Searching for God # 72

 Thanatos and Eros, Freud’s two inescapable, universal, penetrating and highly operative ‘forces’ in life, the former indicative of and demanding death, destruction, deformation, destitution, the latter definitive of love, life, energy, creativity, and imagination…..Yet, what if these two ‘metaphoric, imaginative forces are, by definition identity and operational manifestation, radioactive. Too much of either or too little, is life-denying. And what if God, the universal, ubiquitous, ineffable, ephemeral force is an embrace of both and the human blindness and growth scale is about adapting to the truth both of our individual being in the thrall of Tanatos and Eros, while deferring, preferring, and adulating only one side, Eros.

The Christian slogan, “God is Love’ is one of the most obvious and prevalent of such blindnesses….the inference is that God is NOT Thanatos….And yet, what if God is and embraces the totality of both Thanatos and Eros and what if the Christian theology is a valiant attempt to bridge the two by posing God and Satan as representatives, symbols of each respectively….and over the centuries, we have burdened Satan with a massive list of everything every successive generation considered to be ‘morally and ethically wrong. The absolute separation of God and Satan, as a theological method of attempting to ‘elevate’ God to the sacred, and to denigrate Satan to the evil, along with the further accoutrements of Purgatory, The Penitential, and the Promise of Eternal Life for those who have been ‘saved’ deeply embed the notion of separation of good from evil in the minds, hearts, perceptions and beliefs of millions.

And then, theologically as well as legalistically, pedagogically and sociologically we have turned Thanatos on its head as the ‘instrument’ of our detestation of its very identity and axiomatically pitted Eros as the great Saviour through such poignant and penetrating images as the Good Samaritan and the Jesus stories of healing and wisdom. What if, for example, each of us has, psychologically, a death-wish, which perhaps Hillman captures in his ‘love of war’ insight, and with which each of us can identify, from moments of our own destructive self-sabotage, not to mention the havoc we have wreaked on others? And then, what if that pattern can be traced back to the imbalance we have “posited” on both humans and the universe, similar to the separation of man and nature which has also plagued both human psychology and Chrisitan theology, along with the notion of the blindness that we ignore, deny or disavow, the epithet that God made us in His image, might we not be engaged, whether consciously or unconsciously or both, in a game of double-jeopardy.

Identifying evil with the individual human whose salvation is the stated purpose of Christian faith, we have ignored the ‘salvation of the whole world’ and perhaps innocently, yet recklessly tortured millions while remaining blind to the power and influence of both Thanatos and Eros, equally in our personal as well as our shared global and planetary survival.

We cannot, and never have been able to ‘solve’ what we consider to be our worst ‘social enemies’ such as tyranny, or the absence of human rights by waging war on the perpetrators, or perceived perpetrators of such evils. We cannot and never will eliminate or even dissipate war by waging war just as we can and never will be able to reduce or eliminate drug wars and drug addictions by attacking either drug gangs and warlords or individual street addictions through however compassionate and comprehensive medical interventions. We cannot and never will resolve our dependence on clean air, water, land and nutrition by competing, using the methods and the psychology and the instruments of war to ‘punish’ the perpetrators’ of pollution, whether the pollution comes from individual negligence or corporate and government malfeasance.

Identifying enemies, on the basic premise that ‘those identifying the enemies and holding the weapons of war (including the militarized instruments of law enforcement) believe that they are themselves wholly pure and pristine without any of the barnacles of the very ‘evil’ they are attempting to ‘stamp out’ is another obvious game of ‘social, political, ethical and moral insanity’….doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

While Jung and Hillman extended and differed the work of Freud, primarily by delving into the individual personal psychic forces they intuited and theorized in and through intense psychoanalysis, and while Hillman did attempt to bring the ‘anima mundi’ (the social, cultural mileau) into the frame of his thinking, personalizing it as if it were another ‘psyche’ in need of therapy, Freud may still have something significant to say to us.

If, for example, we are simply, by dint of our hardwiring, unable to escape the clutches of both Thanatos and Eros, forces indemically embedded in each human psyche, and still part of the imago dei premise of Chrsitian theology, then our separation of their impact into moral and ethical imperatives, separately representing only one force, without the complementary influence of the other, we are caught in what Hillman describes as the human dissociation….impaled on the extremes, or the polarity of these two forces, both individually and culturally.

