The Cry for Myth (13 page)
Authors: Rollo May
Time and again the same pantomime was enacted, and time and again the nymph eluded his touch; but the enamored youth could not tear himself away from the spot haunted by this sweet image, whose sensitive face reflected his every emotion and who grew as pale and wan as he—evidently, like him, a victim to love and despair.
There Narcissus lingered day and night, without eating or drinking, until he died, little suspecting that the fancied nymph was but his own image reflected in the clear waters. Echo was avenged; but the gods of Olympus gazed compassionately down upon the beautiful corpse and changed it into a flower bearing the youth’s name, which has ever since flourished beside quiet pools, wherein its pale image is clearly reflected.
Out of this lonely and isolated individual there has come a new psychotherapeutic category fittingly called the “narcissistic personality.” Freud and his immediate followers obviously cited and described narcissism, however, in Freud’s day, this neurosis had not become prominent. But especially in America the narcissistic personality has become the dominant type of patient in the decades since the 1960s.
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The narcissistic patient in therapy is the modern myth of lonely individualism.
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This person has few if any deep relationships and lacks the capacity for satisfaction or pleasure in the contacts he does have. He is, par excellence, the depressed “man in the gray flannel suit,” as the novel phrased the description of this kind. Christopher Lasch well describes this type of person in
The Culture of Narcissism:
Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even his own anxiety…. Even though his sexual attitudes are permissive rather than puritanical, he gets no lasting pleasure from them. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits … he demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.
“In a narcissistic society—a society that gives increasing prominence and encouragement to narcissistic traits,” he peers as though into the well at his own image. Lasch believes that “the prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche.”
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These patients are difficult to work with in therapy, since their narcissism prevents their establishing any deep relationship with the therapist. They seem cooperative on the surface, for they know how one
should
act in therapy, and they follow the rules without ever being deeply committed to any relationship: They remain isolated, deeply lonely individuals. So therapy with them (which often goes on for an excessive number of years) becomes a situation in which the therapist is a “retainer,” a perpetual source of moral advice on all decisions, one whom you visit at every new need for guidance. That this is a mockery of good psychotherapy goes without saying; the
sine qua non
of interpersonal relationship is not there. Instead, the patient gets advice on this or that specific decision, which results in the confirmation of his original problem, i.e., he cannot make personal decisions on his own.
Narcissism destroys individuality, contradictory though that seems
.
Our society is on two levels, the one optimistic, always smiling, shown particularly in the ads on television for ocean cruises with entertainment all provided, or running in the fields, dancing, and driving Cadillacs, in a period of almost universal happiness. This is on the surface. But just below the surface there is the reality of depression—indeed, fear of nuclear disaster, much sexual activity without lasting relationships. “People then complain of an inability to feel. They cultivate mere void experiences, seek to beat sluggish flesh to life, attempt to revive jaded appetities.”
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Therapists, not priests, are popular preachers of self-help. Even when therapists speak of the need for “meaning” and “love,” they define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements, not as a relationship of caring. Narcissism is an emerging dilemma which gives people the tormenting experience of inner contradiction, blocking their spontaneity and sending them into therapy.
These narcissistic persons have many acquaintances but no
close friends. They are sexually liberated but they experience no passion. They generally are well educated, but they gave up most of their intellectual interests when they graduated from college. The narcissistic type is often skilled at stocks and bonds, but sooner or later this seems a purposeless game. They usually make very good salaries—sometimes in the millions—but it gives them little satisfaction. In short, they have everything that is promised in the TV ads to bring happiness—travel and shiny cars and beautiful women—but happiness eludes them. They are often celebrities, but they find this also to be exasperatingly empty. They are modern and sophisticated and they come in increasing numbers to psychoanalysis, but therapy is difficult and slow.
Most of all, such persons are exceedingly lonely. It seems the only emotions they feel are a mild but permeating depression and a sense of having missed out on the joys of life even though, paradoxically, they have had everything. As de Tocqueville tells us, “They never stop thinking of the good things they have not got.”
The narcissistic personality can be considered in America as a further development of American individualism. But this also brings new difficulties in that the development of the technique of psychoanalysis seems increasingly to support the narcissism rather than to analyze it away. Therapy, for a number of reasons—some financial, some theoretical, and some simply an outgrowth of the behavioristic trends in our traditional American psychology—moves toward narcissism and excessive individualism, each empowering the other. Our psychotherapy then tends to be problem-centered rather than person-centered.
De Tocqueville’s insights agree with William James’, who called the pressure to succeed a “bitch goddess.” How did we develop this bastardized marriage between individualism and success? That we did wed these two attitudes is clear enough. As R. W. White puts it: “[American] culture stresses an individualism tied to competition, aggressively directed toward fellow human beings, as the basis for personal and collective security. Each person should stand on his own feet in order to fight for what he gets—such is the philosophy of this culture.”
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After the Civil War, we needed a new myth to sustain people in the great drive to succeed, which was measured chiefly financially, but in status and prestige as well. We needed a myth to console and inspire us in our worship of “the bitch goddess of success.” The drive toward success inebriated people and soon became identified with individualism in the famous American Dream.
The statement of an early leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Governor John Winthrop, that God sends the wealth, became wedded to the Calvinistic doctrine that the man of wealth was therefore the good man, for his wealth showed that God approved of him. This new myth, probably the most important in American history in the last century, was handed to us in the many stories written by Horatio Alger. It provides a mythical paradigm “for the organization man.” I owe to James Oliver Robertson and his book
American Myth/American Reality
the following outline of one of these stories, “Struggling Upward or Luke Larkins’ Luck.”
