Anthropologists describe a condition among “primitive” peoples called “loss of soul.” In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he is not a true human. He is “not there.” It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely.
One day in Burghölzli, the famous institute in Zurich where the words schizophrenia and complex were born, I watched a woman being interviewed. She sat in a wheelchair because she was elderly and feeble. She said that she was dead for she had lost her heart. The psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast to feel her heart beating: it must still be there if she could feel its beat. “That,” she said, “is not my real heart.” She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. There was nothing more to say. Like the primitive who has lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous connection to life — and that is the real heart, not the ticker which can as well pulsate isolated in a glass bottle.
This is a different view of reality from the usual one. It is so radically different that it forms part of the syndrome of insanity. But one can have as much understanding for the woman in her psychotic depersonalization as for the man attempting to convince her that her heart was indeed still there. Despite the elaborate and moneyed systems of medical research and the advertisements of the health and recreation industries to prove that the real is the physical, and that loss of heart and loss of soul are only in the mind, I believe the “primitive” and the woman in the hospital: we can and do lose our souls.
To understand soul we cannot turn to science for a description. Its meaning is best given by its context. The root metaphor of the analyst’s point of view is that human behavior is understandable because it has an inside meaning. The inside meaning is suffered and experienced. It is understood by the analyst through sympathy and insight. Other words long associated with the word soul amplify it further: mind, spirit, heart, life, warmth, humanness, personality, individuality, intentionality, essence, innermost, purpose, emotion, quality, virtue, morality, sin, wisdom, death, God.
Soul refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern. I want to add three necessary modifications. First, soul refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second, the significance soul makes possible, whether in love or in religious concern, derives from its special relation with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy — that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphoric.
SOUL AND SPIRIT
Today we have rather lost this difference that most cultures, even tribal ones, know and live by. Our distinctions are Cartesian: between outer tangible reality and inner states of mind, or between body and a fuzzy conglomerate of mind, psyche, and spirit. We have lost the third, middle position which earlier in our tradition, and in others too, was the place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical nor material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both. By having its own realm, psyche has its own logic — psychology — which is neither a science of physical things nor a metaphysics of spiritual things. Psychological pathologies also belong to this realm. Approaching them from either side, in terms of medical sickness or religion’s suffering, sin, and salvation, misses the target of soul. Philosophy is less helpful in showing the differences than is the language of the imagination.
I am trying to let the images of language draw our distinction. This is the soul’s way of proceeding. We can recognize what is spiritual by its style of imagery and language; so with soul. To give definitions of spirit and soul — the one abstract, unified, concentrated; the other concrete, multiple, immanent — puts the distinction and the problem into the language of spirit.
The spiritual point of view always posits itself as superior, and operates particularly well in a fantasy of transcendence among ultimates and absolutes.
We can experience soul and spirit interacting. At moments of intellectual concentration or transcendental meditation, soul invades with natural urges, memories, fantasies, and fears. At times of new psychological insights or experiences, spirit would quickly extract a meaning, put them into action, conceptualize them into rules. Soul sticks to the realm of experience and to reflections within experience. It moves indirectly in circular reasonings, where retreats are as important as advances, preferring labyrinths and corners, giving a metaphorical sense to life through such words as close, near, slow, and deep. Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. It is the “patient” part of us. Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire, like a mermaid who beckons the heroic spirit into the depths of passions to extinguish its certainty.
I have drawn apart soul and spirit in order to make us feel the differences, and especially to feel what happens to soul when its phenomena are viewed from the perspective of spirit. Then, it seems, the soul must be disciplined, its desires harnessed, imagination emptied, dreams forgotten, involvements dried. For soul, says spirit, cannot know, neither truth, nor law, nor cause. The soul is fantasy, all fantasy. The thousand pathologizings that soul is heir to by its natural attachments to the ten thousand things of life in the world shall be cured by making soul into an imitation of spirit. The imitatio Christi was the classical way; now there are other models, gurus from the Far East or Far West, who, if followed to the letter, put one’s soul on a spiritual path which supposedly leads to freedom from pathologies. Pathologizing, so says spirit, is by its very nature confined only to soul; only the psyche can be pathological, as the word psychopathology attests. There can be no such thing as mental illness, for the spirit cannot pathologize. So there must be spiritual disciplines for the soul, ways in which soul shall conform with models enunciated for it by the spirit.
But from the viewpoint of the psyche, the humanistic and Oriental movement upward looks like repression. There may well be more psychopathology actually going on while transcending than while being immersed in pathologizing. For any attempt at self-realization without full recognition of the psychopathology that resides inherently in the soul is in itself pathological, an exercise in self-deception. Such self-realization turns out to be a paranoid delusional system, or even a kind of charlatanism, the psychopathic behavior of an emptied soul.
SYMPTOMS
Symptoms, not therapists, led this century to soul. We owe our symptoms an immense debt. The soul can exist without its therapists but not without its afflictions.
Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind — that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listening. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. The soul needs this same attitude in order to be felt and heard. So it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home.
