Provocations
Page 46
McLuhan’s two-way charting of technological advance and obsolescence is anticipated in Emerson’s observation in “Self-Reliance” in 1840: “Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other….For everything that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.” Emerson goes on to draw a Romantic analogy between nature and culture: “Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.”
Indeed it is the respect accorded to nature that I define as a primary characteristic of the North American intellectual tradition. The claustrophobic world of post-structuralism sees nothing but oppressive society operating on passive, helpless mankind. Nature at its wildest and most sublime rarely impinges on Paris—and when it does, as in the once-a-millennium storm winds that swept over France in late December 1999, ten thousand trees fall and the Cathedral of Notre Dame itself begins to crumble. We in North America, with its powerful, ever-changing weather systems, its vast geography, and monumental landmarks like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, know that nature is the ever-present ground of all human thought and action.
Marshall McLuhan’s vastness of perception partly came, as his biographer Philip Marchand notes, from his origins in Alberta with its prairie landscape—exactly the kind of landscape, I would add, that inspired an American genius, the Wisconsin-born architect Frank Lloyd Wright, with his “prairie style” that has revolutionized residential design. Leslie Fiedler too, though born and toughened in urban Newark, New Jersey, became a big-sky Northerner whose work would bring American nature together with American history, ethnicity, and sexuality. Fiedler attended graduate school in the north country at the University of Wisconsin—where McLuhan had briefly taught in his first job in 1936. Fiedler began his career at Montana State University, where he taught from 1941 to 1964, after which he became an eminence for 35 years at the State University of New York at Buffalo, one of the snowiest cities in America. Norman O. Brown, interestingly enough, also attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin at the same time, receiving his Ph.D. a year after Fiedler received his. I too, despite my immigrant Italian lineage, claim the feisty independence of the northerner: I was born, grew up, and attended college in the snow belt of upstate Central New York. I was raised, I like to say, breathing cold, clear Canadian air.
Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown, born within six years of each other (from 1911 to 1917), became models of the public intellectual for the baby-boom generation born just after World War Two. Although an academic at a major university, McLuhan was always an outsider who became a citizen of the world, appearing on talk shows, advising business groups, and always trying to address a general audience. Fiedler too believed that a critic must speak the common language to the widest possible audience. Fiedler became a culture hero to campus radicals everywhere when, because of his sponsorship of a student group advocating legalization of marijuana, he was arrested in 1967 and convicted, though he escaped a prison term when the charges were dropped for lack of evidence. The police raid on Fiedler’s Buffalo house was one of the most sensational events of my college years in Binghamton. In one stroke, Fiedler broke the genteel code of American academe. Norman O. Brown made memorable appearances to student groups (though I never saw him) and seemed to give his Dionysian imprimatur to the sexual revolution—for which he certainly lost credibility in the scholarly community.
The North American synthesis of the pragmatic and the visionary in the works of McLuhan, Fiedler, and Brown is uniquely suited to analyze the swiftly changing present of our age of technology. Mass media and communication, which have been developed and refined in the United States since the nineteenth-century rise of tabloid-style mass-market newspapers, cannot be fully understood with European models. Media domination, as we have known it since television captured the nation in the 1950s, is still unknown in Europe, where at-home Internet use too has at this date barely begun.
McLuhan himself was not the wholesale fan of pop culture that many think him; he called TV “a vile drug,” for example, and relegated it to lesser rooms of the house. McLuhan forecast what my generation lived, from transistor radios and stereo headphones to today’s one hundred cable channels. But we baby boomers had the advantage of a traditional education in history and great books. I agree with social critic Neil Postman that we should be very concerned about the cultural quandary of American children raised on banal TV shows and violent movies. But the antidote, as I see it, is not to curb the rowdy pagan energies of pop but to reconstruct the counterbalancing citadel of primary education, which has so shockingly deteriorated over the past three decades.
As for secondary education, it must be purged of desiccated European formulas, which burden and disable the student mind. We need to recover North American paradigms and metaphors, to restore the North American idiom to academic discourse. Media and Internet communications are a Jamesian and Joycean “stream of consciousness,” fluid and mercurial, and our young people—from the brilliant Web entrepreneurs to the pirate hackers who harass institutions and disrupt e-commerce—occupy a radically different mental space than the valley of death of pre- and postwar Europe.
As I know from my own work with the online magazine Salon, with its international readership, McLuhan’s “global village” has come to pass. The Web’s power of rapid response to breaking news events is making daily newspapers and even network TV seem slow and cumbersome. Every day, the Web is fulfilling the 1960s dream of expanded perception or cosmic consciousness.
In concluding this call for a reawakening of North American sensibility, let me cite Emerson’s exhortation in his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar”: “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he declares. Of Americans, Emerson vows, “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.”
1. McLuhan, “Preface to the Third Printing,” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), p. 7.
* [The Second Annual Marshall McLuhan Lecture, Fordham University, co-sponsored by the Canadian Consulate, February 17, 2000. Published in Explorations in Media Ecology I, no. 1 ( 2002).]
