The Cry for Myth (8 page)
Authors: Rollo May
Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some event occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day—and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations. The myth does not tell us much about the possessive patient’s literal history, but it does tell us a great deal about the person who does the remembering. For the person re-forms the event, shapes it, adds color here and a few details there; and then we have a revelation of this person and his or her attitude toward life. As Sartre would say, “The myth is a behavior of transcendence.”
The myth is formed by the child’s endeavor to make sense of strange experiences. The myth organizes experience, putting this and that together and brooding about the result. In the creative processes of memory and the need of the human mind for unity, the myth is born and nurtured. The formation of the myth is a relief, great or small, for the child. Often the myth is the only thing the child’s mind can hang on to, and whether it is painful or not, it will be less painful than the actual historical event. Myths have a soothing effect, even though—or we may say
especially
though—they may be about cruel things. The poet Susan Musgrave wrote,
You are locked
in a life
you have chosen
to remember.
*
The choice is generally unconscious, but it is nonetheless effective.
What the person remembers from his or her childhood, for example, from the second or third year, is at the most one or two events, and he forgets the thousand and one other things that happened to him during those years. The infant is fed three meals a day, is put to bed 365 times a year, but he forgets all these other things and remembers only this one. Thus the remembering has nothing whatever to do with the frequency of the event—indeed, we are most apt to forget the things we do most frequently, like getting up in the morning. The memory must possess some special significance, some important meaning for the little girl or boy.
In our example above, Adrienne’s memory dwells upon two events. Time adds its color, and the myth is then empowered by the “unhappy childhood” motif. Soon she has the “memory” in the form of a myth which she relates twenty-five years later to me, her therapist. Adrienne lived by the secondary myth of her grandfather’s death (“I am powerless to do anything about problems in life”), but her primary myth is her satisfaction in not letting the world help her. Thus the game she played with mother she continues playing all her life: “
I am terribly needy and the world is powerless to do anything for me.”
At some point the myth has become subconscious: then it becomes, “What a satisfying sense of power I get out of demonstrating that the world cannot do anything to help me, in fact I will arrange my life so no one
can
help me!” She learns to get pleasure out of telling other people, in this case her therapist, “No, that doesn’t help.” This denial of her own power gave her, paradoxically, a real sense of power over her environment and her world, even though it was objectively destructive.
Memory is a strange phenomenon, and it is even more strange when we consider its relation to myth. Students are generally taught in psychology classes in American colleges and universities that memory is a kind of file on the model of the computer, a bank in which we record our day-to-day experiences. Then we file away our memories to be called forth when
we need them. In college we are taught that the “laws” of memory are
recency, vividness
, and
frequency
.
*
That is, we are supposed to recall something from memory to the extent that it had happened frequently and vividly and had occurred recently.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. All these tests in psychology classes are for remembering
nonsense
syllables—you have a good memory if you could remember by rote what nonsense the teacher has written on the board. The bookworm, the intellectual robot, obviously finds these “laws” made to order. But creative students are often offended by such tests because they know (or at least suspect) that the whole project is just what it is called, namely, nonsense.
How absurd is that approach to memory! What a misconception that the human memory has nothing to do with the
significance
or with the
meaning
of the remembered event for the person. Ernest Schachtel proclaimed in his classic essay, in his book
On Memory and Childhood Amnesia
, “Memory is never impersonal [e.g. never ‘nonsense’], but operates on the basis of the significance for the given person.”
Alfred Adler was the first among the early leaders in psychotherapy to see the significance of early childhood memories. A perceptive and humble man, he was gifted with unusual sensitivity for children. One of the early bellwethers in psychotherapy,
he influenced Harry Stack Sullivan through Adolph Meyer, who had translated one of Adler’s first books and was Sullivan’s teacher in psychiatry. An associate of Freud in the early decades of this century, in 1913 Adler broke off to start his own school, in which he made the social aspect of myths his central concern. He believed that the cause of neurosis is the lack of “social interest,” i.e., neurotics are persons who are isolated from their fellow human beings. Psychological problems are not solved until the patient develops an adequate concern with society, an acceptance of his responsibility toward the community. Thus Adler radically opposed the gospel of exclusive self-love; he preferred to speak of self-esteem or integrity, or, to use his special term, “social interest.” He was radically opposed also to the kind of therapy which overemphasized independence and egocentricity. He would have been as critical of the “all-for-me,” narcissistic view of the self as Bellah
*
or MacIntyre.
†
Perhaps the reason he has been so often overlooked in the evolution of therapy in America is that he does not fit our intoxication with narcissism and the ego-centered self. Adler was an active socialist, and like Wil helm Reich and unlike Freud, he was heart and soul concerned with politics.
Out of his great skill in treating children, Adler developed his central concern with the “guiding fiction,” which is a synonym for “myth.” It refers to a significant event in one’s early childhood that the person remembers; the event is turned into a myth which the person keeps as a guide for one’s way of life, whether it is fictitious or not.
