by May, Rollo
About half a million mostly young, mostly affluent, mostly white persons, … paid Erhard and his fellow trainers between $300 and $500 to be transformed in a weekend from confused underachievers into self-assured, take-charge types who “got it”—accepted responsibility for their own lives.*
But it was a short-lived myth. Half a decade later this fountain of transformation began to dry up and soon nobody heard anything about EST, as it was called. Not surprisingly, however, Erhard himself had been transformed. He had now developed a system of “breakthrough” for transforming businesses called Transformational Technologies. Money was now to be made in the corporations. As the reporter of this new form of change puts it,
In our born-again, discard and replace culture, where conversation has replaced correction, fast transformation has become as easy for a self as fast food. It no longer seems to matter what you become in the process of transformation, just so long as you are transformed. And if you’re still the same imperfect animal despite your funny new vocabulary, simply transform yourself again.*
THE MYTH OF PROTEUS
The Greek god Proteus represents the myth of change. Whenever Proteus was in any dangerous or difficult situation, he could change himself into some new form which promised security, whether animal or tree or insect. The American psychiatrist Robert Lifton has brilliantly described this personality which is always in the process of change, Protean. To a considerable extent in America the myth of change, the unending quest for the new, the yearning for transformation, is for us a fleeing from anxiety as it was for Proteus. Homer describes Proteus when, in the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men encounter the wily one and must ring from him the directions home, and it was absolutely necessary:
When Proteus at last slept
We gave a battle cry and plunged
for him,
locking our hands behind him.
But the old one’s
tricks were not knocked out of
him; far from it.
First he took on a whiskered
lion’s shape,
a serpent then; a leopard; a
great boar;
Then sausing water; then a tall
green tree.
Still we clung on, by hook
or crook, through every
thing.
Until the Ancient saw defeat,
and grimly
opened his lips to ask me.*
But this addiction to change can lead to superficiality and psychological emptiness, and like Peer Gynt, we never pause long enough to listen to our own deeper insights. Lifton uses the myth of Proteus to describe the chameleon tendencies, the ease with which many modern Americans play any role the situation requires of them. Consequently, we not only do not speak from our inner integrity, but often have a conviction of never having lived as our “true selves.”
In such a situation, the myth of change can be a synonym for superficiality. We live according to others’ expectations. When a celebrated film actor in therapy was asked his ideas, he answered, “I have no ideas. If you want me to say anything, you must write it down on a card, start the cameras rolling, and I’ll say it.” This man was no different from many of his colleagues, though he had become affluent and a celebrity. But he was also deeply depressed and felt he had missed the meaning of his life—as indeed he had. He described his perpetual mood as “the salt which has lost its savor.”
Whether we dress it up by such terms as “new age,” “transformation,” “new possibilities,” or something else, the myth of Proteus, of continuous change, does temporarily protect us from anxiety. We Americans are always on the move to escape the anxiety of the human paradox and the anxiety of death. But the price for this evasion is a deep loneliness and sense of isolation. With these go depression and the conviction that we have never really lived, that we have been exiled from life.
One of our contemporary poets, W. S. Merwin, discusses the expression of the myth of Proteus in modern Americans. First he states, “Myth is the most important and powerful vehicle in defining the role of the poet in the present.” He sees us in our day as acting out our Protean myth. In his interpretation of the myth of seizing Proteus as a quest for the gifts of wisdom and prophecy, which man projects on the gods, Merwin states,
We run from danger by emulating Proteus, a characteristic not only of the neurotic personality of our time but of all of us. So our passion for change in America harbors within itself our endeavor to escape the spectre of death, to escape any danger which we see threatening us.*
“The head he turned toward me wore a face like mine,” Merwin continues, thus confessing that he too has fallen from time to time for the seduction of Proteus. The myth of Proteus is shown by Wordsworth to capture us by our commercialism.