56
ERICH NEUMANN:
THEORIST OF THE GREAT MOTHER*
How should the humanities be taught, and how should scholars in the humanities be trained? These pivotal questions confront universities today amid signs of spreading agreement that the three-decade era of post-structuralism and postmodernism is over.
It remains my position—as detailed in my long review-essay, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” published in Arion in 1991—that Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault were false gods, created and promoted by secular academics who might have been expected to be more skeptical of authority. As it became institutionalized in the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, post-structuralism hardened into dogma, and many humanities professors lost the ability to respect, assess, or even recognize any hypothesis or system outside their own frame of reference. Such insularity has little to do with genuine intellectualism and is more akin to religious fundamentalism.
Most seriously, post-structuralism did manifest damage to two generations of students who deserved a generous and expansive introduction to the richness of the humanities and who were instead force-fed with cynicism and cant. I fail to see that American students are emerging today even from elite universities with a broad or discerning knowledge of arts and letters. Nor has post-structuralism produced any major new critics—certainly none of the towering scholarly stature once typical of prominent professors who had been educated in the first half of the twentieth century.
The issue I address here is what kind of thinkers or theorists should be set before students as models of progressive yet responsible scholarship. How does one cultivate sensibility or develop scholarly aptitude and judgment? Which writers prove most fruitfu
l over time by stimulating new work in an original voice rather than by simply coercing sycophantic replication?
During my college years, I regarded the declining New Criticism, based on close reading of literary texts, as too limited for the forces—social, historical, psychological, and sexual—then converging in the 1960s, and I began searching for alternate templates. I was drawn to maverick writers who had broken through disciplinary boundaries—Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Norman O. Brown, Alan Watts.
In graduate school, I ransacked the library in my quest for inspiration: it was a kind of archaeological excavation. Today, because of online catalogs and specialty Web sites, information can be targeted with pinpoint accuracy and accessed with stunning speed. Hence I doubt whether that kind of untidy, often grimy engagement with neglected old books will ever appeal again to young scholars. But it was through the laborious handling of concrete books that I learned how to survey material, weigh evidence, and spot innovative categorizations or nuggets of brilliant insight. Many times, the biggest surprises revealed themselves off-topic on neighboring shelves.
One of my central, galvanizing discoveries was Erich Neumann, who was born in Berlin in 1905 and who wrote in German throughout his life. He was a product, I would argue, of the final phase of the great period of German classical philology, which was animated by an ideal of profound erudition. Neumann’s higher education and maturation belonged to the Weimar cultural milieu, with its daring, heady spirit yet underlying economic instability and rising political tension. Neumann pursued graduate study in philosophy at the University of Erlangen in Nuremburg and received his Ph.D. in 1927. Researching eighteenth-century Hasidism and cabalism, he chose as the subject of his dissertation Johann Arnold Kanne, a Christian philosopher who had been influenced by Jewish mysticism. In his subtitle, Neumann called Kanne “a neglected Romantic.”
Increasingly intrigued by psychoanalysis, Neumann began medical studies at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He passed his examinations in 1933 but was unable to obtain an internship because of the race laws affecting Jews. Decades later, when he was already internationally famous, the university granted him a belated medical degree. Neumann had an early interest in the arts: he wrote poetry as well as a long novel, Der Anfang (The Beginning). He undertook a critical study of Kafka’s novels in 1932, when Kafka was still a minor figure.
Though Freud made a deep impact on him, the pivotal figure in Neumann’s career would be Carl Jung, whom he met and studied with in Zurich in 1934. Neumann (thirty years younger) eventually became Jung’s anointed intellectual heir. The relationship between these two prolific writers was close yet ambivalent because of Jung’s sporadic anti-Semitism. Neumann and his wife Julia, who had joined Zionist organizations in their teenage years, emigrated to Palestine in 1934. There Neumann began his lifelong practice as a Jungian psychologist in Tel Aviv. His wife too became an analyst (and, oddly, earned a high reputation as a professional palm reader). Neumann later became president of the Israel Association of Analytical Psychologists.
During World War Two, when communications were disrupted, Neumann suffered severely from his lack of contact with European colleagues. But from 1948 to the end of his life (he died of kidney cancer at the age of 55 in 1960), he frequently traveled to and lectured in Europe, notably at conferences of the Eranos Society in Ascona, Switzerland. (Other attendees at the Eranos conferences included Mircea Eliade, Herbert Read, Heinrich Zimmer, and Carl Kerényi.) Princeton University Press published Neumann’s wide-ranging lectures on art and psychology as four volumes of essays in its Bollingen Series.
Neumann’s first published book was Depth Psychology and a New Ethic (1949), which interpreted the “scapegoating” of the Nazi era as a projection of repressed cultural and psychological forces. In the same year appeared his first magnum opus, The Origins and History of Consciousness, with a foreword by Jung. In this book, my personal favorite of his works, Neumann argues that each individual’s psychological growth recapitulates the history of humanity. He charts what he calls “the mythological stages in the evolution of consciousness”: the creation myth, the hero myth, and the transformation myth, identified with the Egyptian god Osiris. Here he also presents his idiosyncratic theory of centroversion in ego formation—a blend of extraversion and introversion.