The person refers to this guiding fiction down through the subsequent years as the secret myth of oneself
. One knows oneself through this myth, as Charles knew himself as “Satan,” or the actress knew herself as Athena
(see
Chapter 2
). Thus Adler always asked the client in the second or third session in therapy, “What is your earliest childhood memory?” He believed that there “can be no accidental or indifferent memories, and the process of memory cannot be compared in any way to a photographic record.”
*
Looking into literature—the written home of memory—we find some exciting poets describing the function of this capacity. “This is the use of memory,” said T. S. Eliot toward the ending of “Little Gidding,”
For liberation—not less of love but expanding,
Of love beyond desire … and so liberation
From the future as well as the past.
†
Memory can liberate us from attachment, from desire or attachment to the wrong things. Memory is our internal studio, where we let our imaginations roam, where we get our new and sometimes splendid ideas, where we see a glorious future that makes us tremble. Memory and myth are inseparable, a point I have never heard in any psychology courses. Memory can, according to Dante, form the past into any myth, any story, any hope (see
Chapter 9
). Dante believed that memory can lead us to God via myth.
Memory is the mother of creativity
. This is a myth worth pondering. For it is in memory that one saves and savors the significant experiences, the dazzling sights, the critical events. In memory these precious experiences form themselves together into a myth which tells us a story. We say we “sleep on an idea,” and when we wake up we may feel we have arrived at a new insight, as though it were a gift from the gods. And who
is to say it is not? Mnemosyne, or “Memory,” is the goddess who puts together our materials with which new discoveries are made and poems are written and great books and enduring paintings are inspired.
The theory of the instincts is so to say our mythology. Instincts are mythical entities, magnificent in their indefiniteness. In our work we cannot for a moment disregard them, yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly.
Sigmund Freud,
letter to Fleiss, 1897
T
HE ABOVE STATEMENT
is remarkable indeed. First, Freud frankly and specifically admits the mythic base of his theories in psychoanalysis. And the phrase, “magnificent in their indefiniteness,” is doubly remarkable since it suggests that in their very lack of definiteness lies the value of myths. Their magnificence keeps myths open, growing, productive of new insights, which the observer would never have had if he were limited to empirical statements. This is what makes myths inspiring, for their drama perpetually suggests surprising interpretations, new mysteries, novel possibilities. The very things for which rationalists have criticized myths turn out to be their greatest advantage. The Oedipus myth, for example, is forever suggesting new interpretations of the meaning of this triangular
father-mother-child form and, as in
Oedipus in Colonus
, new interpretations of responsibility. The contemporary concern with sexual exploitation of children by parents in families is yet another interpretation of the Oedipus myth.
Freud’s next statement—“we cannot for a moment disregard them”—is likewise the statement of a true scientist. We must keep contradictory assumptions in mind, as Alfred North Whitehead stated, without permitting damage to either conclusion until we know differently. Life consists of living in contradictions; and the person who forgets that is doomed to live in a make-believe world. Living in contradiction takes courage, but it is thrilling at the same moment. The final clause, “yet we are never sure that we are seeing them clearly,” is a revelation of Freud’s honesty and will be understood by every therapist who has experienced the many meanings of a myth. “Myth is the garment of mystery,” writes Thomas Mann in his epic book,
Joseph and His Brothers.
*
OEDIPUS—MYTH OF SELF-DISCOVERY
Freud wrote to Ferenczi about his “unsparing effort to understand himself”; his own self-analysis, he stated, was “harder than any other.” He adds, very much like the original Oedipus, “But it will have to be carried through!”t Jones tells us that Freud’s self-analysis gave him a flood of light on all human destiny. It was the adumbration on a great theme, so great that it can be considered the simplest of all things, the triangular situation of mother-father-child.
Freud elsewhere stated significantly, “The myth, then, is the step by which the individual emerges from group psychology.”
That is to say, we owe the emergence of our self-consciousness to our capacity to think in terms of myth. We may speak of paradigm, or hypothesis, or some other such concept; but these equal some kind of mythology, as Freud well says. Far from being a handicap, myth is essential for progress in our understanding of science and of culture. Freud discovered that when we get to the basic level of the human mind, we are surprised to find myths.
It is important to note that these discoveries were made by Freud in 1897, several years before his great book,
The Interpretation of Dreams
, was published. Freud is thus to be seen as a central cultural figure, in the line of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche; and like these other great contributors, he had a profound influence on the radical changes taking place in the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Whatever one may think of the technique of psychoanalysis, Freud’s importance as a cultural figure cannot be denied. He had the mind of an explorer and an archeologist, as shown also by his great collection of statues and artifacts from cultures of long ago. Surely one of the most influential and original thinkers of our time, he recognized the significance of the irrational dynamics and daimonic side of human nature. Like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, he was emphatic in exposing the futility of the Victorian/Puritanical notion of willpower. He devoted himself to the chief problem of the transition from the nineteenth to twentieth century—how to live in an age of repression.
Freud’s experience in discovering myths is shown in a catastrophic experience in his own self-analysis. He had originally believed that the seduction and rape stories his patients told him were true in fact. But it dawned on him when “memories had come back of sexual wishes about his mother on the occasion of seeing her naked,” writes Jones,