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
But like all myths, the myth of Proteus is not in itself only evil. It is that our error is our absorption in commercialism and our letting our love for money overcome our capacity to appreciate the nature around us:
… Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.*
SEVEN
Individualism and Our Age of Narcissism
In America … 1 have seen the freest and best educated of men in the circumstances the happiest to be found in the world; yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and they seemed serious and almost sad in their pleasure … because they never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.
de Tocqueville
AMERICANS CLING to the myth of individualism as though it were the only normal way to live, unaware that it was unknown in the Middle Ages (except for hermits) and would have been considered psychotic in classical Greece. We feel as Americans that every person must be ready to stand alone, each of us following the powerful myth of the lone cabin on the prairie. Each individual must learn to take care of himself or herself and thus be beholden to no one else. James Fenimore Cooper put these words in the mouth of his eighteenth-century hero, Leatherstocking, when a friend was being rebuked for his solitary life,
No, no judges. I have lived in the woods for forty long years, and have spent five years at a time without seeing the light of a clearing, bigger than a wind-row in the trees; and I should like to know where you’ll find a man, in his sixty-eighth year, who can get an easier living, for all your betterments, and your deer-laws; and, as for honesty, or doing what’s right between man and man, I’ll not turn my back to the longest winded deacon on your Patent.*
Called “rugged individualism” in political circles, and “fierce individualism” by some historians, this myth has obviously great advantages for a democracy. But it exhibits the basic flaw of leaving us no solid community to call our own. No one doubts the important role played by the tough, weather-beaten scouts, dressed more like Indians than Europeans, in the founding and exploring of this nation, and especially the hunters, trappers, and scouts from the Alleghenies all the way through the far west—all individuals to the core. They contributed a myth of lonesome individualism that makes our own loneliness a strange and noble kind of moral achievement.
Walt Whitman, whom many students regard as the greatest poet of America, writes in “Song of Myself,”
One’s self I sing …
Of life immense in passion, pulse,
and power,
Cheerful, for freest action formed
under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
and,
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,…
I loafe and invite
my soul,
I learn and loafe at my ease observing
a spear of summer grass,†
Even in religion, which is supposed to work for community, this individualism is shown in the revivalism that swept the middle west and far west like a prairie fire in the middle of the nineteenth century. The emphasis was on the individual as a figure standing alone. When huge crowds gathered to be “saved,” the songs they sang took no account of any other persons in the hundreds of people around each individual:
I come to the garden alone,
When the dew is still on the roses;
And a voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of man discloses.
And he walks with me and he talks with me,
And he tells me I am his own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
Robert Bellah has emphasized that in America our morality, stated originally by Benjamin Franklin, is focused so “exclusively on individual self-improvement that the larger social context hardly comes into view.”* This myth of individualism goes way back to a story in ancient times, though it has a different name.
THE MYTH AND NEUROSIS OF NARCISSUS
The lovely and talkative nymph Echo lived free from care and whole of heart until she met Narcissus, hunting in the forest. She no sooner beheld the youth than she fell deeply in love with him.
But all her blandishments were unavailing, and in her despair at his hard-heartedness, she implored Aphrodite to punish him by making him suffer the pangs of unrequited love.
Aphrodite did not forget poor Echo’s last passionate prayer and was biding her time to punish the disdainful Narcissus. One day, after a prolonged chase, he hurried to a lonely pool to slake his thirst.
Quickly he knelt upon the grass and bent over the pellucid waters to take a draught; but he suddenly paused, surprised. Down near the pebbly bottom he saw a face so fair that he immediately lost his heart, for he thought it belonged to some water nymph gazing up at him through the transparent water.
With sudden passion he caught at the beautiful apparition; but the moment his arms touched the water, the nymph vanished. Astonished and dismayed, he slowly withdrew to a short distance and breathlessly awaited the nymph’s return.
The agitated waters soon resumed their mirror-like smoothness; and Narcissus, approaching noiselessly on tiptoe and cautiously peeping into the pool, became aware of first curly, tumbled locks and then a pair of beautiful, watchful, anxious eyes. It seemed to him that the nymph was about to emerge from her hiding place to reconnoiter.
Time and again the same pantomime was enacted, and time and again the nymph eluded his touch; but the enamored youth could not tear himself away from the spot haunted by this sweet image, whose sensitive face reflected his every emotion and who grew as pale and wan as he—evidently, like him, a victim to love and despair.
There Narcissus lingered day and night, without eating or drinking, until he died, little suspecting that the fancied nymph was but his own image reflected in the clear waters. Echo was avenged; but the gods of Olympus gazed compassionately down upon the beautiful corpse and changed it into a flower bearing the youth’s name, which has ever since flourished beside quiet pools, wherein its pale image is clearly reflected.
THE NEUROSIS OF OUR TIME
Out of this lonely and isolated individual there has come a new psychotherapeutic category fittingly called the “narcissistic personality.” Freud and his immediate followers obviously cited and described narcissism, however, in Freud’s day, this neurosis had not become prominent. But especially in America the narcissistic personality has become the dominant type of patient in the decades since the 1960s.*
The narcissistic patient in therapy is the modern myth of lonely individualism.† This person has few if any deep relationships and lacks the capacity for satisfaction or pleasure in the contacts he does have. He is, par excellence, the depressed “man in the gray flannel suit,” as the novel phrased the description of this kind. Christopher Lasch well describes this type of person in The Culture of Narcissism:
Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even his own anxiety…. Even though his sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, he gets no lasting pleasure from them. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits … he demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.