The massive volume for which Neumann is most renowned, however, is The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, a study of the Magna Mater that was evidently first published as a 1955 translation into English by Ralph Manheim. (The dedication reads: “To C. G. Jung, Friend and Master in his Eightieth Year.”) In such evocatively titled chapters as “The Primordial Goddess,” “The Great Round,” “The Lady of the Plants,” and “The Lady of the Beasts” (all ancient epithets), Neumann traces the genealogy and symbolism of goddess figures in world culture. Though Origins is well-illustrated, The Great Mother is a visual feast, a truly essential text with 74 figures and 185 plates of pictures of prehistoric and tribal artifacts of mother goddesses, juxtaposed with striking sculptures and paintings from classical antiquity through the Renaissance. The core of these images came from the Eranos Archive for Symbolic Research, assembled by Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, the free-thinking founder of the Eranos Society who was an early disciple of Jung.
Other substantial writings by Neumann include two monographs, Amor and Psyche, a Jungian reading of a myth in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass (1952), and The Archetypal World of Henry Moore (first published as an English translation by R. F. C. Hull in 1959), a study of the British artist’s monumental sculptures of women. The latter is another of my favorite Neumann works: Moore supplied some of his own private, previously unpublished photos for the book, and Neumann supplemented them with comparative images of French Neolithic, Egyptian, Cypriote, Mayan, Peruvian, and African objects. Neumann pointedly calls Moore’s mother-and-child groups “fatherless” and sees them as prophetic evidence of cultural change: “Today a new shift of values is beginning, and with the gradual decay of the patriarchal canon we can discern a new emergence of the matriarchal world in the consciousness of Western man.”
Though he dismissed Freud’s Totem and Taboo as “ethnologically untenable,” Neumann hailed Freud as a “Moses” who had led his people out of “servitude”: “Freud opened the way for the liberation of man from the oppression of the old father figure, to which he himself remained deeply fixated.” But Freud saw too late that an “earth mother” had preceded the “Father-God”: “He never discovered the decisive significance of the mother in the destiny of the individual and of mankind.” Neumann found greater variety and flexibility in Jung’s system, with its spiritual metaphors drawn from alchemy, the occult, and the I Ching. In a tribute to Jung published in 1955, he insisted that Jung had surpassed Freud: “What now emerged was the primal psychic world of mankind, the world of mythology, the world of primitive man and of all those myriad forms of religion and art in which man is visibly gripped and carried away by the suprapersonal power that sustains and nourishes all creative development. The human psyche stood revealed as a creative force in the here and now.” Neumann implied that the therapeutic Freud was too fixed on social adaptation and that he trapped patients in their private past.
The narrowness of Freud’s view of women, based on a limited sample of late-nineteenth-century types, has often been denounced and became an easy excuse in some quarters of mainstream feminism to dismiss his revolutionary work wholesale. I would maintain that Freud’s gender theory, however problematic, was ultimately irrelevant to his mapping of the psyche and the dream life, which radically transformed modern art and thought. Jung’s relations with women, including his unstable mother, were blatantly conflicted, but a remarkable number of the first Jungian analysts were forceful, articulate women, who supplied what they found missing in his theories. Neumann’s work belongs to that successor generation, among whom there was considerable mutual influence.
Neumann laid out what
he theorized to be four fundamental stages in women’s psychological development. The first is an undifferentiated matrix or psychic unity where the ego and the unconscious are still fused. He called this stage “matriarchal” and symbolized it as the uroboros, an ancient symbol of a snake biting its tail, both devouring and giving birth to itself, an image of either solipsism or fertility. In the second stage, there is spiritual invasion and domination by the Great Father archetype (associated with rationalism and monotheism), who is perceived as a destroyer or rapist. A gloss here might be William Blake’s peculiar, haunting poem, “The Sick Rose,” where a ruthlessly phallic “invisible worm…flies in the night / In the howling storm” to “destroy” a virginal rose’s passively self-enclosed “bed / Of crimson joy.” In the engraved plates of The Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794), Blake, like Neumann, is picturing an unfolding series of spiritual and psychosexual states.
In his third developmental stage, Neumann embodies the masculine in a normative individual, a rescuing hero who liberates the young woman from the controlling father but yokes her to conventional marriage under new male authority. Sex roles are polarized, with masculinity and femininity mutually exclusive. Neumann’s fourth and final stage has feminist implications: here the mature woman discovers her authentic self and voice. As she borrows from the masculine, sex roles are blurred.
I hope I have outlined Neumann’s four stages accurately. This is not in fact the aspect of his work that most drew or influenced me. General theories of female psychology quickly lost favor after the resurgence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s. They appeared arbitrary and reactionary insofar as they reflected a conception of women preceding their massive entrance into the professions. Issues relating specifically to motherhood were now avoided and gradually abandoned—at some cost to feminism in the long run. While women’s groups lobbied on and off campus for such practical matters as daycare and flex time, biology and reproduction would be purged from discussion in most women’s studies programs—or rather they were reduced to the single, still hotly contested matter of abortion rights (which as a feminist I fully support).