Wish I could find the youtube clip of this. . .
Norm from Cheers:
"Women. . .can't live with 'em. . . Could you, uh, pass the beer nuts."
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Clarification
Wish I could find the youtube clip of this. . .
Norm from Cheers:
"Women. . .can't live with 'em. . . Could you, uh, pass the beer nuts."
Too much. . .
While I'm all for kids getting high, I think it should still be of their own volition.
Dentists. . .pass the beer nuts. . .
Dentists. . .pass the beer nuts. . .
Unpacking Oedipus - Part III
(cont'd)
In listening to that same lecture set, Solomon mentions in passing that Oedipus's father had been the recipient of a curse. Somehow I had forgotten that. And so I thought, how foolish of me- in all of these myths, the ancestral patterns are relevant, why should Oedipus be any different?
In the old testament, it is said that the sins of the father are visited upon his children. The 10 commandments assure that disobeying souls will be punished 10 generations out. Native American traditions consider the implications for the 7th generation after them of any of their important choices. And yet we in the modern west continue to think that we just sprang out of nowhere with no ancestral antecedents or debts. (this is fundamentally an American delusion with our mythology of the immigrant surrendering all loyalty to Prince or Potentate, and presumably all inherited emotional baggage. Would that wishing made it so. . .).
So to look at the "fate" of Oedipus, with its apparent cruelty (as Solomon puts it), it would behoove us to look at the 'system,' i.e. the family of which Oedipus was but a unit, his centrality inflated by our attention to him and not his ancestors.
Did you know Oedipus's father was cursed? That he was cursed to bear a son that would slay him? Well that certainly takes some of the pressure off of Oedipus, no? After all, he might not have been such a bad guy if he were just acting out an arrangement made by his father and another actor.
In the stories, King Laius, Oedipus's father was a guest at the court of King Pelops. During his stay there, he became sexually intrigued by Pelops's son, Chrysippus, and in the night, abducted and raped him. (It's almost hard to believe this part of the story doesn't get more air time, what with our open embrace of pedophilia and homosexuality). Upon discovering the violation of his child, Pelops curses Laius that his son should murder him.
Well.
That certainly puts a different spin on things, doesn't it? Does the 'evil fate' of Laius, to be murdered by his son, seem slightly less brutal in this context? Does the guilt Oedipus experience as the agent of vengeance in another man's sensible call for justice seem somewhat overwrought? Maybe.
What is more, in the stories, both men try to avoid their fate- one out of selfishness, one out of selflessness. Laius, understanding his curse, exposes Oedipus in order to outwit fate. Oedipus, when learning of his own curse, *runs away from home* in order to spare his (adopted) father the curse of his own fate.
Would that Oedipus and Laius had had the council of Dr. von Franz. This is just the kind of ‘fate evasion’ practiced daily in psychologists’ offices as people try to outsmart their complexes through intellectual analysis. And so perhaps the ancients and their oracles were as foolish as we and our shrinks.
But to our original point. . . That the Oedipus myth is somehow central to our psyches is an arbitrary assertion. It can hardly be said that every young man born in the world is the son of a father who was cursed by a foreign king for raping his son. Furthermore, even for those fathers that did go down that path, some of them might have accepted the cosequences of their actions and raised the son anyway. Laius, however, decided to murder Oedipus, and so his son’s unconscious desire to kill his father is not some kind of ‘psychological predisposition.’ It is simply revenge.
And yet the notion persists. But perhaps we enjoy the avoidance of our fate as much as Laius and Oedipus – and all the others – did. Woody Allen, a psychological devotee, was in analysis for some 30 years before he married his daughter. So perhaps the psychological religion is destined to fail us as much as the Judeo-Christian one.
The Oedipus Complex has distorted our cultural sense of who we are by replacing the Judeo-Christian mono-myth with an equally preposterous, limited construct that simply does not apply in most cases. And still, in our search for meaning through the new religion of psychology, all manner of mythic conditions are referred back to the alleged primogenitor of complexes, the Oedipal.
Solomon, in his lectures, quotes Nietzsche as saying we shall not be through with God until we are through with language, since our notion of God is embedded in our everyday speech. Well the neuro-linguistic programmers, to say nothing of the GOP, are working on that. But in the mean time, getting rid of our notion of monotheism as the governing myth of mankind would set us well in the right direction.