The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in, day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly, and disguised.
LOVE’S TORTURE
What I try to do is not to put the feelings first but the images, that is, not to call something miserable because your feeling is miserable, but to examine the misery in terms of the image. That gives a new handle on it. What is the precise image of the misery? It may be yourself, chained, unable to move. Or yourself like Cinderella, sitting by the fire and deserted, or yourself thrown into a ditch or hated, paranoid, everybody laughing at you and betraying you. Or your misery may be screaming and calling and burning for the other person — in a particular place or scene. I remember once my own misery showed in a dream as a leopard that was on fire inside my bloodstream. You’d be amazed at the images that lie inside the feelings — but one thing is sure, there always will be some revelatory image. Once a woman patient was tortured by a lover who left her — and what was this torture, really, in her imagination? It was a tall, erect phallus, and she was bowing, and it just stood there imperious, impervious, and she was groveling — now that was a revelatory image. And it gave her something to work with. When you see the image, then you can begin to see the archetypal structures and the myths that are going on in the various feelings you have, and then the feelings become a kind of necessary quality of the image, rather than being obsessive in themselves. The image gives you an imagination of the feeling. The image frees you from your obsession with feelings. As the images change, the feelings change. Unfortunately most psychology has been emphasizing feeling, and then reducing these feelings back to parental feelings or sexual feelings rather than imagining the feelings through in detail or mythologizing them. It can help to play your love against the rich background of suffering offered by myths, by literature and drama: then what’s going on not only begins to make new sense, but also cultures you.
BETRAYAL
The need for security within which one can expose one’s primal world, where one can deliver oneself up and not be destroyed, is basic and evident in analysis. What one longs for is not only to be contained in perfection by another who can never let one down. It goes beyond trust and betrayal by the other in a relationship. What one longs for is a situation where one is protected from one’s OWN treachery and ambivalence, one’s own Eve. In other words, primal trust in the paternal world means being in that garden with God and all things but Eve. The primeval world is pre-Eve’l, as it is also pre-evil. To be one with God in primal trust offers protection from one’s own ambivalence.
The situation of primal trust is not viable for life. God and the creation were not enough for Adam; Eve was required, which means that betrayal is required. It would seem that the only way out of that garden was through betrayal and expulsion, as if the vessel of trust cannot be altered in any way except through betrayal. We are led to an essential truth about both trust and betrayal: they contain each other. You cannot have trust without the possibility of betrayal. It is the wife who betrays her husband, and the husband who cheats his wife; partners and friends deceive, the mistress uses her lover for power, the analyst discloses his patient’s secrets, the father lets his son fall. The promise made is not kept, the word given is broken, trust becomes treachery.
We are betrayed in the very same close relationships where primal trust is possible. We can be truly betrayed only where we truly trust — by brothers, lovers, wives, husbands, not by enemies, not by strangers. The greater the love and loyalty, the involvement and commitment, the greater the betrayal. Trust has in it the seed of betrayal; the serpent was in the garden from the beginning, just as Eve was preformed in the structure around Adam’s heart. Trust and the possibility of betrayal come into the world at the same moment. Wherever there is trust in a union, the risk of betrayal becomes a real possibility. And betrayal, as a continual possibility to be lived with, belongs to trust just as doubt belongs to a living faith.
We may expect that primal trust will be broken if relationships are to advance; and, moreover, that the primal trust will not just be outgrown. There will be a crisis, a break characterized by betrayal, which is the sine qua non for the expulsion from Eden into the “real” world of human consciousness and responsibility.
We must be clear that to live or love only where one can trust, where there is security and containment, where one cannot be hurt or let down, where what is pledged in words is forever binding, means really to be out of harm’s way and so to be out of real life. And it does not matter what is this vessel of trust — analysis, marriage, church, or law, any human relationship.
THERAPY: FICTIONS AND EPIPHANIES
The psyche is not unconscious. We are, we patients, we analysts. The psyche is constantly making intelligible statements. It’s making dreams and symptoms, it’s making fantasies and moods. It’s extraordinarily intentional, purposive. But the system of therapy has projected “the unconscious” into the patient’s psyche, which means that the analyst must be conscious. Both patient and analyst tend to believe this system. But the point is that consciousness floats; a psychic fluidum wrapping around and all through the analytical session. It doesn’t belong to either party. Sometimes the patient has an insight, and another moment the analyst is conscious by simply being reticent, and another moment the consciousness is really in the image.
For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about the anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what that snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life. The moment you’ve defined the snake, interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it, and then you leave the hour with a concept about your repressed sexuality or your cold black passions or your mother or whatever it is, and you’ve lost the snake. The task of analysis is to keep the snake there. The black snake’s no longer necessary the moment it’s been interpreted, and you don’t need your dreams any more because they’ve been interpreted.
