The Cry for Myth (25 page)
Authors: Rollo May
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 power, 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.
Sylvia explained that the woman “heard” the order by a kind of telepathy, and then she would move automatically to fill it. From the angle of the Briar Rose motif, the dream is exceedingly enlightening. The woman now earns her admiration, her identity by being so efficient, picking out of the air the order someone gives at the other end of the room.
The dream seems to be saying that at last the woman finds her unique contribution, her special ability, her uniquely feminine aspect of the relationship with a man. Perhaps due to their biological role in bearing and understanding children, women are often better at telepathic ways of communicating than men. This dream salutes the fact that Sylvia is now finding her own abilities, her own unique capacities as a woman. She also points out that the woman is an author. The dream is a mark of genuine human progress, and I silently cheered.
In the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, the adolescent is one who never adolesces, the person who wants to be awakened without ever awakening herself or himself. This has a parallel in the togetherness of premature “going steady” that characterizes the social life of many young people. Too soon they become sources of presence for each other, and it thus becomes a presence without content. A premature awakening sexually means that sex can be used in the service of avoiding an awakening on all other levels of the self. We—adolescent or adult—often hurry into sex to avoid confronting the
meaning
of the relationship. Togetherness then consists of truncated development that is pegged at a partial level; part of the girl and young man remaining unawakened. If one’s awakening consists of knowing only a single person—and now we are speaking particularly of adolescents—one will likely have an undeveloped and truncated perspective on the rest of the human world.
We must ask what happens with this Sleeping Beauty tale now that we’ve turned it into a myth? If Ibsen were to write it, or Arthur Miller, what would it be? There is a story, for which we are indebted to Theodore Reik, about the finding of a little piece of manuscript after the bombing of a German city during the last war. The manuscript was badly damaged, and the one page of it that remained was only barely legible. But it purported
to be the final page of the fairy tale of Briar Rose. It went like this:
… and they lived happily ever after. Some months passed by and the king’s son began to feel restless and bored. He wanted to leave the castle in search of new adventures. There must be, he thought, other sleeping beauties he could awaken with a kiss. And he imagined how they would open their eyes—which he imagined as being sometimes blue, sometimes hazel, or dark brown—and look at him sweetly. One day when he was walking about the castle ground he noticed that what used to be a wall of flowers was now again a hedge of thorns so high and so thick that he couldn’t work his way through it. Every day after that he slipped out of the castle by a side entrance and tried to find some opening in the hedge. Every day the hedge grew thicker and higher. He took a sword and tried to hack his way through, but the thorns held fast together as if they had hands.
At last the young prince gave up and returned to his wife Briar Rose. She told him all about her troubles with the cook and the kitchen maid, and what the butler had said to the laundress and what the laundress answered, and what she herself had wanted to say to the chambermaid, but didn’t.
While she was talking, the eyelids of the young prince grew heavier and heavier, and, in spite of all that his wife and the courtiers could do to prevent it, he fell into a sleep that lasted a hundred years.
That was Theodore Reik’s answer to the conclusion of this myth-tale. There is no reason why one cannot write one’s own:
… and they lived happily for a couple of years. But increasingly the queen began to feel bored by the enclosed life of the castle. No one went out of the castle yard and almost the only people who came in were delivery men.
As she was walking around the castle one morning, she began to think of these other men who had stormed the castle in the old tales about her being asleep, and she wondered how and who they were. It was only a falsehood that they had been killed; she knew many were still alive, one or two in the village below, others throughout the land. So she pulled on her slacks and sweater and strolled down to the village, where she met one of them in the bar. He had become a
writer of fairy tales and had traveled all over the country, and he interested her greatly. So she went back to the castle and summoned the gardener. “Cut down all this hedge,” she said, “And let’s have a lawn that stretches all the way down to the village. I’m tired of being cooped up here!”
In the village she found a painter who, strange to say, turned out to be one of her erstwhile suitors. So she took several lessons from him and found to her delight that she had a great deal of talent. She had exhibits in the village town hall, and there were two others of the old suitors, whom she met. One of them turned out to be a master piano player, so she instituted afternoon soirees and invited all her friends from the village to the palace to hear the music.
One day at her musical soiree the king came in and sat down in the back row. But just as the pianist was doing a Chopin nocturne, the king began to nod and soon he was fast asleep and snoring!
The queen saw him and laughed to herself, “Thank God I got out of this cage!”
