The Cry for Myth (32 page)

People who come for therapy also want sensual gratification. The advertisements over television and in the slick magazines hammer home by sheer repetition the doctrine that if you are not rich and sexy and don’t drink champagne every night you are missing out on life.
**
Patients want “magical knowledge,”
and no matter how correctly the therapist explains that insight is not magic, it still feels that way to the person when an insight “dawns.”

In the early Freudian forms of therapy, when it was believed that repression was the great and universal evil and one should express oneself in all situations (even though this is a misreading of Freud), we detect a particular Faustian flavor. Many of these early forms of therapy operated on the assumption that one needed to clear away the blockages so that patients could achieve all the power and sensual gratification possible. Scream your head off, have as many sexual experiences as possible, let nothing stand in your way!

This use of psychoanalysis was itself based on Faustian principles. Erich Fromm entitled one of his books,
Ye Shall Be as Gods
. People should cultivate the free expression of moods and desires that Marlowe’s Faust lived by (and that led to his doom). The unending crusade “to get more and more out of life,” as was shown in the wide sale of such pop psychology books as
I’m O.K., You’re O.K
., is itself a form of Faustianism.

Psychotherapy surely tries to meet the problems of our day. When people feel guilty at making their million, they can go to a therapist and be reassured that they are only using their abilities and no one should feel guilty about that. When one is caught up in breakneck competition, one can go to a therapist and learn that success would be a proof of his value rather than the reverse. When one marries a dazzling blonde—just like the advertisements—and the marriage goes sour, we can go to a therapist and be strengthened to try again. In conversation one can often assume that the person to whom one is talking has participated in psychotherapy of some sort. One hears from time to time statements that one’s friend is in a hurry; he had a “bad dream” and is rushing off to see his therapist to get his anxiety relieved. In New Hampshire where my family spends its summers, there appeared an ad in the local paper entitled, “Supportive, Transitional Counseling,” and there followed a listing of the things this person and process can do for you:
“Treats stress and crisis management, goal selection, decisionmaking, life style orientation, imaging, pre-marital strategies, social net-working, personal evaluation.”

This and similar advertisements are increasingly frequent in newspapers and the Yellow Pages as the therapists exhibit their wares. These surely are the problems we used to take to pastors in churches: guidance in making decisions, help in formulating goals, right life styles, and so on. The professions which give psychotherapy have been growing by leaps and bounds. This is especially in the five areas called the “helping professions”—psychiatry, psychology, social work, education, and pastoral counselors—all are now not dealing exclusively with the eternal symbols of religion but rather with counseling as psychotherapists.

There is no doubt the Faustian myth is all about us in the psychology of the late twentieth century. It is as alive—or more so—today as at any time in the four centuries past. It is present in our boredom, like Faust’s, with knowledge of the past; in our allying ourselves with the devil in our nuclear warheads; in our demand for power (which is defined in terms of money); in our craze for fulfillment of all sensual desires; in our greed, our compulsive activity, our frantic pursuit of progress. Through all this is our refusal to pause and ask, What is the purpose of this mad race?

The myth is an unseen guide, a silent leader, a way of deciding what is acceptable and not acceptable; and it brooks no more questioning than did Satan in Marlowe’s
Faust
when the clock struck twelve. As Marlowe’s Faust says in a moment of insight, “The god thou servest is thine own appetite.”

God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the world, in order to increase man’s freedom and his will to prove his moral strength in overcoming it.

The Philosophy of Gnosticism

T
HE RELATION OF MODERN PEOPLE
to the myth of the devil is startling indeed. In
Chapter 1
we cited the study made in the 1970s of beliefs in the devil and in God, in which it was discovered that the belief in God was decreasing while the belief in the devil was increasing.

The alarm this phenomenon calls forth is that it indicates that great numbers of contemporary people are expressing their disillusionment with life, their suspicion of their fellows, and their frightening uncertainty about their future. The study implies that people have shifted from faith to fatalism.
*

Most sophisticated and educated people in the West in our
century had cast out the term “devil” as mere superstition. But strange things have been happening in the world during recent decades. By 1950 we had seen so much cruelty in the sheer destruction in Hitlerism and we had observed the use of concentration camps as an accepted technique of government. America had dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, reducing these two whole cities to groaning rubble in two hours. These things understandably led many thoughtful people seriously to wonder whether the term “devil” should not be brought back into our vocabulary, certainly not as a person but as a powerfully active myth.

We also recall the case referred to in
Chapter 2
, when Charles’ critical point in his therapy was his identification with Satan. For Satan existed as a myth of Charles’ identity. The devil empowered his soul. These were more than mere words for Charles; he emphasized that his belief was not a form of Manicheanism since Satan really believed in Cod. By means of the myth of the devil this man could accept his negativity—for it had suddenly changed into a positive term. “I am Satan,” he kept repeating. “Satan was a rebel for God.” At last he had found an outlet for his rebellion merged with his considerable talents. In Jungian terms he was freed to create something of real value by his acceptance of his shadow, Satan.

When we note the number of books written about Satan by recognized scholars in our day, the data become almost overwhelming. Some of these titles are
Lucifer, The Devil in the Middle Ages, Sanctions for Evil, Light at the Core of Darkness
.