But I think you need them all the time, you need that very image you had during the night. Consider the image of a policeman, chasing you down the street — you need that image, because that image keeps you in an imaginative possibility. If you say, “Oh, my guilt complex is loose again and is chasing me down the street,” it’s a different feeling; you’ve taken the unknown policeman into your ego system. You’ve absorbed the unknown into the known (made the unconscious conscious) and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened, nothing. You’re really safe from that policeman, and you can go to sleep again. Your interpretation protects your sleep. I want to let the psyche threaten the hell out of you by keeping that policeman there chasing you down the street, even as we talk. The policeman is more important than what we say about him: I mean the image is always more inclusive, more complex than the concept. “Stick to the image” is a central rule in archetypal psychology. So who is the policeman? Is he guilt, or is he the sense of the law, is he the sense of order, is he the sense of the city, the polis? Has he something to do with an inherent structure of consciousness that wants something from you, or reminds you of something, calls you to him? Otherwise he wouldn’t be chasing you. You need to keep the policeman there so that you can learn what he is up to and what keeps you running.
The images are where the psyche is. People say, “I don’t know what the soul is,” or “I’ve lost my soul,” or whatever. Look immediately to the images that show where you are with your soul in your dreams. “I don’t know where the hell I am, I am all confused, I’ve just lost my job . . . everything is happening.” Where do you look when you feel that way? The place to look is not only to your feelings, not to your interpretations, not to a third person necessarily; ask yourself, what were you in the image? Where’s your imagination? That immediately locates you somewhere, into your own psyche. Whereas the introspection doesn’t help at all, chasing one’s shadow, questioning why did I do this, why do I do that, and why did they do this. An instant turmoil: the Hindus call it vritta, turning the mind on itself like an anthill. But when you have an image of an anthill you know where you are: you’re in the middle of an anthill, they’re going in fifty different directions at once, but the ants are doing something. It seems desperate to me only because I say it shouldn’t be an anthill. But an anthill has an internal structure, it is an organization. So the gift of an image is that it affords a place to watch your soul, to see precisely what it is doing.
LANGUAGE
As one art and academic field after another falls into the paralyzing coils of obsession with language and communication, speech succumbs to a new semantic anxiety. Even psychotherapy, which began as a talking cure — the rediscovery of the oral tradition of telling one’s story — is abandoning language for touch, cry, and gesture. We dare not be eloquent. To be passionate, psychotherapy now says we must be physical or primitive. Such psychotherapy promotes a new barbarism. Our semantic anxiety has made us forget that words, too, burn and become flesh as we speak.
A new angelology of words is needed so that we may once again have faith in them. Without the inherence of the angel in the word — and angel means originally “emissary,” “message-bearer” — how can we utter anything but personal opinions, things made up in our subjective minds? How can anything of worth and soul be conveyed from one psyche to another, as in a conversation, a letter, or a book, if archetypal significances are not carried in the depths of our words?
We need to recall the angel aspect of the word, recognizing words as independent carriers of soul between people. We need to recall that we do not just make words up or learn them in school, or ever have them fully under control. Words, like angels, are powers which have invisible power over us. They are personal presences which have whole mythologies: genders, genealogies, histories, and vogues; and their own guarding, blaspheming, creating, and annihilating effects. For words are persons. This aspect of the word transcends their nominalistic definitions and contexts and evokes in our souls a universal resonance.
Freud’s talking cure is also the cure of our talk, an attempt at that most difficult of cultural tasks, the rectification of language: the right word. The overwhelming difficulty of communicating soul in talk becomes crushingly real when two persons sit in two chairs, face to face and knee to knee, as in an analysis with Jung. Then we realize what a miracle it is to find the right words, words that carry soul accurately, where thought, image, and feeling interweave. Then we realize that soul can be made on the spot simply through speech. Such talk is the most complex psychic endeavor imaginable; that’s why Jung’s psychology was a cultural advance over Freud’s style of talking cure, as free autistic associations on the couch.
All modern therapies which claim that action is more curative than words and which seek techniques other than talk (rather than in addition to it) are repressing the most human of all faculties — the telling of the tales of our souls. These therapies may be curative of the child in us who has not learned to speak or the animal who cannot, or a spirit daemon that is beyond words because it is beyond soul. But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.
The more we become tied by linguistic self-consciousness, the more we abdicate the ruling principle of psychological existence. Man is half-angel because he can speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.
CITY AND SOUL
Without images, we tend to lose our way. This happens, for example, on freeways. Rectangular signs, uniform in size and all painted green (or all painted brown at the airport) with numbers and letters, are not images, but magnified verbal concepts. We don’t know where we are except by means of an abstract process of reading and thinking, remembering and translating. All eyeballs and head. Lost is the bodily sense of orientation. We might even consume less gasoline — all those wrong turns — if our way through the city were landmarked by images like those of the old crossroads, the hangman’s tree, the sign of the red ox, the fountain.
The soul wants its images, and when it doesn’t find them, it makes substitutes; billboards and graffiti, for instance. Even in East Germany and China where ads are not allowed, slogans still are written large on walls and placards posted. Spontaneously, the human hand makes its mark, insisting on personalized messages, as human nature everywhere immediately chalks its initials on monuments.
