The Cry for Myth (7 page)

Our task, as part of the discovery of contemporary myths, is to rediscover the fundamentals of heroism. It is refreshing to find a college president stating, “I think students need heroes, period. When I meet with students again and again and ask
who their heroes are, the question strikes them as being odd.”
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Friedrich Nietzsche states our aim strongly:

That the Great Man should be able to appear and dwell among you again, again, and again,
that
is the sense of all your efforts here on earth. That there should ever and again be men among you able to elevate you to
your
heights: that is the prize for which you strive. For it is only through the occasional coming to light of such human beings that your own existence can be justified…. And if you are not yourself a great exception, well then be a small one at least! and so you will foster on earth that holy fire from which genius may arise.
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I am deeply troubled by the decline of the humanities in the United States, for it is there that students come into contact with the best of Western literature. A graduate professor of English literature in a western university states that in his class there are five students, while in the graduate classes of computer science across the hall there are three hundred. We seem to have forgotten Max Frisch’s statement, “Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.” It is the
what
of human existence rather than the
how
for which we are famished. These cry out from our unread classics and the riches of history and the untouched literature of all centuries. But the cry for the study of myths is heard as a still small voice on many campuses. Martin Luther King, one of the few authentic twentieth-century heroes, dared to dream, and he risked life and limb in his consecration to bringing that dream into reality.

When I was in college, I recall a verse, though it is not deathless poetry, nevertheless was an inspiration to me as I walked across the campus many a night:

Whether one’s hopes succeed or fail is not the hero’s or heroine’s main concern. We emulate the hero, and a multitude of women and men, old and young, modest and shy, feel a triumph on their own pulse, a strengthening of their own self-esteem, as they experience their identification with Martin Luther King, for example. Albert Schweitzer and Mother Teresa, I suggest, are heroes to us as Mahatma Gandhi was a half century ago. Although Mother Teresa will not succeed in relieving the major part of Calcutta’s suffering, and although Schweitzer failed to reduce the plagues in Africa, these heroes still glow like stars in our mythic firmament. For they give us the greatest gift possible, an assurance that there are persons in our universe with whose characteristics we hope to identify.

Our heroes carry our aspirations, our ideals, our hopes, our beliefs, for they are made of our myths. In the profound sense the hero is created by us as we identify with the deeds he or she performs. The hero is thus born collectively as our own myth. This is what makes heroism so important: it reflects our own sense of identity, our combined emotions, our myths.

The rediscovery of heroism is central in the regaining of our myths and the arising of new myths that will suffice to inspire us to go beyond the cocaine, the heroin, the depressions, and the suicides, through the inspiration of myths that lift us above a purely mundane existence. George Eliot, in the nineteenth century, imaged her picture of heroes, the “choir invisible,” inspiring future generations:

Oh, may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence; live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,

And with their mild persistence urge men’s search

To vaster issues.

So to live is heaven:

To make undying music in the world….
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MYTHS AND MORALS: MURDER IN CENTRAL PARK

The barrenness of our culture with respect to ethical values rests upon our barrenness of myths, which means many of us have no faith to live by. Since myths are passed on chiefly by the family, and since this is where we get our first acquaintance with the myths of our society, it behooves us to examine carefully the strangling in Central Park of eighteen-year-old Jennifer Dawn Levin in the summer of 1986 by nineteen-year-old Robert Chambers, Jr.
†

Both of these young people were from affluent families, both had attended superior preparatory schools and had access to the vast culture of New York City. Both came from homes which had been split by divorce, and both had been given everything except what really matters, a dependable family life. Neither Jennifer nor Robert had strong parental ties. Neither had the socializing effect of religion or the ethical bonds that lend mythic power to human resolutions. The night of the
murder they had come from their group in a bar. They were sexually free and apparently jaded; they had walked in Central Park to make love. He claimed she tried to bite off his penis and he then strangled her with her own brassiere.

Joan Farrell, a private investigator in Manhattan whose daughter graduated from the same school as Robert and Jennifer, stated with reference to this crime,

I blame the parents more than the bar owners for the attitudes of these kids…. A lot of these kids are given a great deal without being taught to respect it…. It’s very easy to just hand them twenty dollars and say have a good week-end. I think that’s the biggest downfall of the generation that came up with my daughter.

Dr. Roy Grinker, a Chicago psychiatrist, said in connection with the murder, “Money isn’t the root of all evil, but it is the root of a parent’s ability not to be available to their children—physically or psychologically.” Commenting also on this strange killing, Dr. Bernice Berg, a psychologist at Bank School in Manhattan, said,

When parents spend 90 percent of their time making more money than they could possibly spend and 5 percent of their time with the family, these values are passed on to the kids. It tells them families are not important. Making money, having money, and spending money is.

The owner of the bar which these two had frequented and had left together that evening of the killing tells of the great need of these young people and their friends for hugging, touching, and just being around someone who cared for them and showed it.

