The Cry for Myth

by May, Rollo

  But the story of the beautiful sleeping “Briar Rose,” for so the princess was named, went about the country, so that from time to time kings’ sons came and tried to get through the thorny hedge into the castle. But they found it impossible, for the thorns held fast together as if they had hands and the youths were caught in them and could not get loose again, and died a miserable death.

  The youths try to storm the thorns, to force their way in to Briar Rose before the time is fulfilled and she is ready to be awakened.

  We can assume, now from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, there will be rage in Briar Rose that she is so completely blocked off from life. I propose that her rage shows itself in the fact that the briars around the castle kill the suitors. In every neurotic pattern others are dragged down and made to suffer by virtue of the anger—in this case, Briar Rose’s anger. It may seem strange to talk of rage on the part of such a “sweet” creature as Briar Rose, but that is the unexpected effect neurotic patterns have on one’s world.

  The princes represent wishing without mutuality. Wishing becomes willful defiance when it does not take into account the needs and readiness of the other, when it is not genuinely interpersonal. This storming of the hedge happens when the princes are driven by their own needs and desires without relation to the girl’s. Their behavior has the character of forcing Briar Rose, the attitude of rape rather than mutual love. Their behavior presupposes Briar Rose as a love object to be attained rather than a woman to be loved. They represent what we call the daimonic: they are under the sway of the daimonic gone awry. True, the princes get caught in Briar Rose’s defenses; but otherwise she would become the mere victim of their desires. If the body is forced open before it is ready, there is the likelihood of considerable trauma, including the possibility that the body will never then open of its own accord.

  There then occurs a new development in the story.

  The many young princes had tried to get in but they had tried to get through the thorny hedge, but they had remained sticking fast in it, and had died a pitiful death. Then the youth said: “I am not afraid, I will go and see the beautiful Briar Rose.” The good old man might dissuade him as he would, but the prince did not listen to his words.

  Here we have the beginning of the courage of relationship. It is one aspect of the “courage to be,” as Tillich would put it. The old man who tries to dissuade the prince reminds us of Jocasta in the famous drama of Oedipus. As Jocasta adjures Oedipus to rest, take it easy, not to bother himself, not to insist on being “present to himself,” the old man tries to dissuade the prince with the counsel of common sense and adjustment. But the prince refuses such advice: “I am not afraid. I will go and see the beautiful Briar Rose.”

  But by this time the hundred years had just passed, and the day had come when Briar Rose was to awake again. When the king’s son came near to the thorn-hedge, it was nothing but large and beautiful flowers, which parted from each other of their own accord, and let him pass unhurt.

  This is a beautiful denouement: the thorns become roses and the hedge becomes flowers by virtue of “creative waiting.” The fairy tale would have it that this occurs simply by waiting. I believe differently: it is inner growth, the external manifestation of kairos.

  This mythic approach to time is opposite to the routine—and often boring—concept of time as automatic passage of “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” creeping on “in petty pace from day to day.” This demonstrates that this great change did not occur because of the special qualities of this prince (others were as courageous and died in the thorns). This prince, we assume, sensed the kairos, the moment when “all creation trembled and groaned.”

  Briar Rose and everything in her world is asleep until the man in the form of the Prince comes to awaken her, and then the thorns become large and beautiful flowers which part from each other of their own accord. This is a very meaningful and graphic symbol of the hymen and other protections of the girl from sexuality, protections which now change into their opposite of their own accord. When the time is ripe, the thorn becomes a flower, a rose—a vaginal symbol as beautiful and exquisitely fitting as could be imagined. We are reminded that in mythology and cultural history the word “deflowered” is used for the intercourse in which a woman gives up her virginity in her first sexual relationship. A recurrence of the same symbol is present in such folk songs as “My Wild Irish Rose,”

  Some day for my sake

  She may let me take

  The bloom from my wild Irish rose.

  This tale binds up in symbolic form not only the biological meaning but the psychological meaning of this significant experience. The prince is present when her time arrives in fullness. The tale says, “He could not turn his eyes away,” which indicates an interpersonal relation very different from the previous youths’ desire to storm the castle. He kisses her and she then awakes—specifically awakes sexually, but we may assume the meaning is an awakening in all aspects as well.

  There now is an interpersonal relationship. There is love, we are told; there is capacity for creating new being in procreation, and there is, as in all fairy tales, the happy ending. They marry in splendor and live contentedly to the end of their days.

  But we cannot help thinking at this point of the Three Penny Opera and its charming satirical song, “Happy Ending,” as well as another of its songs, “Sad To Say It Never Has Been So.” Now sad to say it never has been so that any woman’s development in real life is as simple as being asleep in the pre-adolescent age and then, on being awakened by the kiss of the prince, she then lives happily ever after. The vicissitudes of development and individuation are difficult in the best of ages, and particularly in our age of psychological alienation, when we are all to some extent emotionally displaced persons.

  There are within this tale, nevertheless, deeper dimensions which make the myth more than a fairy tale. We see first of all the phenomenon of presence.