These marks made in public places, called the defacing of monuments, actually put a face on an impersonal wall or oversized statue. The human hand wants to touch and leave its touch, even if by only obscene smears and ugly scrawls. So, let us make sure that the hand has its place in the city, not only by means of shops for artisans and displaying crafts, but also by animating and bringing culture to the walls and stones and spaces left bleakly untouched by the human hand. Surely, a city’s masterpieces of engineering form and architectural inspiration would not be despoiled by the presence of images that reflect the “soul” through the hand.
What probably comes first to your mind when you think of soul are the relations between human beings, at eye level in particular. When we think of the cities, our contact with them (with New York, for instance) is craning the neck upward. The rube tourist goes to New York sightseeing its wonders, and ends his vacation with a stiff neck. Yet, the eye-level relation between human beings is a fundamental part of soul in cities. The faces of things — their surfaces, their facings — how we read what meets us at eye level. How we see into each other, look at each others’ faces, read each other — that is how soul contact takes place. So a city would need places for these eye-level human contacts. Places for meeting. A meeting is not only public meeting, it is meeting in public; people meeting each other. Pausing where it’s possible to have a moment of eye-level touching. If the city doesn’t have places for pausing, how is it possible to meet? Strolling, eating, talking, gossiping. Terribly important in city life are those places where gossip can take place. People stand by the water cooler and tell about what’s happening, and that gossip is the very life of the city. We speak differently from behind a desk than we do in the coffee alcove. Who saw whom where, what, what’s new, what’s happening — here is some of the psychological life of the city. That grapevine of gossip.
We also need places where bodies see each other, meet each other, are in touch with each other, like the people who leave their offices in Paris and swim in the Seine River or have a lunch break in Zurich and swim in the lake, or skate. This emphasizes the relationship of body to the daily life of the city, bringing one’s physical body into the town. In other words, I am emphasizing the place of intimacy within a city, for intimacy is crucial to the soul. When we think of soul and soul connections, we think of intimacy; this has nothing to do with how big the city is or how tall the buildings are. There is always the possibility for corners, for pauses, for being together in broken-up interiors where intimacy is possible.
Let’s use, as an image of this aspect of soul in city, one of the main streets of Dallas: Lovers Lane. If you imagine a city as a place for lovers, then you may understand the idea I’m trying to express. Love doesn’t interfere with business or efficiency or tax base or retail sales or any of the rest — at all. A city is built on human relations, of people coming together, and it would increase, if anything, the very things that are desirable in a city. So, it is not a matter of splitting again into two things, that is, work and pleasure, city and soul, public daytime and private nighttime, because that cuts soul off from city. There have always been places built within the city where there is a break with the seeming purpose of the city. It is only recently, of course, that we think the purpose of cities is economical or political. The purpose of the city from the beginning was something instinctual in human beings to build them: to want to be together, to imagine, talk, make, and exchange. One needs those so-called marketplaces, places where the break can take place.
A city that neglects the soul’s welfare makes the soul search for its welfare in a degrading and concrete way, in the shadow of those same gleaming towers. Welfare, mainly an inner-city phenomenon, is not only an economic and social problem, it is predominantly a psychological problem. The soul that is uncared for — whether in personal or in community life — turns into an angry child. It assaults the city which has depersonalized it with a depersonalized rage, a violence against the very objects — storefronts, park monuments, public buildings — which stand for uniform soullessness. What city dwellers in their rage have in recent years chosen to attack, and chosen to defend (trees, old houses, and neighborhoods), is significant.
Once the barbarians who attacked civilization came from outside the walls. Today they spring from our own laps, raised in our own homes. The barbarian is that part of us to whom the city does not speak, that soul in us who has not found a home in its environs. The frustration of this soul in face of the uniformity and impersonality of great walls and towers, destroys like a barbarian what it cannot comprehend, structures which represent the achievement of mind, the power of will, and the magnificence of spirit, but do not reflect the needs of soul. For our psychic health and the well-being of our city, let us continue to find ways to make place for soul.
EDUCATION
Why have we as a nation become more and more illiterate? We blame television and the computer, but they are not causes. They are results of a prior condition that invited them in. They arrived to fill a gap. When imaginative ability declines, other ways to communicate appear. These ways work even though they too are dyslexic in structure: simultaneity of bits, odd juxtapositions, messages that do not move linearly from left to right. Yet television and personal computers communicate.
Evidently, reading does not depend solely on the ordering of words or the ordering of letters in the words. Indeed, poets use dyslexic structures deliberately. Reading depends on the psyche’s capacity to enter imagination. Reading is more like dreaming, which, too, goes on in silence. Our illiteracy reflects our educative process away from the silent grounds of reading: silent study halls and quiet periods, solitary homework, learning by heart, listening through a whole class without interruptions, writing an essay exam in longhand, drawing from nature instead of lab experiments. This long neglect of imaginational conditions that foster reading — Sputnik and the new math; social problems and social relatedness; me-centered motivation; the confusion of information with knowledge, opinion with judgment, and trivia with sources; communications as messages by telephone calls and answering machines rather than as letter writing in silence; learning to speak up without first having learned something to say; multiple choice and scoring as a test of comprehension — has produced illiteracy.