In listening to that same lecture set, Solomon mentions in passing that Oedipus's father had been the recipient of a curse. Somehow I had forgotten that. And so I thought, how foolish of me- in all of these myths, the ancestral patterns are relevant, why should Oedipus be any different?
In the old testament, it is said that the sins of the father are visited upon his children. The 10 commandments assure that disobeying souls will be punished 10 generations out. Native American traditions consider the implications for the 7th generation after them of any of their important choices. And yet we in the modern west continue to think that we just sprang out of nowhere with no ancestral antecedents or debts. (this is fundamentally an American delusion with our mythology of the immigrant surrendering all loyalty to Prince or Potentate, and presumably all inherited emotional baggage. Would that wishing made it so. . .).
So to look at the "fate" of Oedipus, with its apparent cruelty (as Solomon puts it), it would behoove us to look at the 'system,' i.e. the family of which Oedipus was but a unit, his centrality inflated by our attention to him and not his ancestors.
Did you know Oedipus's father was cursed? That he was cursed to bear a son that would slay him? Well that certainly takes some of the pressure off of Oedipus, no? After all, he might not have been such a bad guy if he were just acting out an arrangement made by his father and another actor.
In the stories, King Laius, Oedipus's father was a guest at the court of King Pelops. During his stay there, he became sexually intrigued by Pelops's son, Chrysippus, and in the night, abducted and raped him. (It's almost hard to believe this part of the story doesn't get more air time, what with our open embrace of pedophilia and homosexuality). Upon discovering the violation of his child, Pelops curses Laius that his son should murder him.
Well.
That certainly puts a different spin on things, doesn't it? Does the 'evil fate' of Laius, to be murdered by his son, seem slightly less brutal in this context? Does the guilt Oedipus experience as the agent of vengeance in another man's sensible call for justice seem somewhat overwrought? Maybe.
What is more, in the stories, both men try to avoid their fate- one out of selfishness, one out of selflessness. Laius, understanding his curse, exposes Oedipus in order to outwit fate. Oedipus, when learning of his own curse, *runs away from home* in order to spare his (adopted) father the curse of his own fate.
Would that Oedipus and Laius had had the council of Dr. von Franz. This is just the kind of ‘fate evasion’ practiced daily in psychologists’ offices as people try to outsmart their complexes through intellectual analysis. And so perhaps the ancients and their oracles were as foolish as we and our shrinks.
But to our original point. . . That the Oedipus myth is somehow central to our psyches is an arbitrary assertion. It can hardly be said that every young man born in the world is the son of a father who was cursed by a foreign king for raping his son. Furthermore, even for those fathers that did go down that path, some of them might have accepted the cosequences of their actions and raised the son anyway. Laius, however, decided to murder Oedipus, and so his son’s unconscious desire to kill his father is not some kind of ‘psychological predisposition.’ It is simply revenge.
And yet the notion persists. But perhaps we enjoy the avoidance of our fate as much as Laius and Oedipus – and all the others – did. Woody Allen, a psychological devotee, was in analysis for some 30 years before he married his daughter. So perhaps the psychological religion is destined to fail us as much as the Judeo-Christian one.
The Oedipus Complex has distorted our cultural sense of who we are by replacing the Judeo-Christian mono-myth with an equally preposterous, limited construct that simply does not apply in most cases. And still, in our search for meaning through the new religion of psychology, all manner of mythic conditions are referred back to the alleged primogenitor of complexes, the Oedipal.
Solomon, in his lectures, quotes Nietzsche as saying we shall not be through with God until we are through with language, since our notion of God is embedded in our everyday speech. Well the neuro-linguistic programmers, to say nothing of the GOP, are working on that. But in the mean time, getting rid of our notion of monotheism as the governing myth of mankind would set us well in the right direction.
Unpacking Oedipus - Part II
So from my perspective, it is arguable about which (if any) of Freud's legacies has contributed most to public health, but certainly the one that has most captured the public's imagination is the famous "Oedipus Complex." And it is no wonder- modern man, particularly in America, is sorely lacking in mythic exposure, and it is just the function of imagination that is most touched on by mythic analogs such as Oedipus.
Jung, Freud's prodigal student, complained that Freud emphasized the Oedipus Myth above all others, not realizing that the entire psychic world is the interplay of different myths, stories, and legends- infinite in number, concocted by the collective human imagination through eons of experience. Myths of childhood range from Attis to Narcissus, from Hippodamia to Mirope, and well beyond . . .the Oedipus myth is but one, and yet it is the one which has stuck with us.
