The Cry for Myth (22 page)

This is what also often happens with our patients when they come to psychotherapy in this state of despair and emptiness. First there surges up in them a surprising amount of spite and envy (often put in the sophisticated form of cynicism) toward others’ loves and happiness. Obviously it does no good to moralize to the patient about this. They
are
full of envy and spite; they
have
been cheated, regardless of whose fault it was. Our moralism is not only ineffectual and unconstructive but wrong in a more important sense. For the patient’s envy and spite is the beginning of something positive, something that can be constructively used. It is an emotion that is
sincere
, for one thing; it is an emotion also that is
strong
for another. It comes out in
Peer Gynt
as the play goes on, as it does with our patients, that spite and envy can be a prelude to other more constructive emotions, and the spite and envy make available to the Peer Gynts a power that they did not have before. In due time with the patient we get to the most important question of all, “What do you yourself have to do with the fact that no one is waiting at home?”

Peer Gynt, of course, has everything in the world to do with his inner despairing conviction that no one is waiting with a candle at his table. The despair is a function of the contradiction in his subjective attitudes and is then projected on the outside world. For it is objectively inaccurate: someone
is
waiting
for Peer Gynt, namely, Solveig, and on an intuitive level he knows it.
*
But Peer Gynt can’t allow this fact into his own consciousness, cannot “accept acceptance,” in Tillich’s pithy phrase.

Now they pass a ship that has been wrecked on a rock in the storm, and Peer Gynt has the urge to rescue the men on the stricken ship. When the captain refuses to turn the ship around to save the drowning men, Peer Gynt tries to bribe the sailors to rescue the men on the sinking ship. Here comes out not only some genuine statement of concern, but active commitment in its behalf. Peer hears the screams on the ship that is going down near them;

Peer at last can hear the pain of others, can “weep for other’s woes.” As the other ship sinks, Peer Gynt speaks in soliloquy, “There is no faith left among men any more.” The story wrenches from him a profoundly gripping cry, “On a night like this our Lord is dangerous.”

Here emerges the daimonic in the service not of aggression and destructiveness but of awe and wonder. It is an entirely different mood from the time in Morocco when he commanded God to pay attention. It is a human being who stands in awe of the significance of life and death and the portentous ness of their powers. With the closeness to death there comes an honesty—one can no longer take refuge in platitudes. The fact that Peer can experience this awe and wonder, this respect for Being, makes it also possible for him to affirm, as he does a few lines further, his human ties:

THE STRANGE PASSENGER

Now a character who is called by the curious name “Strange Passenger” comes up to Peer Gynt at the ship’s rail and puts a question to him, “Suppose we, for example, should strike on a rock and sink in the darkness.” Frightened, Peer responds, “Do you think there is a danger?” The Strange Passenger answers, “I don’t really know what I ought to say,” but he continues to remind Peer of the imminence of death. When Peer remonstrates, the Strange Passenger cautions,

This Strange Passenger is indeed a curious character. Peer, in angry “resistance,” disposes of him by calling him a horrible “scientist … you damned free thinker!” Does the Strange Passenger not have the role of the psychoanalyst? Even his language, though perhaps partially spoken in Ibsen’s jest, sounds like a prediction of psychoanalysis.

But most of all the Strange Passenger is Peer speaking to himself. In a profound sense this scene is an endeavor to show Peer Gynt’s awareness of what is going on in his consciousness in the hope that this may be the beginning of some reintegration.

Now we see several symbolic portrayals of the vicissitudes of
the longed-for integration. In one scene we see Peer Gynt crawling up to a cabin in the woods, a cabin which he left. He soliloquizes, “The old boy’s had to crawl back to his mother.” Then comes the graphic scene in which he peels an onion, which is himself:

It turns out that in the hut toward which he is crawling he finds Solveig. She is singing, “I will wait for you, my love.” But Peer Gynt is not yet ready to accept a genuine relationship; he gets up saying to himself, “One who remembered and one who forgot.”

He goes away with the realization that he must become more integrated before he can come back.

Scene after scene now piles up as symbols of the lost self. A Button Moulder wants to melt down Peer Gynt in his casting ladle. Peer Gynt has never been anything, charges the Button Moulder, so why shouldn’t he be melted down? Peer Gynt protests, crying, “I have never been a real sinner,” and the Button Moulder rejoins, “That’s just the trouble,”

This last powerful sentence, this demonstration of the daimonic, Nietzsche would have loved. Peer Gynt would have amounted to more if he had been a real sinner. He now has to admit the truth of these judgments: “I just splashed about on the surface. … I have never been—? I could almost laugh!”And the Button Moulder later sums it up in this one proclamation: “To be oneself is: to kill oneself.”
†

In this nadir of despair, Peer Gynt is told in effect that he is nothing. The gospel of “being one’s self alone” ends up in becoming nothing. The ultimate meaning of this myth, even more true today than it was in Ibsen’s day, is that all such narcissistic egocentricity leads to self-destruction.