The human person as a data bank does not need to read more than functionally. A data bank deciding yes or no on the basis of feedback (i.e., reinforcement) need not imagine beyond getting, storing, and spending. Just get the instructions right; never mind the content. Learn the how rather than the what with its qualities, values, and subtleties. Then the human agent becomes an incarnated credit card performing the religious rituals of consumerism. You need only be able to sign your name in the space marked X, like an immigrant, like a slave, or a . . .
Or a psychopath. Descriptions of psychopathy, or sociopathic personalities, speak of their inability to imagine the other. Psychopaths are well able to size up situations and charm people. They perceive, assess, and relate, making use of any opportunity. Hence their successful manipulations of others. But the psychopath is far less able to imagine the other beyond a fantasy of usefulness, the other as a true interiority with his or her own needs, intentions, and feelings. An education that in any way neglects imagination is an education into psychopathy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations. We learn how to deal with others and become a society of dealers.
WORK
We moralize work and make it a problem, forgetting that the hands love to work and that in the hands is the mind. That “work ethic” idea does more to impede working — it makes it a duty instead of a pleasure. We need to talk of the work instinct, not the work ethic, and instead of putting work with the superego we need to imagine it as an id activity, like a fermentation, something going on instinctively, autonomously, like beer works, like bread works.
I have a fantasy, for example, that I have a farm, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m correcting proofs or writing footnotes or reading some tiresome paper or other or editing somebody else’s work; whatever I am doing, it’s like a farm, and I have to feed the chickens and hoe the potatoes and chop the wood and do the accounts and pull the weeds. And every one of those jobs is necessary, and none is more important than the other. So the new white page, the important new thought you are developing is not more important than the many little things that happen to be in your way or along your way. But they also happen to be the way itself. I don’t have a monocentric image of work as if each person had one special task. If I ask myself, what’s your task in life? I’m going to get a single answer. Questions like this come out of the ego so they only can have one answer — or a choice among single answers. Ego questions are setups — you can never answer them psychologically, with a polytheistic answer. So there isn’t just one special task, like a calling or vocation. Vocation is a very inflating spiritual idea. One to one. God to me. Notice how our idea of Renaissance man is a polytheistic fantasy. He does all kinds of things. But vocation addresses the ego and makes it a specialist; then you “believe in yourself.” That’s another trap of that devil, belief — because who is believing in whom? I am believing in myself — all ego, and then I have a mission.
That fantasy of the farm is polytheistic, and who is to say what is the important thing on a farm: the man who buys eggs from me would like more eggs and sees the time I spend chopping wood a waste. “Have a secretary do it. You have the best eggs around. Produce more, and even better ones.” Specialization: the best egg man around; and that’s monotheism and mission and early death!
My farm is a psychological fantasy, and therefore it tends to distribute the value into the actual tasks rather than having a spiritual farm where the tasks would be laid out in a hierarchy. Importance on my farm is not some overarching idea of a great canvas or a thousand-page history of psychology; importance appears in the way you do each thing.
I merely want to speak of working as a pleasure, as an instinctual gratification — not just the “right to work,” or work as an economic necessity or a social duty or a moral penance laid onto Adam after leaving Paradise. The hands themselves want to do things, and the mind loves to apply itself. Work is irreducible. We don’t work for food gathering or tribal power and conquest or to buy a new car and so on and so forth. Working is its own end and brings its own joy; but one has to have a fantasy so that work can go on, and the fantasies we now have about it — economic and sociological — keep it from going on, so we have a huge problem of productivity and quality in our Western work. We have got work where we don’t want it. We don’t want to work. It’s like not wanting to eat or to make love. It’s an instinctual laming. And this is psychology’s fault: it doesn’t attend to the work instinct.
TERRORISM
If you had been in a concentration camp in the forties and the doctors took out your womb, that would be a war crime, wouldn’t it? Today more than half of the women over forty in the United States have their wombs removed. Imagine that! Every other woman over forty you pass in the street in the United States has no uterus. Hysterectomies are performed more than appendectomies and tonsillectomies. It’s America’s favorite operation. This is terrifying, terrible — it’s not forced on the women as in a concentration camp. They come willingly: it’s “good for you.” Or take Germany today: one out of seven people — that means millions — take sleeping pills of some kind every night. This is Fahrenheit 451; 1984 . . . don’t you see?