An excellent study of the devil has been made by psychologist Henry Murray of Harvard in his essay, “The Personality and Career of Satan.”
*
Murray first refers to Isaiah in the Bible for his description of Satan:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst lay low the nations!
And thou saidst in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; and I will sit upon the mount of congregation, in the uttermost parts of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like unto the Most High.

Murray then speaks of Origen. This Church Father

convinced his fellow theologians that these words could refer, not to any earthly king, but to Satan only; and henceforth the Devil became the prince of pride on whose brow was to be read. I will be like unto the Most High. This puts Satan in a class which includes the giants who tried to scale Olympus and replace Zeus, as well as a host of other defeated defiant ascensionists, frustrated dictators, would-be deicides, regicides, and parricides.
*

Our task here is to look at the reality of the myth of the devil without reifying the concept, that is, without seeing the devil in time and space. When Luther, as a student in the seminary, threw his inkwell at the devil, he was reifying the concept. In the twentieth century it gives us a strange feeling to hear someone talking of the devil as an actual person in the flesh. An elderly black woman who was the cook for some neighbors told us that a younger friend of hers had been waiting for the bus in a small crowd when “the devil spoke to her right there!” Her young friend ran fast around the block to escape the devil. I don’t recall the rest of the story, but being a psychoanalyst I assumed the young friend may have seen someone in the crowd who cued off some reverie of sexual or other prohibited contents and the devil was the best creature upon whom to project it.

There is another strange contradiction in the treatment of Satan, or the devil, which is the paradox in all three versions of Faust. The devil, or Mephistopheles, the representative of Satan, tries to persuade Faust
not
to sell his soul to Lucifer. The devils had already done so, and they had afterward greatly regretted their decisions. In answer to Faust’s question in Marlowe’s version, for example, Mephistopheles answers,

And he states how much he regrets his own loss of the chance to see the “face of God and taste the eternal joys of heaven.”
*

This surely says that an inner conflict goes on even in hell. The group around their leader, Lucifer, already has a number of famous names. The forms that this myth may take are infinite; the myths of the devil each of us brings to therapy are unique. But the individual myths are variations on a central theme of the classical myths, in this case Satan, which refer to the existential crises in every person’s life.

The devil’s land of hell has been kept as part of our classical vocabulary. In the myth of purgatory, we have seen Dante exploring hell in company with Virgil. Hell is also that part of the underworld which Odysseus had to visit to get directions from his deceased father as to how to sail back to Ithaca in his journey home. It is clear in these classics that one can learn things of great value by visiting the underworld, the habitat of the devil.

THE SOURCES OF CREATIVITY

The devil, in some strange form, turns out to be essential to creativity. In Dostoevsky’s novel,
The Brothers Karamazov
, Ivan has a discussion with the devil. The devil speaks, “No, you are not someone apart, you are myself. You are I and nothing more.”

Ivan replies, “You are the incarnation of myself, but only one side of me … of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them. You are myself—with a different face. You just say what I am thinking, you are incapable of saying anything new!”

This brings out one aspect of the devil—the fact that true originality, creating something which is unique, is denied him, though creativity cannot occur without him. He is the
negating
aspect of experience. The devil’s reality lies in his opposing the laws of Cod, and this sets the dynamic necessary for all human experience.
The devil exists by virtue of the fact that he opposes God. Out of this comes the dynamic of human creativity
. Rilke was right when he said after his one and only session of psychotherapy, “If my devils are taken away, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.” This tension between the angels and the devils is essential for the creative process. Without the devil there would be stagnation instead of creative production. This is what William Blake had in mind when he stated that Milton in his
Paradise Lost
was “of Satan’s party and didn’t know it.”

One way to avoid awareness of the struggle against the devil in our world is simply to deny it out of hand. This is the method of the cults. Rejuvenated by their new acquaintanceship with the religions from India and Asia Minor, the followers of cult leaders wipe out all those fears of what might happen and then concentrate in meditation on only the beliefs of the cult leader. Cult members close their ears and eyes to the clamoring of evil pounding at the door. We cannot wipe from our memories the gruesome logic in the mass suicide in Guyana in the summer of 1980, when 980 of the people belonging to this cult, all those present in the camp, who had come from America, committed suicide because Jim Jones, their leader, ordered them to do so. That is the logical climax of the activity of all cults which deny the conflict between good and evil.

It is possible to worship evil, which also makes the same mistake in reverse. There have been many “cults of the devil” during the last two decades, though they are not called that, just as there were cults of the devil at the time of the witch burnings in Salem.

We recall that Thomas Mann pictures the devil in his long dialogue with Dr. Faustus; the devil spoke mainly about art. It
is the tension between the devil and the inspiration of the harmonious in the painter or musician or other creative person which leads to the creative act. In Beethoven’s composing a symphony or Cezanne’s painting Mount Sainte-Victoire that the struggle for originality—to sing the music or to paint the picture as they hear it or see it—is so intense. And if the artist succeeds, he or she has achieved the creative work by virtue of the struggle between negation and creation. Creation has won, defeating negation.