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First presented in a serial in a magazine aptly entitled
Ways to Success
, this story sold 50 million copies in paperback and
was read by millions more. The story begins with a typical American competition, namely an ice-skating race. Randolph Duncan, whose father was Prince Duncan, a banker, having all the characteristics of European aristocracy including the name of his father, Prince, is matched against Luke, a poor boy, the son of a carpenter’s widow. Luke makes his way by being janitor of the school. He is presented as “eager to work, reliable, generous,” and his face has a “pleasant expression, a warmhearted, resolute look.”
Luke is tripped up by an accomplice of Duncan and so loses the race and the Waterbury watch, which was the prize. When Luke comes up to congratulate him, Duncan remarks patronizingly about the watch, “You are a poor boy. It doesn’t matter to you.” And Luke replies, “I don’t know about that, Randolph. Time is likely to be of as much importance to a poor boy as a rich boy.” The implication here is that time is money to the corporations and their offices; everything runs on the exact time, whereas to the farmer or janitor a watch is a luxury.
Luke is then saved from conviction for a crime he did not commit by a “tall, dark-complexioned stranger” who takes him to New York City, where he meets Mr. Armstrong. The latter remarks that Luke is “a thoroughly good boy, and a smart boy too. I must see if I can give him a chance to rise. He seems absolutely reliable.” One notes that important word “rise”—success meant rising indefinitely.
The upshot of the story is that Luke discovers that the banker, the father of Randolph, has stolen some bonds from Mr. Armstrong, and the tale concludes with Luke’s discovering the theft and achieving success in New York, while Randolph and the Duncan family are required to move to the west to recuperate their integrity. What is fascinating here is that the west is “healing,” as we have pointed out; it is the place where people get their strength and their integrity. Then this power from the west—which I take to be the power from absorbing the American myths—is absorbed by the individual and he is transferred back to the east, where the myth is used for the
climb to success in the great corporations.
This dark-complexioned, tall stranger mentioned above is a curious figure. He brings to mind the “strange traveler” in Ibsen’s play
Peer Gynt
, a man who is crucial to Peer Gynt at last finding
his
own integrity. The “tall stranger” is parallel furthermore to Mr. Cody, the rich man who gives Gatsby his first job and a yachtsman’s costume. There is also the omnipresent element in the story of being taken care of by someone who
likes
you; it reminds us of the myth presented in
Death of a Salesman
, where Willy Loman puts so much stake on being the “best liked.”
These Alger stories gave a powerful sanction to the individual and sustained each person working in the great corporations. It helped persons to accept their station, meet their anxiety, and quench their guilt and gave a structure to their sense of morality and their identity. We have our great examples of such success: the chief hero of the Horatio Alger myths was Andrew Carnegie, who came to this country as an immigrant boy, worked his way up to president of American Steel, and sold his interest in it for four hundred million dollars. He wrote a book called
Road to Success
and made lecture tours around the country on how to succeed.
The myth of success consoled us in the difficulties of struggling to “rise” to higher and higher positions. When we were anxious with such questions as, Did I reach too far? Or too high? we could console ourselves: only a bold person would reach the top. When we had a pang of guilt at exploiting our fellow men, we could whisper to ourselves that we need not take the responsibility for others, that they must learn on their own, and this expression of individualism then relieved us of our guilt.
Luck, in “Luke Larkin’s Luck,” is unpredictable, something over which we have no control. How is one to be certain that his endeavors will yield the vaunted “success”? No wonder physicians researching ulcers and heart trouble in contemporary people state that the “pervasive Horatio Alger myth is a
prime cause of type A behavior.”
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This describes the syndrome of the person in our day who is driven, always in a hurry, tense, lean, competitive, and prone to stress-related diseases. This, rightly say the researchers, is “fed by the Horatio Alger Myth.”
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That word “luck” in this story of Luke Larkin is a repetition of the myth of the Renaissance goddess Fortuna, which in turn comes down from the Greek mythic figure Tyche, who traveled everywhere at the side of Zeus. She is pictured on a constantly revolving wheel, and in her journeys around the world she “scattered with careless hands her numerous gifts, lavishing with indifference her choicest smiles.” In our culture it is still a matter to a great extent of “luck”; Fortuna is unpredictable, dependent on the vagaries of the stock market and other things over which we have little or no control.
Most dramatically of all, ex-President Reagan was the spokesman for the Horatio Alger myth. He affected the rags-to-riches style: he made a point in his news conferences of telling how he had to eat “oatmeal-meat” as a boy. He now has become a millionaire, an ideal he holds for every American. When pushed in one of his news conferences to state his bottom-line position on the question of whether he was for the rich or the poor, he stated firmly, “What I want to see above all is that this country remains
a country where someone can always get rich. “
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Here is the Horatio Alger myth to a syllable—the plea that this country continue to strive for the myth of Horatio Alger. President Reagan also took pride in the fact that in his judgment—and possibly also in reality—the great rise of the
Dow-Jones average and the spending spree led to what he called the “greatest example of entrepreneurial success in history.”
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The stock market boomed to a height never dreamt of before. Money flowed freely, and armed with credit cards the nation seemed to be on a gigantic spending spree. We were inundated on television and radio by those living out an adage of Coolidge half a century earlier, “Advertising is the method by which the desire is created for better things.” Our new inventions in computer techniques and VCRs and travels by ship or plane presented new possibilities at every moment. Young people filled the business schools to overflowing, and the newspapers idealized the numerous millionaires in their twenties who were making it “big.” Reagan took partial credit for this “miracle of prosperity,” as he called it. It was the heyday of individualism in the business world.
