by May, Rollo
The problem of identity, as Erik Erikson has emphasized, is present in our clients and in all of us, and we can approach a solution through listening to the various myths the client may bring up. For we all think of ourselves not in moral or rational categories but rather as central characters in the drama of life. Each of us may be hero or heroine, or criminal or rogue or onlooker, or any other character in the drama, and the emotions we experience will fit these characters.
Indeed, our consciousness is more profound when it takes into itself the so-called destructive myths like Satan. As Paul Tillich wrote in the fly-leaf of the copy of The Courage To Be which he gave to me, “The self-affirmation of a being is the stronger the more non-being it can take into itself.”† Satan in our day has of course received a bad press, and those therapists who follow the motto of “accent on the positive” will tend to cover up such negations. But when we do this we have omitted the fact that every conscious myth is balanced in our unconsciousness by the contrary picture. To leave out Satan means, for all practical purposes, to leave out our positive ultimate concerns as well.
Satan has turned out to be an amazingly powerful myth, and has many pseudonyms with forms of satanic power, such as “Lucifer” and “Mephistopheles.” Satan was on speaking terms with God in the prologue to the Book of Job, and also in the similar prologue to Goethe’s Faust In this drama Faust asks Mephistopheles who he is, and the devil responds,
I am the spirit that seeks to do evil
But always turns out to be good.*
Milton’s Paradise Lost would be without its power except for the myth of Satan; Moby Dick would lose its very heart if Satan in Captain Ahab were omitted. Among the modern psychiatrists, Harry Stack Sullivan speaks well of Satan, for very good reason, since Satan emphasizes exactly what we are concerned with in psychotherapy. The late psychologist at Harvard, Henry Murray, has written at length about Satan and has described how he developed from Lucifer, the “morning star” and “the shining One, first and highest of the angels,” to the creature we mistakenly scorn as the Devil.†
Charles then began to make progress in his clarification of himself when he hit upon the myth of Satan. If any psychotherapy is to be successful in any deep, lasting way, it must help the patients to relate to such evil and experience again the myth by which human beings make the perilous journey into and through their hell. It is that tortuous path which we will explore later in this book in Chapter 9, “The Therapist and the Journey Into Hell.”
A PATIENT’S DREAM OF ATHENA
Another use of myth as a way of revealing oneself is in the experience of Ursula, a woman in her early forties who had studied in Hollywood and been an actress in several films. She had previously been in therapy twice for extended periods of time, but though she had had a good relationship with the respective therapists, her psychological disturbances had continued unabated. She was unable to go out of her house alone (she was brought to my office for her sessions by a hired driver), and the fact that she was unable to go to dances or parties or the openings of dramas on Broadway in which her husband starred troubled her deeply. She also suffered under the conviction that she was lesbian (which turned out not to be so), but she had never in her whole life had any gratifying sexual experience with a man.
During the first month of therapy she had often asked at the end of the hour, “Do you think I can get over these problems?” I found myself responding with some variant of, “You can if you really want to.” This response would always lead to a momentary flare-up of anger on her part. Did I not realize that she would not be making these difficult trips to my office if she did not really want to get over these blockages?
Near the end of her first month of psychotherapy, she had the following dream:
I was cut in the forehead. I searched around for a bandage. All I could find was a Kotex. I put that on the cut. It’s all right if you don’t mind.
Her associations to the dream were that the cut referred to her coming to see me; we are “cutting” into her head. Since it was a cut in the forehead, it could also tell us that she had a tendency to intellectualize, which we knew anyway but it did not interfere with our doing productive work. The Kotex seemed to refer partially to her sexual seductiveness toward me, although it was not in a degree as to be troublesome. Other associations with the Kotex were procreation: since Kotex is used for menstrual periods she could have a baby (which could refer to her expecting a positive outcome in our therapy, though I thought it was too early in the treatment to verbalize that). The “if-you-don’t-mind” remark seemed to be simply the statement of a middle-class person of “good” upbringing.
But is this all?
By no means. There is in this dream an ancient myth which is more important, in my judgment, than all of the things we have said so far. It is the narrative of the birth of Athena, who leapt out of a slit in Zeus’ forehead fully armed. It is the famous birth of Athena who was androgynous; she had had no mother, and this was believed to give her the ability to be the impartial judge in the last play of Aeschylus’ great trilogy, The Oresteia, which marks the beginnings of human civilization.
At first glance this myth in the dream might seem to be making me, the therapist, into Zeus, and thus flattering me for the moment. But wait: the cut is in her forehead, not mine. So she will be the king of the gods and the maker of miracles! I can expect some competitiveness since I had a budding Zeus in my consulting room.