Last night I was listening to a recorded lecture that the late Bob Solomon and his wife, Kathleen Higgins, were giving on the life of Nietzsche. It was the lecture on the notorious "God is Dead" theme in which the lecturers decry the lack of a "foundational myth" to replace the Christian myth, which is the one Nietzsche was referring to when he spoke of God as being dead.
I was struck by the way the lecturers described this quest as the search for a "foundational" myth. They are absolutely right that that is what the culture has been searching for for some time. But the idea itself rests on a fundamental assumption whose validity I would vigorously dispute: the modern Western bias towards Monotheism.
Monotheism, historically is not the norm. It is an aberration from the great religious traditions of mankind. The pretension that there is only one god, and with it one "foundational myth," is a fence we have wrapped ourselves in so tightly these past 4000 years that it seems almost impossible to get out of it.
And yet even in our supposed monotheism we pray to different aspects of the deity for salvation- Jehovah, Yahweh, Hashem, and others described different subtle aspects of the Hebrew God. Even the Holy Trinity and the recently assumed Virgin Mother (Congratulations, Mary) are differentiated, albeit grossly, mythic aspects of the supposedly one deity. So, as so many religious people display in everyday life, we are hypocrites- even foundationally. For while we feign to believe in one god, we in fact worship many.
And yet it is monotheism that has endured even into our 21st century. Perhaps it was Freud's ambition that latched onto this fact, or perhaps it was society that latched itself onto Freud, but the supposed ubiquity of the Oedipus Complex satisfies our modern craving for a monotheistic, "foundational myth."
Particularly for the secular educated who themselves hold the hilarious pretension of being immune from religion, the psychological mono-myth of Oedipus forms a sort of Rock of Gibraltar on which to hang their psychological theories while evading the complexity, turmoil, and irreducibility that accompanies a wholly more accurate and honest version of the psyche: the polytheistic.
The mono-myth of Oedipus has usurped the thousands of other childhood mythologems that comprise the human experience just as God-the-Father has usurped the thousands of Gods and Goddesses who have woven the story of mankind since time immemorial.
It is certainly very comforting for us to have such a strong protective father, whether in the guise of an inaccessible deity, or an equally ephemeral urge to kill our father and bed our mothers. Indeed these two parallel mono-myths share primarily the fact that lay persons rarely, if ever, experience them directly. We just have to take somebody's word for it. How convenient.
On the other hand, the multi-mythic outlook is as rich as can be, and can be experienced - indeed is always experienced - viscerally, personally, and primordially- three religious attitudes that are all but forbidden in a formalized, monotheistic setting. That these experiences happen whether we identify as monotheists or not, Oedipists or not, is the cause of much disturbance to the formalized religious structure. So there should be no wonder that over the past 2000 years especially, the monists have done their damndest to stamp out any diverging mythological threads and condemn them to the realm of "hell"- either figuratively by denunciation or physically by aggravated murder.
And yet the church didn't act alone. They extinguished polytheism by representing the interests of their constituents. After all, the Christian cult, by expurgating the notion of violence and embracing the notion of lamb-like surrender, left itself extremely vulnerable to aggression. The cthonic Roman culture of violence, out of which the original Christian sects arose, became the repressed shadow of a culture based on martyrdom and self-sacrifice.
The unconscious need, therefore, for manly protection and security grew exponentially. And what could be more secure than the mono-myth? The one sure truth in which one could take refuge.
Polytheism is sloppy. How do you know which God to pray to? How do you know (psychologically) that you are living out the Persephone Myth and not the Artemis Myth? How reassuring, then, to know you're either an Oedipus or an Electra, a Jock or a Cheerleader, as it were? This kind of Judeo-Christian-Freudian reassurance was absolutely necessary for a culture that consciously rejected militarism and the mortal protection it offered. (The Christan wars of aggression in subsequent centuries would be further evidence of the repressed violent side acting autonomously, but I find the protective violence of a fixed belief system to be a more compelling study.)
When one actively engages the polytheistic "lifestyle" things start to make a lot more sense. The "grid" into which we must force ourselves in mono-culture transforms into an ocean of connectivity. For some, this ocean remains terrifying, and the risk of drowning without proper flotation equipment is real. Fortunately, disciplines such as astrology and other mytho-temporal interface studies offer a sort of "Coast Guard for the Soul" and help us navigate our mythic waters with greater assurance. Jungian Psychology, I Ching, Tarot, and good old-fashioned Animism all offer compelling maps of the ocean's depths and can even lead one back to land, should one so desire.