We know that life and especially abundant life is available on the side of Eros, and history, literature, theology and psychology have all demonstrated the efficacy and the trustworthiness of that proposition. We also know that ‘death’ and all of the many other images of wantonness, devastation, depression, hopelessness, depravity can be assured by falling into the arms and charms of Thanatos. What we may not ‘know’ or appreciate or apprehend, or grasp, or integrate into our needed paradoxical proposition of opposites, middle grounds between extremes, is that Thanatos and Eros are themselves NOT enemies, but rather contain influences of each other, just as anima and animus, from Jung, represent the female instincts in the male psyche, and the male instincts in the female psyche, respectively. Androgyny, so despised and ignored thought both ignorance and fear, primarily by men, is neither foreign to nature nor to God.

And the model of the paradoxical impact of what on the surface especially to our literal, empirical, scientific perception and understanding seem to be opposing opposites, uncontaminated each with the other, could help to unpack that other self-righteously declared and imposed blindness, the Thanatos and Eros are at war within both human individual psyches, as well as on the collective world psychc stage.

We have all been, and continue to be, complicit, in our ignoring the implications of the ‘anima mundi’ in our psychic distress. Yet, in fact, we have created a culture in the West at least, that is diametrically opposed and also virulently and destructively opposed to the deepest and most innate needs and aspirations of each human on the planet. We focus on the image of the reputation of each individual ego, as either heroic or villain, and all of the shades of grey between those ‘white and black’ extremes, and constructing, renewing, reinforcing and dispersing the mind-bending pedagogy of competition, perfection, production, profit. And then we also  undermine all of those potentially honourable values with equally and opposite nefarious methods from Thanatos, as the instruments and methods of those who are going to ‘win’ in a zero-sum’ game. The combination of the two absolute extremes constitute a Western lie and deception for which no single entity, person, agency,  organization, university, or church can be, or is, held responsible and accountable.

To say that we are all in this together is a truism almost unworthy of having to be typed. It is, however, possible, that the Christian church with its acknowledgement of its confounding separation obsessive-compulsion in what has to have been a organizational psychic conundrum for many, might begin to shed some light on its own perhaps unconscious, and perhaps not, putting Thanatos and Eros on a ‘war-footing’ for its own purposes. If God is on the side only of Eros, then, from that proposition Satan must be on the side of Thanatos. Whereas, it is not only feasible and believable that Thanatos and Eros themselves, when recognized and respected for their unique and inherent strengths and weaknesses, are allies in the dramatic and tense and biographic and spiritual and psychic lives of each of us.

The two archetypes of Carol Pearson’s The Hero Within, the Warrior and the Victim, as male and female have already been identified as the two prominent archetypes in American film and literature. And there is a highly respectable and dignified aspect to each waiting to be discovered, deployed and referred to when and if the personal situation requires. If Thanatos and Eros were two archetypes operating within and among all of us, then it is our opportunity to seize their strengths, and to become apprised of their seductive potential to bring us to our knees.

Too much Thanatos lies death; also, paradoxically, too much Eros is slavery and another form of death. So. it might be described as a potential uroborus snake circle leading from one extreme to another, both of which are the excess of each archetype. It likely feels like a monstrous rush of testosterone to wreak havoc on another, on another state or another corporation, or another academic or political rival. Similarly, it has to feel like a monumental moment of psychic, physiological, sexual and emotional ecstasy, beyond the limits of an LSD hit to fall headlong into the arms of Eros. And, as we all sit back and reflect, have we not all been engaged in variations of such moments, incidents, events, campaigns, or even life-long dramas from which there seemed no escape.

And, while sitting back, who can be blind to the many melodramas sponsored by one or both of the psychic tyrants Thanatos and Eros on the current world stage. Indeed, it could be argued that an absence of Eros, both of self and of others, would likely contribute to a psychic deferral to the death-wish and to the apparent, however fleeting, rush of testosterone that its deployment would generate. Call that deferral compensation if you like; from a lay perspective, there is an obvious imbalance. The absence of the personal psychic warrior archetype, too, leaves one vulnerable to the ravages of unsuspecting and seductive charms of Eros. And that absence could be seen as abandonment by a parent, generating a metaphoric vacuum of self-love that, unconsciously seeks ‘love in all the wrong places’ for years. The confluence of a weak or denied Thanatos and a weak or denied Eros leaves one, one can only speculate, prostrate psychically, and needing support, lots of it, without being disrespected.

And, if these two forces, unconscious and they may be, continue to dispense their respective radioactivity (metaphorically) in the face of our shared, universal collective unconscious, we face a continual loop that relies and depends on our participation.

From a psychic and a theological perspective, we can become both conscious of such a predicament, as well as, with the supportive and reflective engagement of a friend or trusted colleague, help to unpack out shared dependence on this oscillation.

Tolystoy, Blake, Hillman, Jame Alison, and especially, the God who is being sought and imagined here might rejoice in such a ‘revelation’ and revolution.’ Some individual lives and cultures might also start to breathe deeply again.