The myth in this dream told me two other things that were important for the therapy. First, there was a sense of power and forthrightness as well in the reference to having a baby, all of which suggested to me that her prognosis was good: she would in all probability get her neurosis under control (which she did). Second, it told me that my adding the words “if-you-really-want-to” after each question about her prognosis was fortunate, and her momentary flare of anger after each such response from me was understandable if her secret (and probably unconscious) aim was to play king of the gods and defeat me as she assumedly had defeated the other two therapists before me. Probably the mistake of the first two therapists, I hypothesized to myself, was that they got drawn into assuming the responsibility for her success in therapy and she therefore did not have to go through her own “hell.”
The reader may well ask, Suppose the patients are unsophisticated and have never read the Greeks or any other classics? While it is true that this woman was eminently interesting and a pleasure to work with, it is not true that she consciously knew about this myth. So far as I can surmise, she had not read it and did not consciously know it. This illustrates that myths do not require that one have read them specifically. Myths are archetypal patterns in human consciousness, as Joseph Campbell and others have pointed out. We are all born of a mother and we die: we all confront sex or its absence; we work or we avoid it; and so on. The great dramas like Hamlet are mythic in the sense that they present the existential crises in everyone’s life. We cannot escape believing in the assumption that myth and self-consciousness are to some degree synonymous. Where there is consciousness, there will be myth. One will have dreams of the myth of Oedipus out of the vicissitudes of living in a triangular family (father, mother, child) whether he or she has actually read this classic drama or not.
Jung writes, “A negro of the Southern States of America dreams in motifs of Grecian mythology and a Swiss grocer’s apprentice repeats, in his psychosis, the vision of an Egyptian Gnostic.”*
Myths are original revelations, states Jung, of the precon scious psyche. They are involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings. “They are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul.” The Swiss psychologist agrees with many other authorities that the alarming poverty of symbols is now the condition of our life.†
Jung believes that poets are in touch with a reality beyond that which the rational mind can perceive; they know that t
hey have discovered the “spirits, demons and gods.” The deepest level of the unconscious, writes Jung, can be discovered only through myth and ritual. He sees myths as necessary interlinks between the human spirit and the natural man. Out of this theory come the archetypes, the expression of the collective unconscious.
Each of us, by virtue of our pattern of myths, participates in these archetypes; they are the structure of human existence. It is not necessary to be a scholar in order to be influenced by them; it is only necessary that one existentially participate in human life. “I have written that myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him,” Lévi-Strauss states. “For me it [the myth] describes a lived experience.”* Dreams are a private application to one’s life of public myths in which we are all participants.
The first of these existential crises is of course birth. Each of us was born with fanfare or lack of it, though we were not self-aware at the time, and each of us later gives to his or her birth some meaning far more significant than the mere fact. Heroes regularly are seen as having a special birth, as Otto Rank pictures in his Myth of the Birth of the Hero. Moses was found by Pharaoh’s daughter in a crib floating in the bullrushes of the Nile; Jesus was born of a virgin with a star in the east; Oedipus was exiled to die in the wilderness as soon as he was born. We all look back and prize our birth, or hate it, or are baffled by it, or have a million and one other reactions which can only be encompassed in a myth.
Another crisis occurs around the ages of five and six, the Oedipal longing which makes itself felt as an expression of the yearning for the parent of the opposite sex; here Oedipus Rex is the fitting myth. In the stage of puberty around twelve or later, we find myths expressed by the cluster of rituals when the boy child becomes a man and the girl child becomes a woman. The myths are expressed in rituals of confirmation in the Christian church, or as bar mitzvah in Jewish synagogues, or in the tribal rituals of the American Indian boy joining the braves and the girl becoming an adult woman who can have children of her own.
Another existential crisis in growth is the adolescent’s assertion of independence, which is shown in the great Greek classic, the Oresteia. Whether interpreted by Aeschylus in ancient times, or Sartre or Jeffers in modern life, the myth of Orestes is central in the crises which mark the adolescent’s path. It is renowned as the hero’s struggle in becoming freed from the biological tie to mother and father.
Then come the crises of love and marriage with their never-ending proliferation of myths about Aphrodite, Eros, Psyche, ad infinitum. The existential crisis of work is expressed in the myth of Sisyphus, which we will discuss in greater depth in The Great Gatsby. Finally, when we anticipate death, we are overwhelmed with the abundance of myths attending this existential crisis, not least of which is the grandeur and fascination in Dante’s meeting with his dead acquaintances and friends in the Inferno (see Chapter 9). It seems impossible to let go of our loved—or hated—ones, and so we devise never-ending future lives of punishment for our enemies and beatitude for our friends.
As Gilbert Highet, the late professor of classics at Columbia University, wrote so charmingly:
The central answer is that myths are permanent. They deal with the greatest of all problems, the problems which do not change because men and women do not change. They deal with love; with war; with sin; with tyranny; with courage; with fate: and all in some way or other deal with the relation of man to those divine powers which are sometimes to be cruel, and sometimes, alas, to be just.*
It is not true that old myths either die or wither away. The fact that these crises have to be met in some fashion by every creature with consciousness is one aspect of the element of infinity in which myths participate. The myths are reinterpreted by each succeeding generation to fit the new aspects and the needs of the culture. The great Oresteia had its source in the dim origins of Greek poetry before Homer; it was then reinterpreted by Aeschylus as the myth of the youth enduring the struggles required to become a man and identify with his father. Orestes’ great guilt at killing his mother, his being pursued and driven into temporary psychosis by the Furies until he is finally forgiven at the famous trial at Athens in which human justice is supported by divine power—all these fall into place.