Judging by the Solomon lectures, it seems as if Nietzsche with his reverence for the Greeks was very much on to this. But the unwillingness to break with the monotheistic ueber-paradigm hampered him from engaging fully in the mythic on a personal level. This great wash of different possibilities of human experience he believed were only available to the ancients but were somehow lost to himself. In fact Nietzsche's obsession with the Dionysian-Apollonian split reflects this. What he meant by this was essentially a monotheistic (Apollonian) - polytheistic (Dionysian) split, which is a false one created by the unconscious monotheistic bias. (It could also be described more simply as a masculine-feminine split with Apollo being the former, Dionysos, the latter. It is no coincidence that the great patriarchal religions are monotheistic.)
After all, polytheism *includes* the God of monotheism. There is no Apollo-Dionysos split in Pagan thought. The two are brothers, but they are also brothers with Aries, Hermes, Hephaestos, and countless others born to Zeus's concubines. Add to this Athena, Demeter, Hecate, and all the rest, and you have a vast psycho-mythic framework that is wholly compatible with itself and underpins fully the stories of our lives.
And taking us into the 21st century, in the post-Matrix era, I would have to add that we may no longer be in the age of discovering our mythic substructures but actually choosing them- or at minimum realizing that the myths we experience presently are myths we have already chosen. To wake up, therefore, while still in the dream is to choose consciously- to choose joy, suffering, endurance, exhaustion or whatever story catches our fancy.
Surely nothing could be more terrifying to the fundamentalist monists out there. But the gradual loosening of the death grip on mortal security has in fact been the stated intention of the Church teachings for 2000 years. Perhaps it took two millenia of pretense to arrive at a place where we can actually do what that god demanded of us- let go of our attachment to mortal protection and flow with the ever-unfolding stories that are our lives.
My intention in this piece was to undermine a bit the particular notion of Oedipus and its centrality in modern psychology, so I would like to say a few things about that (although I confess the detour may have been much more interesting than the destination may yet be!). We'll take them up in Part III.
Jung, Freud's prodigal student, complained that Freud emphasized the Oedipus Myth above all others, not realizing that the entire psychic world is the interplay of different myths, stories, and legends- infinite in number, concocted by the collective human imagination through eons of experience. Myths of childhood range from Attis to Narcissus, from Hippodamia to Mirope, and well beyond . . .the Oedipus myth is but one, and yet it is the one which has stuck with us.
Last night I was listening to a recorded lecture that the late Bob Solomon and his wife, Kathleen Higgins, were giving on the life of Nietzsche. It was the lecture on the notorious "God is Dead" theme in which the lecturers decry the lack of a "foundational myth" to replace the Christian myth, which is the one Nietzsche was referring to when he spoke of God as being dead.
I was struck by the way the lecturers described this quest as the search for a "foundational" myth. They are absolutely right that that is what the culture has been searching for for some time. But the idea itself rests on a fundamental assumption whose validity I would vigorously dispute: the modern Western bias towards Monotheism.
Monotheism, historically is not the norm. It is an aberration from the great religious traditions of mankind. The pretension that there is only one god, and with it one "foundational myth," is a fence we have wrapped ourselves in so tightly these past 4000 years that it seems almost impossible to get out of it.
And yet even in our supposed monotheism we pray to different aspects of the deity for salvation- Jehovah, Yahweh, Hashem, and others described different subtle aspects of the Hebrew God. Even the Holy Trinity and the recently assumed Virgin Mother (Congratulations, Mary) are differentiated, albeit grossly, mythic aspects of the supposedly one deity. So, as so many religious people display in everyday life, we are hypocrites- even foundationally. For while we feign to believe in one god, we in fact worship many.
And yet it is monotheism that has endured even into our 21st century. Perhaps it was Freud's ambition that latched onto this fact, or perhaps it was society that latched itself onto Freud, but the supposed ubiquity of the Oedipus Complex satisfies our modern craving for a monotheistic, "foundational myth."
Particularly for the secular educated who themselves hold the hilarious pretension of being immune from religion, the psychological mono-myth of Oedipus forms a sort of Rock of Gibraltar on which to hang their psychological theories while evading the complexity, turmoil, and irreducibility that accompanies a wholly more accurate and honest version of the psyche: the polytheistic.
