The Cry for Myth

by May, Rollo

  MEMORY NEEDS MYTH

  Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some event occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day—and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations. The myth does not tell us much about the possessive patient’s literal history, but it does tell us a great deal about the person who does the remembering. For the person re-forms the event, shapes it, adds color here and a few details there; and then we have a revelation of this person and his or her attitude toward life. As Sartre would say, “The myth is a behavior of transcendence.”

  The myth is formed by the child’s endeavor to make sense of strange experiences. The myth organizes experience, putting this and that together and brooding about the result. In the creative processes of memory and the need of the human mind for unity, the myth is born and nurtured. The formation of the myth is a relief, great or small, for the child. Often the myth is the only thing the child’s mind can hang on to, and whether it is painful or not, it will be less painful than the actual historical event. Myths have a soothing effect, even though—or we may say especially though—they may be about cruel things. The poet Susan Musgrave wrote,

  You are locked

  in a life

  you have chosen

  to remember.*

  The choice is generally unconscious, but it is nonetheless effective.

  What the person remembers from his or her childhood, for example, from the second or third year, is at the most one or two events, and he forgets the thousand and one other things that happened to him during those years. The infant is fed three meals a day, is put to bed 365 times a year, but he forgets all these other things and remembers only this one. Thus the remembering has nothing whatever to do with the frequency of the event—indeed, we are most apt to forget the things we do most frequently, like getting up in the morning. The memory must possess some special significance, some important meaning for the little girl or boy.

  In our example above, Adrienne’s memory dwells upon two events. Time adds its color, and the myth is then empowered by the “unhappy childhood” motif. Soon she has the “memory” in the form of a myth which she relates twenty-five years later to me, her therapist. Adrienne lived by the secondary myth of her grandfather’s death (“I am powerless to do anything about problems in life”), but her primary myth is her satisfaction in not letting the world help her. Thus the game she played with mother she continues playing all her life: “I am terribly needy and the world is powerless to do anything for me.”

  At some point the myth has become subconscious: then it becomes, “What a satisfying sense of power I get out of demonstrating that the world cannot do anything to help me, in fact I will arrange my life so no one can help me!” She learns to get pleasure out of telling other people, in this case her therapist, “No, that doesn’t help.” This denial of her own power gave her, paradoxically, a real sense of power over her environment and her world, even though it was objectively destructive.

  Memory is a strange phenomenon, and it is even more strange when we consider its relation to myth. Students are generally taught in psychology classes in American colleges and universities that memory is a kind of file on the model of the computer, a bank in which we record our day-to-day experiences. Then we file away our memories to be called forth when we need them. In college we are taught that the “laws” of memory are recency, vividness, and frequency. * That is, we are supposed to recall something from memory to the extent that it had happened frequently and vividly and had occurred recently.

  Nothing could be farther from the truth. All these tests in psychology classes are for remembering nonsense syllables—you have a good memory if you could remember by rote what nonsense the teacher has written on the board. The bookworm, the intellectual robot, obviously finds these “laws” made to order. But creative students are often offended by such tests because they know (or at least suspect) that the whole project is just what it is called, namely, nonsense.

  How absurd is that approach to memory! What a misconception that the human memory has nothing to do with the significance or with the meaning of the remembered event for the person. Ernest Schachtel proclaimed in his classic essay, in his book On Memory and Childhood Amnesia, “Memory is never impersonal [e.g. never ‘nonsense’], but operates on the basis of the significance for the given person.”

  ADLER AND EARLY MEMORIES

  Alfred Adler was the first among the early leaders in psychotherapy to see the significance of early childhood memories. A perceptive and humble man, he was gifted with unusual sensitivity for children. One of the early bellwethers in psychotherapy, he influenced Harry Stack Sullivan through Adolph Meyer, who had translated one of Adler’s first books and was Sullivan’s teacher in psychiatry. An associate of Freud in the early decades of this century, in 1913 Adler broke off to start his own school, in which he made the social aspect of myths his central concern. He believed that the cause of neurosis is the lack of “social interest,” i.e., neurotics are persons who are isolated from their fellow human beings. Psychological problems are not solved until the patient develops an adequate concern with society, an acceptance of his responsibility toward the community. Thus Adler radically opposed the gospel of exclusive self-love; he preferred to speak of self-esteem or integrity, or, to use his special term, “social interest.” He was radically opposed also to the kind of therapy which overemphasized independence and egocentricity. He would have been as critical of the “all-for-me,” narcissistic view of the self as Bellah* or MacIntyre.† Perhaps the reason he has been so often overlooked in the evolution of therapy in America is that he does not fit our intoxication with narcissism and the ego-centered self. Adler was an active socialist, and like Wil helm Reich and unlike Freud, he was heart and soul concerned with politics.