  The loss of the presence means we are not fully alive to ourselves and so not fully alive to others. Thus the central issue in the myth is the presence of Briar Rose to herself. The spokesmen in contemporary Western civilization for this loss of presence to ourselves are Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; they are the prophets who saw the consequences of our alienation from our culture, from our friends, and especially from meaning in life. Nietzsche was passionately concerned with the fact that we have become vapid, empty, powerless in ourselves. He represents the phase in the myth of these young men who try to storm the thorns and citadel, who try to take it by force but, since the time is not yet ripe, fail.

  The next phase is that in which the sleeping girl’s presence can be restored only by waiting. Heidegger is the representative of this phase, for he was aware of the death of God—if we put it in a theological context—and he lived in the awareness that this presence is lost. Heidegger knew how to “wait for Godot,” to borrow the title of Beckett’s play.

  Whether or not one likes this specific language and these illustrations, one must grant that the concept of presence is a fruitful one for understanding this tale and myth. “Man is only man,” writes Heidegger, “when he is spoken to by Being,” which is the enlarged, universalized form of what is going on concretely in this tale. Woman is only woman when she is spoken to by her true being. She gains presence to herself when her feelings, passions, and capabilities are not only hers but are called forth by other people and by her community. The same thing is in W. H. Auden’s poem, “The Age of Anxiety”:

  …. for the ego is a dream

  Till a neighbor’s need by

  name create it.*

  These are all endeavors to highlight a fundamental aspect of human relationship, namely, that the birth and development of the self take place in an interpersonal field. We call to each other, we awaken each other; hopefully we are present to each other, either through books, or art, or relationship.

  CREATIVE PRESENCE

  We return now to a topic broached earlier, the capacity for c
reative presence. We saw that the premature youths who stormed the hedges and “died a miserable death” were those who lacked the capacity to wait until the time of kairos, the time when Briar Rose’s sleep was fulfilled. I refer to waiting until something is ready to be born—whether it be a baby, an idea, an invention, or an artistic vision. This waiting is not passive and empty; the one who waits is an active participant in the gestation. Too much emphasis on conscious intention—like the active pushing of the premature suitors in the tale of Briar Rose—blocks the capacity to wait. Intentionality, the condition that everything has meaning which is given by our consciousness, is possible only when we have this capacity for creative waiting.

  It is fascinating to compare the waiting of Briar Rose in the fairy tale with the lady Eliot evokes in “The Waste Land,” a lady who is rich and beautiful but jaded, bored with everything, including sex, although she is with her lover. Both are waiting. The jaded lady says, “What shall we do tomorrow. What shall we ever do?”* Both are expressions of wishing for something. Both imply some hope that there may be a “knock upon the door.”† But Briar Rose is the waiting of innocence, the waiting of dreaming; she sleeps, her eyelids are closed. Whereas Eliot significantly tells us that his lady presses “lidless eyes”; her eyes are fixed open, she cannot close them. Now it is well known clinically that in anxiety a person’s eyelids tend to be distended, to be fixed rigidly open in the face of danger. Artists observe this; Michelangelo’s sculptures and his paintings of persons who are anxious have the eyelids distended, frozen open.

  Briar Rose was in pre-awareness; Eliot’s lady is post-awareness, her tragedy being not that she has not gained awareness but that she has lost it. For Briar Rose the chance for awareness had not yet arrived and does so only with the coming of the prince; for the lady, the possibilities for awareness are present, but she is blocked off from seeing them, even though her eyes are pried open. She is in the state not of innocence but of despair; she is in the Waste Land. Briar Rose is asleep without consciousness. The lady is sexually emancipated, “free,” with all the riches of technology and culture at her fingertips; however, what she experiences is not gratification but the satiety of sex and appetite. Eliot is saying that one must wait through the age of despair for the gestation to occur which will lead us to a birth of consciousness on a higher level, that is, to kairos.

  The myth, we have said, presents creative waiting. The distinction between this and passive waiting, which in psychotherapy can be quite unconstructive, lies in the question, What is one waiting for? Waiting is self-destructive, emptying, when the person, whether a patient in therapy or Eliot’s lady, takes no responsibility for what he or she is waiting for.

  Clinically speaking, I believe this pattern of the patient’s refusing to take cognizance of what he is waiting for is when he or she is actually waiting for some infantile wish, possibly omnipotent, to be gratified-. “Mother will finally knock upon the door.” Also it involves relatively severe anxiety, which has to be confronted before one can dare to ask and see what she or he is waiting for. The lady’s waiting in Eliot’s poem strikes one like the problem in much modern art and drama: waiting through nihilism and satiety until some new meaning can be born.

  At the beginning of this chapter, we cited some dreams of Sylvia, whom we proposed as a modern example of the Briar Rose motif. As Sylvia’s analysis proceeded, patterns emerged which were not at all the sweet young princess waiting to be awakened. She uttered in various forms the stubborn cry from Peter Pan, “I won’t grow up!” This is a defiant statement when seen outside its fairy-tale setting. But even this defiance can be a harbinger of some valuable insights to be born.

  Sylvia brought in the following dreams:

  You [the therapist] and 1 were in a session. It was at some sanatorium. You complimented me by saying I was very bright and cute. Part of my being cute and bright in the dream came naturally, part of it was learned. I kissed you spontaneously on the cheek. I was in my nightdress. Then you left. I looked in the minor and I saw I had mumps and my face was swollen. Then I thought that you must have been sorry for me.