These two young people were, in a mythic sense, homeless. “Myth safeguards and enforces morality,” as Malinowski proclaimed, and if there are no myths there will be no morality. Robert and Jennifer had no pattern of myths and ethics even to rebel against. They were homeless obviously not in a physical or
financial sense but rather psychologically and spiritually.
It is a truism to state that they grew up in a mythic vacuum and therefore in an ethical rootlessness
. When Robert Chambers re-enacted the murder scene, there was a profound pathos in his repetition of the phrase, “I wanted to go home, I wanted to go home.” But he had no home in a mythic sense. Among the “explanations” of this murder can be heard a shrill protest against the mythlessness and spiritual barrenness, indeed the
homelessness
, in our society.
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In
Love and Will
†
I pointed out that behind will lies wish. This does not mean that whatever one wishes will then become the goal of one’s resolution, but it does mean that the deeper levels of human motivation must include wishing, whether one calls it yearning, longing, passionate desiring, or something else. Otherwise the willing is merely applied from the outside and is never transformed into action. We must have a conviction before an act of will can be effective. “Wish” is part of the area in human consciousness which includes hoping, yearning, imagination, believing—all of which have to do with the innate dimension of feelings that give birth to motivation. This is expressed in the conviction which is required of all aspirants for membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, for example; they must
want
with their total being to break the habit.

Wishing, longing, yearning, myth making—all these activities of human consciousness are as central as they have ever been, and any teaching of resolutions or guiding rules that does not include these activities is doomed to failure.
Wishing and hoping come directly out of the functions of dreaming and making myths
. “In dreams begin responsibilities,”
**
as the poet Delmore Schwartz so rightly reminded us, and we could say
with even more cogency, if less poetically, in myths begin ethics and aspirations. It was a wise person who stated, “I don’t care who makes a society’s laws as long as I can make their myths.”

Hardly had I finished the manuscript when it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one…. [The] man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, like one uprooted, has no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. This plaything of his reason never grips his vitals.

C.G. Jung

A
DRIENNE, A WOMAN
in her late twenties, stated a number of times in the early sessions of therapy that she clung to the idea of suicide. She continually thought of jumping into the river or stepping in front of a truck. When I reminded her that if she really wanted to do one of those things she obviously could, she dropped that tack. But she continued with her manner of coming into each session upset by everything, repeating almost each time, “I am in the worst crisis I’ve ever been in!”

The phrase “I can’t” came up dozens of times in each session; almost always when I offered some interpretation, she would greet it with an irritated “No.” She seemed to live off anger. I silently mused that she probably had been able to get
away with this behavior in her life so far because she was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her neurotic pattern was obviously breaking down. But how to find a niche where we might get at it?

In an early session, she began by saying, “I don’t know whether this hour will be therapy or not. I’m in a state of shock.” She cried a little and then continued in a whining voice that her man friend had taken a lease on an apartment in which there was not enough room for her. He had rejected her and she was devastated. Then she said, “You have to say something…. Somebody has to drop a bomb.”

I agreed. I asked whether she was aware of the tone of voice in which she was saying these things? “No.” And did she recall that she had said the previous session that she had had enough of this man and was considering throwing him out? “No.” I also pointed out that she went through every session with the same story, only different characters. I wondered why she came for therapy at all; was it merely to find a wailing wall?

This cleared the air, but we were still unable to get anyplace therapeutically. Then I asked her to tell me her earliest childhood memories. She gave two. The first was of her grandfather who was sick and dying; he vomited up yellow stuff. “I was filled with the awareness that I was powerless to do anything about it.”

The second was relevant to our immediate point here:

I was playing baby with my mother. I would play a hurt baby and she would comfort me, diaper me, and so on. Part of the game was that each time she did something, I was to say, “No, that doesn’t help.”—I liked to play this.

It was certainly clear that she liked to play this game for she had spent her life playing it and was now doing so with me. The first “memory” fits in a subsidiary way: she was helpless to do anything about her grandfather, which suggests that she saw herself going through life helplessly, unable to affect the people around her.

But the second was more pertinent: “I am the hurt baby, and
I must demonstrate that no one can help me.”
That pattern was the myth which had guided her behavior during her whole life up till now and was an excellent opening for her therapy. When I pointed this out, she at last got her feet on the ground, and we were able to tackle her therapy with some promise of success.

As we see in this passive, angry woman who plays the endless game of proving that the world cannot help her, the myths of a given person can often be discerned with a particular clarity in such earliest childhood memories. It is not that the particular memory actually
happened
—we can never know whether it did or not, and furthermore it does not matter in the slightest whether it is a real event or a phantasied
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one. The patient herself generally cannot be certain whether it actually occurred or was a dream or a phantasy. This is the same problem that Freud faced when he developed his theories of infant sexuality on the basis of the “memories” his Victorian women revealed to him about having been raped by their fathers. At first Freud accepted these revelations as factual, only to be chagrined when he began to suspect that many of them were myths and not empirical happenings. But the stories were equally significant as myths of a child dominated by an arrogant, Victorian father who expected the child to meet his every desire. The narration is of real importance as a myth, and from our point of view this creation of the myth around an event—real or imagined—is the significant issue.
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