by May, Rollo
The myth of Sisyphus thus makes sense of our otherwise senseless efforts; it throws light on the darkness of our routine labors and lends some zest to our monotony. This is true whether we row our boats against a current that blocks progress, or work like a robot in a factory, or struggle day after day to express some recalcitrant thoughts in words that always seem to elude us.
The myth of Sisyphus is the ultimate challenge to the American dream. We are required—“destined,” if you will—to recognize our human state of consciousness in progress or without it, with the Green Light or without it, with Daisy or without her, with the disintegration of our world or without it. It is this which saves us from destruction when our little rules prove unavailing.
This is what led Albert Camus to conclude his essay on Sisyphus, “We must consider Sisyphus happy.”*
PART III
MYTHS OF THE WESTERN WORLD
NINE
The Therapist and the Journey Into Hell
No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.
Sigmund Freud
THERAPISTS BELONG to a strange profession. It is partly religion. Since the time of Paracelsus in the Renaissance the physician—and afterward the psychiatrist and psychological therapist—has taken on the mantle of the priest. We cannot deny that we who are therapists deal with people’s moral and spiritual questions and that we fill the role of father-confessor as part of our armamentarium, as shown in Freud’s position behind and unseen by the person confessing.
Therapy is also partly science. Freud’s contribution was to make therapy to some extent objective, and thus to make it teachable. Third, therapy is partly—an inseparable part—friendship. This friendship, of course, is likely to be more contentious than the familiar camaraderie of social relationships. Therapists best aid their patients by “evoking their resistances.” Even those in the general public who have not entered therapy know this beneficial struggle from published case studies and from popular films like An Unmarried Woman and Ordinary People.
These three ingredients make a strong brew. Four centuries ago Shakespeare has Macbeth take his physician to hide behind the curtain to watch and hear Lady Macbeth, as she moans in her hysterical guilt feelings. Macbeth then begs the physican,
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Clean the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?*
Macbeth was indicating that human beings need some new mixture of professions. When the physician answers, in what seems to our age a platitude, “Therein the patient / Must minister to himself,” Macbeth rightly retorts, “Throw physic to the dogs, I’ll none of it.” For physic—no matter how many forms of Valium or Librium we invent—will not basically confront the rooted sorrow or raze out the written troubles of the brain.
Science and technology have, of course, proposed new myths as they displaced or exploded old ones, but the history of technology, so exhilarating at first, has increasingly repelled believers. Now, in the post-industrial age, humanity feels itself bereft of faith, like Matthew Arnold when he wrote more than a century ago the classic epitaph for his dying culture:
Ah love, let us be true to one another….
… the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.*
We have shown earlier in this book how a loss of this magnitude leaves people en masse without any reliable structure; each one of us feels like a passenger in a rowboat, loose upon the ocean, having no compass or sense of direction, with a storm coming up. Is it any wonder, then, that psychology, the discipline which tells us about ourselves, and psychotherapy, which is able to cast some light on how we should live, burgeoned in our century?
DANTE’S DIVINE COMEDY
We propose another such myth, Dante’s great poem, The Divine Comedy. We shall ask what light it throws on the therapeutic process. This dramatic myth is that of Virgil’s relation to Dante as therapist-patient in their journey through hell in The Divine Comedy.
Many therapists have no knowledge of Dante’s great drama. Even such a humanist as Freud, when asked in 1907 to name his favorite books, cited Homer, Sophocles, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, and many others, but ignored Dante. It is a radical deficiency that, in the education of post-Freudian psychotherapists, most students are left illiterate about the humanities. Our literature is the richest source of the presentation of human beings’ self-interpretation down through history. For therapists the peril is greater than for naturalists because the imagination is specifically their tool and object of study, and any abridgement in understanding its workings will significantly limit professional progress.
This Inferno starts on Good Friday, when Dante was thirty-five,
Midway in my life, I found myself in a dark
wood, where I had lost the way.*
This opening line of The Divine Comedy has left an indelible impression on many figures in history. James Joyce once said, “I love Dante almost as much as the Bible; he is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.” †
Dante is so lovable because he admits his human problems at every step and never pretends to artificial virtues. He became aware that he had reached an impasse, a psychological place akin to Arnold’s in “Dover Beach.” As Dante writes in the Prologue of his poem,
… I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.**
The “selva oscura” is not only the dark world of sin but of ignorance. Dante does not understand himself or the purpose of his life and requires some high ground, some elevation of perspective, by which to perceive the structure of his experience in its totality. He sights high above him the Mount of Joy, but is unable to make his journey there by himself. In this sense he is like our patients. On the mountainside his way is blocked by three beasts: the Lion of violence, the Leopard of malice, and the She-wolf of incontinence. About the last Dante writes:
And down [the Lion’s] track,
a She-wolf drove upon me, a starved horror
ravening and wasted beyond all belief.