The mono-myth of Oedipus has usurped the thousands of other childhood mythologems that comprise the human experience just as God-the-Father has usurped the thousands of Gods and Goddesses who have woven the story of mankind since time immemorial.
It is certainly very comforting for us to have such a strong protective father, whether in the guise of an inaccessible deity, or an equally ephemeral urge to kill our father and bed our mothers. Indeed these two parallel mono-myths share primarily the fact that lay persons rarely, if ever, experience them directly. We just have to take somebody's word for it. How convenient.
On the other hand, the multi-mythic outlook is as rich as can be, and can be experienced - indeed is always experienced - viscerally, personally, and primordially- three religious attitudes that are all but forbidden in a formalized, monotheistic setting. That these experiences happen whether we identify as monotheists or not, Oedipists or not, is the cause of much disturbance to the formalized religious structure. So there should be no wonder that over the past 2000 years especially, the monists have done their damndest to stamp out any diverging mythological threads and condemn them to the realm of "hell"- either figuratively by denunciation or physically by aggravated murder.
And yet the church didn't act alone. They extinguished polytheism by representing the interests of their constituents. After all, the Christian cult, by expurgating the notion of violence and embracing the notion of lamb-like surrender, left itself extremely vulnerable to aggression. The cthonic Roman culture of violence, out of which the original Christian sects arose, became the repressed shadow of a culture based on martyrdom and self-sacrifice.
The unconscious need, therefore, for manly protection and security grew exponentially. And what could be more secure than the mono-myth? The one sure truth in which one could take refuge.
Polytheism is sloppy. How do you know which God to pray to? How do you know (psychologically) that you are living out the Persephone Myth and not the Artemis Myth? How reassuring, then, to know you're either an Oedipus or an Electra, a Jock or a Cheerleader, as it were? This kind of Judeo-Christian-Freudian reassurance was absolutely necessary for a culture that consciously rejected militarism and the mortal protection it offered. (The Christan wars of aggression in subsequent centuries would be further evidence of the repressed violent side acting autonomously, but I find the protective violence of a fixed belief system to be a more compelling study.)
When one actively engages the polytheistic "lifestyle" things start to make a lot more sense. The "grid" into which we must force ourselves in mono-culture transforms into an ocean of connectivity. For some, this ocean remains terrifying, and the risk of drowning without proper flotation equipment is real. Fortunately, disciplines such as astrology and other mytho-temporal interface studies offer a sort of "Coast Guard for the Soul" and help us navigate our mythic waters with greater assurance. Jungian Psychology, I Ching, Tarot, and good old-fashioned Animism all offer compelling maps of the ocean's depths and can even lead one back to land, should one so desire.
Judging by the Solomon lectures, it seems as if Nietzsche with his reverence for the Greeks was very much on to this. But the unwillingness to break with the monotheistic ueber-paradigm hampered him from engaging fully in the mythic on a personal level. This great wash of different possibilities of human experience he believed were only available to the ancients but were somehow lost to himself. In fact Nietzsche's obsession with the Dionysian-Apollonian split reflects this. What he meant by this was essentially a monotheistic (Apollonian) - polytheistic (Dionysian) split, which is a false one created by the unconscious monotheistic bias. (It could also be described more simply as a masculine-feminine split with Apollo being the former, Dionysos, the latter. It is no coincidence that the great patriarchal religions are monotheistic.)
After all, polytheism *includes* the God of monotheism. There is no Apollo-Dionysos split in Pagan thought. The two are brothers, but they are also brothers with Aries, Hermes, Hephaestos, and countless others born to Zeus's concubines. Add to this Athena, Demeter, Hecate, and all the rest, and you have a vast psycho-mythic framework that is wholly compatible with itself and underpins fully the stories of our lives.
And taking us into the 21st century, in the post-Matrix era, I would have to add that we may no longer be in the age of discovering our mythic substructures but actually choosing them- or at minimum realizing that the myths we experience presently are myths we have already chosen. To wake up, therefore, while still in the dream is to choose consciously- to choose joy, suffering, endurance, exhaustion or whatever story catches our fancy.
Surely nothing could be more terrifying to the fundamentalist monists out there. But the gradual loosening of the death grip on mortal security has in fact been the stated intention of the Church teachings for 2000 years. Perhaps it took two millenia of pretense to arrive at a place where we can actually do what that god demanded of us- let go of our attachment to mortal protection and flow with the ever-unfolding stories that are our lives.
