The Cry for Myth (19 page)

The “Inferno”—or hell—consists of suffering and endless torment that produces no change in the soul that endures it and is imposed from without. But in the “Purgatorio” suffering is temporary, a means of purification, and is eagerly embraced by the soul’s own will. Both must be traversed before arriving at the celestial “Paradiso.” I think of these three stages as simultaneous—three coexisting aspects of all human experience. Indeed, modern literature in the epic tradition of Dante’s spiritual poem, such as Joyce’s
Ulysses
, Pound’s
Cantos
, or Eliot’s
Four Quartets
, makes no radical separation of moral landscapes.

I wish to turn now to the problem of the limits of therapy. Does
The Divine Comedy
cast light upon the limits of our work as therapists? I propose that it does.

Virgil, whose relation to Dante I have been taking as parallel to that of therapist to patient, symbolizes human reason. This is made clear by Dante time and again. But “reason” in Dante does not at all mean our contemporary intellectualism, or technical reason, or rationalism. It stands for the broad spectrum of life in which a person reflects on or pauses to question the meaning of experience, especially of suffering. In our age reason is taken as logic, as it is mainly channeled through the left hemisphere of the brain. This does not describe Virgil: he is a great imaginative poet, not a logician. Reason can, if we take it in Dante’s broad sense, guide us in our private hells.

But reason even in his amplified sense cannot lead us into the celestial paradise. Dante has need of other guides in his
journey. These guides are
revelation
and
intuition
. I shall not present any brief for these two functions of human experience. But I do wish to state out of my experience with supervising inexperienced therapists that therapists cut themselves off from a great deal of reality if they do not leave themselves open to other ways of communication than human reason. (I recall Freud’s statement that his patients so often saw through any “white lie” he might tell them that he had decided never to lie: this he proposes as his “moral” belief in mental telepathy.) It is interesting to me that Dante identifies intuition as the supreme form of guidance. Therapists who have succumbed to the sin of dogmatic rationalism, if I may be permitted to add it to Dante’s hell, might consider the legitimacy of this mental power.

The limits of therapy are illuminated by Virgil’s leaving Dante when they have passed through hell and almost through purgatory. When the poets come in sight of the earthly paradise, as Ciardi points out, Virgil “speaks his last words, for the poets have now come to the limit of Reason, and Dante is free to follow every impulse, since all notion of sin has been purged away.”
*
Thus they bid goodbye to each other, with mixed emotions of sadness at leave-taking, comradeship, and loneliness but zest for the future. Once (three cantos later) Dante cries out for Virgil:

In place of Virgil, Beatrice appears as a redemptive and beatific presence. The parallel is that
our therapy is the prologue to
life rather than life itself
. We, like Virgil, seek to help the other person to the point where he can “gather the fruit of liberty,” not without understandable lapses of need for the therapist’s presence, and he moves forward to a place in time where “his will is free, unwarped and sound.”

THE FREEDOM TO LOVE

Note that this self-directed life to which Dante, and our patients, go forth, is
life as community
, or more specifically, a freedom to love. This seems to be why the guides at the end of “Purgatorio” and in “Paradiso” are women and why Beatrice is portrayed as saving Dante by sending Virgil to him in the first place. It is in the summoning of Beatrice that Dante most reminds us of a modern analysand.

Beatrice is an entirely personal myth, a Florentine girl of Dante’s acquaintance whose death inspired his first great poetic work,
La Vita Nuova
. Her reappearance in the “Purgatorio” shows us Dante successfully overcoming a morbid sense of loss—perhaps the trauma that steered him to the dark wood?—by means of a mystical reunion with this beloved figure from his childhood (they first met when he was nine years old). She is a reality in Dante’s own mind and heart. One wonders what she stands for in Dante’s mind—we propose the kernel (heart) of Dante’s own inspiration, his spiritual longings, his sense of being guided by ethereal means. This imaginative encounter might be compared to the secular resurrection scene in Wilhelm Jensen’s novel of Pompeii,
Gradiva
, about which Freud wrote a book-length study. In both works, a female figure from the protagonist’s youth reappears in a radically different landscape in order to restore love and joy to the craving soul of her admirer. We recall other classics which put women in this crucial position: Goethe’s
Faust
, where so much importance is given to the inspirational force of Helen and “the Mothers,” or
Peer Gynt
, when Ibsen has Peer Gynt come back
for his salvation to Solveig. In his essays on the
anima
concept, Jung singled out three novels of H. Rider Haggard—
She, The Return of She
, and
Wisdom’s Daughter
—as supreme descriptions of the replenishing libido-object. This myth is of special importance, he claimed, to patients who have reached middle age.

I suggest that women here are symbolic of community. We all experienced life first in the womb and then in the journey from the womb out into the daylight. We were not born alone but in partnership with our mothers. Whether girls or boys, we nursed at our mother’s breast, actually or metaphorically. It is in the reunion with a loved one in the sexual function that we participate in the ongoingness of the race. In this sense we experience the world as we experience love. Thus after our journey through hell and purgatory, life itself is the therapist.
Our patients leave us to join the human community of life itself
. This is why Alfred Adler made social interest—the commitment to life in community—the test of mental health.