She seemed a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving
Oh many the souls she has brought to endless grief!*
Freud’s insight that sexual disturbances were the invariable causes of neurotic afflictions receives support from Dante’s confession that it is the concupiscent appetite that drives him away from the prospect of joy. But we need not read the allegory narrowly. What for Dante were dispositions to sin we would call mechanisms for rationalizing the private hell of the neurotic: repression, pride, distortion, pretense, and so on. These block our way as effectively, if less interestingly, than the Lion, Leopard, and She-wolf.
A person’s hell may consist of confronting the fact that his mother never loved him; or it may consist of fantasies of destroying those a person loves most, like Medea destroying her children; or undergoing the hideous cruelty released in wartime when it becomes patriotic to hate and kill. The private hell of each one of us is there crying to be confronted, and we find ourselves powerless to make progress unaided against these obstacles.
Dante’s condition on that Good Friday, then, will remind us of numerous testimonies, not excluding our own. His situation recalls Hamlet at Elsinore, or Arnold at Dover Beach, or, to move backward toward Dante’s own sources, St. Augustine’s, who compared his licen
tious life in Rome, and its resultant despair, to a journey through hell, and St. Paul’s, whose unhappy confession in Romans (7:18-19) resounds through the literature of psychoanalysis no less than through Dante’s poem: “To will is present with me, but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
VIRGIL AND TRANSFERENCE
At this psychological moment in the poem, Dante sees a figure near him and cries out: “Have pity on me, whatever thing you are, / whether shade or living man.” The figure is Virgil, who has been sent to guide him through the Inferno. After some explanations about himself, Virgil concludes:
Therefore, for your own good, I think it well
you follow me,
and I will be your guide
and lead you forth through an eternal place.
There you shall see the ancient spirits tried
in endless pain, and hear their lamentation.
To whom Dante answers:
Poet, by that God to you unknown,
lead me this way. Beyond the present ill
and worse to dread, lead me to Peter’s gate
and be my guide through the sad halls of Hell.*
So Virgil, as guide and counselor, accompanies Dante to interpret the various levels of evil in hell (or, as Freudians would say, the depth of the unconscious). Virgil had shown in his own practice, especially in the Aeneid, a thorough familiarity with the dangerous moral landscape they will now traverse. Most of all, Virgil is to be a friend, an accompanying presence for the bewildered pilgrim.
This “presence” (see Chapter 8) in the relation of therapist to patient is the heuristic method most important but the one we understand least. Virgil will not only interpret these levels in hell but will be a being, alive and present in Dante’s world. Dante may be taken here as both patient and therapist. Some therapists, as John Rosen shows us in his active therapy with schizophrenics, need to have some friend present in order to let themselves go into the depths of the patient’s disorder. The friend, who walks slightly behind Rosen, may say nothing at all, but his presence changes the magnetic field; and Rosen can then throw himself into the treatment without himself getting lost in the schizophrenia. Sometimes called empathy or simply relationship, this presence is central to the world of all therapists, I believe, and has a powerful effect upon the patient quite in addition to what the therapist says or the school in which he or she was trained.
In Dante’s drama the first hurdle occurs immediately after the “contract” with Virgil and has an amazing similarity to what happens in present-day therapy. Dante is overcome with the conviction that he is not worthy of such special treatment. He cries to Virgil:
Poet, you who must guide,
before you trust me to that arduous passage,
look to me and look through me—can I be worthy?*
How often, in doing therapy, do we hear that question, at least with the inner ear, if the patient does not verbalize it directly: why is he singled out, among all other people in the world, for this special guidance? Dante, like our patients, cannot “accept acceptance,” in Paul Tillich’s phrase. Dante recalls to Virgil the images of St. Paul and Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic poem, and avers that he can see why they were chosen:
But I—how should I dare? By whose permission?
I am not Aeneas. I am not Paul.
Who could believe me worthy of the vision?
How, then, may I presume to this high quest
and not fear my own brashness?
In his pleas to Virgil, he then adds what we might call a statement of positive transference: “You are wise / and will grasp what my poor words can but suggest.”
Does Virgil respond in a way that many inexperienced therapists would, namely, to reassure the other person, “Of course you are worthy”? Not at all. He attacks Dante:
I understand from your words and the look in your eyes …
your soul is sunken in that cowardice
that bears down many men, turning their course
and resolution by imagined perils,
as his own shadow turns the frightened horse.*
This can be interpreted as a kind of challenge, which we use in therapy with patients addicted to any kind of neurosis (or habit-forming drug). Reassurance should be rarely used. Psychologists must not take the crucial initiative out of the patient’s hands, especially at the beginning of therapy.