My intention in this piece was to undermine a bit the particular notion of Oedipus and its centrality in modern psychology, so I would like to say a few things about that (although I confess the detour may have been much more interesting than the destination may yet be!). We'll take them up in Part III.
Unpacking Oedipus - Part I
I go in and out with Freud, if you’ll excuse me. I write him off as a product of his time and heritage, I see him as a revisionist career-monger, I admire him as a genius, and yet I see him as a curse on our time.
The widespread dispensation of psychology has been one of the great plagues on modern society. Underestimating the psyche’s genius for maintaining its protective perversions, psychological knowledge in the public’s hands has served little purpose but to give the psyche one more line of defense- to believe itself ‘cured’ through alignment with academic insights. And yet we are the worse for it, since the human believes its psyche to be cured, where instead its neurosis has only hidden itself farther from view.
I have no doubt that the first generation of psychiatric patients under Freud’s care experienced miraculous recoveries. The healings arose spontaneously from the psyches of those seeking cure. They were not attempting to match up their unfolding with a textbook description of some generic healing process. They were authentic.
But modern psychological healings are over-contaminated by patients' presuppositions about psychological complexes and "defense mechanisms." This complicates the matter infinitely.
To draw an analogy, we can look at the evolution of musical compositional technique in the western world. First there was the music. The composers who innovated and developed the language, from Monteverdi to Bach, from Beethoven to Schumann, did so out of their own imaginative psyches. Their music was authentic.
Then, following their developments the discoveries were codified, mass-disseminated, and became fixed canons of musical technique. The result was a kind of ‘plug and play’ compositional style in which the forms conscientiously imitated those of the masters, presumably in order to get good marks in the music conservatory-factories of the 19th century (particularly in France). You have probably never heard these pieces, since their ability to stand the test of time was nonexistent. They were not “cured” the way the originals were. They became exercises in imitation and people-pleasing rather than creative revelations from deep beyond.
We moderns do the same thing with our psychology. We understand the forms- repression, projection, and the Oedipal Drama, and we plug our lives and experiences into them. And the result is just the same as with the French conservatory composers- a dull shade of a life, an unremarkable journey.
Because it is not the forms that cure, it is the process- the organic unfolding that defies prediction, regularity, or reliability. “Psyche” both in myth and fact is feminine, and she flows and changes and has no desire to be pinned down. She has her own rhythm, her own destiny process. This process is usually unknown even to herself- and it is certainly unknown to you and your books.
Marie-Louise von Franz is one of those rare psychologists (herself in the Jungian tradition) who understood the destructive quality that psychology had on modern life, particularly on the young. She went so far as to say that it would be better to grow up in an unconscious, neurotic household than one which had learned to ‘tame’ their neuroses with the morality of psychology, yet which still remained neurotic underneath. This situation gives the developing child the doubly hard task of discerning what was farcical overlay and what was foundational in terms of their own psychological troubles.
For von Franz, the process was receptive, as would befit Psyche herself. In “The Cat,” she describes an analysis she had with a young man who came to see her with a stock set of problems. She knew what the problem was and what the solution would be, and yet when the man told her his dreams, it didn’t add up. The dreams led in a completely different direction. It was von Franz’s genius (and courage) to place her diagnoses on the shelf and follow the dreams instead, which led, eventually, to the self-same conclusion she had drawn in the first place. And yet it was clear that in order for the patient to realize that conclusion in a useful, cathartic way, Psyche had to dream her own journey, her own unraveling, perhaps retracing the steps the neurosis took in forming- which were, in any case – in every case – unique to the patient.
This is masterful analysis, and really requires far less analysis than the other version, the young shrink eager to prove his “theories” and “cure” the patient. As happens often enough (see “Lying on the Couch” by I. Yalom for a brilliant satire) the patient will conform his psychic healing to the expectation of the therapist, just as French conservatory students would compose in order to get their “prix” from the designated authority figure at the Conservatoire.
Certainly there are therapists trained to deal with this version of ‘counter transference,’ but Psyche is usually cleverer than they. After all, if you are subject to desiring this kind of professional vindication, simply “knowing about it” won’t make any difference to your psyche. Just as the patient pretending to be cured, your own psyche will pretend to be objective. And in both cases one is swindled by one’s own mind.