This view of the limits of therapy implies again that our task is not to “cure” people. I wince to think of how much time has been wasted by intelligent men and women arguing about whether psychotherapy cures and trying to fit psychotherapy into the mode of Western nineteenth-century medicine.
Our task is to be guide, friend, and interpreter to persons on their journeys through their private hells and purgatories
. Specifically, our task is to help patients get to the point where they can decide whether they wish to remain victims—for to be a victim has real benefits in terms of power over one’s family and friends and other secondary gains—or whether they choose to leave this victim-state and venture through purgatory with the hope of achieving some sense of paradise. Our patients often, toward the end, are understandably frightened by the possibility of freely deciding for themselves whether to take their chances by completing the quest they have bravely begun.

All through history it is true that only by going through hell does one have any chance of reaching heaven
. The journey
through hell is a part of the journey that cannot be omitted—indeed, what one learns in hell is prerequisite to arriving at any good value thereafter. Homer has Odysseus visit the underworld, and there—and only there—can he get the knowledge that will enable him to get safely back to Ithaca. Virgil has Aeneas go into the netherworld and there talk to his father, in which discussion he gets directions as to what to do and what not to do in the founding of the great city of Rome. How fitting it is that
each of these gets a vital wisdom which is learned in the descent into hell!
Without this knowledge there is no success in finding directions by which to go, or achieving the things of paradise—purity of experience, purity of heart. Dante makes the journey in person; he himself goes through hell and then is enabled to discover paradise at the end of his journey. Dante writes his great poem to enable the rest of us also to go ultimately to paradise.

Human beings can reach heaven only through hell
. Without suffering—say, as an author struggles to find the right word with which to communicate his meaning—or without a probing of one’s fundamental aims, one cannot get to heaven. Even a purely secular heaven has the same requirements. Poincaré, for example, struggles for weeks and months, faces depression and hopelessness, but then struggles again, and finally through hell arrives at a new discovery in mathematics, the “heaven” of his solution to the problem that he had posed.

At the beginning of this chapter I stated that Dante started his journey on Good Friday. The significance of this is that the mordant despair of this day is a necessary prelude to the triumphant experience of Easter, the resurrection. The agony, the honor, the sadness, are a necessary prelude to self-realization and self-fulfillment. In Europe multitudes go to church on Good Friday to hear testimony that Jesus is crucified, for they know that the ascent to heaven must be preceded by death on earth. In America we seem, by our practice, to act on the wish that we could pass over the despair of mortification and know only the exaltation of ascent. We seem to believe that we can
be reborn without ever dying. Such is the spiritual version of the American Dream!

The Divine Comedy
, like so many other great literary classics, gives the lie to such simplistic illusions. Dante’s harrowing and exemplary journey remains one of the greatest case studies the profession of psychotherapy possesses, and is a presentation of a radiant myth of the methods and aims of the best of modem therapy.

The visions of Malapaga, those of Peer Gynt, seem, all of them, now to apply to me.
*

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

P
EER GYNT COULD
be called the myth of males in the twentieth century, for it is a fascinating picture of the psychological patterns and conflicts of contemporary man. The drama reveals a pattern that many psychotherapists find in their practice in the twentieth century. Presented to us as a work of art in Ibsen’s drama, it is a product of the particular stresses of our time.
†

Peer Gynt is the myth, that is, the life pattern, of a man characterized by two desires, and in the contradiction between
them his self is lost. One desire is to be
admired
by women, and the other desire is to be
taken care of
by the same women. The first desire leads to machismo behavior: a braggart, he swaggers and is grandiose. But all of this apparent power is in the service of pleasing the woman, the figurative Queen, in order that the second desire be satisfied. The power thus leads to passivity, to dependence upon the woman, and this ends up undermining his power. Thus these two desires are contradictory. The woman is the one who holds the final judgment and, correspondingly, the power over him. No matter how much he appears to be the swaggering master with his various women, he is in reality a slave serving the Queen. His self-esteem and his self-image depend upon her smile, her approval. He owes his being to her just as a courtier depends on his Queen to knight him.

THE LOSS OF ONE’S SELF

Peer Gynt is a myth developed from an old Scandinavian tale. But beyond the fact that Ibsen is Norwegian, the myth and the drama have a universal quality for our time. Ibsen has Peer himself say in this play, “Everyone feels akin to Peer Gynt.”
*
When he wrote this drama Ibsen thought that it wouldn’t be understood outside Scandinavia. He found rather quickly that it wasn’t entirely understood
in
Scandinavia, but was very much understood in other parts of the world. Peer was acclaimed everywhere as national prototype. George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The universality of Ibsen, and his grip upon humanity, makes his plays come home to all nations, and Peer Gynt is as good a Frenchman as a Norwegian.” Even in Japan it is claimed that Peer Gynt is “typically Japanese.” The contemporary Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in an introspective
poem, “I Don’t Understand,” writes that he feels
he
is Peer Gynt.

Actually the reason Peer Gynt is a man for all nations is that the character and the myth are the product of Ibsen’s own profound self-knowledge. The deeper the level to which any writer penetrates his own individual experience, the more these experiences will be archetypal, will have something significant in common with other nationalities—the Japanese, the Frenchman, the young Soviet Russian. Ibsen writes in his introduction, “The poem contains much that has its roots in my own childhood.”
*
Ibsen’s own mother is particularly the model for Aase, Peer Gynt’s mother in the drama.