  Out of his great skill in treating children, Adler developed his central concern with the “guiding fiction,” which is a synonym for “myth.” It refers to a significant event in one’s early childhood that the person remembers; the event is turned into a myth which the person keeps as a guide for one’s way of life, whether it is fictitious or not. The person refers to this guiding fiction down through the subsequent years as the secret myth of oneself. One knows oneself through this myth, as Charles knew himself as “Satan,” or the actress knew herself as Athena (see Chapter 2). Thus Adler always asked the client in the second or third session in therapy, “What is your earliest childhood memory?” He believed that there “can be no accidental or indifferent memories, and the process of memory cannot be compared in any way to a photographic record.”*

  Looking into literature—the written home of memory—we find some exciting poets describing the function of this capacity. “This is the use of memory,” said T. S. Eliot toward the ending of “Little Gidding,”

  For liberation—not less of love but expanding,

  Of love beyond desire … and so liberation

  From the future as well as the past.†

  Memory can liberate us from attachment, from desire or attachment to the wrong things. Memory is our internal studio, where we let our imaginations roam, where we get our new and sometimes splendid ideas, where we see a glorious future that makes us tremble. Memory and myth are inseparable, a point I have never heard in any psychology courses. Memory can, according to Dante, form the past into any myth, any story, any hope (see Chapter 9). Dante believed that memory can lead us to God via myth.

  Memory is the mother of creativity. This is a myth worth pondering. For it is in memory that one saves and savors the significant experiences, the dazzling sights, the critical events. In memory these precious experiences form themselves together into a myth which tells us a story. We say we “sleep on an idea,” and when we wake up we may feel we have arrived at a new insight, as though it were a gift from the gods. And who is to say it is not? Mnemosyne, or “Memory,” is the goddess who puts together our
materials with which new discoveries are made and poems are written and great books and enduring paintings are inspired.

  FIVE

  Freud and the Mystery of Myths

  The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.

  Sigmund Freud,

  letter to Fleiss, 1897

  THE ABOVE STATEMENT is remarkable indeed. First, Freud frankly and specifically admits the mythic base of his theories in psychoanalysis. And the phrase, “magnificent in their indefiniteness,” is doubly remarkable since it suggests that in their very lack of definiteness lies the value of myths. Their magnificence keeps myths open, growing, productive of new insights, which the observer would never have had if he were limited to empirical statements. This is what makes myths inspiring, for their drama perpetually suggests surprising interpretations, new mysteries, novel possibilities. The very things for which rationalists have criticized myths turn out to be their greatest advantage. The Oedipus myth, for example, is forever suggesting new interpretations of the meaning of this triangular father-mother-child form and, as in Oedipus in Colonus, new interpretations of responsibility. The contemporary concern with sexual exploitation of children by parents in families is yet another interpretation of the Oedipus myth.

  Freud’s next statement—“we cannot for a moment disregard them”—is likewise the statement of a true scientist. We must keep contradictory assumptions in mind, as Alfred North Whitehead stated, without permitting damage to either conclusion until we know differently. Life consists of living in contradictions; and the person who forgets that is doomed to live in a make-believe world. Living in contradiction takes courage, but it is thrilling at the same moment. The final clause, “yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly,” is a revelation of Freud’s honesty and will be understood by every therapist who has experienced the many meanings of a myth. “Myth is the garment of mystery,” writes Thomas Mann in his epic book, Joseph and His Brothers.*

  OEDIPUS—MYTH OF SELF-DISCOVERY

  Freud wrote to Ferenczi about his “unsparing effort to understand himself”; his own self-analysis, he stated, was “harder than any other.” He adds, very much like the original Oedipus, “But it will have to be carried through!”t Jones tells us that Freud’s self-analysis gave him a flood of light on all human destiny. It was the adumbration on a great theme, so great that it can be considered the simplest of all things, the triangular situation of mother-father-child.

  Freud elsewhere stated significantly, “The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology.” That is to say, we owe the emergence of our self-consciousness to our capacity to think in terms of myth. We may speak of paradigm, or hypothesis, or some other such concept; but these equal some kind of mythology, as Freud well says. Far from being a handicap, myth is essential for progress in our understanding of science and of culture. Freud discovered that when we get to the basic level of the human mind, we are surprised to find myths.

  It is important to note that these discoveries were made by Freud in 1897, several years before his great book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published. Freud is thus to be seen as a central cultural figure, in the line of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche; and like these other great contributors, he had a profound influence on the radical changes taking place in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Whatever one may think of the technique of psychoanalysis, Freud’s importance as a cultural figure cannot be denied. He had the mind of an explorer and an archeologist, as shown also by his great collection of statues and artifacts from cultures of long ago. Surely one of the most influential and original thinkers of our time, he recognized the significance of the irrational dynamics and daimonic side of human nature. Like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he was emphatic in exposing the futility of the Victorian/Puritanical notion of willpower. He devoted himself to the chief problem of the transition from the nineteenth to twentieth century—how to live in an age of repression.

