decades. In the 1970s suicide among white young men increased greatly. We may try various ways to prevent suicide in these young people, like telephoning seriously depressed persons and so on. But as long as the highest goal remains making money, as long as we teach practically no ethics by example in home or in government, as long as these young people are not inspired to form a philosophy of life, and as long as television is overloaded with aggression and sex with no mentors in learning to love—as long as these obtain, there will continue to be among young people such frightening depression and suicide.

  At a graduation speech at Stanford University recently, the student speaker described his class as not knowing how it “relates to the past or the future, having little sense of the present, no life-sustaining beliefs, secular or religious,” and as consequently having “no goal and no path of effective action.” As long as our world and society remain thus empty of myths which express beliefs and moral goals, there will be depression, as we shall see below, and suicide. We shall refer in a later chapter to some reasons for this ethical emptiness; here we only assert that the lack of myths is a lack of language even to begin to communicate on such issues.