  Her associations with this dream came immediately: the Nutcracker legend. In this story a princess is deformed with swollen jaws the way Sylvia was in the dream, and only a man who has never shaved and always worn boots can save her. Soon the young man comes and is kissed by the princess, who thereupon gets over her deformities and becomes beautiful. But the man gets all her deformities, including the swollen jaws, and she thereafter will have nothing to do with him.

  This is obviously a sexual and angry dream. She is in her nightdress and she kisses me. But in her associations, she transfers her deformities to me. No person can experience being robbed of talents, as Sylvia had been robbed of freedom and other capacities—all involved in her being put to sleep—without experiencing anger. And against whom should her anger be directed? Surely a large part of it toward those who are fated to kiss her to overcome the spell (“Why is my Prince so long in coming?”). In therapy this is expressed toward the therapist, and understandably so. Regardless of the motives, such a client would feel shortchanged. No one would choose this pattern if other patterns were open to her; but when it is forced upon her—as it was in Sylvia’s experience—she is, rightly, angry.

  Now this poses a serious contradiction. The very ones who are supposed to rescue Briar Rose in her powerlessness at the hands of a cruel fate, the ones who are supposed to validate her as a woman and as an awakened self, get their power by her forcing them. The fact that her deformities are placed on them adds vengeful, sadistic fuel to the fire and it keeps the vicious circle going.

  This is a contradiction parallel to what we saw in Peer Gynt—he got his self-validation out of the same pattern which destroyed it. Such a pattern, then, becomes more and more self-destructive, until it cracks up in neurosis.

  The anger toward men consists, when we track it down, of anger that the man did not save her from the spiteful woman. As I suggested this interpretation to Sylvia in the hour in which she brought the princess/Nutcracker dream, she responded, “It just occurred to me that my mother was envious of me. She had so much rejected the woman’s role, but there I was, bright and cute.”

  In Peer Gynt, we recall Peer’s spite and envy toward the sailors who had candles waiting for them at home. We emphasized then, as we do now, that envy and spite are the first, imperfect but honest, emotions which show the emergence of the person’s self-affirmation. These are not idle feelings but the harbingers of more acceptable emotions to come later on.

  As a neurotic feeling this is the expression of the state where the person has potentialities that he or she does not live out. Envy is the characteristic of the person who has not developed. Thus it is fitting that envy should be a problem in the whole tale of development of femininity. Envy is found in those who try to develop by the very means—giving the power for one’s development to another—which block development. If Briar Rose cannot experience her feelings as her own, cannot experience her sexuality as hers, her capacity for procreation, her spontaneous awareness as hers, but always in hock to an envious mother, she will indeed always feel powerless no matter how many princes kiss her.

  But I propose that the envy, in the last analysis, is within the girl, Sylvia, herself. We have seen that the fairy tale objectivizes the problem, puts it outside the person, and presents it in naive innocence. But the myth puts it in the person; it adds the highly significant subjective dimension, and if you can imagine this myth written as a drama you would need to assume that the struggle, the conflict surrounding envy, is spite within the person, Sylvia, herself. She is the person who was undeveloped, and the envy arose with her, as with all of us, to the extent that the neurotic form blocks her, or our, development. Sylvia herself is characterized by envy, which is a neurotic perversion of the undeveloped potentialities within herself. As an expression of this conflict her potentialities are expressed in a negative, destructive form that is sheer pow
er, validating herself by her power to command others. This first comes out toward men (toward me as in the Nutcracker dream) and later on toward women. A central part of the therapeutic problem with the Briar Rose type is helping them find and experience the positive strength that is present in the whip cracking. Sylvia, indeed, got a good deal of gratification and sense of significance out of experiencing how she had been able to control her brothers, and to some extent her father, those years of childhood. The negative, resentful, revengeful power that goes with envy needs to be shifted into the wishing and willing that will serve constructively to help her get what she wants and needs for her own freedom and responsibility.

  About this time in the therapy Sylvia met a man at a concert committee meeting who interested her greatly. He was of high position and seemed to have real charm; his skin was of a different color from hers. They met a number of times when she could arrange it and he was free from his duties. One significant thing about this relationship was that Sylvia turned out to have powerful sexual energy. They spent passionate nights in which they made love all night long, not bothering to sleep. This seemed to have no particular effect on her marriage; she did not tell her husband, keeping the experience as her own. But she was more relaxed at home. The experiences gave Sylvia proof that she was capable of intense response to a man, and demonstrated to her that she could abandon herself in a sensual relationship. It confirmed her femininity in many different ways.

  Toward the conclusion of her therapy Sylvia brought the following dream:

  There was a woman who was an author. She and her husband ran a short-order lunch counter. The husband stood at the counter, the wife back by the stove. When the order was taken by the husband, the wife immediately heard it and started to make it. This was to prove how unnecessary and affected were the usual ways of domestic servants when you have to spell everything out. The woman was more intelligent and efficient than anyone gave her credit for being as a domestic servant.