The Cry for Myth (2 page)
Authors: Rollo May
“I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN”
This autobiographical novel,
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden
, tells the experience of a young schizophrenic woman, Deborah, in her actual treatment with a psychiatrist. The stirring events in the treatment of this girl read like a contemporary extraterrestrial film. In her therapy we see a constant and gripping interplay of myths. Deborah (as she is called) lived with the mythic figures of Idat, Yr, Anterrabae, Lactamaen, the Collect, all of whom inhabited the Kingdom of Yr. Since Deborah could communicate with no one else in the world, she desperately needed these mythic figures. She writes, “the gods of Yr had been companions—secret, precisely
sharers of her loneliness
. “
*
She would flee to them when she was terrified or unbearably lonely in the so-called real world.
On the way to the sanatorium, as Deborah tells us, she and her parents stayed overnight in adjacent rooms in a motel.
On the other side of the wall, Deborah stretched to sleep. The kingdom of Yr had a kind of neutral place which was called the Fourth Level. It was achieved only by accident and could not be reached by formula or an act of will. At the Fourth Level there was no emotion to endure, no past or future to grind against.
Now, in bed, achieving the Fourth Level, a future was of no concern to her. The people in the next room were supposed to be her parents. Very well. But that was part of a shadowy world that was dissolving, and now she was being flung unencumbered into a new one in which she had not the slightest concern. In moving from the old world, she was also moving from the intricacies of Yr’s kingdom, from the Collect of Others, the Censor, and the Yri gods. She rolled over and slept a deep, dreamless, and restful sleep.
Next morning, she tells us, she felt the great reassurance and comfort the myths had given her.
… it occurred to Deborah, as the car pulled away from the motel and out into the sunny day, that the trip might last forever and that the calm and marvelous freedom she felt might be a new gift from the usually too demanding gods and offices of Yr.
*
Not only are these gods in Deborah’s scheme remarkable for their imaginative depth, but they are remarkable as well for their great similarity to what has been shown thirty years later in
E. T., The Return of the Jedi, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, and the other extra-worldly films which attract millions of children and adults in our late twentieth century. Deborah was schizophrenic. But where one draws the line between schizophrenia and an intensely creative imagination is a perpetual puzzle. Again Hannah Green (her pen name) writes:
She began to fall, going with Anterrabe through this fire-framed darkness into Yr. This time the fall was far. There was utter darkness for a long time and then a grayness, seen only in bands across the eye. The place was familiar; it was the Pit. In this place gods and Collect moaned and shouted, but even they were unintelligible. Human sounds came, too, but they came without meaning. The world intruded, but it was a shattered world and unrecognizable.
†
The psychiatrist who served as therapist for Deborah at Chestnut Lodge, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, wisely made clear to Deborah at the outset that she would not pull these gods away against Deborah’s will. Dr. Frieda, as she is called in the book, worked them into the treatment, suggesting sometimes to Deborah that she tell her gods such-and-such, or occasionally asking her what her gods say. What is most important is that Dr. Fromm-Reichmann respected Deborah’s need for these mythic figures, and she sought to help Deborah to see
that she, Deborah, had her part in creating them. In one session,
“Our time is over,” the doctor said gently, “You have done well to tell me about the secret world. I want you to go back and tell those gods and Collect and Censor that I will not be cowed by them and that neither of us is going to stop working because of their power.”
*
But when Dr. Frieda had to go to Europe for a summer, Deborah was temporarily assigned to a younger psychiatrist who was imbued with the new rationalism. This psychiatrist marched in to destroy the “delusions” of Deborah with no understanding whatever of Deborah’s need for her myths. The result was that Deborah, her whole system of gods and their extraterrestrial kingdom in shambles, deteriorated markedly. She regressed into a completely withdrawn world. She set fire to the sanatorium, burned and maimed herself, and behaved like a human being whose humanity is destroyed. For this is literally what had happened. Her soul—defined as the most intimate and fundamental function of her consciousness—was taken away, and she had literally nothing to hold on to.
Deborah described this to Dr. Frieda when the latter returned from Europe. The other psychiatrist, she wept, “wanted only to prove how right he was and how smart.” Amid her flood of tears, she continued, “He might as well have said, ‘Come to your senses and stop the silliness.’… God curse me!” groaned Deborah. “God curse me! … for my truth the world gives only lies!”
We may take the rationalistic psychiatrist’s behavior as an allegory of our modern age. When we in the twentieth century are so concerned about proving that our technical reason is right and we wipe away in one fell swoop the “silliness” of myths, we also rob our own souls and we threaten to destroy our society as part of the same deterioration.
Deborah’s myths continued right up to the last page of
I
Never Promised You a Rose Garden
. But by then she had learned that her myths were also a product of her own rich creativity. Dr. Frieda had helped her understand that the form the myths took—allegedly schizophrenic to start with—was within her own power to mold.
Though Deborah had her part in creating the myths, it is important to state that she did not create the
need
for them. This need is part of our destiny as human beings, part of our language and our way of understanding each other. At the end of the therapy Deborah’s creativity emerged in ways that genuinely contributed to herself and her society; she has written and published several excellent novels after completing her treatment at Chestnut Lodge, at least two of these novels about seriously handicapped persons.
This present book is written not chiefly about schizophrenics as such but about the need of all of us for myths arising from our character as human beings. The form these myths take will vary. But the
need
for myths, indeed, the
cry
for myths, will be present wherever there are persons who call themselves human. We are all like Deborah in this sense: though we form our own myths in various collective and personal ways, the myths are necessary as ways of bridging the gap between our biological and our personal selves.
Myths are our self-interpretation of our inner selves in relation to the outside world. They are narrations by which our society is unified.