Of course, today we don’t live in concentration camps, literally, with barbed wire and SS guards. But if we go on imagining those camps of the forties as the only kind of terror, then we miss the actual horrors that are perpetrated every day — whether with toxic dumps and industrial pollutants or with drug prescriptions or with those hysterectomies. Even if the women collude with their surgeons and want the operation, it is still a horror. The clitoridectomies in some African societies or the binding of Chinese feet in the Mandarin culture were horrors, terrors in fact, even if the women “wanted” these operations. Terror doesn’t depend only on whether what’s done to you is “voluntary” or not — that’s a big part of it, of course, and I’m not denying that in the 1940s in Germany cruelty and force were used. Cruelty and force can happen in ways that are not felt as cruelty and force — but still they are cruelty and force. The terror is there, even if it is not perceived. At least then, in the 1940s, we weren’t already so anesthetized, already so unconscious that the victims didn’t sense what was happening. Maybe it’s worse today since we don’t even sense it. Instead we have this huge displacement on abortion, the right to life. Never mind the fetus; what about the women over forty? What about what’s happening — the terror of which we are unconscious — in our everyday anesthetized lives? And this is only the medical aspect, and a tiny bit of it.
Look at the world of buildings: look at all that has been blown up and torn down, everything solid and well made and with memory; in the forties — Dresden, Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw, all over — it was called bombing and destruction, and we mourned the loss of our cities. Now we call it development, and the people who do it are called “developers” and “planners.” Then it was terror: now, of course, people aren’t firebombed and killed, but the civilization — the world of things that are their repositories of memory and beauty and love — these are gone, and I think this is a terror, an unconscious terror, an even worse terror to live in a city that has been destroyed and yet looks marvelous and new. The soul feels its loss but it can’t tell what’s wrong. We are getting two signals at once, because the actual destruction that is terrible is given wonderful names like “development,” “urban renewal” — and then we wonder why the cities with their marvelous buildings and developments are full of crime, as if it were the fault of social factors or unemployment or fatherless families. The crime begins in those buildings, on the drawing boards and planning commissions. One crime begets another.
Of course I’m exaggerating. That’s the best way to enter into the extremist mentality: not by taking the opposite stance of reasonable good sense. If you become classic with me, sure enough I’ll become romantic. Right now we are attempting to enter the anarchist fantasy, the nihilist fantasy of terrorism. And I’m trying to place it as a reaction to a world soul that is in terror, from all that has been done to its materialization in things. Not just by developers and planners, but by Christianity and Descartes and Newton and by science and the universities — our whole tradition has declared matter and material things to be evil and dead to begin with. Study philosophy; see how much serious time is spent proving the reality of the external world. Imagine having to prove what every animal knows! Ascetic world denial, world destruction go on every day in our philosophy classes. Terrorism and nihilism are already in our Western worldview; the terrorists are the incarnation of the nihilism that is inherent to our system of thinking.
I remember a student of religion telling me about his meditation. Somebody in the seminar said, “What about the political world?” He said, “That doesn’t matter. Computers can run the political world, the whole country, much more efficiently, and that frees us to pursue enlightenment with meditation.” Do you see the complete harmony between central dictatorship, fascism, political callousness, and the self-centeredness of the spiritual point of view? It opened my eyes: the present cults of meditation are not so gentle, not so harmless as they like to be, but a vicious bunch of totalitarians. They can’t see the individual — which you see only if you look for soul, look with soul. They can’t see an individual person, let alone an individual thing. And the terrorist shooting a man coming out his front door, shooting him in the knees, is not seeing that man at all. He is in his spiritual meditation, he is actually a religious fanatic.
They are like those mystics who have wiped out imagination to live in the dark night of the spirit, and their via negativa shoots you in the knees — the knees, the very place of kneeling, of genuflection, bending before images. We have to tie terrorism to its roots in our religious consciousness. A terrorist is the product of an education that says fantasy is not real, that says aesthetics is just for artists, that says soul is only for priests, imagination is trivial or dangerous and for crazies, and that reality, what we must adapt to, is the external world, and that world is dead. A terrorist is a result of this whole long process of wiping out the psyche.
FAMILY
We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. Family grave, family altar, family trust, family secrets, family pride.
Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home — father and mother, brother and sister — from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them.
Where does family fit in the modern myth of individual independence? That myth says home is what you leave behind. Moving on means moving out. You can’t go home again — unless after failure or divorce. Women want careers, downtown, where the action is. Men long for something more, undefined, but most surely not more family. Marriages and family founding, especially foundings of large families, are more and more countered by separations, living apart, single-parent households, divorces. Generations divided; children in day care; elders in Arizona. One is most likely to be killed at home — both perpetrator and victim, family members.
Yet family has been battered by more than these sociological developments. It has taken an even worse beating from the notion of development itself. Nothing has abused the family more than our psychological theories of development, with their myth of individual independence.
Family, so goes the developmental tale, is only the beginning, a necessary evil, which like all beginnings must be left behind. An adult has grown up, declared his independence, and his life and liberty are dedicated to the pursuit of his own happiness. In the United States a newborn infant is believed to be so symbiotically fused with its mother that every effort must be made to develop its ability to separate, to stand on its own as early as it can. In Japan a newborn infant is believed to be so utterly alien that every effort must be made to enfold it within the human community as early as possible. Two opposed trajectories of development, though neither is right or wrong; both are living myths, myths because they are lived unconsciously as truths and have long-term consequences.