That sentence of Dante’s, “You are wise/and will grasp what my poor words can but suggest,” would be, in familiar terms, a buttering up of the therapist. Such a compliment is not going to be met by verbal denial (indeed, we may secretly believe we can read his mind!) but rather by a gesture or a wide grin—anyone who grins cannot be all-wise.
There is in Virgil’s response to Dante an important sentence: “I was a soul/among the souls of Limbo.”† We are all in limbo; we are all struggling along in the human condition, whether we be prince or pauper, patient or therapist, at that particular time. But therapists will not get across to the patient the humanness of it all by telling him their own problems. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann sagely remarks, “The patient is burdened enough with his own problems without having to hear the therapist’s also.” Again, it can best be communicated to the patient by gesture and attitude, rather than moral lectures, that everyone who lives is in limbo, that the sin (if I may put this in Dante’s language) is not to have problems but to fail to be aware of them and fail to confront them.
In any case, Virgil does give some explanation of why he is there. Beatrice in heaven has sent him to help Dante. But Virgil is firm throughout, never sentimental. He concludes:
And now what ails you? Why do you lag? Why
this heartsick hesitation and pale fright?
This rebuke has a strong effect upon Dante, who responds,
As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night
turn up to the returning sun and spread
their petals wide on his new warmth and light—
just so my wilted spirits rose again
and such a heat of zeal surged through my veins
that I was born anew.…
My Guide! My Lord! My Master! Now lead on:
one will shall serve the two of us in this.*
And so they set out on what Dante calls “that hard and perilous track into hell.”
We need not be too concerned about the “directive” language here. We must search continually for the inner meaning, which is that Dante cannot find his way alone through human misery. He requires not only the stability of a myth, which Virgil provides, but a myth that he can assimilate to his own purposes. The guide and pilgrim cannot be at cross-purposes or share radically dissimilar cultural myths. Likewise, to be a metaphorical Lord and Master, the therapist must paradoxically remain a humble friend, a figure of trust.
Virgil does, however, reassure his friend at certain crucial points in the narrative. In one experience later, when Dante is seized by genuine and profound anxiety, and cries to Virgil:
O my beloved Master, my Guide in peril, …
stand by me now … in my heart’s fright.
Virgil does respond:
Take heart …
I will not leave you
to wander in this underworld alone.*
This is a reassurance which leaves the task of the journey still with the patient, and so does not take over his responsibility. In my own work, I have reached stages parallel to this when the patient is afraid to go farther for fear he will not be able to come out again, or afraid that I will drop him. I may say, “I am glad to work with you so long as it is helpful to you.” This puts the emphasis on active help rather than passivity (always a temptation) or stagnation. In the Inferno, one is impressed by Virgil’s attitude, as Dante describes it: his “gentle and encouraging smile.”
THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL
As they begin their journey, they pause in the vestibule of hell, where th
ey hear the cries of anguish from the Opportunists. These are the souls who in life were neither good nor evil but acted only for themselves. They are the outcasts who took no sides in the rebellion of the angels. In modern psychology these opportunists would be called well adjusted; they know how to keep out of trouble! But Dante sees them as guilty of the sin of fence-sitting. Hence they are neither in hell nor out of it. John Ciardi describes them thus: “Eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood.” Dante’s hell enacts the law of symbolic retribution: since these opportunists took no sides they are given no place. Ciardi remarks, “As their sin was a darkness, so they move in darkness. As their own guilty conscience pursued them, so they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets.”*
It is highly interesting that classical literature, whether the author is Dante or Sophocles or Shakespeare, has no sympathy with the sentimental or superficial idea of human perfection. These authors and myth makers saw the reality of man’s inhumanity to man, and they viewed the human condition as essentially tragic. Any character who is neither good nor evil—like Peer Gynt in the first part of Ibsen’s drama—is simply not living an authentic life. The great dramatists take care to punish the evil they depict, but they understand profoundly the passion that drives human beings away from the moral life. With Ibsen they believe that “it takes courage to be a real sinner.”† The lovers Paolo and Francesca, who gave way to the concupiscence Dante had been warned against in the poem’s opening, provide the most complex case of flawed humanity, sympathetic because flawed. Dante, the literary character, must learn by his traversal through hell how to evaluate the variety of sinful examples he witnesses. Again the analogy is apt, for the patient in therapy learns to cope with his problems (not to “cure” them) in part by means of the therapist’s superior familiarity with disordered human types, what St. Augustine called “the land of unlikeness.”