*
Myths are essential to the process of keeping our souls alive and bringing us new meaning in a difficult and often meaningless world. Such aspects of eternity as beauty, love, great ideas, appear suddenly or gradually in the language of myth.
Myth making thus is central in psychotherapy. It is of the essence that the therapist permit the client to take his or her myths seriously, whether the myths come up in dreams or in free association or in fantasy. Every individual who needs to bring order and coherence into the streams of her or his sensations, emotions, and ideas entering consciousness from within and without is forced to do deliberately for himself what in previous ages had been done for him by family, custom, church, and state. In the therapy myths may be a reaching out, a way of trying out new structures of life, or a desperate venture at rebuilding his or her broken way of life. Myths, as Hannah Green put it, are “sharers of our loneliness.”
There are frightening statistics of suicide by young people in the last decades. In the 1970s suicide among white young men increased greatly. We may try various ways to prevent suicide in these young people, like telephoning seriously depressed persons and so on. But as long as the highest goal remains making money, as long as we teach practically no ethics by example in home or in government, as long as these young people are not inspired to form a philosophy of life, and as long as television is overloaded with aggression and sex with no mentors in learning to love—as long as these obtain, there will continue to be among young people such frightening depression and suicide.
At a graduation speech at Stanford University recently, the student speaker described his class as not knowing how it “relates to the past or the future, having little sense of the present, no life-sustaining beliefs, secular or religious,” and as consequently having “no goal and no path of effective action.” As long as our world and society remain thus empty of myths which express beliefs and moral goals, there will be depression, as we shall see below, and suicide. We shall refer in a later chapter to some reasons for this ethical emptiness; here we only
assert that the lack of myths is a lack of language even to begin to communicate on such issues.
In such directionless states as we find ourselves near the end of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that frantic people flock to the new cults, or resurrect the old ones, seeking answers to their anxiety and longing for relief from their guilt or depressions, longing for something to fill the vacuum of their lives. They also beg for guidance from astrologers.
*
Or they grasp at superstitions from the primitive past, however reminiscent of the age of witchcraft.
†
Our twentieth century was originally heralded as the age which would be graced with rationalism, the age when enlightened education would be widespread, religion would at last be cleansed of all superstition and would be itself enlightened. Indeed, almost all the fond aims of the Enlightenment have been at least partially realized: we have great wealth for
some
people, freedom from tyranny as a goal for most people in the West, dissemination of science, ad infinitum. But what has happened? As a people we are more confused, lacking in moral ideals, dreading the future, uncertain what to do to change things or how to rescue our own inner life. “We are the best informed people on earth,” Archibald MacLeish proclaims:
We are deluged with facts, but we have lost, or are losing, our human ability to feel them…. We know with the head now, by the facts, by the abstractions. We seem unable to know as Shakespeare knew who
made King Lear cry out to blinded Gloucester on the heath:… “you see how this world goes,” and Gloucester answers: “I see it feelingly.”
*
Language abandons myth only at the price of the loss of human warmth, color, intimate meaning, values—these things that give personal meaning to life. For we understand each other by identifying with the subjective meaning of the language of the other persons, by experiencing what important words mean to them in
their
world.
Without myth we are like a race of brain-injured people unable to go beyond the word and hear the person who is speaking
. There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular—though profoundly mistaken—definition of myth as falsehood.
The thirst for myth and the discouragement at the lack of adequate myths show in the use of narcotics. If we cannot make sense of our lives, we can at least temporarily check out of our boring routine by “out-of-the-body” experiences with cocaine or heroin or crack or some other drug which will take one temporarily out of this world. This is also a pattern we see not infrequently in psychotherapy: when the person finds his prospects overwhelmingly difficult, he may consider that at least he can participate in his own fate by overdosing or shooting himself. If we are going to be annihilated anyway, it is less humiliating to go out with a bang than a whimper.
The flocking to cults in our day, especially by young people but by older ones as well, is also an indication of the desperate need for myths. Any group which promises bliss and love and an inside track to whatever gods may be can get an audience, and people flock to the banner of a new cult whatever it is called. Jim Jones and the Guyana tragedy, when 980 of his followers committed suicide because the authoritarian Jones told them to, is a warning we cannot forget.
Cults have the power of myths without the social limits, without the brakes, without societal responsibility. The cry for
myths must be listened to, for unless we achieve authentic myths our society will fill the vacuum with pseudo-myths and beliefs in magic. The sociologists inform us of a number of polls in the 1960s and 1970s which showed that the belief in God was decreasing and the belief in the Devil increasing.
*
This is a reflection of the passion for cults by people who feel our society is disintegrating and need to have some way of explaining it.
Instead of being viewed as random, irrational behavior, Devil-belief is an effort by the powerless to make sense of the world, to apply causality when disorder threatens, and to reduce the dissonance generated by their commitment to a social order that is incomprehensible and unresponsive to them.
†
It will seem confusing indeed to propose our need for myths when we have become accustomed in our culture to label myths as falsehoods. Even people of high intelligence speak of “only a myth” as a deprecatory phrase; the Biblical creation story, for example, is “
only
a myth.”
**
This use of the word “only” as a deprecation of myth began with the Christian Fathers in the third century
A
.
D
. as their way of fighting against the common people’s faith in Greek and Roman myths. The Fathers argued that only the Christian message was true and the Greek and Roman stories were “only” myths. But if the Church Fathers could have had more confidence in the great wealth of mythology which came with Christianity—from the celebration of Christmas with the Wise Men following the star in the east to the indescribably charming gift giving, or the impressive experience of Easter with its celebration of spring
and the birth of plants and flowers and grain as well as the myth of the resurrection—they would have had less need to attack the great myths of classical Greece and Rome.