“In a narcissistic society—a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits,” he peers as though into the well at his own image. Lasch believes that “the prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche.”**
These patients are difficult to work with in therapy, since their narcissism prevents their establishing any deep relationship with the therapist. They seem cooperative on the surface, for they know how one should act in therapy, and they follow the rules without ever being deeply committed to any relationship: They remain isolated, deeply lonely individuals. So therapy with them (which often goes on for an excessive number of years) becomes a situation in which the therapist is a “retainer,” a perpetual source of moral advice on all decisions, one whom you visit at every new need for guidance. That this is a mockery of good psychotherapy goes without saying; the sine qua non of interpersonal relationship is not there. Instead, the patient gets advice on this or that specific decision, which results in the confirmation of his original problem, i.e., he cannot make personal decisions on his own. Narcissism destroys individuality, contradictory though that seems.
Our society is on two levels, the one optimistic, always smiling, shown particularly in the ads on television for ocean cruises with entertainment all provided, or running in the fields, dancing, and driving Cadillacs, in a period of almost universal happiness. This is on the surface. But just below the surface there is the reality of depression—indeed, fear of nuclear disaster, much sexual activity without lasting relationships. “People then complain of an inability to feel. They cultivate mere void experiences, seek to beat sluggish flesh to life, attempt to revive jaded appetities.”* Therapists, not priests, are popular preachers of self-help. Even when therapists speak of the need for “meaning” and “love,” they define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements, not as a relationship of caring. Narcissism is an emerging dilemma which gives people the tormenting experience of inner contradiction, blocking their spontaneity and sending them into therapy.
These narcissistic persons have many acquaintances but no close friends. They are sexually liberated but they experience no passion. They generally are well educated, but they gave up most of their intellectual interests when they graduated from college. The narcissistic type is often skilled at stocks and bonds, but sooner or later this seems a purposeless game. They usually make very good salaries—sometimes in the millions—but it gives them little satisfaction. In short, they have everything that is promised in the TV ads to bring happiness—travel and shiny cars and beautiful women—but happiness eludes them. They are often celebrities, but they find this also to be exasperatingly empty. They are modern and sophisticated and they come in increasing numbers to psychoanalysis, but therapy is difficult and slow.
Most of all, such persons are exceedingly lonely. It seems the only emotions they feel are a mild but permeating depression and a sense of having missed out on the joys of life even though, paradoxically, they have had everything. As de Tocqueville tells us, “They never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.”
The narcissistic personality can be considered in America as a further development of American individualism. But this also brings new difficulties in that the development of the technique of psychoanalysis seems increasingly to support the narcissism rather than to analyze it away. Therapy, for a number of reasons—some financial, some theoretical, and some simply an outgrowth of th
e behavioristic trends in our traditional American psychology—moves toward narcissism and excessive individualism, each empowering the other. Our psychotherapy then tends to be problem-centered rather than person-centered.
THE HORATIO ALGER MYTH
De Tocqueville’s insights agree with William James’, who called the pressure to succeed a “bitch goddess.” How did we develop this bastardized marriage between individualism and success? That we did wed these two attitudes is clear enough. As R. W. White puts it: “[American] culture stresses an individualism tied to competition, aggressively directed toward fellow human beings, as the basis for personal and collective security. Each person should stand on his own feet in order to fight for what he gets—such is the philosophy of this culture.”*
After the Civil War, we needed a new myth to sustain people in the great drive to succeed, which was measured chiefly financially, but in status and prestige as well. We needed a myth to console and inspire us in our worship of “the bitch goddess of success.” The drive toward success inebriated people and soon became identified with individualism in the famous American Dream.
The statement of an early leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Governor John Winthrop, that God sends the wealth, became wedded to the Calvinistic doctrine that the man of wealth was therefore the good man, for his wealth showed that God approved of him. This new myth, probably the most important in American history in the last century, was handed to us in the many stories written by Horatio Alger. It provides a mythical paradigm “for the organization man.” I owe to James Oliver Robertson and his book American Myth/American Reality the following outline of one of these stories, “Struggling Upward or Luke Larkins’ Luck.”†