Psychoanalysis has swallowed whole the myth of individual development away from family. Everyone who buys an hour of analysis buys into this myth called “strengthening the ego.” The first steps of any current treatment in mental hygiene (brain washing?) uncover the family romance, as it is called, which, in the widest sense, refers to the damaging fantasies arising from an individual’s relations within the family. Notice here the focus on the independent ego; the family represents merely the limits imposed by genetic nature or environmental nurture, a restrictive influence on personal growth. Other cultures would not imagine the individual over and against family. Where other cultural myths dominate, an individual is always perceived as a family member. Our myth, however, insists that ego is strengthened and full personality achieved away from familial ties and pressures.
Psychology has even invented secondary embellishments to make its myth of individual independence more compelling. (Otherwise a person might naively suppose that the family pulls and pressures are what other cultures regard as filial bonds, kinship love, family pride, parental sacrifice.) Therefore, psychology has discovered an entire demonology within family: the irremediable envy of sibling rivalry between brothers and sisters, castration threats by fathers, disguised cannibalism by sons, devouring mothers, as well as omnipotent, amoral, polymorphously perverse children. These are only some of the denizens of the deeps in family life. Maturing, coping, and handling have come to mean freedom from family. And of course psychology finds itself justified to go right into the home to exorcise by means of family therapy the creatures that its myth has created.
Is it too much to assert that the most devastating effect of Western psychology is neither the reductive sexualization of the mind nor the pseudoreligion of self-centeredness, but rather its deliberate rupture of the great chain of generations, which it has accomplished by means of its myth of individual development toward independence? Not honor your father and mother, but blame them and you will come out strong.
The overwrought, exhausting difficulties that consume family life indicate that something important is going on. Any big emotion signals value; the task is to discover the gold in the sludge. Let’s see what we can recover from four typically emotional moments in family life.
False identity: During childhood, traits of personality are identified and one’s identity begins to form partly in accordance with the perceptions of others. “Gilly’s a real tomboy, a string bean who only has time for animals.” (Will Gilly ever marry? Will she become a lesbian or a veterinarian?) “Billy can’t keep out of trouble. I can’t trust him out of my sight.” (Will Billy ever hold down a decent job? Might he end up in prison?) “Milly was the quietest baby, always smiling and such a charmer.” (Will Milly stay home with her parents, keeping them happy, or get pregnant at fifteen?)
From these sorts of family fantasies two contradictory cliches emerge: “No one knows you better than your family,” and “My family can’t see me at all.” The division of “goods” between Gilly, Billy, and Milly keeps them in family-determined roles that seem, as time goes on, to be false identities. Was I really a tomboy, or was I only living out what my mother wanted to be herself? Am I really a charmer, or was I only placating my father?
Discovering whether these perceptions are true or false, that illusion of finding a real identity independent of the family fantasy, is far less rewarding than is the recognition that within the family a personal myth begins to take shape, the myth that forms one’s identity. By identity here I mean identifiable reactions, habits, styles. One finds oneself inside a myth, which is neither true nor false, but simply the precondition for fitting one into the family drama as a recognizable character.
Moreover, if there are no pronounced family fantasies, the drama doesn’t work, and we flounder about in that strangely loveless limbo that psychology calls an “identity crisis.” Family love expresses itself by means of these fantasies of “what I want you to become” and “what I am proud of you for.” These fantasies of identity show that someone is noticing traits, habits, styles. Whether a person lives into the myth or rebels against it, there must first be a myth.
Relatives and in-laws: Most lives are spent among likes — similar budgets, similar age spreads, and gaps, similar tastes and vocabularies. The people whom we choose to be with do not truly force us beyond our usual psychological boundaries. In the family, however, just where you might expect to be with those most like you, you encounter instead a collection of the strangest folk! At any large family gathering there come together the most extraordinary behaviors and most incompatible opinions, yet all in the same clan.
Voltaire supposedly said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Relatives and in-laws provide the opportunity of extending our human understanding to what strikes us as alien, indeed. Where else, how else would one ever spend an evening with a man from Orange County who pays dues to the Klan, or with a math professor who interprets signals from outer space, or a junkyard dealer who did time in the state penitentiary. And the manners, the clothes, the bodies!
This is more than “alien,” Voltaire. This is downright outlandish, freakish. Here we realize that large family affairs, rather than being scenes of convention, are actually performances of high comedy, outrageously funny, which also serve to encourage one’s own peculiarities.
After all, as an in-law and relative yourself, you too appear, and are, rather freakish to the others. The attentiveness you pay to the in-laws and relatives at such reunions works both ways, for rarely are you yourself heard out so patiently, with such curiosity. Family seems to evoke a profound curiosity in each of its members about the others, especially the more distantly related or more peculiarly entwined. Gossip abounds; people spill the beans and try to catch up on what has happened “since we last met” — a catching up that goes beyond recording births and deaths. Shadows come rushing out of the closet and join the party without moral opprobrium. All events — good or bad — associated with family members are magnified and glorified, thereby extending the size of the family’s heart. The measure of a family’s magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members. Charity begins at home. We each feel this heart extending when, for instance, a little pride arises over the naming as “best insurance salesman in the county” a seemingly unremarkable young man who is, nonetheless, married to your great niece.