As with the patient, the analyst must have the degree of certainty possessed by the likes of von Franz to relinquish control of the process in order to allow it to unfold as it desires. Holding such a healing environment for the patient may be the one guarantor of success, and yet the manner of that success will be entirely without precedent. How magical indeed. And yet it’s just another day for Psyche.
The widespread dispensation of psychology has been one of the great plagues on modern society. Underestimating the psyche’s genius for maintaining its protective perversions, psychological knowledge in the public’s hands has served little purpose but to give the psyche one more line of defense- to believe itself ‘cured’ through alignment with academic insights. And yet we are the worse for it, since the human believes its psyche to be cured, where instead its neurosis has only hidden itself farther from view.
I have no doubt that the first generation of psychiatric patients under Freud’s care experienced miraculous recoveries. The healings arose spontaneously from the psyches of those seeking cure. They were not attempting to match up their unfolding with a textbook description of some generic healing process. They were authentic.
But modern psychological healings are over-contaminated by patients' presuppositions about psychological complexes and "defense mechanisms." This complicates the matter infinitely.
To draw an analogy, we can look at the evolution of musical compositional technique in the western world. First there was the music. The composers who innovated and developed the language, from Monteverdi to Bach, from Beethoven to Schumann, did so out of their own imaginative psyches. Their music was authentic.
Then, following their developments the discoveries were codified, mass-disseminated, and became fixed canons of musical technique. The result was a kind of ‘plug and play’ compositional style in which the forms conscientiously imitated those of the masters, presumably in order to get good marks in the music conservatory-factories of the 19th century (particularly in France). You have probably never heard these pieces, since their ability to stand the test of time was nonexistent. They were not “cured” the way the originals were. They became exercises in imitation and people-pleasing rather than creative revelations from deep beyond.
We moderns do the same thing with our psychology. We understand the forms- repression, projection, and the Oedipal Drama, and we plug our lives and experiences into them. And the result is just the same as with the French conservatory composers- a dull shade of a life, an unremarkable journey.
Because it is not the forms that cure, it is the process- the organic unfolding that defies prediction, regularity, or reliability. “Psyche” both in myth and fact is feminine, and she flows and changes and has no desire to be pinned down. She has her own rhythm, her own destiny process. This process is usually unknown even to herself- and it is certainly unknown to you and your books.
Marie-Louise von Franz is one of those rare psychologists (herself in the Jungian tradition) who understood the destructive quality that psychology had on modern life, particularly on the young. She went so far as to say that it would be better to grow up in an unconscious, neurotic household than one which had learned to ‘tame’ their neuroses with the morality of psychology, yet which still remained neurotic underneath. This situation gives the developing child the doubly hard task of discerning what was farcical overlay and what was foundational in terms of their own psychological troubles.
For von Franz, the process was receptive, as would befit Psyche herself. In “The Cat,” she describes an analysis she had with a young man who came to see her with a stock set of problems. She knew what the problem was and what the solution would be, and yet when the man told her his dreams, it didn’t add up. The dreams led in a completely different direction. It was von Franz’s genius (and courage) to place her diagnoses on the shelf and follow the dreams instead, which led, eventually, to the self-same conclusion she had drawn in the first place. And yet it was clear that in order for the patient to realize that conclusion in a useful, cathartic way, Psyche had to dream her own journey, her own unraveling, perhaps retracing the steps the neurosis took in forming- which were, in any case – in every case – unique to the patient.
This is masterful analysis, and really requires far less analysis than the other version, the young shrink eager to prove his “theories” and “cure” the patient. As happens often enough (see “Lying on the Couch” by I. Yalom for a brilliant satire) the patient will conform his psychic healing to the expectation of the therapist, just as French conservatory students would compose in order to get their “prix” from the designated authority figure at the Conservatoire.
Certainly there are therapists trained to deal with this version of ‘counter transference,’ but Psyche is usually cleverer than they. After all, if you are subject to desiring this kind of professional vindication, simply “knowing about it” won’t make any difference to your psyche. Just as the patient pretending to be cured, your own psyche will pretend to be objective. And in both cases one is swindled by one’s own mind.
As with the patient, the analyst must have the degree of certainty possessed by the likes of von Franz to relinquish control of the process in order to allow it to unfold as it desires. Holding such a healing environment for the patient may be the one guarantor of success, and yet the manner of that success will be entirely without precedent. How magical indeed. And yet it’s just another day for Psyche.
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