  Freud’s experience in discovering myths is shown in a catastrophic experience in his own self-analysis. He had originally believed that the seduction and rape stories his patients told him were true in fact. But it dawned on him when “memories had come back of sexual wishes about his mother on the occasion of seeing her naked,” writes Jones,

  and his awareness that his father was innocent and that he had projected on his father rivalry of the Oedipal kind which he later came to see was not true in fact. Hence the breakdown of this theory of parental seduction was part of the dawning of the truth of the Oedipus complex. His own personal phantasies forced him to this new conclusion. It was then that he wrote to Fliess, in 1897, to give him “the fateful news” that the seduction stories he had believed in were not literally true.*

  The merging of all these elements tells us again about how memory is related to myth. The drama of father and mother and child is kept alive in a self-generating way, not just a memory of a factual phenomenon but as a dynamic, growing, active drama. The myth is always being reinterpreted, growing, changing, even adding to itself. Then when memories do come alive, they are more than memories; they have assumed the character of myth. Indeed, the cruelty of Laius in putting the infant Oedipus out to die, Jocasta hanging herself, Oedipus wrenching the secrets from old Tiresias and then gouging out his own eyes—all are part of this great myth. In this sense psychoanalysis is a reflection of the basic interpersonal patterns which have been present since the dawn of human history.

  That triangular form of the perdurable relationship, hung with a thousand different shades and colors, is the ladder the child must climb as he or she grows in the world. To us it is tremendously interesting that Freud regretted this conclusion forced upon him; he regarded it as a radical loss. “In the collapse of all values only the psychological theory has remained unimpaired,”† he wrote to Fliess. He then turned to the writing of his first and most influential book, The Interpretation of Dreams. His new psychology and his new understanding of mythic truth were the essential bases of this work.

  By employing the language of myth, Freud, like Einstein, creates a symbolic structure—a comprehensive psychological equation—which opens up the possibilities of further scientific knowledge and avoids any suggestion that he is setting down eternal truth.*

  Feder adds these comforting words: “If we live in this paradox, we can enjoy our existence on this planet.”†

  Freud came to the conclusion that myths show a “conscious ignorance and an unconscious wisdom.” Those who believe our modern culture has gone “beyond myth” had best ask themselves: Are we not showing precisely this “conscious ignorance and an unconscious wisdom”?

  MYTHS OF LOVE AND DEATH

  Most impressive of all in Freud’s mythology is his description of the eternal conflict between Eros, the myth of love, and Thanatos, the myth of death. The former draws people together, leads to friendship, interdependence, and all the constructive aspects which make for unity with our fellow men and women. The fact that we can live with some joy and pleasure, some sense of intimacy with our fellows, is an expression of the myth of Eros, as Freud put it. This is the positive, the upbuilding, the warmth of life—which we will see cropping up in many ways, like the cultural creativity of Faust in Goethe’s last section, and in the experiences of Peer Gynt as he struggles over oceans and mountains till he at last comes to terms with his love for Solveig. Freud uses Eros as a catchall for the powers in us to rise to a struggle the likes of which are not found as the product of any other force. Out of this conflict of Eros against Thanatos comes the civilizing force which seeks to tame the primitive destructive tendencies of the human creature.

  This struggle of Eros, we have said, takes place against its antagonist Thanatos, the myth of death. Just as there are many gradations of Eros, so Thanatos includ
es many phases, including illness, fatigue, and all of what Paul Tillich called non-being. The forces that tear us apart, the dread of finitude, all that which fights against Eros, is included in the myth of Thanatos. This conflict between love and death, said Freud, is the “battle of the giants which nursemaids try to appease with their lullaby about heaven.”*

  Out of this continuous struggle civilization is wrought. Works of art are produced, great poetry is written, ideas spring up, all from the conflict of Eros and Thanatos. There is no creativity without this struggle. Eros by itself would be insipid, childish, uninteresting, indeed, as irrelevant as the little boy “Cupid” as he appears in so many paintings of the Italian Renaissance.

  The great things in civilizations come from Eros struggling against Thanatos. Thanatos without Eros would be an emptiness beyond even cruelty. But as these two great forces struggle against each other, we see the paradox of normal life; we see, for an example which contains both myths, the beauty and the magnificence of cathedrals at the same time as their gargoyles mock the human viewers down below.

  Freud’s positing of the war between Eros and Thanatos was stark, dramatic, tragic…. Human beings are caught in the endless conflict between these two poles. The eternal warfare within us creates the sense of guilt which continually torments us: it is the price we pay for civilization, which results only when man’s deepest aggressive instincts are curbed.†

  THE TRAGEDY OF TRUTH ABOUT ONESELF

  When we read the actual drama of Oedipus, as it came to Freud and comes to us from the pen of Sophocles, we are surprised to see that the myth has nothing to do with conflicts about sexual desire or killing one’s father as such. These are all done long in the past before the drama begins. Oedipus is a good king (“the mightiest head among us all,” he is called) who has reigned wisely and strongly in Thebes and has been for a number of years happily married to Queen Jocasta. The only issue in the drama is whether he will recognize and admit what he has done. The tragic issue is that of seeking the truth about oneself; it is the tragic drama of a person’s passionate relation to truth. Oedipus’ tragic flaw is his wrath against his own reality.*