Family meals: The sign “Home Cooking” might still bring in some customers, but for many the family table was the place of trauma. Studies in family disorders accuse the evening meal of being the major focus of household tension. Here, at table, family fights over money, politics, or morals are most likely to break out, and later eating patterns — the rhythms of chewing, swallowing, breathing, and talking; the intermissions between silence and noise; the very notion of what constitutes “good” food — take on their definitive forms. Here, too, gross food disorders like anorexia and bulimia often appear first. Whether the atmosphere at meals be boisterous and competitive, or chaotic with phoning and television, or gravely formalized, tension is always on the menu.
Tension at the start of a meal belongs with the instinct of appetite. Just go to the zoo at feeding time and watch the animals pace and snarl, or ask a good Italian waiter about getting the first course on the table quickly. Meals are meant to start fast and conclude in digestive leisure. Tension therefore belongs to the moment of sitting down at table, and not only for animal reasons. Tension arises as an unconscious recognition of the sacramental nature of this family act. Grace overtly acknowledges this sacramental tension, and so do all the many rituals that go with family meals: fixed places and dinner “on time,” the rituals of clean hands, of setting places and clearing the table, and the endless attempts to mollify the tension with light music, dimmer lights, and rules concerning what is appropriate to talk about at table. All this elaborate etiquette — every family will have some rituals, even if utterly disguised as “just dig in” — attempts to propitiate the archetypal forces that gather invisibly around the family meals and are ready to explode civilized conventions at the most innocuous provocation.
Going back home: Whether from prison camp after a war or just taking the bus home for Thanksgiving, homecoming is fraught with dreadful anticipation. Opening the front door releases overwhelming emotions — and also the counterforce of repression against those emotions that so often characterizes the stifled atmosphere of returning.
Here we must remember that going home is always going back home. Returning is essentially a regressive act in keeping with an essential function of family: to provide shelter for the regressive needs of the soul. Everyone needs a place to crawl and lick his wounds, a place to hide and be twelve years old, inept and needy. The bar, the bed, the boardroom, and the buddies do not meet the gamut of needs, which always limp along behind the myth of independent individuality. Something always remains undeveloped and this piece needs to “go back home” as country-and-western lyrics often enough affirm.
Going back may mean sleeping till two in the afternoon, or taking refuge in the bathroom, crying with mom in the kitchen, or just complaining as do the grandparents who fall ill during every visit. Going home, at whatever age, offers going back, regression. And the fight against family during these return trips is therefore a displacement of the fight against regression. We don’t want to admit the weaknesses in our characters and the hungers in our desires. We don’t want to admit that we have not “grown up,” and so blame the family both for bringing out our worst and then for not indulging it enough. Meanwhile, there is that strange sense of consciousness ebbing away, going down the family drain.
The debilitating energy loss strikes everyone alike as if a communal power outage. Everyone caught in repeating, and resisting, old patterns. Nothing changed, after all these years! No one can get out even for a walk to break the spell, the whole family sinking deeper into the upholstery (and television has little to do with it and may even be, in such moments, the household god who saves). These moments attest to the capacity of family for sharing — French anthropology used to speak of a participation mystique — in a common soul or psychic state, and for containing the regressive needs of the soul.
No one is at fault, no one is kicked out, and no one can be helped. In the paralysis lies the profoundest source of acceptance. Grandpa can go on grumbling, brother attacking the administration, sister introvertedly attending her exacerbating eczema, and mother covering up with solicitous busyness. Everyone goes down the drain because family love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home.
These four bad moments are symptomatic of what lies at the root of family problems. Not the failure to “relate,” not the breakdown of the old patriarchal model, not even the incurably freakish, especially depressive, pathologies that make their home at home, but rather the root lies in the archetypal nature of family itself. As an archetypal reality, the experience of family feels so often “unreal” because family is permeated through and through with eternal exaggerations, an impossible too-muchness or mythic dimension, which is the stuff of the symptoms we suffer and also the stuff of much of Western culture’s stories, novels, and dramas. And this mythical exaggeration is at work in even the most conventionalized, urban, eat-and-run, unconnected, first-name parents, upwardly mobile, areligious unit of consumers called family. Family is less a rational place than a mythical one, and the expectation of finding rational reality at home is precisely what makes us condemn it as “unreal.” Attempts at unambiguous communication, reasonable discussion of problems, and the structuring of a new paradigm, all overlook the fundamentals at the source of family life: the deep-seated and indestructible complexes of the psyche — once called daemons, ghosts, and ancestors — whose place is in the home.
Excerpts from A Blue Fire are reprinted with the permission of Harper & Row.