But from the profound nadir of despair life shows us, as in Alcoholics Anonymous, the way toward a resurrection of the self.

The negative in the long run is essential to the positive—the original is there and what is necessary is to develop it, arduous as this undertaking may be.

Stumbling into the Troll King, to settle a long-ago score, Peer is assured that he has done well indeed in living up to the
motto, “Troll, be thyself—and thyself alone!” Whenever they are writing a newspaper article extolling Trolldom, the troll adds, they cite him as their best example of one who really believed, “To hell with the rest of the world!” Peer gives Trolldom short shrift this time and hurries down the road toward Solveig.

In his experiencing of the abyss of heaven he sees a shooting star and is overcome with awe,

He gradually calms himself and then speaks one of the most beautiful passages of the play:

LOVE AND RESTORATION

This renunciation of the narcissistic self is the beginning of authentic selfhood. Now the Boyg who comes in for a final scene again repeats to Peer Gynt, “Always go around.” But Peer finally can now commit himself. “Ah! No! This time straight through.”
*

He finally arrives back to Solveig. The poignant words they speak at the end are significant for us here:

PEER:
Tell me, then!

Where was my self, my whole self, my true self?

The self that bore God’s stamp upon its brow?

SOLVEIG:
In my faith, in my hope, and in my love.

….

PEER:
My mother! My wife! O, thou pure woman!

O hide me in your love! Hide me! Hide me!

SOLVEIG:
Sleep, O sleep, my dearest boy.

I will cradle you. I will guard you.

Sleep, O sleep, my love, my joy.

Sleep now, and rest.
†

For some readers this ending will present a problem. Are we to assume that Ibsen is simply saying Peer Gynt goes back to mother? This is one conclusion that could be drawn, but it would be much too superficial. There is a great difference between the way Solveig relates to him here, and he to Solveig, and the way he related previously to his mother. Solveig waits for him out of her
own choice and integrity, whereas the mother clung to him out of her deprivation
. Solveig lets him come when he is ready to come, when he has gone through the experiences that he must go through. These experiences make him finally able to love her.

Solveig is a symbol of the presence of some significant person in relation to whom it is possible for Peer Gynt to experience human ties and to love. Thus he too can at last become a self. Like the Strange Passenger, Solveig fulfills the role of the true human healer. A world of interpersonal relationship is made available in which Peer can at last experience and find himself. This world is characterized by consistency and has within it some person or persons who will accept Peer’s rejection without withdrawing, accept his anger without retaliation, and steadily value him for his own worth.

It is the combination of these characteristics which we call.
presence
. The Strange Passenger on the ship symbolized presence at the nadir stage in Peer’s development; he was willing to face with Peer the ultimate state of loss of being, namely, death. The function of the therapist, applying this myth to psychotherapy, is to provide a presence which constitutes a human world within which the patient not only
can
find the polarity of the I-thou relationship but within which he must find it.

This presence, and the making of such a world possible, is the function of Solveig in the drama. As Dante can survive the long vigil in purgatory and continue his journey into paradise when he meets Beatrice, so Peer Gynt can now continue his journey into human integrity and joy in his love for Solveig.

In a way this story tells that to be able to love, a person first has to become able to feel; even if the feelings are negative, that is better than not feeling. In the beginning the princess is entirely self-centered; all her interest is in her ball. She has no feelings when she plans to go back on her promise to the frog, gives no thought as to what this may mean for it. The closer the frog comes to her physically and personally, the stronger her feelings become, but with this she becomes more a person. For a long stretch of development she obeys her father, but feels ever more strongly; then at the end she asserts her independence in going against his orders. As she thus becomes herself, so does the frog; it turns into a prince.

Bruno Bettelheim,
The Uses of Enchantment

T
HE QUESTION THAT LEAPS OUT
immediately is, how did this tale’s name get changed to “Sleeping Beauty” in our society? If you look into a collection of Grimms’ fairy tales, you will find no entry by that name. The tale is called
Briar Rose
by the Grimm brothers, and rightly so. There is a vast difference between the connotations of these two names. Whereas “Sleeping
Beauty” connotes Hollywood and our American tendency from decades ago to romanticize the developing girl, “Briar Rose” implies that the girl is by no means so open to exploitation as the fairy tale implies.