The whole of civilization hangs on the outcome of this trial in the Oresteia. For in this symbolic act of the trial the jury is made up of men, nor gods; men and women must now take responsibility for their own civilization. The myth tells us it is our responsibility in this day of “greenhouse effect” and the other threats to our lives on earth.
SARTRE AND THE FLIES
Let us look at Sartre’s use of the ancient drama of Orestes, surely a historical treasure, among the most magnificent of all human creations. In our post-Freudian day, when the psychology of adolescence is researched and discussed endlessly, one might think the drama of Orestes would be interesting only as a classical replica. But one would be wrong. When Jean-Paul Sartre needed a modern drama to communicate to the despairing French people while Paris was occupied by the Germans in World War II, he chose the ancient drama of Orestes.
Paris was then suffering literally under the Nazi heel; German officers marched up and down in front of the theater. Sartre rewrote the old drama of Aeschylus and entitled his version The Flies. The drama opens with a bronze statue of Zeus dominating the stage while the people in Argos* are engaged in their yearly orgy of morbid guilt. Sartre’s Orestes, a youth of seventeen who comes on the stage with his friend Pylos, is so far a copy of Aeschylus’ drama.
But from here on Sartre puts his own interpretation on the ancient myth. He has Orestes engage in an argument with Zeus, who had been till that time in the play a bronze statue at the back of the stage. Zeus now steps down from his pedestal and tries to persuade the youth not to go ahead with his planned matricide, which will cure Argos of its guilt-infested doldrums. Zeus stands for the power of the Nazis, the generals who might be marching past the theater at that very moment. How do you stand against authoritarian orders when you are a conquered people under the heel of the Nazis in 1944?
Zeus cries out in the drama that he created Orestes and all other human beings, and therefore Orestes has to obey his orders. Orestes’ resounding answer to Zeus must have invigorated the French audience, “But you blundered—you made me free!”
Angry, Zeus causes the stars and planets to whirl through the skies to exhibit his great power in the creation of the heavens. Then he challenges the youth, “Do you realize what despair lies in wait for you if you follow the path you are on?”
Orestes answers with a sentence which inspires us with some of the power it had in Paris in 1944, “Human life begins on the far side of despair!”
The universe may not be just or rational in Sartre’s view, but men and women can affirm the freedom of human beings in the face of tyrants. “Orestes is the Resistance hero,” as Hazel Barnes puts it, “who will work for freedom without remorse even though he must commit acts which will inevitably bring death to some of his people.”†
DRAMAS EXPRESSING MYTHS
Great dramas, like Hamlet and Macbeth, speak to the hearts of all of us. By the same token they remain in our memories as myths, year in and year out, giving us an increasingly profound appreciation of our humanness. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is such a drama. It is a tender and profound myth which grips us in its depths of contradiction; it possesses the same poignancy as Nietzsche’s parable, “God is dead.” The characters of the drama wait for a myth which says we are in the absence of the gripping character of the drama.
This search for meaning in life, this quest in an age when one waits forever for God, is suffused with tenderness in our common perplexity at being human. When Estragon says to Vladimir, “Well, shall we go?” and Vladimir answers, “Yes, let’s go,” but the stage directions state, “They do not move.” This profound myth shows the depth of our human uncertainty; we live as in a sleepwalk. Norman Mailer wrote of this drama that the doubt concerns the “moral … basis o
f Christianity which was lost with Christ.” And the London Times speaks of this drama as “suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity … [with] stabs of beauty and pain.”*
Though the myths of Orestes and Oedipus were written in that brilliant burst of civilization in ancient Greece, there are similarly powerful myths from the Hebrew tradition—Adam and Eve awakening to consciousness, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Isaiah and the Suffering Servant, ad infinitum. These two sources of ancient myths, the Greek and the Hebrew, are the “mother” and “father” of Western civilization, and we will forever be indebted to them.
In his Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller shows us again the mythic drama and the playwright’s concern for the issues of right and wrong. Miller asserts that the great bulk of contemporaneous theater on Broadway trivializes drama: it produces gross entertainment without confronting the great issues of life and death which cry out of the Creek dramas and Biblical tales. What I have called existential crises Miller describes as psychic situations:
What we take away from the Bible may seem like characters—Abraham and Isaac, Bathsheba and David—but really, they’re psychic situations. That kind of storytelling was always fantastic to me. And it’s the same thing with the Creeks. Look at Oedipus—we don’t know much about him, apart from his situation, but his story bears in itself the deepest paradoxes in the most adept shorthand.*